Fullness (5): The Changing Room
- Rev Norman Cameron

In recent years there has been a spate of programmes about changing appearances. Trinny and Susanna want to change our appearance, others want to help us do a makeover of our homes. But the most important change of course is the change in us, an inward change of our lives that we might become better people. It is one thing to have a make over of a room, or have some plastic surgery, or a whole new wardrobe of clothes which make us look and feel better, but the biggest challenge of all is to change a person’s character, how a person behaves.

Paul is concerned that the believers in Colossae who say they follow Jesus Christ should actually behave in a way which shows they are Christians. Before they came to know Jesus Christ they were behaving in a way which was not godly or Christ honouring, now that they were Christians Paul had an expectation that their lives would change, that they would behave differently.

LIVING AN INTEGRATED LIFE

If we say that we are Christians then for that to mean anything surely it must mean that our behaviour shows that we are Christians. Paul lived in a pagan world where there was a differentiation between what you believed and how you behaved. People would sacrifice to their gods but in terms of how they lived their day to day lives there was no real change – they were just as immoral, selfish, greedy, and proud after they went to their temple as before they went to the temple. This is pagan religion - a religion that remains external, that does not really change us in our being, at the heart. This was the culture that the early church lived amongst in the Roman empire.

Now there is something of that culture around today. One of the great lies of the 20^th and 21^st centuries is that we can separate what we believe from how we behave, especially as regards religious beliefs. We hear it most often in the realm of politics and from senior political figures. The debate has been aired again recently at the conversion of Tony Blair to Roman Catholicism.

It is a problem of integrity, or lack of integrity. The message coming across from the media and many public figures is that our belief in God is a private matter and should not affect how for example a person votes in the House of Parliament. How they live in private is not a relevant matter to how they live in public.

Now of course this is not a Christian attitude. The Bible says that our lives need to be integrated, there needs to be a seamless join between our private and public lives, between the spiritual and the secular, between the invisible and the visible. To thine own self be true said William Shakespeare. Rather than having an integrated life many live a dis-integrated life which leads to stress for you are not being true to your self. This can happen not just for politicians but for any of us who claim to be followers of Christ. Our beliefs certainly are personal but if they are reserved purely for how we live our private lives and not our private and public lives then we end up being hypocritical and living a lie.

In this passage Paul says to the Colossians in 3:4 “Christ is your life” in some versions Christ is our life. If we describe something as our life then it impacts everything about us, we cannot separate it off from our public life or work life. It is like in 1981 when someone said to Bill Shankly, the then manager of Liverpool, “football is a bit like life and death to you” and he said “son it’s more important than that”. To say Christ is your life is to say that he is more important than life or death and his influence pervades your life and every way you think. No-one was in any doubt about where Bill Shankly stood and what he believed in and what made him tick. He once said “there were only two teams in Liverpool – Liverpool and Liverpool Reserves”. He had a passion for football and for his team and many of us perhaps need to be as passionate about our faith as some are about football or music or cars or whatever. You cannot be a proper Christian without your beliefs affecting how you behave.

Paul wanted to communicate this to the church and in Colossians, as in all his letters, Paul follows the pattern of starting with the theology, the beliefs about God and Jesus Christ and then he moves to the practical outworking of those beliefs. If you believe this then this is how you should live. There is a movement from the head to the heart to the hand. What we believe in our head moves to the heart and becomes our passion and really takes hold of us and that in turn affects how we live. For too many of us it is in the head just about but it has not moved to the heart and therefore does not change the behaviour. Today I want to talk about mere head knowledge becoming heart knowledge for this is the secret to living a changed life.

Our theme for this series has been the fullness of Christ. The fullness of God dwells in Jesus Christ as the second person of the Trinity. Paul wants us to see that as we open ourselves up to the fullness of Christ then we are enabled to live God honouring lives. We are enabled to love God better and our neighbour as ourselves, which for Jesus was the summing up of all the law and the prophets. Love God and love others. Now, simple as this sounds, you and I know that actually it is quite difficult because of the strong hold that sin has in our world and in our lives. If we recognise that what we believe should affect how we behave how can we ensure that this happens?

We have said before that Christianity is more than a religion and it is more than trying to adhere to a list of do’s and don’ts. As we read ch.3 we are tempted to think that it is all about following a list of do’s and don’ts for Paul gives us examples of good and bad behaviour in three areas - in the realm of sexual conduct, the realm of how we speak and the realm of our relationships with others. But actually what Paul is saying is that it is not just about us trying harder to follow an external list of rules, there is a measure of trying and it is our responsibility to work at it but primarily godly behaviour is about our heart being changed. If the heart is right then the right behaviour follows more naturally.

The key is recognising that Christ is in us the hope of glory. Stuart Briscoe says “the biblical definition of a Christian is a person in whom Christ lives. Christianity is all of Him in all of you”. We need to define Christian faith primarily in terms of a relationship and that is what Paul is doing here in the first few verses of Colossians 3. Before we get to verse 5 and the following verses which speak of our behaviour and the things that we should and should not do we need to have a clear grasp of what Paul is saying in v.1-4 for it is absolutely vital if we are to live properly.

ABOVE AND BELOW

Paul in this passage makes a distinction between setting our hearts and minds on things above, and setting our hearts and minds on things below, a distinction between thinking in a heavenly way and thinking in an earthly way. By thinking in an earthly way Paul means thinking in a fleshly way, a selfish way, a godless way. He does not mean that we are to become like monks and separate ourselves from living an ordinary earthly existence. He is not talking about us separating ourselves into communities and locking ourselves away from the world. That is not what he means by earthly things. By earthly he means the natural way people think, that is without much reference to God. Self is on the throne, pride is the default setting – “no-one is going to tell me how to behave or think least of all God”. This is the natural, common, earthly, fleshly way of thinking and Paul contrasts that with thinking from above.

DYING & LIVING

But if we are to think and behave in a heavenly way, in the way that God thinks about things, then something needs to happen to us. Christ needs to come alive in us. And for that to happen we need to experience death and resurrection. What happened to Jesus actually and physically needs to happen to us spiritually.

Just as Jesus was crucified, he really died and then he was raised by God to a new life on the third day so we need to die to sin and self and then be raised to a new life. When, by the enabling of God’s Spirit, we see Jesus for who he is and we see ourselves and our sin for what it is, and when we give our lives to Jesus and invite him to come in it is as if we have died to an old way of thinking and we have come alive to a new way of thinking and living. As 2 Cor.5:17 says “Therefore if anyone is a new creation the old has gone and the new has come”.

Now I want to take this slowly for it is absolutely central to our understanding of the christian faith. If we go wrong in our understanding here we go wrong everywhere.

Let us work backwards from v.3. Paul says “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God”. When a person trusts in Jesus Christ as their saviour something in them dies. What dies? The selfish, rebellious, proud nature dies that says to God things like – “God I can get along without you, or God I can save myself or please you by my own self effort, or God you may be there but you are not really that important to me or how I live my day to day life, or I have no problem with sin” – those type of attitudes die. The old man, the old woman, the old way of thinking is put on the cross as it were with Jesus and it is put to death.

What happens is that we truly identify with Jesus and his death. Jesus when he died on the cross took our punishment, he paid the penalty for sin. When we trust in Jesus we identify with what he did and we see that our punishment is taken by him. We are freed from our sin. As we identify with Christ w also die to sin – to its power and its penalty – or as Paul has it in verse three – “our life is now hidden with Christ in God”. In other words we are in Christ and Christ is in us, to such an extent that as God looks at us he sees us in Christ, hidden in Christ. But that is only half the story for Christ not only died but was resurrected to new life with a new body.

We die to sin and then we rise to a new life. Christianity is about a new beginning, not just turning over a new leaf but about renewal, Christianity is not about trying harder to live a more moral life, it is about being given a new life with a power from within to fight sin. Verse 1 of Colossians 3 says “Since then you have been raised with Christ set your hearts on things above… set your minds on things above.” We only have the capacity and the ability to set our heart and minds on God because God has raised us and given us a new life and we now have Christ living within us by His Spirit. We cannot do this in our own strength.

So to summarise - before we get to trying to live in the way that Paul describes in the rest of chapter 3 – living sexually moral lives, watching how we speak and how we relate to other people – there needs to be a foundational understanding in our heads and in our hearts. We can only have a chance of defeating sin and changing our behaviour when we realise some great truths and let them saturate our hearts:

1. Christ has died for our sin

2. When we trust in Christ we die to sin and we rise with Christ

3. We become united to Christ and are hidden in him

4. Because we are united to Christ God imputes righteousness to us; in other words as he looks at us he sees us perfect and guiltless in Christ. 2 Cor.5:21 – “God made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” A great exchange takes place – Christ takes our sin and we receive his perfect status.

5. As a result of this we are to reckon, or count ourselves dead to sin and alive to righteousness. We are to consider that sin no longer has a hold over us and we do not need to give into it. We say to ourselves I am a child of God and as such I want to live in a way which pleases my heavenly Father.

6. As we tell ourselves that we are a new creation in Christ we also know that we continue to live in a sinful world and we are ourselves are still subject to sin. Notice v.9 and 10 says “we have taken off the old self and put on the new self which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its creator.” We have taken off and put on but we are still being renewed (ongoing present tense). That renewing keeps on for the rest of our lives.

eg we have just had a new manse built. The old one had problems and is gone and a new one is in its place but the new building still needs maintenance, it is still subject to living in a world of rust and moth and decay. It is new but still needs maintenance, though nothing like what it needed before. As long as we live in this world we are still in the presence of sin and under a measure of its influence until we get to the new heaven and new earth.

The old fleshly nature is not banished this side of heaven so we need to consciously say no to certain practices. But we can better say no when we know in our heads and hearts that we are children of God and we know we are meant to liver in a certain way; we can better say no when we know that Christ by His Spirit is in us and with us and helps us to have the power to change and to say no. We cannot do it in our own strength – sin is too strong.

7. But the last thing we need to realise is that if we are to say no to sin and yes to godly living we must make a choice and we must say to ourselves I will prefer morality over immorality, love over lust, moderation over greed, peace over rage, contentment over anger, truth over lies, forgiveness over bitterness because I am a child of God and because I know the way to true happiness, contentment and satisfaction is actually the godly way of living. To surrender to sin is actually the road to misery not joyful life. We need to make that conscious choice. But we are enabled to make the right choice because of Christ within, because he has given us a new heart with new desires.

Dallas Willard says “a fundamental mistake of the conservative side of much of the Western church is that its basic goal is to get people into heaven rather than to get heaven into people. This creates groups of people who may be ready die but who are not ready to live. They have become Christian without becoming Christlike. The way to get as many people into heaven as you can is to get heaven into as many people as you can – that is… to follow the path of discipleship to Jesus Christ.”

To live properly we need to receive Christ and with him a new heart. And then be so open to Jesus that his fullness fills us, and when that happens we don’t need rules for godly living, we just do it, because we love him more than anything, for we can truly say Christ is my life.