In a discussion with friends this morning about the implications and application of Colossians 3:1-15, we pondered how to live out of the reality of who we are now as new creations in Christ, how to “seek the things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God,” and “set our minds that are above, not on things that are on the earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” How do we do take that to the office?
It’s not a new question, but it is a good heart-check.
One of our trio regularly reminds us that our “new creatureliness” is truest thing about those who belong to Christ. I shouldn’t be surprised, then, when I realize that I actually show compassion (e.g. while driving in Atlanta traffic) when circumstances would typically trigger impatience. “Spiritual formation,” “discipleship,” “growing in Christ,” and “Christian thinking” should evidence increasing love — for Christ and for others. The end result, or rather the continuing result, of learning theology should be a changed mind, a changed heart, and a changed life marked by the love of Christ. That was a goal of early Christian thinker-writers . . .
Robert Wilken writes, “The intellectual effort of the early church was at the service of a much loftier goal than giving conceptual form to Christian belief. Its mission was to win the hearts and minds of men and women and to change their lives.” [The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. pp xiv]
The early Christian writers who wrestled through the facts, meaning and implications of the Incarnation did not set out to honor a hero, but to collectively explain (among other things) the new reality of “God with us”…
“The church gave men and women a new love, Jesus Christ, a person who inspired their actions and held their affections. This was a love unlike others. For it was not only that
Jesus was a wise teacher, or a compassionate human being who reached out to the sick and needy or even that he patiently suffered abuse and calumny and died a cruel death,
but that after his death God had raised him from the dead to a new life. He who was once dead now lives. The Resurrection of Jesus is the central fact of all Christian devotion
and the ground of all Christian thinking. The Resurrection was not a solitary occurrence, a prodigious miracle, but an event within the framework of Jewish history, and it brought
into being a new community, the church. Christianity enters history not only as a message but also as a communal life, a society or city, whose inner discipline and practices,
rituals and creeds, and institutions and traditions were the setting for Christian thinking.” [Ibid, pp xv]
In Colossians 3 Paul exhorts us to “live according to who we are” (my term) — a new kind of human being — since we have been “raised in Christ” [Resurrection] and have “put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self [new creatureliness], which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator …. Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love ….” (vv 1, 9-10, 12-14a ESV)
Heading to the office . . .