Buried And Raised With Christ | Thomas Grocki | February 15th, 2026

A strange question opens a surprising door: why was Jesus baptized if he had no sin? We take that question straight into Colossians 2:11–15 and uncover the heartbeat of the Christian life—union with Christ. Not a slogan, not a side note, but the reality that relocates us into Jesus’ death and resurrection, where our record of debt is canceled and the powers that shamed us are put to open shame.

We trace three vivid pictures that make union tangible. First, representation: like David defeating Goliath for Israel, Christ wins and we share the victory. Second, marriage: two become one, and Paul says this mystery points to Jesus and his people—real attachment, not mere agreement. Third, adoption: a Father who delights to give, teaching our anxious hearts to stop storing scraps and trust his table. These images carry us to two signs—spiritual circumcision that marks our belonging to Christ, and baptism that proclaims we are buried with him and raised to new life.

Along the way, we press into the engine of it all: through faith, not works. Faith joins us to the righteousness of Another. That changes everything. Penalty is gone because our debt was nailed to the cross. Power is broken because Christ disarmed rulers and authorities. The battlefield that once terrified us becomes ground for courage and joy. Baptism isn’t a box to check; it’s a living map for discipleship—down into death to the old self, up into the newness of life by the Spirit.

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Transcript

Reading Colossians And Setting The Scene

SPEAKER_00 0:49

In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead, and you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him. This is the word of the Lord.

Union With Christ: In Him Explained

Representation: David, Goliath, And Our Champion

Marriage And Adoption As Union Pictures

Circumcision Of Christ And Belonging

Buried And Raised With Him In Baptism

Through Faith Not Works

Debt Canceled And Powers Disarmed

Living Free From Penalty And Power Of Sin

Responding In Worship, Prayer, And Giving

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Excellent. Thank you. Josiah is working on an iPad there. It always is fun, I think, just to watch the body language of pastoral staff when someone else is preaching. Um I was, I told Will, President State Weekend, we're not gonna have youth. Hey, we were supposed to have kickball, youth kids canceled today. Um I said, I said, let me preach. He was like, okay. And it was so fun just to watch him this morning. I literally saw Will down one of the kids' hallways kissing a baby on the forehead. Like he was town mayor, free from responsibilities. He got to do basically whatever he wanted. And I probably looked like I got a bad phone call, and I wanted all of the youth boys to get away from me because I couldn't handle them before I preached. And so um it's fun. I I really enjoy it. Um, so Colossians chapter two is where we are this morning, starting in verse 11. But before we get there, I've got kind of a question for us or a couple of questions. One, why do we get baptized? What is baptism? We didn't plan this to be a baptism Sunday, but when we looked at the text, I knew that I was preaching and I was like, okay, cool, there's gonna be a lot of baptism lined up for us kind of in the message. And subsequently, I was reading a book on baptism just for fun. And I asked Carrie, what's what's the spotlight? And she was like, Brent McCarrager is getting baptized, and I was like, perfect. We didn't plan this, and this happens all the time in the providence of the Lord, in the providence of the Holy Spirit, that things just work out like this to where we get a holistic Sunday where we get to see what we're talking about, what we're praying about, what our minds and hopefully our hearts are going through. And so later on in the service, we will get to see Brent be baptized. But why? Why do we do it? It's a little weird. If you've never grown up in church and this was your first time in a church, you might say, Why is this guy going to get in this tub and get dunked in this water and come out and everyone cheer? Like it's kind of bizarre. I think if we were to ask a lot of people, maybe even in the church, we might get responses like, Well, baptism makes you pure. Baptism washes away your sins, you were dirty, and once you get baptized, you are not, and so you just try to keep the filth off you as long as you can. Um, we might get answers like that. But if that is all that baptism is, I have a second question. Why did Jesus get baptized? If it's a representation mostly of going from dirty to clean, if it's a sign that you are accepted by God, why did Jesus get baptized? Because he wasn't dirty. He had no sins to be washed away. He already was pure and he was accepted by God. He was God. So why did Jesus get into the waters? We're gonna unpack that kind of towards the middle of our text. But if you guys would, in your Bibles, look with me in Colossians chapter 2, verse 6. We're gonna back up a little bit to get where we're going because especially if you have physical paperback Bibles or even iPads, you can see where we start in verse 11 is kind of in the middle of a paragraph. And so usually just on a literary level, it's bad practice just to start reading in the middle of a paragraph. So this is kind of the beginning of Paul's line of thought. He says, Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus in the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. There's two little words tucked into um this section and really all throughout Pauline language, the letters of Paul, and I want us to unpack it at the front end because it's if if when Laura read verses 11 through 15 and you thought, I've got no clue what this is about, circumcision, baptism, all of this, like I don't understand it. If if you guys can stick with me for about 10 to 15 minutes on the front end, I think it gives us a beautiful and easy on-ramp for understanding what Paul was talking about. And it's these two words in him, in him. If you look in your Bibles at all, any of Paul's writings, these two words put together appear all the time in him or in Christ, in the Lord. It's this doctrine which we call union with Christ. Greg, I don't think, had seen my notes before this, but when we were praying at 8 a.m., he was praying about the doctrine of union with Christ based on this text. It's it's this idea that Paul, when he's writing to the churches, when he's writing to Christians, he never once calls them Christians. I know there's translations and it was written in Greek, but never once in your Bibles are you gonna see the word Christians appear in Paul's letters, all 13 of them. He uses the word saints about 45 times, believers about 20 times, again, depending on your translations. His favorite phrase to use when describing the people of God are those who are in Christ. In him. And I'll show you just real quick examples. I know these are small. Uh blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world. In him we have redemption, in him we have obtained an inheritance, in him you also. These are um five, I'll go to six, five examples just from Ephesians chapter one. If you go back and look at Ephesians uh chapter one, in him is written all over it. And this is the first one. I found this one to be personally the most compelling. I can't zoom in on this, that's fine. Do the saints who are in Ephesus, locationally, physically, like their bodies are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus. Same sentence, separated by three words. He uses the same phrase to describe their physical location of the city they are in, and if we may, the physical location of those who are Christians. They are found in Christ. As much as we are in Midtree, as much as we are in Katala, for those of us who are Christians, we are in Christ. If you want to use the analogy of in his body, which Paul has used a lot in Colossians, we are in his body, and he himself is the head. And so I've got three pictures of what union with Christ looks like in Scripture that we're gonna unpack, and then we're gonna go back to verse 11 of Colossians. And so, three um simple pictures that I think we all are able to wrap our minds around with profound truth in them. And then we will look at um our passage at hand and hopefully it's a lot easier. And so, the first one, I wasn't super satisfied with the title of it, but it makes sense when you think about it. Representation. When you have been united with Christ, you have Christ as your representative. I'll I'll illustrate this with a story. This is 1 Samuel 17. We know this one well. This is David and Goliath. Verse 8, it says that he, Goliath, stood and shouted to the ranks of Israel, Why have you come out to draw up for battle? Am I not a Philistine? And are you not servants of Saul? Choose a man for yourself and let him come down to me. And if he is able to fight with me and kill me, then we will be your servants. But if I prevail against him and kill him, then you shall be our servants. This is a representation. We know the story that all of Israel, from the strongest men to even the king, were terrified to go out to Goliath. He was in the field roaring just uh insults to them and their God. It says, for 40 days, and they all looked around and they said, Who's gonna go? Who's gonna fight? Who's gonna try to defeat this giant? And the answer was, No one in our midst until this shepherd little boy comes out and he hears these insults being hurled against God, and he says, Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, and why aren't you guys doing anything about it? And David marches out and he is able to defeat Goliath with the sling, and then he cuts off his head. And so one of the questions is who won the battle? David won the battle, right? He was the only one that marched out. Saul didn't go out, David's brothers didn't go out, but who enjoyed the victory? The answer is all of Israel enjoyed the victory. Why? Because they were united with David. They were hidden in David and in his accomplishments, so to speak. After David goes out and kills Goliath, he doesn't single out anyone and says, Hey, you were a little more scared than the rest of them. No, they all celebrated equally, not because of their own accomplishments, but because of the accomplishments of another. And just like in the testimony that we heard, we can try as much as we can to do right, to be good, to be successful in the world's eyes, and it is all nothing. We need representation. Here is um the second picture of union with Christ is marriage. This is what Paul says in Ephesians 5. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two, you've got two separate people, two separate beings, shall become one flesh. They become united, they become singular in their desires, affections, and all of that kind of stuff. They become one. And Paul doesn't leave us hanging. He says, This mystery is profound, and I'm saying that it refers to Christ and the church. He's saying when you see two people get married, or if you have been married yourself, what you're actually putting on display, whether you know it or not, is the fact that this is what it looks like when Christ comes and unionizes himself with his church, with his body. And I do mean that corporately, like us in the room, but also you individually. Sometimes we can think in terms of one or the other, that we just think about ourselves and we forget about the room. I think this church, we do a really good job of explaining the corporateness of um our union with Christ. And so I might need to remind some of us that this is an individual thing as well. These are uh two pictures I did not run by my wife. These are two of my favorite pictures. Um this, the one on the left, is a picture of us, uh, not actually on our wedding day. It was a little after. We had a COVID wedding, it was awesome. We had 20 people, and I wouldn't change anything about it. We were asked recently, some friends of ours got snowed out of their wedding basically and had 20 people instead of 200. And they were like, We can we understand what you guys went through. We were like, we saved so much money. Um But we we took some pictures on our wedding day, and this was a couple weeks, maybe a couple months afterwards. We went back to the same place that we got married, the farmhouse. And so we're let's just say, let's just say three months into marriage is the first picture. The second picture is about six years later. We've got three kids, um, and this was snow day a couple weeks ago, maybe a month ago. Six years have gone in between these two different pictures. And my question for us is in which of these pictures are we more married? Think for a second, don't answer out loud. In which of these pictures are we more married? The answer, of course, is in neither. We are equally as married in both pictures. We didn't become more married as we grew, as soon as, however, you want to slice it, as soon as we said I do, or uh her dad pronounced us man and wife, whichever like signal marker you have, like when that when we crossed that line, we were married 100% as much as we are now, today, six years, three kids later. We are exactly the same in terms of our union. Let me um kind of unpack this thought for a second. Our communion has grown. We've learned more about each other, we know each other um more deeply, we have served one another, we have suffered with one another, we have rejoiced with one another more than we have before we were married, but our union has stayed exactly the same at 100%. And that is the same with those who are in Christ. So whether you pulled into this parking lot, somehow repented of your sins and put your faith and trust in Christ, you are just as much united as you will be 60 years from now if you are um still alive. Our union may grow, our union may ebb and flow, we may feel distant from the Lord, but our union, if you have been united, will stay the same. And the third picture of union with Christ is adoption. Brent mentioned this word um during his testimony. Um, Ephesians 1, even as he chose us again in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him in love. He predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Christ. I know that we have many um adoptive families in this body here today. And so I won't use any of you guys as an example to illustrate this, but where we go to Snowbird, it's up in um I think North Carolina, and uh the guy that kind of runs the camp, he has an adoptive family. He's got, I think, two children from Uganda. And he and he told this story, it's always stuck with me, um, that when he brought his daughter, she was about 10 years old, from Uganda to the mountains of North Carolina. He's he's like six foot five, like his chest is as big as I am tall, and he's just this mountain man. They said when he bought the camp, it was just trees, and he would go out after working in a coal mine just for fun and lop trees down so that he could clear it for uh the camp. And so this is the guy telling the story. So if I do an accent, I apologize. But he says, um, when when we brought home our daughter from Uganda, um, we would have family dinner together, and we would we would just put this food in front of her and we would tell her to eat, and she would be a little peckish. And if if you are an adoptive family or know them, you may know where this story is going. She wouldn't eat all that much, and they just thought she's not used to food as much as we have it, and so she's just not as hungry. She doesn't have quite as much of an appetite as we do. And he he says a couple weeks later, a couple weeks went by, and they found out that she would be storing food, that she would put some in her pockets, that she would put some in a napkin, and she would take these little samplings of food to her room where she would, he used the the phrase pack rat. She would pack rat her food away. And when he found it, basically they found it because of a smell, and and he like peeled back this cover wherever it was hidden, and he found it, and he's just found this gargantuant, just pile of gross, curdled, maybe moldy food that she had prepared for herself from the table of the family. And he's he said, what arose in him were two emotions. One was heartbreak, obviously, that he was heartbroken, that she felt the need to put away food that she she thought maybe they're gonna stop feeding me, maybe they're gonna run out of food themselves, maybe all of these things. And so she took it upon herself to kind of hide away these foods. And the other emotion was anger. Not with her, he wasn't angry at her, but just at the situation, at the brokenness of what he could physically see on display. And I think oftentimes that is how we live as adopted children of God, where he is a good father who delights to give his children things. And sometimes we need to hear that because we pack rat things thinking God is stingy, God doesn't want to bless me, God wants me to be miserable. We we can think that sometimes, but we have been adopted to himself as sons through Jesus Christ. It it feels weird to say, but this is this is biblical, that as much as Jesus is a son of God, he shares his inheritance with us. There's nothing that Jesus gets that's a little more than us. In Christ, we have all of the same blessings. But when a child is brought into the family, it comes with privileges and responsibilities. Privileges and responsibilities. And so just recognizing all three of these pictures when we've been in Christ, when we've been united to Christ, Paul is going to tell us to think about two different things. He gives us two pictures of union with Christ in this. He gives us circumcision and baptism to illustrate what we have in Christ with Jesus. And so now we can look at verse 11. It says, In him, kind of at the beginning of that, think adoption, think representation, think marriage, in him you also were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh by the circumcision in Christ or of Christ. In the old testament, in order to be able to participate and be unified with the people of God as a man, you had to be circumcised. Uh when Will preached on circumcision, uh, there's no I'm not gonna make any circumcision jokes, but but I heard Greg sigh, but it was in Joshua. The men circumcised themselves, and it said they had to wait a couple of days before they went out to battle, and they actually did beforehand because God told them to. I had a uh ninth grade boy come up to me in the in the lobby, and he was like, Hey, what's circumcision? And I gave him a and he was like, No, I'm serious. And I was like, Oh, you're serious? And he's like, Yeah. And I was like, Oh, okay, we'll sit down and talk about this. And at the end, I was fully expecting him to be like, Gotcha, my dad put me up to this. Um, but no, I I had to explain it to him. So, just in short, circumcision for those of us that don't know, is where you would um take kind of a man's private parts and you would cut a portion of the skin off. Generally, for those in Israel, this was a less than memorable occasion because it happened on their eighth day when they were born. So most Israelite men didn't remember their circumcision the way that we might remember a baptism or something like that. But if any foreign man wanted to join Israel, which did happen, if any Canaanite or Philistine or Egyptian wanted to join the ranks of Israel, the Lord made provisions for that. And they said, Okay, you can join us. You must put away your faults, God. Check, like we can we can leave that guy behind back in Egypt. Um, you you've got to come to the tabernacle, make sacrifices with us. Okay, cool, I'll do that. Also, you have to be circumcised, and they did. Like they did and they would. I was talking with Adam. There's a story in scripture where um a foreigner wants to marry an Israelite woman, and the brothers are like, Hey, before you marry her, you got to circumcise yourself. And the dude was like, Heck yeah, like I will. And we we were just talking about like how crazy that guy must have been for that girl. Um, like I I can't put into words that. Um, but If a foreigner came into the people of Christ, it required a bit more effort and willpower than those who were, we can say, naturally those of Israel. Physical circumcision marked your entrance into Israel, a people group, a nation, a system of laws, and and all of that kind of stuff. What Paul says here is that spiritual circumcision marks your entrance into Christ. Not just a people, not just a system, but into a person, and that person being Jesus himself. Once we are in Christ, we can start to think in terms of with Christ. And this is where Paul goes in the next couple of verses. Having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised him from the dead. And so this gets us to kind of the question of why was Jesus baptized? Romans 6 maybe paints it for us. Do you so again listen to this into language? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life. Jesus goes through baptism in part, there's a bunch of different parts, but in part to put on display his union with us, knowing that we were going to undergo baptism. He was identifying with his people, not washing away sins, but saying, Hey, what you are going to go through, I will go through first. And what I go through first, I want you to go through as well. Sinclair Ferguson puts it this way when Jesus was baptized with water in the Jordan, it was a sign and seal of his future baptism in blood for us on the cross of Calvary. It was a signpost, it was a pointing fix pick uh a picture pointing forward to the death, burial, and resurrection of what he was going to do. It's what we participate in. And so, if I may, Will, as you baptize Brent, we joke about leaving him under until he goes down, but perhaps I think we culturally do baptism too quickly. Brent, how long can you hold your breath? We'll see. It might be a better picture to lay him down, give it a one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, and then raise him back up. I think far too often we do this number and we lose the significance of the old man, the old flesh dying to self and raising to the newness of life the way Christ did. Um, and so the the question that we haven't answered, how are we united to Christ? Don't look in your Bibles and see what you're looking down. Having been buried with him in baptism in which you were raised with him. There's two words. Does anyone want to take a guess or know what it is? We'll go Uthroop style. No one, no one? All right, I'll give you the answer. Through faith. Through faith. This is the vehicle by which we are united to Christ. This is the way, the conduit by which we are brought together with a righteous and holy God. It's not through works, but through faith. This is what Paul says in Philippians. He says he's he's listing off all of the good accomplishments he has. He's listing off his resume, and it is very impressive. And he says, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, as garbage, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, not by having 51% good and 49% bad, not by doing the right things and going to church more Sundays than I miss, not by doing any sort of thing, but he has a righteousness which comes through faith in Christ. That's the only way that we, a sinful, dirty, fleshly people, can be not just made right, but that's true too, but be united with a perfect and holy, unblemished, unvarnished God completely. And so verse 13 and you, a Christian in the room, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all of our trespasses. Um Paul says there's basically two types of people in this room: those who are dead, those who are walking in the futility of their life, those that are trying to muster up enough uh righteousness or goodness to be able to jumpstart their heart. There are those who are dead currently, and those who were dead, but have been made alive together with Christ because of his work. And so two benefits of being alive in Christ, Paul lays out in these verses. And so we've gone from the union with Christ to being with him in circumcision and baptism, and now we look to the object of our faith, Christ, and what he's done for us. Verse 14, he has canceled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. Two benefits currently, one, sin loses its penalty. Sin loses the legal um kind of punishment that we deserve, and rightly so, and deep down we all know it. We lose our penalty, not because Christ took the paper, crumpled it up, and threw it out and said, Don't worry about it, I got you guys, but because he himself took it upon himself. The Bible says that he who knew no sin became sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God. In a sense, when Christ went to the cross, he did not go alone. He went beaten, naked, scorned, up on that cross, in a sense, carrying a document with all of the wrongdoings that we have done, all of the reasons that we should be separated from God, and all of the reasons that we deserve punishment. And he climbed upon the cross and he held it tight as his blood flowed out and his life drained, and eventually that paper was so soaked in blood that it couldn't be read. That is what Paul is describing here because of what Christ has done. There is no more penalty. The second benefit that we have is that sin loses its power. Verse 15 says, And he disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him. Sin is like a lion that has lost its teeth by now. Christ says, Not only am I taking the legal punishment, I'm also taking the teeth out so that you cannot terrorize my people anymore. Yes, we will sin and we are gonna fall into sin, but we have so many commands to walk in the newness of life, to put on Christ, to take off the flesh. And through the Spirit of God, like we do believe that we can overcome sin and temptations. Sin has lost its power. Um, one of my favorite pictures just as I think about this, and I hope this isn't too graphic, I don't know, um, this image of David after he fought Goliath. You can think about, Ben, if you guys want to come up, you guys can. Um, you can think about the terror that filled the mightiest of soldiers, the terror that filled the king that had a uh reputation to uphold. You can think about all of the different people that were cowering in their tents praying to God that it wasn't them who drew the next lot that said they had to go out and fight Goliath. That's probably what it would have come down to. They were terrified of that battlefield. Why? Because Goliath was there, because this powerful um giant of a foreign army was taunting them, and yet, after David killed Goliath, after David got his stone and slung it into the forehead of that giant, and not only that, took his sword out and cut off his own head and lifted it high for all the people to see, they were not scared of that battlefield anymore. That battlefield might as well have become a playground for children. It may have become anything that you can think of. Today, that battlefield, I looked it up, is a national park in the country of Israel. Why? Because the giant is gone. The power that terrorized God's people is gone. It's no longer in that field. Its power has been evaporated and it has been put on display, how shameful it is. And that is what Christ does for his people. So, in Christ, sin has lost its penalty and its power, and soon we see a third benefit. It will lose its presence. Soon we will be in a place where sin is not anywhere present. It's not anywhere to be seen, there will be no more temptations, there will be no more things ensnaring us, our flesh. We will be fully removed and given a new body that longs for righteous things, that longs for pure things. Soon we will be out of the presence of sin itself. And so, close again with why was Jesus baptized? We may have never thought about this, we may have come up with different answers, if I could put it succinctly. The cross is a picture of Christ's death, the empty tomb is a picture of his resurrection, and baptism is a picture of both at the same time. In a microsecond, or maybe longer, if Will decides to hold them down, we are able to see maybe the fullest picture of the gospel before our eyes as laid out in Scripture. And so I'm gonna leave us with this question. Christian of the room, do you live like you are free from the penalty and the power of sin? Or are you still struggling with this mentally, emotionally, spiritually? Do you feel like you owe God something to be able to take it off your plate? Do you feel like you are powerless to struggle against sin? Or do you feel the benefits of being united with Christ and what he has done for his people? So we're gonna take a moment just to think about this question. You guys can um sit and think. If you want to come out to the porch for prayer, we're gonna respond in four different ways. When Stokes leads us, we're gonna stand and we're gonna sing together the same words, all sufficient merit. If you want to, you can fill out a connect card. Um, let us get in touch with you. And then uh just a reminder um this is the first week that offering baskets are gonna go by. If you feel um an urge or burden or conviction to give, um, please do so. But if you give online, just even let this time be a reflection on giving back to the Lord because he has given so much. And then um some pastors will be out on the porch. But let me pray for us for a moment and then reflect on this, and then we can stand and say the word. As we think about being united with you, I pray that you would encourage the Christian, that you would uh strengthen us, that you would remind us of these truths, that we are united with you. And Lord, for those of us in this room who are not Christians, I pray that you would just give conviction, that you would prick hearts, that you would say, I don't have any of these benefits, but I want them. I want to be free from sin, the power of it, the penalty of it, and one day the presence of it. Lord, I'm tired of living like and so, Lord, your spirit knows what each one of us needs. Pray that you would attend to each one of us. Sing together your praises. Jesus Christ. Perfect. And I pray. Amen.