Christ Our Life
Colossians, Part 9: Living the new life according to the gospel.
To understand Paul’s argument in Colossians 3, it is critical to keep Chapter 2 readily in mind. As Paul explains the certainty of the life of faith, he does so by reminding the believers in Colossae what has taken place in the gospel — namely, death and resurrection (Col. 2:12). Just as the Lord himself died on the cross and rose again the third day, so, too, has every believer been resurrected with him, pulled out of their sinful putrefaction by faith alone. The gospel, of course, is not merely an announcement of information; it’s an announcement of new life. God’s word of the gospel is a word of life that brings the dead back to life by giving them the life of the one who died for them. This, to be sure, is what makes the euangelion so endlessly unique. It is only through the proclamation of this dynamic word of God that any of us are made alive and forgiven.
1. Dying and Rising with Christ
Any preacher worth his salt will never take credit for any conversion since it is neither his words nor his eloquence that has any power or authority to make such a miracle happen. It is all derived from the word of the gospel, which is God’s word of life. Death and resurrection, therefore, are the central portrait for conveying and understanding what the gospel does, a fact that is true of every sinner who repents and believes in the work of Jesus for them. Paul, though, doesn’t leave the Colossians hanging in the balance by merely informing them of all the teachings to resist or avoid without also drawing their attention (and ours) to all the things worth pursuing. In other words, the hope of the gospel is not only about the death of sin but also about the resurrection to life.
Accordingly, in Chapter 3 of his letter, the apostle begins to describe what this new life with Christ and in Christ looks like (Col. 3:1–4). The underlying question of this section — and really the rest of the letter — is, Now what? “What does all this mean exactly?” After explaining and exposing the emptiness of the words of the false teachers, and after reminding the Colossians of the certainty of the Lord Jesus’s work for them, Paul proceeds to explain what that means in the here and now.
2. Christ Our Life and Righteousness
The gospel, to be sure, is not dependent upon you. God’s good news announces that what was demanded of you was done for you by God’s Son, before any repentance, before any faith, or before any “come to Jesus moment.” Through his perfect life and death, God in Christ was working all things out to bring you to himself, precisely by “not counting [the world’s] trespasses against them” and instead counting them against the one “who knew no sin,” that is, his Son (2 Cor. 5:19–21). This is the groundbreaking and life-changing truth at the heart of the gospel, by which we are forgiven and redeemed. To be sure, though, the sufficiency of this truth is not relegated to past sins. It’s not just that your record of wrongs has been wiped clean and your debt of unrighteousness cleared away. Through Christ, God has credited you with his righteousness; through the death of his Son, we are raised to life. Alexander Maclaren puts it like this:
Faith joins us in most real and close union to Jesus Christ, so that in His death we die to sin and the world, and that, even while we live the bodily life of men here, we have in us another life, derived from Jesus.1
At the moment of faith, the gospel stuns us by announcing that a deposit has been made on our behalf. The very life, death, and resurrection of the person of God’s Son have been deposited into our account. This is the game-changing declaration of God’s gospel, which says that just as much as Christ is your death, so, too, is Christ your life. Your frantic quest to be made right with God is over. Because of him, you no longer have to strive to earn God’s favor. Hidden in Christ’s shadow (Col. 3:3), you already have it. All that he accomplished through his life, death, resurrection, and ascension is yours by faith, and continues to serve as the perpetual grounds of your life and your assurance. In other words, your present and future life of faith is rooted and established in the infinitely free and unmerited favor of God, revealed in and lavished on you in Christ alone. This is “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). “Joined spiritually to Christ,” R. C. H. Lenski comments, “he is in us, and we in him, i.e., in a living connection by which he, the Life, fills us with spiritual, eternal life.”2
3. Living with a New Purpose
Our new life in Christ, which is built on this new foundation, also imbues us with a new purpose. “If then you have been raised with Christ,” Paul says, “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Col. 3:1–2). Perhaps a better rendering of “if” would be “since”: Since all of that is true, here’s what that means. Prior to Christ’s intervention, our hearts and minds were “set on” the detritus and debris of the world, things which are all decidedly self-serving. Ever since sin broke into creation, humankind has been exposed as self-consumed beings, doing all we can to get what we can for ourselves. The posture of our hearts is enchanted by what is most beneficial and/or convenient for us. This way of life, though, is a living death. It’s frail and woefully unfulfilling, leaving us to trudge through the wasteland.
When faith comes as the gospel echoes in our ears and souls, and we are made alive in and with Christ, our hearts and minds are “set on” something (Someone) else. The “newness of life” (Rom. 6:4) that we are given in Christ is defined by this new purpose, which calls us to “seek the things that are above.” What Paul is describing is a heart and life posture that’s preoccupied with the words, works, and person of Christ, a joyful preoccupation that is characterized by delightfully seeking and submitting to a higher, truer, and more loving authority.3 We are no longer slaves, shackled by the false promises of the world. We’ve been set free from all that through what the gospel announces, furnishing and filling you with new desires and aspirations.
In other words, the new “true north” of our soul is centered on the Christ of God, who is himself the center and source of all our joy, life, peace, and belonging. Everything you need, in Christ, you already have. And when our hearts and minds are preoccupied with that glorious truth, our lives begin to take the shape our Creator intended, where we are free to serve him fully and love our neighbors freely — not out of some sense of obligation or reciprocation but out of the overflow of his infinite favor. Our new purpose, therefore, is a byproduct of our new foundation. “The more we set our minds to consider the things above,” notes R. C. Lucas, “the firmer the ground beneath our feet.”4 Indeed, the more your heart and mind are “set on” the things above, “where Christ is,” the more truly you will “walk in him.”
4. The Hope of Glory
The end goal or telos of this new life is also defined by a new hope, which Paul expresses when he writes, “When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Col. 3:4). This sentiment defies much of the modern Christian thinking, which is enthralled with the notion that we can “find our best lives now.” That’s the mantra you’ll find spewing out of some pulpits today, which is nothing more than the frantic hope of “self-help.” It’s the biblical message watered down through “self-made religion” and empty philosophy, where the work of Christ becomes a message all about you and your progress. A vibrant, full, and prosperous life is the carrot dangled at the end of the stick of your grit and grind. But what else is this other than setting our minds on things that are on earth?
This, to be sure, isn’t the hope that Paul has in mind. Rather, Paul’s hope is nothing less than the hope of the gospel, which is tethered to the promise of Christ’s return. Even though he wasn’t privy to those upper room discourses, Paul was still well aware and fully confident that the Son of God was coming back one day to sweep up his church in his arms and bring them with him to glory (cf. John 14:3). His hope wasn’t tied to how much progress he could achieve or how much better his life in the here and now might be or could be. Instead, his hope was entirely connected to and found in the Christ of God, whose dying and rising again make everything new. And when he returns, it won’t be with a tip of the hat for all our effort, but with the incandescent news that all things are restored in him. This is our hope, our confident expectation (1 John 3:1–2).
Accordingly, setting our minds on this hope puts everything else into perspective, subverting the colloquialism that “some folks are so heavenly minded that they’re of no earthly good.” Paul certainly didn’t subscribe to that. His words to the Colossians suggest that only as we are more heavenly-minded will we be of any earthly good. This doesn’t mean that we should all become monks, cloistered away in a tower somewhere. Rather, it means that our lives are finally rightly ordered because of the risen Christ. It means that our hope of being made new has nothing to do with us, how well we can behave, or perform, but resides solely with the one who came down to where we are so that he might bring us to where he is. It’s all because of him.
Alexander Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture, Vols. 1–17 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1944), 14:2.128.
R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians, to the Thessalonians, to Timothy, to Titus, and to Philemon (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1961), 155.
David vividly expresses the same thing in the Psalms (cf. Ps. 42:1–2; 63:1, 8; 84:1–2).
R. C. Lucas, The Message of Colossians & Philemon: Fullness and Freedom, The Bible Speaks Today Series (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020), 140.