Turn to Colossians 3

The last two weeks we have looked in depth at Colossians 3:5-11 and at the primary command in verse 5 in particular. By way of review Paul says in light of the fact that you have died with Christ and have been raised with Christ we are to

Colossians 3:5 ESV

5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

In light of verses 5-7 we said two weeks ago that we are to execute our inappropriate desires. And of course if you were able to join us last week, you heard Bro. Jim expound even more on this idea of putting our sins to death as he preached from Romans 8:12

Romans 8:13 ESV

13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.

The apostle consistently uses this metaphor or killing sin in our lives, and I’m so grateful that we’ve given it full attention.

But if you remember back two weeks ago, there was another metaphor that the apostle used. Look at verse 8:

Colossians 3:8 CSB

8 But now, put away all the following: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and filthy language from your mouth.

We mentioned it briefly, but it bears repeating because of how it will impact the way we understand our text for today: this command “put away” involves the word picture of putting off a dirty set of clothes.

Back in Tallahassee I used to shop periodically at Men’s Wearhouse when they had some good sales running. One time when I went in I saw where they were doing a charity drive to collect used suits to donate to those who were less fortunate. They would give these used suits to men who were wanting to have a nice look for a job application, or who needed more suits for their existing job but simply could not afford them. I thought that was really cool and I donated a couple of my used suits to them. And if this pandemic lasts much longer I may have a couple more that don’t fit me to give away.

But whether it’s a brand new suit or suit that’s brand new to you, there truly is something to the idea of dressing for success.

That’s the picture we get here in Colossians chapter 3. We are impoverished, and unable to purchase the new suit of righteousness. But by God’s grace, he gives us Christ’s righteousness - which is far better than a used suit, BTW - and we are commanded - take off those ragged gym clothes of the flesh, and put on the new suit of righteous living in the Spirit.

Let’s read Col. 3:12-17 together.

Colossians 3:12–17 CSB

12 Therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and dearly loved, put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and forgiving one another if anyone has a grievance against another. Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you are also to forgive. 14 Above all, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity. 15 And let the peace of Christ, to which you were also called in one body, rule your hearts. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell richly among you, in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. 17 And whatever you do, in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Pray

My goal today is that the Holy Spirit would help us see and obey the commands of Scripture to put on the fresh set of clothes we receive as believers and to give expression to the full hearts of gratitude we have for God’s grace.

The New Self: Fresh Clothes and Full Hearts

To aid us in that goal, I want us to ask and answer a few questions of our text through the title I’ve chosen for the message:

When we talk about Fresh Clothes…

What are they?

Is there any way to summarize them?

What is the basis for our receiving them?

What are we to do with them?

When we talk about Full Hearts...

5. What should they be filled with?

6. How do we give expression to them?

So first off...

1) What are the fresh clothes?

To answer this, we’re going to kind of work backwards through verses 12-14 and linger briefly at each piece of fabric as it were that makes up the new man’s suit of clothes

That means that we’ll end up starting with the sports coat of the clothing...

a. Love

In the CSB, Col. 3:14 is translated:

Colossians 3:14 CSB

14 Above all, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity.

The original language is somewhat ambiguous - it uses the preposition “epi” which could be translated - upon, on top of, in addition to, over, beyond, etc. Whichever way you slice it you get the impression that love is the thing that ties the wardrobe all together.

In fact, Paul has said in Romans 13:10,

Romans 13:10 ESV

10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

To be an obedient, new creation Christian, you must clothe yourself with LOVE. You don’t dare leave home without it on! There is a sense, Paul is saying, that love completes your outfit - it ties it together. It brings all of the other pieces of clothes into harmony. Christians have no greater way of showing Christ to the world than to put on love!

The next piece of clothing we’ll examine comes at the end of verse 13. It’s easy to talk theoretically about love, but the love command comes right on the heels of the command to forgive one another.

b. Forgiveness

Colossians 3:13 CSB

13 bearing with one another and forgiving one another if anyone has a grievance against another. Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you are also to forgive.

A man who was telling his friend about an argument he’d had with his wife commented, “Man... I hate it! Every time we have an argument, she gets historical.”

The friend replied, “You mean hysterical, right?”

“No,” he insisted. “I mean historical. Every time we argue she drags up everything from the past and holds it against me!”

The reality is that if we live in close community with anyone for any period of time, we will have to learn to clothe ourselves with forgiveness.

Henry Beecher said...

Every man should have a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends. — Henry Ward Beecher

That’s good advice.

Paul is aware that the longer you are a part of a local church, the more backup pairs of forgiveness you’ll need in your wardrobe. We haven’t been together long enough for you all to have to have shown off your fancy forgiveness socks, but trust me - I’ll need you to be wearing them over and over again. And you can trust that I’ll be wearing mine too when it’s my turn to forgive you. Why? Because who are we to hold a grudge with someone our Savior has COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY forgiven us?

Matthew 18:21–22 CSB

21 Then Peter approached him and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? As many as seven times?” 22 “I tell you, not as many as seven,” Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven.

c. Forbearance

The next piece of clothes on my backwards list, forbearance, may look similar to forgiveness, but it’s not the same. In fact there are two different greek verbs underlying these two different nouns I’ve chosen for my list.

To me, forbearance is the harder piece of clothing to put on. It’s one thing for me to intellectually get to a place where I understand that I have been forgiven so much by our Lord... who am I to not forgive my brother. But it’s a whole ‘nother animal for me to put up with him!

But this is what we’re called to do! According to the verses we just read in Matthew, even when you’re on forgiveness number 38, we are still to bear with one another and keep on forgiving.

But trust me - it will look really good on you.

That leads us to

d. Patience

Notice how nicely patience goes with forbearance. One commentary defined this greek word for patience as “the ability not to become frustrated and enraged but to make allowances for others’ shortcomings and to tolerate their exasperating behavior.”

When you’re put on a team at work with someone that literally exhausts you, could it be as good as going to get a new dress shirt at the store? Think of it as an opportunity for you to put on PATIENCE!

And then there’s

e. Gentleness

One Greek dictionary defined this as “gentleness of attitude and behavior, in contrast with harshness in one’s dealings with others” or to use a more old-fashioned term: meekness.

At the Christian horse ranch I went to several summers growing up, I can still recall the owner saying Jesus was MEEK not WEAK! If you clothe yourself in meekness, the same will be true for you.

Indeed as R. Kent Hughes put it so beautifully:

Behind gentleness is a steel-like strength. The supreme characteristic of the meek man or woman is that he or she is under perfect control. Those wearing the true garment of gentleness/meekness are immensely powerful people, for they are controlled by God. – R. Kent Hughes

The next piece of clothing is

f. Humility

The most famous American theologian, Jonathan Edwards once said that

Nothing sets a person so much out of the devil’s reach as humility. - Jonathan Edwards

And as we’ll see in just a moment, just like forgiveness and every other one of these qualities, Jesus is our supreme example:

Philippians 2:8 ESV

8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Continuing our trek backwards toward the beginning of verse 12 we find another piece of clothing to put on is

g. Kindness

The sense of this underlying Greek word is “to provide something beneficial for someone as an act of kindness.”

I don’t know if my orthodontist is a Christian, but I do love his slogan:

“Kindness matters.”

That could not be more true for the believer.

And then in true Christian form, where the first shall be last… we have

h. Compassion

I actually prefer the ESV when it comes to this piece of clothing because it hints that it is a compassion from the deepest seat of your being...

which of course we all know is....

your bowels, RIGHT?!

Now for some of you long-time Bible students, you know that the Greek word splanchna means literally BOWELS, but the Greeks used that word for what we 21st Century Americans would call our hearts.

And thus we get the ESV translation:

Put on compassionate hearts. Seems a little more poetic than bowels I guess.

But the point is, from the depth of our beings, Christians should display the beautiful clothing of compassion. Francis Schaeffer once said:

Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world. - Francis Schaeffer

So we must clothe ourselves with all these things:

Compassion, Kindness, Humility, Gentleness, Patience, Forbearance, Forgiveness, and Love.

Which leads me to ask,

2) Is there any way to summarize these fresh clothes?

because... that can be a lot to remember when you’re getting dressed. So I want to give you a verse of Scripture that I believe directly parallels this section of Colossians 3 and summarizes it so beautifully:

Romans 13:14 ESV

14 But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Take note that Paul is using the same exact verb to command the believers in Romans - put on (like a fresh set of clothes) - THE LORD JESUS CHRIST.

May I suggest that you write Romans 13:14 on an index card and post it to your bathroom mirror, or wherever you get dressed every day?

Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.

After all, Jesus (as we have said already) demonstrated every one of these qualities in their fullest sense, and if we are to become what we are as Christians, we are going to become like our Lord Jesus Christ.

The new self is being renewed in his image. So for a high-level approach to thinking about this - when you clothe yourself as the new man, you clothe yourself with Christ. And if you want to know what that looks like specifically, I refer you to the first part of this message and Colossians 3:12-14.

But then we said, we wanted to know:

3) What is the basis for our receiving these new clothes?

This is the reason why I have worked backwards in our text, because it is all built on the foundation at the beginning of verse 12. Take a look:

Colossians 3:12 CSB

12 Therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and dearly loved, put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience,

Paul says we are God’s chosen ones, holy and dearly loved.

It is critical to know that this language Paul is using to describe the church at Colossae which included Gentiles was the same language that the Old Testament used to describe His chosen people, Israel.

Doug Moo writes,

“In distinction from the Old Testament where God selects his people mainly from one nation, Israel… God now forms his new covenant people by choosing (or “electing”) individuals from among both Jews and Gentiles.”

So based on this corollary, we say

The reason you have new clothes is because of your election by God.

It’s right there at the beginning of verse 12.

Now, allow me to remind you how it is that God chose you...

Ephesians 1:4 CSB

4 For he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in love before him.

God chose believers IN CHRIST before the foundation of the world. Before TIME BEGAN, you were chosen by God in His Son. Geerhardus Vos once said:

“The best proof that [God] will never cease to love us lies in that He never began.” – Geerhardus Vos

Vos is of course reminding us of the fact that before the world was ever created and before time existed we were elected by God unto salvation. If we were to say that God’s love for us "began,” that would imply that there was a chronological time when God started loving us. But God the Father loved us before time existed. So we can truly say that he has always loved us. How? He has always loved us IN the SON. That is mind-boggling.

Paul doesn’t explain all the ins and outs of election right here in Colossians - he just assumes it as part of the argument. So I am going to take my cue from Paul and I’m not going to try and explain election to you in this message, I’m simply going to assume it as true because this is what God’s Word says in Col. 3:12. Christians are God’s chosen ones - holy and dearly loved.

This of course explains why we can best summarize putting on the fresh clothes as putting on Christ. Because we were chosen in him, and we are being transformed into his likeness.

Romans 8:29 ESV

29 For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

Therefore I want to boldly remind those of you who have put your faith in Jesus Christ alone for Salvation... become what you are!

That is the essentially the answer to our final question about these clothes:

4) What are we to do with the new clothes?

PUT THEM ON.

Pretty simple isn’t it?

That is the command. And the fact that we are chosen by God does not make our obedience to the command any less important... in fact, our election by God is what makes the command possible!

Philippians 2:12–13 ESV

12 Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

So work at it - strive to put them on. Why? Because God is at work in you to will and work for his good pleasure.

Now, in the time that remains, let us take up the second half of our text and answer our two remaining questions.

We said we not only have fresh clothes to put on, but that our hearts should be filled up. And we asked the question:

5) What should our hearts be filled with?

Look now to verses 15 and following:

Colossians 3:15–17 CSB

15 And let the peace of Christ, to which you were also called in one body, rule your hearts. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell richly among you, in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. 17 And whatever you do, in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Paul says (first of all) in verse 15 that we are to let the peace of Christ to which we were called in one body rule in our hearts.

a. The Peace of Christ

This peace is the goal of our calling and election, Paul says, and it is a natural outflow from the bond of love in verse 14.

Paul uses the imperative verb (or command) “let [peace] rule” in our hearts. If you remember back to Colossians 2:18, this the same verb that Paul used for those who were acting like bad umpires in the Colossian church.

Colossians 2:18 CSB

18 Let no one condemn you by delighting in ascetic practices and the worship of angels, claiming access to a visionary realm. Such people are inflated by empty notions of their unspiritual mind.

So instead of letting misguided people arbitrate who’s in and who’s out of the Christian inner circle, Paul says the thing that should be arbitrating your relationships and filling your hearts is the peace of Christ.

As an aside, I have heard some people use this verse to describe the idea of having a sense of inner peace about decisions they make. They say “let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. Emphasis on the “in your hearts” part…

But in context, this verse is not about an inner peace someone has about decision making. We can say that first of all because the “your” in verse 15 isn’t singular. It could be better translated:

Let the peace of Christ rule in y’all’s hearts.

In other words, it’s about letting the peace of Christ be the guiding judge of how you live in harmonious love with others.

Paul is no less interested that the peace of Christ that rules in their hearts be EXPRESSED in community than he is that the singing of songs with gratitude in their hearts be SUNG OUT LOUD!

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’ll look more closely at this when we answer our final question.

The second thing that Paul says we are to have in our hearts is

b. Thankfulness to God

At the end of verse 15, Paul commands us to be thankful. That command could be better translated - y’all become thankful. This is an aspect of Christian lives in community that will be an ongoing process of sanctification. But thankfulness is a central response in this whole passage as you can see if you just skim verses 15-17. In fact it is central to the entire book of Colossians.

You may remember that we learned early in our study of Colossians that in Christianity, theology is grace, and ethics is gratitude. And once again, using a good southern translation, the thankfulness is in to be found in y’all’s hearts. It should be characteristic of all believers.

But the new creation community (commonly made visible in local churches) not only has the peace of Christ ruling in their hearts, and gratitude overflowing in their hearts, it also has the word of Christ dwelling richly among us.

c. The Word of Christ

Verse 16 says let the word of Christ dwell richly among you. At the center of Christian worship always has been and always will be the preaching of the Word of Christ. We are to experience his tabernacling presence among us by being filled in our collective hearts with the Scripture. And we know that all of Scripture finds its fulfillment in Jesus.

Now, that answers the question - “what are our collective hearts to be filled with?”. But the final question we must answer is:

6) How do we give expression to these hearts filled with peace, thankfulness and the Word of Christ?

Well, we already tipped our hand a little bit when we looked at the peace of Christ. We noticed that the peace of Christ isn’t an inward calm during tough decisions, it’s a ruling umpire whose principals guide all of our relationships.

a. The peace of Christ which rules our hearts is expressed in loving, harmonious relationships.

And what about the thankfulness in our hearts? Well there we see in verse 16 that

b. Thankfulness in our hearts is expressed with joyful singing.

But more than that we find thankful singing is a response to the way the Word of Christ is expressed:

c. The Word of Christ in our hearts is expressed by teaching and admonishing one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.

And it’s important to note that the teaching and admonishing is of one another.

I love what G.K. Beale says about verse 16:

“Paul places squarely on the shoulders of each Christian the responsibility to ‘teach and admonish one another’ through psalm-based material and to sing psalm-like hymns to God. This does not mean that there was not a hierarchy of elder-teachers in the Colossian church (like in the Pastoral Epistles) but only that there is a place for each believer in teaching and admonishing other believers through Christ’s word.” - G.K. Beale

By the way, this is why ABF’s are so valuable and why I appreciate so much the energy that LBC members pour into teaching and admonishing one another with the Word of Christ.

These verses have also been my motivation in producing the Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs segments on YouTube as a way of encouraging my brothers and sisters in Christ through this difficult season.

And I want to encourage you that in whatever way you can, whether teaching children, or youth, or encouraging someone in your ABF, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly and teach or admonish someone with it through a psalm or a hymn or a spiritual song. That should be part of what it means for you to be a normal, every-day Christian. This command is not just for the pastors.

We have covered a lot of ground today. This text is very rich and very important. The Spirit of God is calling us to obedience in these commands. And the best way to summarize what we’ve learned and how we apply today’s message is to use the Spirit-inspired words of the Apostle:

Colossians 3:17 CSB

17 And whatever you do, in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Living lives in the fresh new clothes and with full hearts will not only take place in teaching and singing, it will take place in the every day aspects of your life. And I would argue that since our gathering for singing and preaching and teaching has been thrown a massive curveball, THERE’S NEVERE BEEN A TIME IN YOUR LIFE WHERE THE “WHATEVER-YOU-DO” PART OF THIS TEXT HAS BEEN MORE CRITICAL. Paul says it like this in 1 Corinthians.

1 Corinthians 10:31 CSB

31 So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.

LBC - until we can effectively gather together again, my prayer for you is that whatever you do it is for the glory of God and it is with thanksgiving in your heart to God the father through our Lord Jesus Christ.