Seeds for 3/23/2023 - Colossians 3:12
Scripture: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”
Observation: This sentence promotes qualities of character that are widely affirmed today. “Compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience” are values we know we ought to appreciate, practice, and recommend for ourselves and others. And can’t we find a circumstance that justifies setting them aside if we want to badly enough?
Let’s take a closer look.
First, the metaphor Paul uses is putting on a new outfit. He started this just a couple verses prior, taking off the old self and putting on the new. “Clothe yourselves” is an “outside-in” metaphor. Transformation from the inside-out is about dealing with interior issues of the heart and mind so that exterior attributes flow forth from who we are becoming as a person in Christ. Inside-out is vital. But let’s not ignore the insight here. Practice is what we do when something is important but doesn’t come naturally or is hard to do consistently. Especially with people or situations that really get under our skin! Inside-out is vital, but outside-in acknowledges that, while we continue to cultivate inside-out transformation, we’re not allowed to wait to practice kindness (and the others) until it feels natural.
The English Christian G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” In other words, some things are so important, we dare not wait to do them until we’re convinced we’ll be good at them. Embrace being a beginner and start practicing them now. Paul provides us an excellent list of things worth practicing before they come naturally. Perhaps “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience” are like learning to ride a bike. Start. Fall. Struggle. Falter. Try again. Rinse and repeat until eventually we ride. Do it badly until we eventually do it well.
Second, these are not simply nice qualities in case we feel like it, but signature marks of the people of God. Paul could hardly underscore this more clearly: “as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved…” In other words, these are the character qualities for the family of God. Consider the opposites: indifferent, cruel, proud, harsh, and curt. Not an attractive picture and certainly incongruent with “God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved.”
Application:
Where do you have an opportunity to practice these before you feel like it?
Have you experienced God’s inside-out work in your heart about these too?
What is the Holy Spirit speaking with you about in the text today?
Prayer: Lord, may your love in my life transform me from the inside-out. May I have the courage to practice compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience when and with whom it is challenging. For your glory’s sake. Amen.
“But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (Matthew 13:23)
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