Informative Speech On Jesus 1: 1-18

Jesus Is First 5/29/16

Good morning, thank you for being with us here at Gateway this morning. If we haven't met, my name is Don. I’m the Pastor of our Spanish Gathering here at Gateway. And this is Johanna. She helps me translate at our gathering because if you don't know it by now, Im not spanish! Im a coconut, brown on the outside and white on the inside.

How many of you have been pulled over for speeding before? Don't you just hate it when you pass that Trooper on the highway and immediately you look to your speedometer t see how fast you were going and then quickly look in your rear view mirror to see if he’s coming after you? And then all of a sudden the terror that you feel when you do see him coming after you with those lights and

We need to remember what Jesus did for us on the cross.

9 For in Christ lives all the fullness of God in a human body. 10 So you also are complete through your union with Christ, who is the head over every ruler and authority.
11 When you came to Christ, you were “circumcised,” but not by a physical procedure. Christ performed a spiritual circumcision—the cutting away of your sinful nature. 12 For you were buried with Christ when you were baptized. And with him you were raised to new life because you trusted the mighty power of God, who raised Christ from the dead.
13 You were dead because of your sins and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away. Then God made you alive with Christ, for he forgave all our sins. 14 He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross. 15 In this way, he disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by his victory over them on the cross.

Here are 3 things that we can learn from the text this

Sometimes people have asked me “What are we studying today” And Ive responded “Oh you know, the 7 steps to a successful circumcision” and as people look at me like what? really? Then I say . . . In Christ! And they laugh and say of course! And so when the teaching team got together to talk about this series and we were diving up the scriptures and assigning who was going to preach about what, Pastor Tom gave me this passage about circumcision!

Take a look at verses 11 - 13a . . . 11 When you came to Christ, you were “circumcised,” but not by a physical procedure. Christ performed a spiritual circumcision—the cutting away of your sinful nature. 12 For you were buried with Christ when you were baptized. And with him you were raised to new life because you trusted the mighty power of God, who raised Christ from the dead. 13 You were dead because of your sins and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away.

God initiated circumcision in the Old Testament as part of His covenant with His people in order to set them apart and identify them as true followers. One of the problems at Colosse was that legalist were demanding that Christians submit to circumcision and obey the OT Law. These false teachers were a bit different than the ones that Paul confronted in the book of Galatians. In Galatia, the false teachers were insisting that circumcision was necessary for salvation. Here in