Colossians 3:1-10 Heaven as destination and as fulfillment.

It is one thing to say that you must live for Jesus. It is a very different concern to say that everything you do must reflect your love for him. To live for Jesus can be as simple as saying a prayer in the morning or being kind through the day. Having Christ affect the attitudes, the savor, the direction, the implications, and the tenor of all you do, is very different.

Lightfoot (on Colossians 3:1) says, “All your aims must centre in heaven, where the Christ reigns who has thus exalted you, enthroned on God’s right hand. All your thoughts must abide in heaven, not on the earth. For, I say it once again, you have nothing to do with the mundane things: you died, died once for all the world: you are living another life” (Colossians, 208).

The hidden life.

There is now no outward splendor of the Christian’s life. Your life is hidden, for now. It is hidden with Christ in God. This means we are now to center all our aims in Christ. Our focus is on the Person of Christ. He rules over the entire Universe at the Right Hand of God – the place of supreme authority and power.

You now make decisions, choices, create attitudes, build faith; walk faithfully, because your life, your truest life is now hidden with Christ. Christ is now residing physically in Heaven, and you must keep your attention focused on him there.

Your life is lived out here in this place, reflecting our incorporation into Christ and directly impacting your soon-to-be-revealed eternity with God where you will live and reign with him forever. Your hidden life with Christ is lived today by focusing your attention on the One who redeemed you, who indwells your lives by the Spirit of Christ, and in whom you draw your confidence, are assured of his good pleasure and grace toward you, and by living with him daily, you begin a relationship that will continue forever and ever — the relationship of the one who lives by faith and who is every moment, “in Christ.”

The conflict.

We are still on the Earth. But we are positioned, our standing is in Heaven. We must live on this planet, breathing, eating, working, loving. But our true life isn’t here at all. What is worse is that our nature (our members) is infected with sin so thoroughly that we cannot escape the impact of sin. Even in our most devoted moment, we are assaulted and insulted by our sinful selves. We live on the Earth and we can be quite Earthy. But that is not our truest selves. That is not our redeemed life. That is not what we could be by faith and faithfulness. The NIV translates Colossians 3:1 “set your hearts on things above.” We must turn our Earth-bound, Earthy hearts toward our Savior who lives in Heaven.

The false and the true.

The Earthly system is filled with lies and with unkept promises. Ever sin promises us a kind of joy or freedom that we longed for, but then it disappoints and then it kills us. The claims of the world are impressive to us. We love the new cars, the smell of perfume, the taste of the expensive steak. But they are all fleeting.

Our lives are lived on Earth, but they are redeemed to live for God. Our values are not the utilitarian doctrines of the person who just desires more fun and stuff. Our values have been captured by the God who, in a short time, will reveal himself with great splendor and shouts, with trumpets and overwhelming power, to be only God and Savior of those who trust in him.

The world would entertain us to death, lest we think for a second about what happens when we die. Rather that living for God now, the Earth would have us live solely and supremely for ourselves. The short-sightedness of the world’s view of things is astonishing. It is as though the Earth is a city at the base of a giant mountain, a mountain with millions of giant boulders about to cascade down on the village, but the people refuse to see the danger, or flee to safety. The picture of Pompeii before and during the eruption of Vesuvius is a telling parable about the nature of humans to refuse to think in terms of eternity or, most surely, the God who made all things and who will judge or redeem all people.

Calvin writes that he sees the conflict between “those fruitless exercises which the false apostles urge” versus “true exercises in which it become Christians to employ themselves.” (Commentary on Colossians, ad loc. Colossians 3:1). The challenge is to see the false system, the system of lies and then to view, to cast the gaze much higher to see the true and the eternal, where “Christ is.”

Some key versus on the world.

(Jesus) John 15:19 – you do not belong to the world …

John 16:33 – in this world you will have tribulation …

John 18:36 – my kingdom is not of this world …

(Paul) 1 Corinthians 3:19 – the wisdom of this world is foolishness …

(John) 1 John 2:15 – do not love the world or anything in it …

How do we seek the things above?

Calvin, “When in our minds we are truly sojourners in this world, and are not bound to it.” “Let your whole meditation be as to this: to this apply your intellect – that is your mind.” It is thinking of Christ (who is above) “that we may adore him, and that our minds may dwell with him.”

All the Earthly things have nothing for the believer in Christ. All will perish. All will be taken away, even gold. Isaiah 55:2, “why do you spend your money for what is not bread?” The institutions of worldly glory seem hollow and they taste like death. They do not deliver on their promises. They focus on people, fame, success, money, beauty, and the opinion and praise of others. Human science fails even to see the existence of God and rejects all who would begin with God as the source of all knowledge and insight. They would choose randomness and the wisdom of people over the Christ of history and his redemption — the grandest act of all time and in the whole of eternity. God came to Earth! To live among us! To die for the sins of his people. And to crush death and sin and Hell forever. It hardly makes the news in this day of great human wisdom and with more communication that can be imagined. Yet the world fails to communicate God. He has already spoken.

The point of division. Do we live as citizens of Heaven or of the Earth?

The danger. There is the implication that it would be a tremendous tragedy and an offense to God not to bear up while we are in the world, to abide in Christ, to refuse to die to sin, or to break with the world. On that glorious Day when Christ is revealed from Heaven as Victor, our true union with him will be made manifest; what was hidden about our lives in Christ will be made known for all to see. So those who served Christ well and who died to self, will be honored. Those who did not will not be rewarded, though they may welcomed into the presence of Christ. But those who have a false faith, who impersonated Christian faith but never saw Christ seated and never knew true salvation and did not have a living relationship with Christ, they will be separated from the true Christians in judgment and by eternal separation from God. So they, too, will be revealed to their sorrow and final judgment.

Put to death your “earthly members.”

Colossians 3:5 – what is tied to the Earth, to sin, to our members (various parts, tied into a mass of sin and corruption) must be put off and put to death. Including: Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness. Lightfoot notes that passion is passive (easy to remember), but that evil desire is active and results in specific sins we commit actively. We are warned against passive and active sins. Both should be put to death.

Every true Christian will know the mortification, the putting to death, of sins. It is absolutely impossible for a true believer, a person who is indwelt by the Spirit of Christ, whose life is hidden with Christ in God, to continue to sin and to sin and to sin. There must come a break with sin and putting to death of many sins that had entrapped us when we came to Christ.

Every true believer becomes more and more like Christ. They come to resemble Christ in their character and in the motives behind their moral choices. They do not merely belong to Christ or are forgiven by the work of the Cross (as wonderful and important as they are), but they come to love Christ and he becomes the center of every choice and action. How could he not be that important to the one who loves him more than anything on this Earth?