Eighth Sunday after Pentecost: Epistle, Colossians 3:1-11                                  

Colossians 3:1-11

I often hear this thought spoken within the circles I frequent: “Right living comes from right thinking.” And what is meant in my circles more often than not is believing the right thing is the only way to DO the right thing. I’m impressed by this text that it encompasses both ideas surely. But not in the old “good in-good out” format. In other words, the life produced by either good or bad thinking is much deeper than cause and effect. It’s about who you are. Who we are.

“If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God” (3:1) Paul goes on to deliver the reality of dying and rising with Christ to an entirely new order of living. Then comes the list of what we are to kill from the person we used to be. Note: the person we used to be. We are not the same person we were B.C. (before Christ). I don’t think we realize that nearly enough. An old British revivalist I love used to say, “Jesus Christ did not come into the world to make bad men good. He came to make dead men live.”

That’s what our reading is about. That’s what our lives are about. It’s who we are because of who Christ is.