Holding Fast to the Head
By M.T. Clark — P-2065 | 09/10/2026 – Today’s Audio Podcast
Today’s Message on YouTube:
Today’s photo of my canine pal Harley walking down a gravel farm path through a wide green field in the foreground of a distant tree line, under a dramatic pillar of streaming clouds in a bright blue sky, comes to us from yours truly, as I captured this wonderful September afternoon walk down “Freedom Road” in Easton, NY, on September 6, 2024.
Well, it’s Thursday, and I share this pathway photo as a reminder and an encouragement to get on, or to stay on, the path of Christian discipleship. I love pathway photos because they remind us that the walk of faith is a real, walkable path with real steps, and that the Lord loves to lead His people along it one day at a time, just as He led Israel through the wilderness with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
I call this unnamed dead-end farmland access road Freedom Road because the Lord had set me free from a whole lot of old bondage by the time Harley and I started walking it together, and every trip down it was a chance to thank God for the freedom He had given me, and for the love of my life, my wife TammyLyn, who had brought me to Easton in the first place. I would have never known TammyLyn, Easton, Harley, Freedom Road, my new life, and all those memories there if it wasn’t for the Lord moving me to launch a Freedom Ministry at my local church and a podcast to share it to a broader audience in 2021.
If you take a step of faith to repent and to do what the Lord is calling you to do, I guarantee you that your life will never be the same. I would say I simply cannot imagine what my life would have been like if I didn’t go into recovery in 2015 and do the things that I did that led to meeting my wife, but the truth is I can. I can imagine sitting in my old local church just content in being a “sinner saved by grace” – resting on the Lord’s forgiveness for my besetting sins and just doing church twice a week and living the double life of an alcoholic Christian who is consumed with lust, bitterness, and fear. I think about that – what if I never trusted the Lord to set me free? What if I had just stayed “saved but stuck”? – and it makes me shudder. It’s scary to think about that I could have missed this life…
But that’s fear, and that’s a big lie. I didn’t miss it – I’m living it every day, and if I ever forget how good my life is now, please remind me what it could have been like if I never got on this path and decided to live free in Christ and share it with anyone who will listen.
So, decide to walk with the Lord today, and every day, and trust that He has already gone ahead of you and He is moving all things together for your good. And it’s probably best that you just keep walking with Him until you get there.
Speaking of the daily walk that grows into something good when we stay connected to the One who leads it,
Our series, “Rooted in Him,” continues today with holding fast to Christ as the Head, and how growth actually happens.
Holding Fast to the Head
The Apostle Paul names the root problem underneath everything the false teachers were doing to the Colossian believers in Colossians 2:19 (NKJV), which puts it plainly. He describes the person who is “not holding fast to the Head, from whom all the body, nourished and knit together by joints and ligaments, grows with the increase that is from God.”
That one phrase does a lot of work. The trouble with empty philosophy, with self-imposed religion, and with people grading our walk with God isn’t only that those things are wrong. It is that they pull us off of the Head, and a body part that has let go of the head is in real trouble no matter how impressive it looks.
Let’s notice how ordinary and physical Paul’s picture is. He talks about a body that is nourished and knitted together by joints and ligaments. That is not glamorous language. Ligaments don’t get much attention until one of them tears, and then we find out that nothing in the body works the way it should without them.
Paul is saying the Christian life grows the way a body grows, through a steady connection to the head and a real connection to the other parts, and not through some dramatic leap into a higher level.
That matters because the false teaching in Colossae was selling exactly that kind of leap. Its promise was a shortcut past ordinary faithfulness into something deeper, and Paul’s answer is that there is no such shortcut, because there is no growth apart from the Head. In the body of Christ, we have to be connected to Jesus, who is the Head.
Whatever we are connected to determines what we are being fed. If we are joined to Christ, we are being nourished by Christ, and the growth that follows is real growth.
If we get talked into hanging our spiritual life on a teaching, a method, or a leader instead of Christ alone, we may get activity and excitement out of it, but we won’t get the increase that is from God.
Let’s look at that last phrase, because it takes the pressure off in a way that most of us really need. Paul says the body “grows with the increase that is from God.” He doesn’t say the body grows by itself. Our job isn’t to generate growth. Our job is to hold fast to the Head, and God gives the increase. As much as we may try to repent or grow in faithfulness by our own efforts, unless we are connected to God and blessed by the Holy Spirit, we won’t really be changed. Real repentance and Christian maturity come from the Lord’s grace, not our performance.
This is a completely different way of living than trying to manufacture spiritual progress by force of will. Farmers understand this. A farmer works hard, but no farmer has ever made a seed grow. He plants, he waters, he tends, and God does what only God can do. We plant ourselves in Christ and stay there, and God grows us.
I spent too many years working the other way around. Early on in my walk with the Lord, I treated my faith like a project I was managing, with growth as my responsibility and the disciplines as the levers I pulled to produce it. I read a lot, I served a lot, and I could show you a schedule that looked serious. What I couldn’t show you was much peace, because a man who believes his growth depends on his own output never gets to rest.
In my saved but stuck years, I was a student of scripture and a servant to my church, but until the Lord convicted me to surrender my besetting sins and go into recovery, I was double-minded, unstable in all my ways, and incapable of the growth that God had for me.
The change came, by God’s grace, when I finally understood that abiding is the work. When I started coming to Christ for supply instead of coming to my own effort for results, growth started happening in me that I hadn’t been able to produce on my own, much of it in areas I had stopped trying to fix. That is the increase that is from God, and it doesn’t come out of us.
Holding fast to Jesus is also a comfort when growth feels slow, and it will feel slow at times. The body doesn’t grow on a schedule we can watch. Nobody has ever sat still and felt themselves getting taller. Growth happens quietly, over long stretches, and we notice it in hindsight when we realize that something that used to mess us up doesn’t anymore.
So, if you don’t see much progress in yourself right now, don’t take that as evidence that nothing is happening. Ask a simpler question instead: am I still holding on to Jesus? If the answer is yes, then you are connected to the supply, and God is doing His work in you whether you can feel it today or not.
Paul also puts the whole body in this sentence for a reason. Joints and ligaments connect one part to another. We hold fast to the Head personally, and we are also knit to the rest of the body, and both of those connections carry nourishment. We need to be connected to Jesus the Head, but we also need the joints and ligaments, the church and fellow believers, to be a living part of the body of Christ.
This is why the enemy works to isolate believers. Deception comes first, accusation follows, and isolation is where he wants it to end, because a believer who has drifted away from other believers is far easier to keep confused. Staying connected to a few people who know us and will tell us the truth isn’t an optional extra in the Christian life. It is part of how God has designed us to grow.
So, what does holding fast to the Head look like on a normal day? It looks less impressive than we would like to think. It looks like opening God’s word and letting it tell us the truth about ourselves. It looks like talking with the Lord about what is actually going on rather than what we think we should say. It looks like showing up with other believers when we would rather not, and letting somebody know how we are really doing.
None of that will feel like a breakthrough while we are doing it. Being connected to the church and to doing the sometimes monotonous, faithful practices of a disciple never does. But that steady connection is where the nourishment comes through, and over time the growth shows up.
So, hold fast to Jesus. Stay joined to the Head, stay knit to the body, and let God give the increase in His own time and in His own way. That is what a real daily walk with the Lord grows into over time, and it grows into something no other kind of effort can produce.
Every step we take toward the Lord is a step in the right direction. So, keep on walking and talking with God.
— M.T.
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“The views, opinions, and commentary of this publication are those of the author, M.T. Clark, only, and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of any of the photographers, artists, ministries, or other authors of the other works that may be included in this publication, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities the author may represent.”
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