Faithful Living
July 21, 2024 – Cody Young
Colossians 3:1-17
CSB
3 So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3 For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. 5 Therefore, put to death what belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desire, and greed, which is idolatry. 6 Because of these, God’s wrath is coming upon the disobedient, 7 and you once walked in these things when you were living in them. 8 But now, put away all the following: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and filthy language from your mouth. 9 Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self. You are being renewed in knowledge according to the image of your Creator. 11 In Christ there is not Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all.
The Apostle Paul had never been to Colossae, but he’d heard from a good friend that the church in that city was vibrant and growing. In this brief letter, Paul describes who we are in Christ and how to walk in Christ. He emphasized that the better they knew what they believed, the harder it would be for someone to persuade them otherwise. A major overarching theme in this letter is walking in a manner worthy of Jesus.
What does it look like to walk in a worthy manner? How do we become more faithful in following Jesus? How can we know what God expects of us?
Faithful living is a combination of honoring God, caring for ourselves, saturating ourselves in God’s Word, and praying earnestly and sincerely. The more we practice, cultivate, feed on, and devote ourselves to developing faithfulness, the more it will naturally become part of us.
As we will see from Colossians 3, faithful living starts when we “set our minds on things above” and results in “putting to death what belongs to our earthly nature” so we can “put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience… And love.”
The Apostle Paul had never been to Colossae, but he’d heard from a good friend that the church in that city was vibrant and growing. In this brief letter, Paul describes who we are in Christ and how to walk in Christ. He emphasized that the better they knew what they believed, the harder it would be for someone to persuade them otherwise. A major overarching theme in this letter is walking in a manner worthy of Jesus.
What does it look like to walk in a worthy manner? How do we become more faithful in following Jesus? How can we know what God expects of us?
Faithful living is a combination of honoring God, caring for ourselves, saturating ourselves in God’s Word, and praying earnestly and sincerely. The more we practice, cultivate, feed on, and devote ourselves to developing faithfulness, the more it will naturally become part of us.
As we will see from Colossians 3, faithful living starts when we “set our minds on things above” and results in “putting to death what belongs to our earthly nature” so we can “put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience… And love.”
