Inside Out by Joe La Bianca
Colossians 3
1If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. (In a positional sense, Jesus didn’t rise from the dead alone. God, in His mind, placed us with Jesus in all His deeds. As far as God is concerned, the believer’s sins have already been paid for, the believer in Jesus has already risen, and the believer is seated with Christ in the heavenlies. True, our resurrection is yet in the future, but we rise only because of the first fruit, Jesus. We died with Him and we were risen with Jesus. We even ascended to glory with Jesus. We are seated with Him in Heaven so that in the coming ages, God might show us His unspeakable grace.)
2Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. (Earth is only temporal. We all know this inside. Our deep longings are for someplace else. Our hearts always seem to be in transition, looking for the next thing. But they will one day settle in Heaven, if we believe in Jesus. We are constantly finding new moments and then immediately losing them. I would like this to stop. But it won’t. Not down here anyway. So I look to my Savior for one eternal day. This will happen at the last transformation, when this mortal shall put on immortality.)
3For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God (We are dead if we believe in Jesus. The real us is not yet known, on the outside that is. We are hidden with Christ, up there. So outwardly speaking, we are perishing. It’s true. If you are too young to know this, just wait and see. We died with Christ but we also rose with Christ. Now we are new inside and later, outside. If we believe in the Resurrection we will never die. Death is dead. Christ died for sin, as sin and to sin. We live through Jesus. Sure, our bodies will stop living, but the death that separates us from God is in the past. Jesus died that death for us. Christ on the cross is our salvation. Christ at the tomb is our resurrection. Just believe it and get it all. Our lives are hidden now. We cannot see our lives for they are in Christ.)
3For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. (Don’t feel bad when things are not going well for you, believer. Your real life is hidden, and one day eternal glory will be all you know. So hold on to faith in Christ. This is the only thing that really counts. It will result in your uninterrupted happiness. Lose faith and suffer doubly. Suffer in this world and the next. Keep faith in the cross and inherit all.)
4When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory. (The real us will appear when Christ appears. We will appear in glory with Him at His second coming. Our Life is coming soon. Not that we don’t have eternal life right now, but the revelation of all that we are in Him will be made known at His return. Most believers are lowly now, but not then. All things are ours and we are of Christ, and Christ is of God.)
5Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry: (We can subdue the extreme sins only by faith. When we believe right, these overt evils go away. Believing correctly is merely trusting that Jesus, our Savior, died for our sins and rose again. This is the entire gospel! This causes us to live in Christ. Because we already live in Christ, this will enable us to not live like the Devil. But we are still only human dust. There are Christians who will not admit they have imperfections because it ruins their attempts to save themselves. To these people, Jesus is not a Savior, just a Lord to be obeyed! But the believer readily confesses his imperfections and knows that Jesus covers them. To be sure, Jesus covers all our sins, both big and small. This is why only believers in this have assurance in their relationships with God. We shall never be sinless and perfect in this life. Paul is warning against a life diametrically opposed to God here. By faith in Jesus, we are perfect in God’s sight, so we do not need to worry that our imperfections will drive Jesus away from us. He washes our feet every day. But Paul was warning these freshly-saved Gentiles that God is not the way the Greek gods were. These people were new to the culture of God, and Paul explained the A, B, C’s of godliness. God doesn’t save us because we abstain from blatant sins. That would be an insult to the cross of Jesus. But God does not want His children to do harmful things. The things in this list are very harmful to us as people. Since we will appear with Jesus, we should mortify our members on earth. Paul always warns us after he assures us. Too bad so many preachers can only warn in a legalistic way. They only see rules and never see justification by faith. To mortify our members does not mean that we must deny our humanness and not function as God made us. I use every member that God gave me, and thankfully too! This is a warning about abusing the blessings that God gave us. Before Paul warns us about extreme sin in our lives, he first cements the truth that we are saved and already with Christ in the heavenlies. When we read the bible we must make sure that we see and understand all the surrounding scripture before we comment on a certain passage. With this in mind, we will understand that believers in Jesus do not live like the Devil. Fornication means “under the archway”. It’s where the Roman prostitutes gathered. Uncleanness is not defined, but you get the point. If Paul would have made a list of all unclean things, he would have created a new law and destroyed the gospel. It’s the same with the next two words. They are not defined. Instead, Paul is painting a picture of extreme sin, without making a law. Paul knows that God will speak to our hearts and guide us. Paul trusts the Holy Spirit in the believer. The kind of covetousness in our passage is putting something above God. That’s why he calls it idolatry. No believer would do that. Every believer knows that God is the best! So fornication, which is the only truly definable word in this list, sets the stage for all the other words which are subjective. They are subjective because our relationships with God are between God and us. Never use these lists in Paul’s letters to preach legalism. Paul always has grace things to say before and after all his warnings. Through faith in Jesus we can subdue our base practices. All things are possible with God. No one is perfect, but if we live in habitual obvious sins, we cannot say that we are in the faith. For how can we put our hated sins on Jesus if we love them? How can we be willing for Jesus to forgive every imperfection in our lives and at the same time gladly indulge in the grossest of sins? That’s like receiving a white garment as a gift which we could never have gotten on our own, and then throwing the stainless silk into the mud! Not that we’re perfect, by no means. Paul is talking about extreme sins and blatantly evil behavior here. Never forget that. We either love our sins, or we love the idea that Jesus died for our sins. We cannot love both. When Jesus died on the cross, He ended the reign of sin. Jesus became sin and then died, thus ending sin for the believer. Now we can be one with God, who is sinless. Jesus is our oneness with God by simple belief! So when we just trust Jesus as Savior, He cleanses us from everything bad, the big sins and the imperfections. But if we go back into a life like the one just described, we show that we have forgotten the gospel. There are results when we forget God’s grace. The sad outcome is a falling back to the person we were before God touched us.)
6For which things’ sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience: (Poor translation here! The original Greek word that Paul wrote is not disobedience, but unbelief. It’s when we do not believe in Jesus that the wrath of God comes on us. When we refuse the Way, the anger of God comes on us. When we refuse the Way, we call God a liar and mock the cross. But when we believe the good story, the story of our forgiveness because of Jesus, the pleasure and good will of the most High comes upon us. He will show us this love for ages of ages. )
7In the which ye also walked some time, when ye lived in them. (Again, we walked in unbelief and that’s why we were a certain way. We walked in unbelief. Every idea, every conception, and the way we looked at the world was all in an unbelieving way. Our justice was tainted. We couldn’t forgive because we never felt forgiven.)
8But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth. 9Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; (How do we put off these things? It’s by faith. It just happens when we believe right! But the translators put “disobedience” in verse 6 of the English versions instead of the real word, “unbelief”. This threw many people off the path of correct interpretation. We must be careful in our study of the bible to look further until we find the truth. I found this truth because I already knew that we are saved by faith alone and not by obedience. This prompted me to look further and what do you know? I found that the word was mistranslated. Our forgiveness does not depend on our obedience, but on our faith. When someone gets their sins forgiven for free, it makes it easier for them to forgive others. When someone walks in unbelief, he has no reason to think God has forgiven his sins, so he is more liable to be angry, hateful, and bitter. Free forgiveness by faith in the cross is the way to a peaceful and loving heart. These traits come as a result of faith. So real lovers don’t really try to love, they love collaterally, because good feelings follow behind a forgiven person.)
10And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: (We put on the new person when we just believe. Paul said “new man” because the women back then took a back seat in many things. I’m glad that God changed all that and now in Christ there is neither male nor female. We are all equal in God’s eyes. Notice the new person is renewed in knowledge. We must know the gospel and then believe it to be renewed. We do not renew ourselves with good works. We are not renewed in works, but in knowledge. When we hear the gospel and believe it, we are changed by God. Two things happen. We are given absolute perfection when we just believe. This qualifies us for Heaven. We are also given the Holy Spirit and a new nature. This qualifies us for earthly living. But never confuse the two. We are perfect in God’s eyes through Jesus, but we are not perfect in the way we live. It’s a matter of old and new. Old is doing it without God. New is receiving from God. We cannot change our natures. We cannot change our height or make a gray hair black. Since we cannot do these little things, how could we do the big eternal things like changing our natures? We must depend on God. God enters our lives through faith in His only Son. Let God change you, from the inside out. When we trust in the cross our insides are perfect and our outsides are perfecting!)