Colossians 3 -Power Dressing for the Christian

I want to start with verse 1 of Colossians 3, so we will have the context- then we will proceed to look at verses 5-14 in some depth. In chapter 2, Paul has been telling the Colossians of his goals for ministry- then he exhorts them to realize who they are IN CHRIST and the ramifications of that.

3:1Therefore, if you have been raised with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

3:2 Keep thinking about things above, not things on the earth,

3:3 for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

3:4 When Christ (who is your life) appears, then you too will be revealed in glory with him.

3:5 So put to death whatever in your nature belongs to the earth: sexual immorality, impurity, shameful passion, evil desire, and greed which is idolatry.

3:6 Because of these things the wrath of God is coming on the sons of disobedience.

3:7 You too lived your lives in this way at one time, when you used to live among them.

3:8 But now, put off all such things as anger, rage, malice, slander, abusive language from your mouth.

3:9 Do not lie to one another since you have put off the old man with its practices

3:10 and have been clothed with the new man that is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the one who created it.

3:11 Here there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and in all.

3:12 Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with a heart of mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience,

3:13 bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if someone happens to have a complaint against anyone else. Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you too forgive others.

3:14 And to all these virtues add love, which is the perfect bond.

An article in a San Francisco newspaper reported that a young man who once found a $5 bill on the street resolved that from that time on he would never lift his eyes while walking. The paper went on to say that over the years he accumulated, among other things, 29,516 buttons, 54,172 pins, 12 cents, a bent back, and a miserly disposition. But he also lost something—the glory of sunlight, the radiance of the stars, the smiles of friends, and the freshness of blue skies.

I’m afraid that some Christians are like that man. While they may not walk around staring at the sidewalk, they are so engrossed with the things of this life that they give little attention to spiritual and eternal values. Perhaps they’ve gotten a taste of some fleeting pleasure offered by the world and they’ve been spending all their time pursuing it. But that is dangerous. When God’s children, who are “seated with Christ in the heavenlies,” give their affection and attention to a world that is passing away, they lose the upward look. Their perspective becomes distorted, and they fail to bask in heaven’s sunlight. Taken up with the baubles of this world, they become defeated, delinquent Christians. Buttons, pins, and pennies, but no treasures laid up in heaven.

The apostle Paul said, “If ye, then, be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above” (Col. 3:1). To live for the things of this world is to miss life’s best. Paul is saying, “Let’s set our sights on the heights! “ We were created to find our life in Christ alone.

Paul then shifts his focus and teaching to an analogy. For us to be able to do that, we need to do some spiritual undressing.. we have to remove the things from our new life that are not in keeping with who we have become. Like the wedding guests invited from off the street in the parable, we are to exchange our old clothes for the wedding garments that the King has waiting for us to wear.

The thing that impresses one first about this passage is how it revolves around the idea of clothing. The first time I ever taught on this passage I commented that you have to strip off the clothing and then in verse 9 you come back to the idea of taking off the old man and putting on the new man. My whole lesson was taught around this idea of put off the old man’s clothes, put on the new man’s clothes.

I think that is correct but there is an underlying point that must be made as well- who we are should be reflected in how we should live. The business world talks about dressing to reflect your position- "Power Dressing". In the text we are looking at today , the overall context that is advanced is that there comes a time when you should decide to dress in a certain way- then, since you have to get dressed every morning, you have to make that decision over and over again for the rest of your life. Putting on godly qualities is not a once for all decision- it is as daily as dressing up. So every day I must give as much care to my spiritual being as I would give to my physical being.

Paul is telling us to think of things we need to put off- about how to live a holy life in the world. He doesn’t say , now listen- if you want to live a better life you’ve got to search for a new experience. What he says is, you have to understand a past experience! The way to understand how to move ahead is to understand what happened when we trusted Christ. I want you to notice with me several great truths in this passage.

1. If we are to live for God in this world we have to know our identity (vv9-10). The fundamental sense in this passage is encapsulated in the statement “since you have taken off the old self with its practices”. You’ve stripped it off- you’ve removed it. The old self is all that you were, all that I was apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. The old self is Anthony Foster living without the grace of God in his life: my guilt that I had before God, all of my sin, all of my disobedience, all of my transgressions before God as someone who was guilty and separated from Him. That is the condition apart from Christ of every man and woman in the world, by our connection with Adam and by our own sin. That is who we are. It isn’t just that I have my old position, my guilt before Him, but I have my old character. Sin had a power and control over me apart from my life under the grace of God. Paul says, when I trusted Christ I put that off!

Don’t misunderstand. Paul is not talking about a grit your teeth, turn over a new leaf self reformation. Turning your life around does not mean going from being depressed and miserable to being miserable and depressed! Self reformation can never change the real me before God! Instead we trust in the Lord Jesus, recognizing that we ARE guilty before God and we are powerless to change who we are before Him. We have to recognize that God sent His own son to die on the cross to deal with our sin in the terms of its guilt and in terms of its power in our life. If any one is in Christ he is a new creature!

You have also put on the new man- that involves a new position before God. I used to be guilty and now I am forgiven. I used to be an outsider and now I am a member of the family. I used to be condemned and now I have a right to be in heaven. Once I was unrighteous and now I am righteous. I have been justified- declared acceptable by God Himself who gave the righteousness of Christ to me. I am a new man. Not only that, but I am a new man in terms of who I am internally. The moment before I trusted Christ, if I died I would go into a lost eternity, forever separated from God. The moment I trust Christ there is a new me, the eternal me that death has no power over and I would go into the presence of the Lord Jesus. God hasn’t just remodeled me- there has been a deep fundamental change! There is a new, eternal Anthony, the child of God who has a new heart, anew desire, a new nature. That’s regeneration.

2. Keep reading- there is something very important. I am totally new in Christ- but I’m not completely new! You must put on the new self which is being renewed. There is a new creation, but that renewal is being progressively being manifested in all of my life.It is not going to be completed until I am in heaven in the presence of the Lord and everything about me is completely new. So the new self is the renewing self. I am being renewed.

Remember when Eastern Europe was reborn? There was a difference in having a new government and a new society. Let’s not deny that there has been a real change when we remember the former Soviet Union , but there has been a long process of renewal that has ensued. So with the child of God, I am new and I am being renewed.

3. I am being renewed in a direction- did you notice? I am being renewed into knowledge according to the image of the creator- progressively being changed towards Christlikeness. God’s intention is not to make us into people who don’t do certain things and avoid certain activities. Holiness does not come from having a special experience. Holiness comes as we are progressively changed into the likeness of the Lord Jesus as we become more and more like Him.

J. I. Packer says it well when he says “We are children of an age that values kicks above character, self gratification above self control, and emotional maturity above moral stature. Pleasures are regarded as more important than fidelity or honesty or altruism or service, and we plan harder for recreation than we do for righteousness.” That last part is particularly instructive, because most Christians spend more time planning their vacations than their godliness. When we live in a society like that it affects us. We bring the habits of the old man, even though we are fundamentally different. We need to know our identity. But the second thing I want you to notice is that we need to understand our complexity. We are people who are renewed but not renewed. We are regenerated but not yet completely transformed.

It is damned hard to be renewed. Look at the language Paul uses- put to death- these are executioners terms. Put to death what attitudes and thought patterns that belong to your past sinful nature. In verse 8 he says you must rid yourself of all such things- so it is possible. Then in verse 12, clothe yourself. He is saying that there is something we do. We are not passive, sitting back and saying, Oh Lord change me! We have to put to death, to put off, to put on, accept that we have a responsibility. Romans 8:13 says we are to do this by the Spirit who dwells in us.

As we put this together, three things jump out at me about our complexity.

a. Sin’s power is broken, but it is not removed in our lives. These are Christians Paul is speaking to, yet look at what they are involved in: sexual impurity, lust, evil desires, anger, malice, you have the list there.

This may strike home to some of us and we think- oh no one around me has the same struggles I have, but I assure you , everyone reading this has a struggle with the complexity of who we are! We are new creatures if we have trusted Christ but most of us look inwardly and know how unrenewed we are. No matter how young you came to be a Christian, you were programmed in your formative years by the world.

b. The second thing that surfaces in regard to our complexity is that our problems are inside us, not outside us. Jack Paar once said “ As I look back , my life has been one big long obstacle course with me as the main obstacle.” Do you identify with that? I do.

Did you ever think that when Lazarus came out of the tomb he came bound with all the grave clothes on. When Christ came out he came with all the grave clothes neatly left behind. Jesus said “Unwrap him and let him go!” Our life here is a life of unwrapping and being set free.

c. The third thing this passage tells me about how complex we are is that sin needs to be amputated, not coddled. Radical surgery is in order, not some kind of therapy. In fact the Greek here is that strong- Put to death means just that. Amputation is a scary thought. Amputaion is so drastic and so final.

I shared a work studio in college with a student who was Kentucky State champion fiddler and a remarkably talented potter. One day he was preparing canvases for a professor by cutting redwood stretchers and cut off two of his fingers and mangled another. The doctor was able to reattach the fingers and he was given assurances that they would live. Yet they were worse than useless- they impeded what he could do in a worse way than if they were gone once and for all. So, he chose to have the crippled fingers removed again because they were detrimental to his playing the fiddle and working the clay.

He went on to become a successful ceramicist and college professor. But he had to make a hard choice. Sin is like that- at the fall, we were cut off from what we could be- masters of creation and productivity. We try to fix ourselves by the world's devices, but we just cannot be what we were in the garden. At salvation, we are separated from our remedies- God cuts them off from us and we go back and try to reattach ourselves to it, but is never quite works that way. It binds and hinders what our life could be without it.

Now the analogy I gave of the amputation breaks down- for this is not a onetime act- but it is a decisive act. The list that ensues is not very attractive, but it is very realistic. Inverses 3-7 we have the sins of the flesh. Sexual sin was a real problem in the ancient world. This is the context they lived in- but now holiness in Christ came along and Paul says- you have to amputate some things. Did you know that there are three times more adult bookstores than there are McDonald in North America? That doesn’t even count cable television and the Internet. The Bible here calls this impurity or uncleanness. Our society feeds on that.

Paul then tells us he wants us to think about materialism. It is covetousness and greed. He puts this in the same list that talks about being involved with a prostitute. When you use your body for your purposes rather than god’s that is a form of idolatry. We need to wrestle honestly with these things. Label it honestly, deal with it precisely and drastically. Don’t play with the idea of a relationship outside of marriage. Don’t make divorce an option. Don’t toy with the idea. If things are dragging and drawing you, take the axe and cut it. Why? It is dangerous- the wrath of God is coming.

Dorothy Sayers can help us here with her observation of the law of the stop sign and the law of the fire. The law of the stop sign is the one organized by the city council that says while traffic is in such and such a form so we need to put a stop sign here. Then traffic patterns change and a traffic light is needed. Then if traffic patterns change again we need to take it down or build a freeway. The stop sign is the law that says whatever is pragmatically useful, we will put it there. It is a human decision.

The law of the fire is very different. The law of the fire says- put your hand in the fire and it burns. You can say- we are going to repeal the law of the fire. Everybody up the chain of command can agree. Everyone in the world can agree- and the law of the fire is repealed. Now if you stick your hand in the fire, will it still burn? Rationalization will never change the fact that the wrath of God is coming. While you may never get a STD in this world you may get an internally hardened heart. That is even more dangerous.

At this I want to compare and contrast the specifics of the negative and positive lists Paul gives us.

Taking off the old Life-style

In Colossians 3:5 the Apostle Paul says, "Consider the members of your earthly body as dead . " What specifically is Paul asking us consider as dead? He gives us two lists: one in verse 5 and one in verses 8‑9. The first list refers to unholy, perverted kinds of love, and the second list refers to wicked kinds of hate. Let's look at both lists. We are to consider as dead:

1. Immorality‑This refers to unlawful sexual relationships. God looks on immorality as a serious sin. In the Old Testament, it was punishable by death, and God's attitude toward it hasn't changed. He forbids any sexual activity outside of marriage.

2. Impurity‑This refers to evil thoughts and intentions. The evil thought is behind the evil deed; therefore, if you control your thoughts, you'll control your body. That's why Paul says, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Rom. 12:2).

3. Passion‑This is related to the next item on the list. It is a passive term referring to latent sexual desire.

4. Evil Desire‑This is a more intense passion, and more active than the previous term. Paul is saying that latent sexual desire becomes activated sexual desire. That creates evil thoughts, which in turn produce evil deeds.

5. Greed‑The Greek word translated as "greed" in verse 5 is pleonexia. It literally means, "to have more. " In actuality it means more than that. It can mean, "to have what isn't yours;' or, "to want what is forbidden." Paul says that greed amounts to idolatry. You either worship God or self. As one bows to self, evil desires surface, which lead to evil thoughts and then to evil deeds. Paul is saying that if we want to get rid of sin, we have to get rid of greed‑the core of sin.

The second list of various kinds of hate is related more to speech than feelings:

1. Anger‑This refers to smoldering, resentful bitterness that refuses to be pacified.

2. Wrath‑Anger gives way to wrath. This refers to a blaze of sudden anger. It is like setting fire to straw‑it flames furiously, but quickly burns out.

3. Malice‑This is the result of wrath. It refers to evil or wickedness.

4. Slander‑This is also a result of wrath. Every time you slander a person, you slander God. Jesus said, "Whoever shall say, 'You fool; shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell" (Matt. 5:22). When you insult someone, you are disparaging someone made in the image of God.

5. Abusive speech‑This refers to obscene language. Ephesians 4:29 says, "Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, that it may give grace to those who hear." If you're going to say something, say what is edifying, necessary, and gracious.

6. Lying‑ This is another problem of the mouth. You need to tell the truth. If Christians can't speak the truth, who can?

How can you get rid of those sins? There are two ways: One, starve them. Don't feed your mind with trash. Second, crowd sin out with positive graces. Pour into your mind the Word of God and things that are good and right (Phil. 4:8).

Putting on a New Life‑style

Those of us who have come to Christ are chosen by God, and considered holy and beloved by Him (Col. 3:12). On the basis of that, we are to put on a life‑style that is consistent with such a calling. What kind of a life‑style are we to put on? Let's look at some characteristics in verse 12:

1. Compassion‑The King James Version here refers to the "bowels of mercies." (splagchnon in Greek- I always liked the sound of that) In Hebrew thinking, the bowels, or visceral area, were understood to be the seat of compassion and sympathy. Compassion was certainly characteristic of Jesus. He was so moved with compassion for people that He wept for them (Luke 19:41). He was so concerned about the poor that He fed them. He was so concerned about the sick that He healed them. Based on Christ's example, Christians should be the greatest helpers of the poor, blind, sick, and needy.

2. Kindness‑This is the virtue of a man whose neighbor's good is as dear to him as his own. That attitude is no better expressed than by the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, who bound the wounds of an enemy, took him to an inn, and spent a good amount of money so that the man would have a nice bed and be cared for properly. The word in the Greek marches in two directions- first it mean to do what is useful- what meets needs. Also it is used as mellowness- for instance wine was said to be kind when it lost its bite.

3. Humilty‑ This is the antidote to self‑love. Whenever you are always desiring things for yourself‑whether they are things at your job, in your family, or in your church‑ you will poison your relationships with other people.

The Greeks hated this word. They thought that the measure of a person's greatness was how many people served him. Therefore the servant was the lowest kind of person. Andrew Murray said that our humility before men is the only sufficient evidence that our humility before God is real.

4. Gentleness‑This can be translated, "meekness." It refers to a willingness to suffer injury rather than inflict it. It is strength under control. It was said of the Roman army that they were meek as they were tremendously self disciplined. Second Timothy 2:24‑25 says, "The Lord's bondservant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition."

5. Patience‑When someone who is patient is confronted by someone who argues, interrupts, or won't listen, he doesn't become angry. In I Timothy 1:16 Paul acknowledges this characteristic of Jesus: "I found mercy, in order that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience."

Practicing the attitudes listed in Colossians 3:12 make possible the actions listed in verse 13:

1. Bearing with one another‑This can best be summarized by what Peter says about Christ in I Peter 2:23: "While being reviled, He did not revile in return; while suffering, He uttered no threats, but kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously." It is a beautiful characteristic to be able to endure under hardship or difficulty.

2. Forgiving each other‑This phrase refers to the church, which should be a corporate, forgiving fellowship. We should do among ourselves what Christ has done for us all. Christ is the model of forgiveness. He forgave us, even though we don't deserve it‑and that is the essence of true forgiveness.

According to the Apostle Paul in Colossians 3:14, we will never experience the attitudes or actions listed above until we love one another. Without love, this is just a list of legalistic, moral attitudes. If you try to generate them all on your own, it won't work. Love is the spirit of self‑sacrifice that only the Spirit of God can produce in your life when you walk in Him.