See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.
Colossians 2:8 (NIV)
The Teacher Who Sounded Sure
See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. Paul puts the watching on the Colossians themselves, and he tells them what it arrives dressed as: a hollow and deceptive philosophy that rests on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.
A voice teacher tells a girl just out of high school to push from the throat for the big notes, because that’s where the size comes from. For a while the size does come, and she believes him. He’s certain, and certainty is most of what a teacher sells. By November she can’t get through a warm-up without something catching, and the woman she goes to next spends the whole first lesson getting her to stop doing the thing she has practiced hardest.
At Colossae it came in through teachers. There were rules about what they ate and drank, about festivals and New Moons and Sabbath days. There were people who delighted in false humility and the worship of angels, who went into great detail about what they had seen.
It happens in small agreeable steps that each feel like progress, taught by someone who has been kind to you and does know more than you do about the subject. So Paul tells them to do the watching themselves.
It keeps all the right words and starts costing things it has no business costing. She couldn’t explain what she was working on to her own mother without words her mother had never heard. She got harder to be around, and it felt like seriousness. The voice teacher wasn’t lying to her. He believed what he taught, and he went on believing it while it took her voice.
Paul answers all of it with a person. For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.
The second teacher gives her almost nothing to work on. In February she sings one phrase the way she sang it at fifteen, before anybody had told her anything, and she knows it’s right before the woman says a word.
A Prayer to Remember
Lord, we believe a lot of things because whoever taught them to us sounded sure, and we’ve never held one of them up next to you. Take one of them today, before dinner, and show me what it’s resting on. We’d rather be corrected at our own table than go on practicing a habit that is taking our voice.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
