As Paul warns the Colossians about listening to the wrong teaching, it is clear that he believes the stakes are high: listening to the false teachers could lead to their "disqualification".
Colossians 2:18 Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, 19 and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.
Again, learning - whether truth or falsehood - leads to practice. Listen to the false teachers and, next thing you know, you're an ascetic who is making a habit of worshipping angels!
And the influence of sin in your life goes unchallenged.
Paul points to the better path in his third chapter:
2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. 3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
Where your mind is anchored makes all the difference in the world!
When the mind is set on things above, the believer is enabled to take off the old and put on the new.
5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. 6 On account of these the wrath of God is coming. 7 In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. 8 But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth.
Verses 9 and 10 seem to lie at the very center of Paul's letter to the Colossians:
9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.
And, once again, we see the centrality of knowledge for the believer. Good teaching leads to good practice which leads to "being renewed" in "knowledge".
And so, again, Paul says that knowledge begets more knowledge.
And this is the final knowledge and the most important of all because it is central to the restoration of what that individual believer was created to be in the first place: the image of God!
This is a reversal of the original sin.
Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, taking upon themselves the prerogative of determining right from wrong, independently of God's directives.
Now Jesus the Christ has opened a path to reorient the human mind, renewing its dependence on - and sensitivity to - its Creator's will.
This is salvation.
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