LIFE “UPSIDE- DOWN & RIGHT-SIDE UP”: NEW LIFE – NEW PRACTICE IN CHRIST
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“8 But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. 9 Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” Colossians 3:8-10
Hello everyone: I hope you are learning, encouraged, and continuing to be challenged as we study Paul’s letter to the Colossians in our Fall Sunday School Study. So much of living the Christian Life successfully involves the harmony between having a Gospel perspective by faith of “whose we are and why” and putting that New Life of faith in Christ into everyday practice.
Most of us have heard this definition of Insanity – “Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.” We can take this same definition and apply it to the living of our New Lives in Christ. When we ask Jesus to be our LORD and Savior, when we confess our sin and accept His free gift of salvation by grace through faith in His name we are transformed/remade into NEW CREATION (2 Corinthians 5:17) and given a new life but we still have to deal with the Insanity of the World. On the one hand, we have a completely new life in Christ but on the other we are still immersed in old habits and ways of thinking and practices. The “Insanity” for Believers comes when we are adopted into New Life (Romans 8:9-14) but continue to live in old life kind of thinking and practices while expecting different results. It just doesn’t work, and we find ourselves living for Christ unsuccessfully and our testimony compromised!
The first two British attempts at colonization of the east coast of North America were miserable failures: Roanoke along the Outer-banks of North Carolina, and the first Jamestown Colony of Virginia were built in festering swamps where water-born, and insect-laden disease decimated the population. The settlers were living in a New World in a New Life but attempting to do so with Old World thinking and practices that dated to the Middle Ages. Old World practices in a New World life brought disaster, destruction, and failure to their community and their neighbors.
Many of us, and many churches have faced the same dilemma spiritually. God, by His grace has given us New Life- and a New World in Christ. He has forgiven us our sins and given us everything we need through Him to grow and be shaped more and more into His image. Our only obstacle is not our circumstances, not our temptations, nor other people, or even the spiritual powers of darkness that have temporary dominion over this world (the Bible says we have victory over all this in Christ). No, the problem as “Born-Again” Believers is we have been intentionally “Breech-Birthed” (upside-down by worldly standards) as New Creation, with New Life in Christ into the old circumstances and practices of a fallen world (making us a witness of light in darkness and the cry of resurrected life in a graveyard of death spiritually). And we can’t be successfully “right-side-up” in living our New Life with God if we aren’t’ “upside-down” in our relationships to our old world and its practices. This is our crucial key to having integrity, a godly testimony, and a “strengthened faith” (Colossians 2:6-7) as we follow Christ; we are spiritually ALIVE and called to live as Jesus did. This is the crux of Paul’s pastoral argument and practical living to the Colossian church and the other churches of his “Prison Epistles.” We cannot live and serve well in our New Life in Christ if we aren’t “turning over” “surrendering” and “putting to death” the old life and its practices (Colossians 3:1-7).
I am not “mathematical.” I am not a “fun with numbers” kind of guy and pupil, but my daughter is. I stopped being able to help her with math after the First Grade and it was not because I couldn’t come up with the right answer but because I was using old practices instead of the new ones she had been taught and her teacher would not be pleased with old methods when she had sacrificed to invest her student with new ones! HOW I got to the answer was just as important as the answer itself- if not more so. Many times, as Believers, individually and corporately we justify using old sinful methods taught by the world and its political machinations: lies, half-truths, malice, gossip, envy, threats, unjust treatment and hatred of our enemies to reach what we feel are godly ambitions, and noble aims thinking God won’t mind what we’ve done if we eventually arrive at the right place… But our Teacher and Master does mind and He won’t be pleased with the dirt on our hands and a guilty conscience in exchange for what we think is a crystalized principle. His grace is not a permission and license for us to sin but to grow in godliness. We must exchange the pride of old practice for the humility of learning and doing the Gospel of the New! Many a Man and Woman of God and well-intentioned leader and church have ruined their testimony by attempting to use sinful means to reach a godly end! Let that NEVER be true of us!
We must confess our sins and old practices- get them in the open and surrender them to God- repent and turn around by “turning over” old practices to the new so that old, dirtied hands soiled in evil and old selfish ambitions and self-centeredness can be washed in the unifying love of Christ and the penance of a new and contrite heart. The history of the spiritual failures of our denomination over almost 200 years should at least be teaching us that much and where our testimony of Christ should begin anew today. Simply put, how we live and the humility and care or lack thereof by which we treat others matters immensely to God and should matter to us (finish Colossians 3). Leave room to confess- get old but present sins in the open before God so He can help us deal with them and get rid of them! Repent and embrace our New Lives in Christ and its new practices of compassion, love, joy, thankfulness, forgiveness and sacrifice and watch what God can do with a life lived upside-down by the old principles of this world and right-side up in the new principles of His Kingdom of Light! ALL THE BEST to you this week!
Love in Christ, Darrin.