Who Are You?

 “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 your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”

‭‭Colossians‬ ‭3:1-4‬ ‭ESV‬‬

You are what you eat. This is what we’re often told. In other words, what we do makes us who we are.  

If we eat unhealthy, if we’re constantly eating junk food, we’ll be unhealthy. But if we eat healthy, if we eat a balanced diet, we’ll be healthy.

In the same way, our tendency as believers is to think that we are what we do. We think that what we do makes us who we are. We think it’s behaving as a Christian that makes us Christian. We think that, as we act in a way that is holy, we become holy.

So, as we read the passage above, we understand it to mean that, as we seek things that are above, we are raised with Christ. We think that, as we seek the things of God rather than the things of the world, we are saved. Again, we believe that what we do makes us who we are.

The problem with this is that, before we come to faith in Christ, and before we receive the grace of God, we cannot live for the Lord. We cannot live according to his commands. Before we come to faith in Christ we cannot and will not desire the things of God nor seek them.

We cannot do so because we are dead in sin, and there is no life in us. We are in bondage to sin. Sin is our master, and all we can do is sin. We can seek only to satisfy its lusts and desires.

Paul, however, states the opposite. He’s stating what’s already true of us. And, based on this, he calls us to live accordingly.

If we’ve been raised with Christ, we’re to seek the things that are above. And the “if” in this statement isn’t conditional. It’s a statement of reality.

We have been raised with Christ. As we saw in chapter 2, this happened to us through baptism. And because we’ve been raised with Christ, we’re to seek the things that are above.

Later, he states that we’ve died and that our life is hidden with Christ in God. Again, this is our state. And based on this state, we are to set our minds on the things of God rather than those of the world.

This means that we don’t focus on the things of the world, believing that they’ll make us holy. We do not depend upon the things that we do to bring us into a right relationship with God. And it means that we also do not pursue the desires of our sinful nature. 

We, instead, love the things that God loves. We desire the things that God desires. And we seek the things that God seeks. In short, we live a life of ongoing repentance and faith.

We do these things because this is who we are in Christ. We do these things because God has saved us. We do so because God has restored us from death to life. And we do so because our life is found in him.

Seeking the things of God, then, is not what makes us a Christian. They are the things that we do because we are a Christian. They are the result, they are the outflow, of the work of God in our life.