Home -- English -- Colossians -- 036 (Have You Risen with Christ?; The Goal with Christ)
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COLOSSIANS - Christ in you, the hope of glory!
Studies in the Letter of Paul to the Colossians
Part 3 - What Does Your Resurrection Life Look like? (Colossians 3:1-17)
14. Have You Risen with Christ from the Dead? (Colossians 3:1-4)
Colossians 3:1-4
1 If then you were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated on the right hand of God. 2 Set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are on the earth. 3 For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ, our life, is revealed, then you will also be revealed with him in glory.
Paul began his teaching about the life and behaviour of a Christian with a thunderbolt! He asked the Colossians if they had already, through their new-found faith, received a portion of the resurrection life of Jesus Christ. This sentence amounts to a provocative and thrilling question! From the time Paul had seen and experienced the glory and splendour of the risen Jesus, everything had become, as far as his life was concerned, only straw and stubble. The only thing that lasted was the living Christ, to whom all power and authority in heaven and on earth had been given. His glorious radiance had deeply affected Paul. The young religious zealot was no longer blind, following his encountering the gleam and glow of Christ´s majesty on the road to Damascus. He had since, through the Holy Spirit, received a portion of the Godhead and life of Jesus. Our faith in the Son of Mary makes us spiritually alive and affects our involvement, judicially and concretely, in the resurrection of Jesus. The Lord had previously prophesied this mystery to Martha, the sister of Lazarus: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die…” (John 11:25-26).
Faith in Jesus is not merely an act of the intellect, but signifies a bestowment of power, a ministration of life, that represents our down-payment on His resurrection from the dead. In the person of Christ, resurrection and eternal life are manifested in all those who bind themselves to Him through faith. His life in them does not die, but is eternal. Paul, therefore, also asks you: “Have you truly risen with Christ from the dead, or are you still hovering somewhere between life and death? Do you live with Him in loyalty, or are you still dead in sin and pride?
15. The Goal of a Life with Christ (Colossians 3:1-4)
The person who has bound himself to Jesus in faith has placed his life at His disposal. Paul wrote to the Colossians, whom he had never met: Seek, search, pray and aspire, with all your energy and will, to come to know Jesus, who dwells above in heaven, at the right hand of God the Father, sitting at the side of honour, ruling together with Him over the universe (Ps. 110:1; Matt. 22:44; Acts 2:34-35; Heb. 1:13). Everything else is transitory and worthless. He alone is worthy of living for. Therefore, Paul repeated his apostolic command: “Set your minds on things above, not on things on the earth” (Col. 3:2). The exalted Jesus remains the goal and the direction for life, death and resurrection of all Christians. All that on earth hovers before them of beauty or all that is desirable to the human eye will pale and pass away in view of the glory of the resurrected Christ. All of the sought after titles and honours from earthly centers of learning, as well as all the so-called ladders to political, economic and social success amount to, in the end, mere self-deception. The smallest in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than the strongest, richest, prettiest and most famous on earth.
Test yourself: What percent of your thoughts and plans are directed toward Jesus and His kingdom, and what percent do you spend for your occupation, your family and for yourself? Many Christians live schizophrenic. They well seek what is above, but just as well, that which is on earth. They fail to recognize that their double strategy becomes ever more worldly and transitory and that the cares of daily life are devouring them. They resemble a person who gets into a car and gives it the gas, only to have one foot still outside on the ground. They are nearly torn in two. They need to decide for Jesus alone, and learn to rethink things through: “Therefore…let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:1-2). This need to change our thinking needs radical treatment.
Paul linked this definition of the Christian´s goal with a macabre sentence, one that nearly sticks to your throat: “For you died” (Col. 3:3). No one wants to hear these annihilating words: “You are dead!” It happened in a Turkish military hospital during WW I that the doctor on duty was passing through the rows of wounded and pronouncing all those dead who were dead, so that they could be taken away. In so doing he said of one soldier lying on the floor: “He is dead!” The soldier, however, raised himself up and cried: “I am not dead, I´m alive”, whereby the male nurse, who was accompanying the doctor, replied: “Be quiet! If the senior medical officer says you´re dead, then you´re dead!”
Paul wrote to the church in Colosse in the perfect tense: “You are dead, deceased!” In writing this to them, he testified what he had already written to the church in Rome (in the “we” form), where he also included the import of these words: 3 “Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? 4 Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, 6 knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. 7 For he who has died has been freed from sin….11 Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:3-11).
Paul certainly knew that no man wants to die. He had also experienced and come to know just how mighty and tenacious the sin in our blood, in our body, and in our soul is. The only thing that can overcome it is a spiritual death. Therefore, Jesus said: “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. 25 For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. 26 For what is a man profited if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matt. 16:24-26).
Such clear and challenging messages seldom please man. Yet whoever has accepted Jesus as the goal for his life comes to hate and reject every sin in him and in the church, and desires to be freed from such. To that end Paul testified: “Your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). If the last part of his stanza regarding our “death” was so shocking, all the more thrilling is the resurrection song for Christ´s followers. Not only are our names written in the Book of Life in heaven, but the new life, that has been given to us through the Holy Spirit, remains imperishably bound to the person of Jesus. He is our life, our strength and our joy. Only in Him and with Him do we live eternally. Otherwise, we remain in ourselves defective and incomplete personages. With Him and in Him, however, we have a glorious future. Since Jesus lives in God and His Father became visible in Him, it also means that the Lamb of God has taken us into His fellowship with His Father. Who are we that we can think, hear and believe such things? “Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:15-16).
Paul did not speak of our hidden life in the Holy Trinity as being some fixed, spiritual reality. Instead, he was compelled of the Holy Spirit to testify to the church in Colosse of the certain hope wherein our eternal life in Christ will become visible. Paul was so certain of this future event that he was led to portray the person of Jesus as the effervescent source of our eternal life. We receive a godly life no other way! The Holy Spirit does not exalt Himself and does not testify that He is the eternal life in us; much more, He glorifies Jesus and pointedly testifies that the Lamb of God is our life in God.
World history is pressing hard for the return of Jesus Christ in glory, when He, as Judge of the world and Saviour of His church, will again set His foot on earth. Paul waited longingly for the Victor of Golgotha to break forth and make visible the fullness of divine life with His appearing. The imprisoned apostle freely testified that, at the coming of Jesus Christ, when He returns in power and authority, His followers, too, will be radiated and clothed with His glory, so that they will be able to fully reflect the splendour and majesty of their beloved Lord and Saviour. Already at the beginning of his letter to the Colossians, he described the great mystery that had been revealed to him: “Christ in you, the hope of glory!” (Col. 1:27).
This hope of a near supernatural transformation of Christians was more important to Paul than anything else on earth. His longing was based upon the reality of the vision and sight of Jesus Christ he had received before Damascus. He had seen “Him” in His glory. Since that time, everything else had become unimportant to him. The returning Lord and King remained the goal, the standard, and the blessed assurance of Paul, who wrote: “Through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Rom. 5:2). It wasn´t earthly, dust-covered qualities of life that constituted his hope; rather, it was the visible perfecting of Christ´s followers in complete unity with their Lord and Head. It pays to memorize this greeting and objective of Paul for all the churches:
1 “If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. 2 Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. 3 For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory” (Col. 3:1-4).
Prayer: Father in heaven, we worship You, for Your Son Jesus has sunk eternal life into our hearts. Today He sits at Your right hand. Our life is hidden in Him. We excitedly await His coming again, so that Your and His glory and Your and His love will become visible in us. Help us to love no one and nothing more than we do You and Him. Amen.
Question 37: What is the objective of your life?
The hope of our visible unity with Jesus in glory demands concrete preparations in the exercise of practical holiness of life for every lover of Christ: You are to be Holy, For I am Holy