A number of people, including some who ought to know better, seem to behave as if this life was all that mattered. Jesus tells us of a world to come. Paul speaks about a coming life.  John, in the Revelation, gives us a staggering vision of a new creation. People strive for many things, aiming their lives, hopes, energies, thoughts, and labors, at things that will not profit, hereafter. Jesus has something to say about this: “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Lk 12:34). Paul may have such words in mind when he tells us we “have been raised to life with Christ, so set your hearts on the things that are in heaven, where Christ sits on his throne at the right side of God” (3:1).

What’s Jesus doing there? John Calvin, commenting on this verse, says that Christ ascended, “that he might draw us up with him.” It is the Father’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom (Lk 12:32). We needn’t be afraid, therefore. John says that love casts out fear (1 Jn 4:18): as we grow in love for God, we find we’re no longer worrying about the things of this world.  It’s like the old hymn says, God will take care of you, and everyone, and all things.

On what is your heart most set? Paul urges us to focus our minds and our hearts on the matters and concerns of heaven, and “not on things here on earth” (3:2). Easier said than done? Work? Bills? That new thing you really want? Family? Friends? Disappointments? Resentments? So much, here, to call our focus away from the things above: God, His promises, His assurance that we will be cared for, that our needs shall not be neglected. How we conflate our needs with our wants, though! I want many things. I need few. How can I be happy if it’s only my needs that are being met? Happiness, as the world reminds me constantly, so glamorously, so convincingly, happiness is getting what I want. Yet Christ tells us not to be occupied with the things that concern so many people.

We “have died,” Paul tells us, “and [our] life is hidden with Christ in God” (3:3). Our baptism has really changed us, not by virtue of the water but by virtue of the Spirit, of the Word, of the promises God makes us in Jesus Christ. We died, and God began in us our dying to the obsessions and preoccupations of those ensnared in this world. Paul has told us all the treasures of wisdom are in Christ. Each person has to make the discovery. Christ is obvious to us who now know and love him; he is not obvious to far too many people, struggling and sorrowing because they can’t seem to get what they want, what the world insists they need in order to be happy and fulfilled. Christ is hidden to them, though he is in plain sight. Have any of those you know who have not received Jesus as Savior and Lord, have any of them never heard of Jesus?

“[Our] real life is Christ and when he appears, then you too will appear with him and share his glory!” (3:4). John tells us something similar: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is” (1 Jn 3:2). To dwell upon such words is to set our minds and hearts on things above, which is to answer the Spirit’s call to turn from the obsessions and preoccupations of this sorrowing, aimless, self-destructive world.

Christ is our real life. Apart from Christ we do not have real life. Paul reminds us that, as followers, Christ is now the focus of our lives, the focus of our living. What else could we be living for? What do other people live for? What gives them greatest joy: eating, drinking, carousing, sleeping, working, getting?

What we pursue speaks about our desires: the aim of our mind and our heart.

Our hearts, beloved! What unruly places! (As Jeremiah and Augustine knew.) All those earthly desires, still roiling there, like an unquiet sea. Paul tells us—is this different from what Christ has told us? —Paul says we “must put to death [. . .] the earthly desires at work” in us (3:5). Those desires are the old life, out of which we died in Christ, died to be raised in him. Paul mentions several of these desires, probably the most dangerous, the most common: “sexual immorality, indecency, lust, evil passions, and greed” (3:5). Our translation seems to couple only greed with idolatry. Most translations say all these earthly desires amount to idolatry. At the center of an idolater’s heart his or her desiring, yearning, and aiming is what is not God. Idols, as Scripture abundantly reminds us, are lifeless things, dead. If you pursue what is dead, all it will get you is dead.

There’s something greedy in all sin, I suspect. Paul warns us against greed. William Barclay, that old Scottish pastor and biblical scholar, notes how the word Paul uses can only roughly be translated as greed as we commonly think of it; it would be closer to say “ruthless self-seeking,” what another scholar called “the opposite of the desire to give.”[1] Ruthless self-seeking—that’s at the heart of idolatry. That’s what idolatry is. No wonder, then, that “God’s anger will come” because of it (3:6). We seek so many wrong things, when there is only one whom we need to be seeking.

I hope all of us are prepared to sacrifice many things to God; many of you already have. No sacrifice is easy: sacrifice is costly by its very nature, as God knows. In every sacrifice, God is asking what we are prepared to give Him. By this, He shows us also what we are not prepared to give. “[Y]ou must get rid of all these things: anger, passion, and hateful feelings. No insults or obscene talk must ever come from your lips” (3:8). By anger, Paul is talking about angry outbursts, an unruly temper—yelling as our default setting. That has to go. Our doctors would tell us that’s sound medical advice; Paul has our spiritual health in view. In line with this, Paul also tells us to be done with passion. He doesn’t mean live without passion. He means the deep anger, the long-lasting, nursed anger: the grudges, the deep resentments. It’s not so easy to let go of those, is it? They’ve been part of us for so long. To remove them would be almost like an amputation, like losing a hand, or a foot, or an eye.

In company with angry outbursts and old, well-worn resentments, Paul insists we must do away with “hateful feelings”: malice, from the Latin word malus, which means bad or evil. We know this word malice, but maybe never thought about it. It is the desire to hurt others. Oh! I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone! No, we haven’t wanted to break anybody’s arm, or knock the teeth down anybody’s throat, but have you never said something to hurt somebody? Maybe to make that person feel the way you were feeling? Or maybe just to give a little cut, a little tear-down? Shameful stuff, isn’t it? O that God would erase all that record of our shame!

Barclay sums up what Paul has been saying: our speech as Christians is to be kind, pure, and true.[2]

We died with Christ so that we shall be raised as Christ was raised. Christ is even now at work, raising us to himself. What we shall be is not seen yet, but do we not have glimpses? Each act of holiness, each act of heartfelt kindness—herein we catch glimpses of the new life, who we are becoming and who we shall be, perfectly, from the Father, in Christ, through the Holy Spirit. “This is the new being which God, its Creator, is constantly renewing in His own image, in order to bring you to a full knowledge of Himself” (3:10).

In Christ, God’s ikon, are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Wisdom and knowledge are from God, and to God: what He gives us returns to Him. He gives so that we shall return. Truly, we belong to him. Why do we aim our lives at so much less, thinking it’s so much more?

Christ is present, though hidden, in all that I’ve said, as we receive it in faith. He is present, though hidden, in this bread and this juice, as we receive these in faith. How can we fix our minds on those heavenly things? How shall our hearts and minds be sobered up from our self-destructive binging on the things and pleasures of this world? How shall we put to death all the God-dishonoring things inside? Our worship of God is part of the answer. This bread and this juice are part of the answer. This sermon is part of the answer. The Word of God, a habit of Bible reading and reflection, is part of the answer. Prayer is part of the answer. Our fellowship (and what we say to one another) is part of the answer. Vital, fruitful, growing faith is the answer, and the answer is Christ, alive in us in the power of the Holy Spirit: that perfect ability of God to accomplish His purposes perfectly.

When you take him, receive him today, he pledges to be at work in you to take away the short temper, the deep resentments, the wish to hurt others—kind speech in place of cutting words, pure speech in place of coarse, suggestive speech; truthful speech—patient, sympathetic, and fearless. Christ. Christ for us. Christ within us. Christ, drawing us to himself.

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.

[1] William Barclay. Letters to the Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians. Daily Study Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975. 152. Barclay quotes Anglican pastor and theologian C. F. D. Moule.

[2] Barclay, 154.