To Encourage You

Colossians 3:1-4 “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is yourlife appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”

If you are a Christian, your way of thinking should be vastly different from the way you used to think before you were a Christian. Colossians 3 explains this perhaps as well as anyplace else in the Scriptures.  This new way of thinking is summarized as “seeking things that are above, not on things that are on the earth.”  Your thinking should be more and more like Christ’s thinking, which is so very different than the sinful natural man thinks.  His eyes were always on the Kingdom of God while He lived on earth.  He always talked about it, He always thought about it, and He always lived with it in perspective because He knew that kingdom was so infinitely better than the kingdoms of this world.  He had come from the Kingdom of God, He was soon to return to it, and there was nothing on this earth that He desired that compared even remotely to it (Psalm 73:25). 

Our lives will directly reflect how much we believe about Jesus  said about the Kingdom from which He came. If we’re living for what we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell in the here and now, we show that we are foolishly valuing this world more than we value the Kingdom.  Covetousness is one of the best words to describe this.  This word means a strong desire or a craving for something, and in the context of the words “Thou shalt not covet” it means that those desires are for things of this world rather than the “things that are above.”  It’s a mind set on the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life – which are the things of the world rather than the things of our heavenly Father and His kingdom (1 John 2:16).

Jesus talked about casting pearls before swine.  Pearls here are likened to the wonderful things of the Kkingdom – but people whose minds are on the world are likened to pigs, i.e., those who choose rolling in slop to anything of true value.  Likewise, the natural man would rather engage in ungodly sexual fantasies and practices than the God-ordained blessings of sex only within marriage.  He would rather seek money and the things it can buy, and lose his own soul for all eternity as a result.  He would seek to build himself up in pride and boasting, with the inevitable result of being humiliated in the end, rather than to humble himself before the mighty hand of God, so that in the end, God would lift him up (James 4:10).  He has so convinced himself that these relatively worthless pursuits are what life is all about, refusing to believe the God Who is the author of life, and to acknowledge that one who lives like this “is dead even while they live” (1 Timothy 5:6). 

But Colossians 3 is written to Christians.  The point is that even believers, who supposedly have now set their minds on things above, can easily and foolishly be tempted to their former mindset.  This passage, as well as so many others in Scripture, warn us and urge us to believe the omniscient Christ about such things and not all the other voices that are speaking from complete and total ignorance. Like the words of the hymn remind us, “it will be worth it all, when we see Jesus.”  Conversely, this is how those whose “god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things” are described by the God who truly knows everything: “Their end is destruction . . . (Philippians 3:19).” 

So where is your value placed?