“And now, just as you accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, you must continue to follow Him.
Let your roots grow down into Him, and let your lives be built on Him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness.
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. 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.
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. He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross.
In this way, He disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by His victory over them on the cross.
He died for everyone so that those who receive His new life will no longer live for themselves. Instead, they will live for Christ, who died and was raised for them.
So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know Him now!
This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!
It doesn’t matter whether we have been circumcised [physically] or not. What counts is whether we have been transformed into a new creation.
A time is coming, says the Lord, when I will punish all those who are circumcised in body but not in spirit
For we must all stand before Christ to be judged. We will each receive whatever we deserve for the good or evil we have done in this earthly body.”
{Colossians 2:6-7, 11-15; 2 Corinthians 5:15-17; Galatians 6:15; Jeremiah 9:25; 2 Corinthians 5:10}