If then you have been raised with Christ, 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. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.
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, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
(Colossians 3:1-17 ESV)
This passage of Scripture is a very informative and helpful one. While at first glance it seems to be just a “do this and don’t do that” legalistic rule-oriented passage, it is not that at all. Like the entire book of Colossians, this is very Christ-focused. In fact, it’s all about Christ. What this passage does for us is detail the proper response to our salvation in Jesus.
The first verse makes this clear to us. “If then you have been raised with Christ…” This is the whole reason for this passage. We have been raised with Christ. Earlier in Colossians, Paul talks about how we have died to earthly things. We were “buried with him” (ch 2:12). After that, we were “raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God.” Chapter 2 also says we “died to the elemental spirits of the world” (v. 8), which means the demonic forces working in our world. The Greek word used for “elemental spirits” here was widely used as a term for spirits in Persian religious texts and other mystical writings. In other words, they are not of God, and thus demonic. But we’ve died to those spirits! We don’t have to submit to them anymore. Romans 6:2 says we’ve “died to sin.” In fact, the entirety of Romans 6 is about being freed from sin and talks greatly about having died to it. Romans 6:7 says, “[O]ne who has died has been set free from sin.”
But we haven’t only died. We have also been raised with Christ into a new life. Colossians 2:13 says, “God made [us] alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses.” Again back in Romans 6, a chapter which connects with this part so greatly, Paul says in verse 4, “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” Paul also says, “[Y]ou … must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:11). Isn’t that incredible? We have died to sin, set free from its evil grasp, so we could be made alive in Christ. This means we “walk in newness of life.” Our lives are no longer enslaved to sin, which is an evil, oppressive and deceptive master. We are now “slaves of righteousness” (Rom. 6:18) and “slaves of God” (Rom. 6:22), which mean the same thing. We have a great, glorious and good Master in Christ whom we are called to follow. That is what this passage is about. This incredibly practical portion of Scripture tells us exactly what our old, dead selves did and what our new, living selves must do. It tells us how to walk with Christ in clear terms. Instead of just saying “Walk with Christ,” this passage tells us how to actually do that.
And we aren’t just doing different earthly things. The commands here that we are to follow, the “new self” as verse 10 puts it, are “above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.” These are not just cold laws. These commands are from above, the righteousness that we are to seek after. This is true righteousness we are called to embody here, and our death and life in Christ is what enables us to do that.
I don’t want this to sound like some kind of works salvation, because that is absolutely not the point. The next two verses make that very clear. “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (emphasis added). The word “for” indicates a causal relationship between two points. We are to set our minds on things that are above because we have died and because our lives are hidden with Christ in God, not the other way around. In other words, we walk with God because He saved us first.
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