Greater Than Your Religion: Why Trying Harder Never Made Anyone Holy

He came to faith as an adult. And like a lot of people who arrive late and take it seriously, one of the first things he did was open a Bible and start reading.

He picked 1 Peter, for a very practical reason. It’s a little letter. Peter’s writing. Peter’s sort of important. I knew that much. Let me start there.

He did not get far. In the first chapter, Peter quotes Leviticus and lands this on the page:

Be holy, for I am holy.

And I was like, whoa. Hold on a second. Be holy? That’s a thing?

He had grown up assuming the categories were be happy, be prosperous, be good, don’t be bad. Nobody had mentioned be holy. And he knew immediately that whatever it meant, he was not it. I knew I was many things, but holy was not one of them.

So he did the reasonable thing. He built a list.

Go to church. Feed the poor. Stop the Friday nights that ran till four in the morning. It was not a stupid list. Most of it was genuinely good. And he could not keep it. He kept doing the very things he had already decided he was finished with.

He calls it the religion of Jay. And the religion of Jay did not work.

That is where our guest preacher, Jay Reynardus, opened Colossians 2:16-23 with us this Sunday — week five of our study through Colossians. And it is worth saying plainly at the start, because the passage is going to be blunt about it: the list you wrote for yourself has no power to change you.

The Problem at Colossae

Something was being pushed at the church in Colossae, and Paul names it: let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.

The message going around was, roughly: it is wonderful that you have Christ. Now here is what a serious believer also does. Keep these festivals. Observe these days. Watch what you touch. Deny the body. And there were people making that case with real force — Paul says they were puffed up without reason, going on in detail about visions.

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say the additions are too strict. He does not offer a moderate version. He says the whole approach is the wrong category of thing.

And before we get too comfortable, note that Paul is not attacking religion as such. There is a true religion. James defines it — caring for widows and orphans in their distress. What Paul is prying out of their hands is something more specific: a system of devotion that is man-made, man-centred, and built for how it makes the practitioner feel.

Which is a description of most of our lists.

Shadow and Substance

Then Paul gives them an image, and it is the key to the whole passage. Those festivals and food laws, he says, are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.

The word translated substance is soma. Body.

So the picture is not abstract. There is a body standing in the light, and it throws a shadow on the ground. All of it — the sacrifices, the temple, the calendar, the law — is the shadow. Christ is the body casting it.

A shadow is not a lie. It is real, and it tells you something true: someone is standing there. The Old Testament system was never a mistake. It was a shape on the ground pointing forward to the one who would come.

But once the person walks into the room, you do not keep talking to the shadow.

That is what makes the Colossian error so strange, and so familiar. It is preferring the outline to the person. We do it whenever we would rather have a system than a Saviour — because a system is manageable, a system tells you exactly where you stand, and a person has to be trusted.

Five Reasons the List Cannot Work

Paul does not simply assert that this fails. He gives reasons, stacked up in verses 20-23.

It is of the world — belonging to the very order that is passing away. It concerns things that perish as they are used, so it is temporary by nature. It comes from human precepts, not from God — somebody made it up and it caught on. It has only an appearance of wisdom, which is Paul’s polite way of saying it is foolishness. And it is self-made religion, assembled by the person practising it.

Then the verdict, and it is devastating: these things are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

Not less effective. Not a lower path. No value. At the one job the list was built to do, it scores zero.

As Jay put it: It don’t work. At the end of the day, none of this works. You’re going to kill yourself to do some stuff and not do some stuff — why? It has no value.

If you have ever built a system for becoming a better person and watched it collapse by the third week, Paul is not surprised, and he is not disappointed in you. He is telling you the thing was never load-bearing.

The Answer Is Not a What

So what is the answer? What do I have to do?

And here the passage turns:

The answer is not a what. The answer is a who.

Paul points back a few verses — in him you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by the putting off of the body of flesh, by the circumcision of Christ. Christ has already cut off that old life and given you a new one. It is done, and it was done to you.

Then he diagnoses the false teachers with one phrase. Their real problem was not holding fast to the head — from whom the whole body, knit together, grows with a growth that is from God.

He grows it. Not we grow it.

So the architecture of the Christian life comes out like this. Union with Christ is the foundation. You died with him and were raised with him; that is the ground you stand on. Communion with Christ is the means — the daily holding fast, the abiding. And holiness is the result. Not the entry fee. The fruit.

There is a theological word for this, and it is worth owning: sanctification. Verses 6-15 dealt with justification — God declaring you righteous because of what Christ did. Verses 16-23 deal with how you actually grow. And the answer is that you grow by staying close, not by trying hard.

The Tree and the Branch

Scripture gives us two pictures of this, and both were on the table Sunday.

Psalm 1 describes the blessed man as a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. Picture it: clean water, and a tree standing beside it, drinking deeply, flowering because of where it is planted.

Now imagine that tree decides it can do better. It pulls itself up, walks into the desert, and plants itself in the sand. Nothing about the tree has changed — same trunk, same roots, same branches. It shrivels anyway. Not because it stopped trying. Because it left the water.

The second picture is John 15. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.

Watch a branch sometime. It never strains. It does not manufacture anything. It has exactly two jobs: stay attached, and hold what appears. The fruit is the vine’s work.

Which is why try harder keeps failing you. It is not too demanding. It is aimed at the wrong thing entirely — it asks the branch to do the vine’s job.

A Love Greater Than the Chain

Two hundred years ago a Scottish preacher named Thomas Chalmers preached a sermon with a title worth carrying around: The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.

His argument was simple and it has outlived him. You do not get free of the thing that has hold of you by gritting your teeth against it. You get free by coming to love something else more.

Which means the honest diagnosis of the sin you keep returning to is not that your willpower is insufficient. It is that you have not yet seen Jesus as bigger than it. Somewhere in you, that thing still looks better than he does.

That is uncomfortable. It is also far better news than try harder, because willpower runs out and affection does not have to be manufactured. It grows by looking.

So the answer to a week of failure is not a stricter list. It is a longer look. Not fight harder, but turn your eyes upon Jesus — cling to him, feed on him, hold fast to the Head, and let the growth come from God.

So Then

Do you want to be holy?

You need one thing and one thing only. More Jesus.

Not more effort. Not a better system. Not the version of the list you are already drafting in your head for tomorrow morning. Holiness is found in proportion to your communion with Christ — it is a byproduct of nearness, the way fruit is a byproduct of staying on the vine.

Your failures are no surprise to God. He has seen every one of them, and he has never once been tempted to give up on his children.

Jesus is greater than your religion. And he is greater than your failure.

Make him bigger this week, and watch what loses its grip.

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