Thankfully, I can manage to make my monthly payments on my student loan. It wasn’t that big. But the claim that sin and death had on me was much greater than that of my lending bank. There was no way I could get free from sin and death. Wherever I went, whatever I did with my life, sin and death would find me and remind me that I owed them, that, in effect, they owned me. I could see evidence of their power all around me--fear and greed in my own heart, sickness, poverty and oppression around me. I was constantly reminded that I would only ever clear my account when they took my very life from me.
Paul actually uses this very image for the power of sin and death in ch 2. But then he says that Jesus, through his cross, freed us from the claims of sin and death. Christ gave his life for ours. Now, if we identify ourselves completely with him, his death counts for ours. The powers of sin and destruction no longer have any claim on us. We’re dead as far as they’re concerned. We owe them nothing, and now we are free to live, just as Jesus lives by the power of his resurrection.
Paul says in Col 3.3, For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. That’s a beautiful picture. The life we live together is hidden away from the forces that want to dominate it. But also hidden in God, which is to say, the way we live now is surrounded by God’s power, it shines with God’s glory, it is full to overflowing with joy, it’s brimming over with love.
So now, Paul tells the believers, live it out. Stop living like sin and death still rule you! Start living like Christ is the one calling the shots! If you’ve really made a commitment to Jesus, you need to change.
(Check out the whole sermon after the jump. . .)
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I want to begin this morning with a story of a day that changed my life. The day was July 31, 2004. Before that day in July, I led a decent life for a guy in college. Sometimes I would stay up late with the guys playing video games. We pulled elaborate pranks and practical jokes. I never paid enough attention to my studies. I played in a rock band that wasn’t really going anywhere. I didn’t get into much trouble--I went to a Christian college, after all. But still, I generally lived my life however I wanted, without much concern for my actions’ effects on myself or on those around me.
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I want to begin this morning with a story of a day that changed my life. The day was July 31, 2004. Before that day in July, I led a decent life for a guy in college. Sometimes I would stay up late with the guys playing video games. We pulled elaborate pranks and practical jokes. I never paid enough attention to my studies. I played in a rock band that wasn’t really going anywhere. I didn’t get into much trouble--I went to a Christian college, after all. But still, I generally lived my life however I wanted, without much concern for my actions’ effects on myself or on those around me.
But on July 31, 2004, I realized that I needed to change the way I was living. I found myself in a church that morning. And while the music played, I walked the aisle to the altar, where a pastor was waiting. Then Cindy walked down the aisle, beautiful in a white dress. On July 31, 2004, Cindy and I got married.
Marriage is a commitment that involves a change of lifestyle. I committed to love and cherish Cindy that morning for as long as we both shall live, but in doing so, I also committed myself to changing my bachelor ways. No more late nights getting into trouble with the guys. No more using my cash to buy whatever album or movie that happened to catch my attention. Now I had someone else’s needs and desires to think about. From that point on, I had committed myself to paying special attention to Cindy, to using my actions to love her--by vacuuming or cleaning the bathroom or taking her on a picnic in a local park. I had committed myself to privileging her desires above my own. This was a pretty big life change for me.
I tell this story this morning because our commitment to Jesus entails a similar kind of change in how we live. For some of us, this change is dramatic. I’ve heard traveling evangelists tell stories of people whose lives teetered on the edge of oblivion, people who were violent criminals or slaves to drug abuse. Then they met Jesus, and their lives turned around. But for many of us, our lives didn’t change quite that dramatically when we began to follow Jesus.
Perhaps, like me, you were young, in a family of believers. A change of allegiances happened in your heart; you no longer cared only for yourself, but now wanted above everything else to please God. But life looked pretty much the same before and after the commitment.
Or maybe you’re still in the middle of making up your mind about Jesus. Is he worth disrupting your familiar habits? Do you really want to have to rethink your goals, values, and prejudices? I hope that this sermon and even more our singing, prayers, and fellowship this morning can be an invitation but also a warning. Following Jesus is good. He brings us back home to God and leads us along a good way of living together. But following Jesus does involve deep and sometimes painful changes, in our hearts and minds and also, especially, in our actions. If you’re still deciding, I hope you join us, but I want you to know the cost. As the saying goes, “Grace is free, but it isn’t cheap.”
Making a commitment to Jesus, however, isn’t a one time thing. Whenever, however we began to follow Jesus, we must choose to continue to follow him day-by-day. It’s these daily decisions that challenge us, perhaps most deeply, to live in a new way.
I’ve seen this in my marriage. Television shows and magazines may tell us marriage is all about how the couple met, the courtship and proposal, and especially the big day of the wedding itself. These are surely great memories and stories to tell, but I’ve discovered that the wedding colors and guest list matter far less for my marriage than how I treat Cindy each morning when I get up, whether I choose to put away the dishes after I wash them, whether I let her pick the movie we watch this evening.
According to the letter Paul sent to the believers living in Colossae, this is also true of in our life with Christ. What matters most is how we choose to live in this relationship day-by-day.
Remember, the Colossian believers had begun to wander away after spirituality experts similar to our New Age gurus today. These experts promised that their set of spiritual exercises, prayers, and new rules was the key to finding God’s power in their lives.
For the last three weeks, we’ve listened to how Paul disproves their arguments. The Colossian believers knew Jesus as savior. They knew he had rescued them from domination by sin and death. And they had just begun to experience what life with Jesus is like in their small church-community. But then these self-proclaimed spiritual experts had shown up, advertising something more, something extra for those who really want to join the spiritually elite. Paul tells the believers that they were being taken in by these so-called experts.
If you look at Col 1.15-20, you’ll find the hymn with which Paul begins his argument against the tips and tricks they peddled. We’ve spent the last two Sundays with this passage, so it should be familiar. Christ Jesus, according to these poetic lines, is not just our deliverer; he’s more than our rescuer. Christ Jesus, it turns out, is also the one who set the world in order in the beginning. What’s more, in the same life-death-and-resurrection rescue mission that pulled us out the grips of sin and death, he also performed the critical action needed to set the entire world right. Paul goes on to say that the believers, as a church, carry on this work of reconciliation. They are the body of which Christ is the head. He made peace by his blood shed on the cross, and the believers carry on his peacemaking by embodying that peace in their fellowship with one another. Just look at Jews and Gentiles worshiping together and sharing meals, Paul says.
Further on in ch 2 Paul sums up his response to the counterfeit spirituality these experts taught. He says in vv 6-8 of ch 2:
So remembering where we’ve been with Paul in this letter, open your Bibles to Colossians ch 3. I’ve said a few times in the past weeks that this chapter and the following one are the goal of everything Paul has to say in chs 1 and 2. Chapter 3 begins the “so what” portion of the letter. If Christ really is the creator and reconciler of the entire world, what does it mean for our lives? If Christ’s reconciliation really shows up best in our fellowship with one another, how does that change how we live? Chapter 3 begins to answer these questions.
In vv 1-4, Paul tells the believers that if they’ve committed themselves to and identified themselves with Christ, then they are dead to all the powers that once so destructively ruled their lives. Just as Jesus gave up his life on the cross and then was resurrected into a new kind of life, the believers now live in the power of his new life.
This may sound a bit “mystical” or even “mysterious.” Dying and rising with Christ sounds more metaphorical than practical. But Paul tells us these ideas are completely practical and that they should give shape to our lives.
Let me describe a situation that may be more familiar. When I started seminary, I took out a loan to pay my tuition. Now that I’m done with school, I’m in the process of paying that loan back. Whatever happens in my life--should I become a father, should I move to another country--the lending bank will find me and demand to be paid back. But if I die, then the bank writes off my debt and clears my name. That’s one of the very few good things about educational debt.
Thankfully, I can manage to make my monthly payments on my student loan. It wasn’t that big. But the claim that sin and death had on me was much greater than that of my lending bank. There was no way I could get free from sin and death. Wherever I went, whatever I did with my life, sin and death would find me and remind me that I owed them, that, in effect, they owned me. I could see evidence of their power all around me--fear and greed in my own heart, sickness, poverty and oppression around me. I was constantly reminded that I would only ever clear my account when they took my very life from me.
Paul actually uses this very image for the power of sin and death in ch 2. But then he says that Jesus, through his cross, freed us from the claims of sin and death. Christ gave his life for ours. Now, if we identify ourselves completely with him, his death counts for ours. The powers of sin and destruction no longer have any claim on us. We’re dead as far as they’re concerned. We owe them nothing, and now we are free to live, just as Jesus lives by the power of his resurrection.
Paul says in v 3, For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. That’s a beautiful picture. The life we live together is hidden away from the forces that want to dominate it. But also hidden in God, which is to say, the way we live now is surrounded by God’s power, it shines with God’s glory, it is full to overflowing with joy, it’s brimming over with love.
So now, Paul tells the believers, live it out. Stop living like sin and death still rule you! Start living like Christ is the one calling the shots! If you’ve really made a commitment to Jesus, you need to change.
This change begins with quitting our old habits. “Habits” is a good word for what Paul wants us to change. Today we use the word “habit” to name certain patterns of behavior we do over and over. Their are good habits, like brushing your teeth, and bad habits, like drinking too much. But the word “habit” can also refer to the special clothes worn by monks and nuns. Throughout vv 7-15, Paul uses this picture of changing clothes to urge the Colossian believers to change their patterns of behavior.
Listen to vv 7 through the beginning of v 9. Paul writes,
Changed identity should lead to a changed lifestyle. This is Paul’s point in Col 3.7-9. It’s as if he’s saying, “It made sense for you to live lives of sin when sin still had a claim on you. Sin leads to destruction, so it made sense that you would be destroying other people through your words.” If we look back to vv 5 and 6, we see that living in the grips of sin also leads to self-destructive behaviors and desires: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed.
I’m new to Canadian football, and I still have quite a bit to learn. But let’s say that Edmonton trades a player to the Riders. Now imagine it’s game day, and there’s the Riders’ new player taking the field, but he’s still wearing his Eskimos jersey. Something wouldn’t be quite right with this situation. This is what Paul is telling the Colossian believers: Now you’ve identified yourselves with Christ, so your lives should look different. Those of us who’ve committed ourselves to Jesus have changed teams, and the jerseys of our lives should accurately show who we’re playing for. We need to peel off the dirty uniforms of our old team and permanently put it away.
Quitting Paul’s list of vices, however, involves more than only personal morality. Identifying with Jesus, committing ourselves to him, affects us inside and out, personally and corporately. The unrestrained desires of vv 5 and 6 and the unedifying speech of vv 8 and 9 violently disrupts the interpersonal peace Jesus earned for us on his cross.
Listen to what Paul says in vv 9 through 11:
But let me explain: I wear a wedding ring to remind me that I am Cindy’s husband. Eight years ago my bachelor self was done away with, I am now a family man. Still, just like the believers in Colossae, I don’t always live up to my new identity. Sometimes I’m not a completely loving husband, sometimes I try to shirk my household responsibilities and leave them to Cindy. But my immature bachelor-like behavior doesn’t undo my identity as Cindy’s husband.
The Colossian believers, according to Paul, took off that old self owned by sin and put on a new self, reconciled to God, from the moment they committed themselves to Jesus. Before they identified with Jesus, they played up the cultural and class divisions between Jews and Gentiles, cultured and uncultured, slave and freeman. They’d use these to get power over each other, to distance themselves from people in need, to justify ignoring people, using people, lying to people. But the new self, according to Paul, is being transformed into the image of Christ, the one who reconciles all things and all people back to God. Selfish desires and behavior don’t fit within Christ’s cosmic peacemaking project. Just as dirty clothes and empty pizza boxes left all over the house don’t fit with my identity as Cindy’s husband, so greed and foul talk don’t fit with the believers’ new identity in Christ. Such messiness disrupts the peace of my marriage; the Colossian believer’s self-interest disrupts the peace Jesus won for them with his death.
In place of the habits of the old self, Paul tells the believers to put on love. When we listen to vv 12 through 15, we hear Paul telling the church-community to show love in one way after another.
He begins in v 12 by telling them to dress themselves with heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Each of these virtues is one way in which love shows itself. And as I hear each one, I find myself thinking of Jesus. Heartfelt compassion immediately reminds me of the many times we hear that Jesus’ actions were motivated by compassion. For instance, when Jesus sees the crowds in Mt 9.36, he has compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Instead of using cultural differences to maintain their distance from their neighbors, the believers should be filled with gut-level empathy when they see someone sitting lonely at the edge of a group or when they drive by men stumbling down the street enslaved by alcoholism.
When Paul adds kindness to the list, he indicates how the believers should respond. When we say someone is kind, we often mean that she is simply sympathetic. The Greek word Paul uses here means something more along the lines “helpful” or even “generous.” It’s sympathy connected to action. Let your compassion lead to action.
Next we hear that the believers should dress themselves with humility or modesty in our opinion of ourselves. We’re endlessly tempted to think much of ourselves, to find fault in others’ successes so we can feel better about our own accomplishments. But this isn’t what we see Jesus doing. Instead we seeing Jesus exercising the next item on Paul’s list: meekness. Instead of acting important, Jesus treated others as important, both in his words and to the ultimate degree in his actions.
The last character trait in v 12 leads us directly to v 13. Patience in this context has less to do with quietly waiting a long time and more to do with keeping a good attitude as you put up with the behavior of others. Paul spells out exactly what this means in v 13: [Put] up with one another and [forgive] each other if anyone has a reason to complain against someone else. Just as the Lord forgave you, so you should also forgive others. Forbearance and forgiveness are perhaps the most striking feature of this team jersey for the new self. We show that we are on Christ’s team when we follow his example in forgiving those who do us wrong--even in the most petty ways--rather than cursing them or trying to get even.
Paul sums up these exhortations by urging the believers, around all these virtues, put on love, which fastens them together perfectly (v 14). Love is the identifying mark, the logo, the uniform of those who have committed themselves to the one who has reconciled all things to God. Love, not as an undefined positive feeling, but love robustly expressed in compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patient forbearance and forgiveness modeled on Jesus.
I’ve said in previous weeks that if Jesus really has reconciled and really is restoring a world broken by sin, we should see this reconciliation most fiercely in the fellowship of the local church. Paul’s words to the Colossians convince me that the church shows off the reality of this reconciliation by how we love, first one another and then all our neighbors near and far. In v 15, Paul says, Let the peace made by Christ judge your actions and thoughts in each of your hearts, for you’ve been called to this peace in one body.
God called us together as a church so that we can embody the peace Jesus made for us by dying on a cross. If we together, as WMC, are going to accomplish this purpose, that peace needs to shape all of our interactions. As Christ’s followers we are called to show compassion rather than distancing ourselves. We are called to help rather than merely being polite. We are called to think less of ourselves and talk other people up. We are called to bear with the shortcomings of others, and, rather than dwelling on them, forgive as quickly as we can. This is what love looks like; this is what a reconciled world looks like.
Marriage is a commitment that involves a change of lifestyle. I committed to love and cherish Cindy that morning for as long as we both shall live, but in doing so, I also committed myself to changing my bachelor ways. No more late nights getting into trouble with the guys. No more using my cash to buy whatever album or movie that happened to catch my attention. Now I had someone else’s needs and desires to think about. From that point on, I had committed myself to paying special attention to Cindy, to using my actions to love her--by vacuuming or cleaning the bathroom or taking her on a picnic in a local park. I had committed myself to privileging her desires above my own. This was a pretty big life change for me.
I tell this story this morning because our commitment to Jesus entails a similar kind of change in how we live. For some of us, this change is dramatic. I’ve heard traveling evangelists tell stories of people whose lives teetered on the edge of oblivion, people who were violent criminals or slaves to drug abuse. Then they met Jesus, and their lives turned around. But for many of us, our lives didn’t change quite that dramatically when we began to follow Jesus.
Perhaps, like me, you were young, in a family of believers. A change of allegiances happened in your heart; you no longer cared only for yourself, but now wanted above everything else to please God. But life looked pretty much the same before and after the commitment.
Or maybe you’re still in the middle of making up your mind about Jesus. Is he worth disrupting your familiar habits? Do you really want to have to rethink your goals, values, and prejudices? I hope that this sermon and even more our singing, prayers, and fellowship this morning can be an invitation but also a warning. Following Jesus is good. He brings us back home to God and leads us along a good way of living together. But following Jesus does involve deep and sometimes painful changes, in our hearts and minds and also, especially, in our actions. If you’re still deciding, I hope you join us, but I want you to know the cost. As the saying goes, “Grace is free, but it isn’t cheap.”
Making a commitment to Jesus, however, isn’t a one time thing. Whenever, however we began to follow Jesus, we must choose to continue to follow him day-by-day. It’s these daily decisions that challenge us, perhaps most deeply, to live in a new way.
I’ve seen this in my marriage. Television shows and magazines may tell us marriage is all about how the couple met, the courtship and proposal, and especially the big day of the wedding itself. These are surely great memories and stories to tell, but I’ve discovered that the wedding colors and guest list matter far less for my marriage than how I treat Cindy each morning when I get up, whether I choose to put away the dishes after I wash them, whether I let her pick the movie we watch this evening.
According to the letter Paul sent to the believers living in Colossae, this is also true of in our life with Christ. What matters most is how we choose to live in this relationship day-by-day.
Remember, the Colossian believers had begun to wander away after spirituality experts similar to our New Age gurus today. These experts promised that their set of spiritual exercises, prayers, and new rules was the key to finding God’s power in their lives.
For the last three weeks, we’ve listened to how Paul disproves their arguments. The Colossian believers knew Jesus as savior. They knew he had rescued them from domination by sin and death. And they had just begun to experience what life with Jesus is like in their small church-community. But then these self-proclaimed spiritual experts had shown up, advertising something more, something extra for those who really want to join the spiritually elite. Paul tells the believers that they were being taken in by these so-called experts.
If you look at Col 1.15-20, you’ll find the hymn with which Paul begins his argument against the tips and tricks they peddled. We’ve spent the last two Sundays with this passage, so it should be familiar. Christ Jesus, according to these poetic lines, is not just our deliverer; he’s more than our rescuer. Christ Jesus, it turns out, is also the one who set the world in order in the beginning. What’s more, in the same life-death-and-resurrection rescue mission that pulled us out the grips of sin and death, he also performed the critical action needed to set the entire world right. Paul goes on to say that the believers, as a church, carry on this work of reconciliation. They are the body of which Christ is the head. He made peace by his blood shed on the cross, and the believers carry on his peacemaking by embodying that peace in their fellowship with one another. Just look at Jews and Gentiles worshiping together and sharing meals, Paul says.
Further on in ch 2 Paul sums up his response to the counterfeit spirituality these experts taught. He says in vv 6-8 of ch 2:
So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. 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 the world rather than on Christ.According to Paul, the Colossian believers don’t need to look anywhere else for access to God’s power. No, they have full access to God’s power through Jesus by the very fact that they are continuing live their lives in him. At the very beginning of the letter, in 1.4, Paul congratulates them for this very thing, namely that they persist in faith and showing love to their fellow believers. Just by doing this, they already have the same Holy Spirit power that filled Jesus as he made peace on a cross.
So remembering where we’ve been with Paul in this letter, open your Bibles to Colossians ch 3. I’ve said a few times in the past weeks that this chapter and the following one are the goal of everything Paul has to say in chs 1 and 2. Chapter 3 begins the “so what” portion of the letter. If Christ really is the creator and reconciler of the entire world, what does it mean for our lives? If Christ’s reconciliation really shows up best in our fellowship with one another, how does that change how we live? Chapter 3 begins to answer these questions.
In vv 1-4, Paul tells the believers that if they’ve committed themselves to and identified themselves with Christ, then they are dead to all the powers that once so destructively ruled their lives. Just as Jesus gave up his life on the cross and then was resurrected into a new kind of life, the believers now live in the power of his new life.
This may sound a bit “mystical” or even “mysterious.” Dying and rising with Christ sounds more metaphorical than practical. But Paul tells us these ideas are completely practical and that they should give shape to our lives.
Let me describe a situation that may be more familiar. When I started seminary, I took out a loan to pay my tuition. Now that I’m done with school, I’m in the process of paying that loan back. Whatever happens in my life--should I become a father, should I move to another country--the lending bank will find me and demand to be paid back. But if I die, then the bank writes off my debt and clears my name. That’s one of the very few good things about educational debt.
Thankfully, I can manage to make my monthly payments on my student loan. It wasn’t that big. But the claim that sin and death had on me was much greater than that of my lending bank. There was no way I could get free from sin and death. Wherever I went, whatever I did with my life, sin and death would find me and remind me that I owed them, that, in effect, they owned me. I could see evidence of their power all around me--fear and greed in my own heart, sickness, poverty and oppression around me. I was constantly reminded that I would only ever clear my account when they took my very life from me.
Paul actually uses this very image for the power of sin and death in ch 2. But then he says that Jesus, through his cross, freed us from the claims of sin and death. Christ gave his life for ours. Now, if we identify ourselves completely with him, his death counts for ours. The powers of sin and destruction no longer have any claim on us. We’re dead as far as they’re concerned. We owe them nothing, and now we are free to live, just as Jesus lives by the power of his resurrection.
Paul says in v 3, For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. That’s a beautiful picture. The life we live together is hidden away from the forces that want to dominate it. But also hidden in God, which is to say, the way we live now is surrounded by God’s power, it shines with God’s glory, it is full to overflowing with joy, it’s brimming over with love.
So now, Paul tells the believers, live it out. Stop living like sin and death still rule you! Start living like Christ is the one calling the shots! If you’ve really made a commitment to Jesus, you need to change.
This change begins with quitting our old habits. “Habits” is a good word for what Paul wants us to change. Today we use the word “habit” to name certain patterns of behavior we do over and over. Their are good habits, like brushing your teeth, and bad habits, like drinking too much. But the word “habit” can also refer to the special clothes worn by monks and nuns. Throughout vv 7-15, Paul uses this picture of changing clothes to urge the Colossian believers to change their patterns of behavior.
Listen to vv 7 through the beginning of v 9. Paul writes,
You also once walked in these ways, when you lived that way. But now you must put away all these things, including anger and rage, ill-will, disrespectful speech, and dirty talk from your mouths. Stop deceiving one another!In a letter to another group of believers, Paul says, when I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me (1 Cor 13.11). If I was to make Paul’s point with an illustration from my own life, I could say, “When I was a bachelor, I talked like a bachelor, I stayed out late with the guys like a bachelor, I left my dirty laundry all over the floor like a bachelor, but when I got married, I put my bachelor ways behind me.”
Changed identity should lead to a changed lifestyle. This is Paul’s point in Col 3.7-9. It’s as if he’s saying, “It made sense for you to live lives of sin when sin still had a claim on you. Sin leads to destruction, so it made sense that you would be destroying other people through your words.” If we look back to vv 5 and 6, we see that living in the grips of sin also leads to self-destructive behaviors and desires: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed.
I’m new to Canadian football, and I still have quite a bit to learn. But let’s say that Edmonton trades a player to the Riders. Now imagine it’s game day, and there’s the Riders’ new player taking the field, but he’s still wearing his Eskimos jersey. Something wouldn’t be quite right with this situation. This is what Paul is telling the Colossian believers: Now you’ve identified yourselves with Christ, so your lives should look different. Those of us who’ve committed ourselves to Jesus have changed teams, and the jerseys of our lives should accurately show who we’re playing for. We need to peel off the dirty uniforms of our old team and permanently put it away.
Quitting Paul’s list of vices, however, involves more than only personal morality. Identifying with Jesus, committing ourselves to him, affects us inside and out, personally and corporately. The unrestrained desires of vv 5 and 6 and the unedifying speech of vv 8 and 9 violently disrupts the interpersonal peace Jesus earned for us on his cross.
Listen to what Paul says in vv 9 through 11:
For you took off the old person with its deeds, and you dressed yourselves in the new person, which is being renewed unto true knowledge, just like the image of its creator; in the new person there is no division between Greek and Jew, circumcised and non-circumcised, foreigner, Scythian savage, slave, free, but all is Christ and Christ is in each one.Notice that Paul uses the past tense in vv 9 and 10: you took off the old person, you dressed yourselves in the new person. Back in v 8, Paul commands the believers in the present tense to take off the habits of the old person, but here he says they’ve already done it. This sounds a bit confusing.
But let me explain: I wear a wedding ring to remind me that I am Cindy’s husband. Eight years ago my bachelor self was done away with, I am now a family man. Still, just like the believers in Colossae, I don’t always live up to my new identity. Sometimes I’m not a completely loving husband, sometimes I try to shirk my household responsibilities and leave them to Cindy. But my immature bachelor-like behavior doesn’t undo my identity as Cindy’s husband.
The Colossian believers, according to Paul, took off that old self owned by sin and put on a new self, reconciled to God, from the moment they committed themselves to Jesus. Before they identified with Jesus, they played up the cultural and class divisions between Jews and Gentiles, cultured and uncultured, slave and freeman. They’d use these to get power over each other, to distance themselves from people in need, to justify ignoring people, using people, lying to people. But the new self, according to Paul, is being transformed into the image of Christ, the one who reconciles all things and all people back to God. Selfish desires and behavior don’t fit within Christ’s cosmic peacemaking project. Just as dirty clothes and empty pizza boxes left all over the house don’t fit with my identity as Cindy’s husband, so greed and foul talk don’t fit with the believers’ new identity in Christ. Such messiness disrupts the peace of my marriage; the Colossian believer’s self-interest disrupts the peace Jesus won for them with his death.
In place of the habits of the old self, Paul tells the believers to put on love. When we listen to vv 12 through 15, we hear Paul telling the church-community to show love in one way after another.
He begins in v 12 by telling them to dress themselves with heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Each of these virtues is one way in which love shows itself. And as I hear each one, I find myself thinking of Jesus. Heartfelt compassion immediately reminds me of the many times we hear that Jesus’ actions were motivated by compassion. For instance, when Jesus sees the crowds in Mt 9.36, he has compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Instead of using cultural differences to maintain their distance from their neighbors, the believers should be filled with gut-level empathy when they see someone sitting lonely at the edge of a group or when they drive by men stumbling down the street enslaved by alcoholism.
When Paul adds kindness to the list, he indicates how the believers should respond. When we say someone is kind, we often mean that she is simply sympathetic. The Greek word Paul uses here means something more along the lines “helpful” or even “generous.” It’s sympathy connected to action. Let your compassion lead to action.
Next we hear that the believers should dress themselves with humility or modesty in our opinion of ourselves. We’re endlessly tempted to think much of ourselves, to find fault in others’ successes so we can feel better about our own accomplishments. But this isn’t what we see Jesus doing. Instead we seeing Jesus exercising the next item on Paul’s list: meekness. Instead of acting important, Jesus treated others as important, both in his words and to the ultimate degree in his actions.
The last character trait in v 12 leads us directly to v 13. Patience in this context has less to do with quietly waiting a long time and more to do with keeping a good attitude as you put up with the behavior of others. Paul spells out exactly what this means in v 13: [Put] up with one another and [forgive] each other if anyone has a reason to complain against someone else. Just as the Lord forgave you, so you should also forgive others. Forbearance and forgiveness are perhaps the most striking feature of this team jersey for the new self. We show that we are on Christ’s team when we follow his example in forgiving those who do us wrong--even in the most petty ways--rather than cursing them or trying to get even.
Paul sums up these exhortations by urging the believers, around all these virtues, put on love, which fastens them together perfectly (v 14). Love is the identifying mark, the logo, the uniform of those who have committed themselves to the one who has reconciled all things to God. Love, not as an undefined positive feeling, but love robustly expressed in compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patient forbearance and forgiveness modeled on Jesus.
I’ve said in previous weeks that if Jesus really has reconciled and really is restoring a world broken by sin, we should see this reconciliation most fiercely in the fellowship of the local church. Paul’s words to the Colossians convince me that the church shows off the reality of this reconciliation by how we love, first one another and then all our neighbors near and far. In v 15, Paul says, Let the peace made by Christ judge your actions and thoughts in each of your hearts, for you’ve been called to this peace in one body.
God called us together as a church so that we can embody the peace Jesus made for us by dying on a cross. If we together, as WMC, are going to accomplish this purpose, that peace needs to shape all of our interactions. As Christ’s followers we are called to show compassion rather than distancing ourselves. We are called to help rather than merely being polite. We are called to think less of ourselves and talk other people up. We are called to bear with the shortcomings of others, and, rather than dwelling on them, forgive as quickly as we can. This is what love looks like; this is what a reconciled world looks like.
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