Who Are You Putting On?

Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

(Colossians 3:12-14 – ESV)

In Colossians 3:11, Paul says that we are to be a community where Christ is all, and in all. The seed is planted, but it is God’s will that God’s people be grown in God’s greenhouse, the church. We are born again, but just as a baby must grow, so too we must grow in the knowledge and grace of Jesus Christ (2 Peter 3:18). As we grow up we must put on new clothes.

When each individual is careful to put off the old ways and put on the new, then the group becomes more representative of this difference between the old man and the new. God has ordained not only a people but also a community for those people, manifested as the local church. This passage explains what it is like for that community, its ideal and purpose.

These people are now a community who stop boasting in their differences, which separated them, and boast only in Christ, which unites them (Galatians 6:14). At one time we got our identification and satisfaction based on our ethnicity, or other factors, but now our life and our love is to boast of Christ. Remember Paul in Philippians 3, and all he gave up as rubbish compared to Christ. Those that had much to boast about, and also those that had little to boast about are now all one.

Looking back at the list Paul gave earlier, we see that the old man that was put off was individualistic and self-centered in its conception. The new man thinks of others and is team oriented and God centered (cf. Philippians 1:8, 2:1-3 / Ephesians 4:2, 32).

We all have a part in helping others, like those who rolled away the stone and removed the grave clothes of Lazarus. We must help one another, after we have been born again, to come out of the dark and stop being hindered by the old dead life. We didn’t initiate this process, Jesus did, but we move ahead and live in it. The new man or your new self could have come into being without the need for preaching, teaching, fellowship and the church community, it could have come with a full set of new clothes, but it didn’t. Oh, there is a full set waiting, but it must be put on, and you have to go to the place where you find it, in the new man section, the local church.

It isn’t dressing up the old man for his best life now; it is putting on the new man who lives as Jesus would now. It isn’t trying to find your purpose in life; it is within Christ and the church is where you discover your purpose and you live as a light to the outside world.

When we find ourselves putting on these good qualities and putting off those bad ones, and we are doing this in the context of community, it is then that we can say that the Spirit is leading us. As our local community develops into a fully orbed and fully ordered unit, then we can be said to be full of the Spirit, in a sense. Of course all of this is predicated upon the fact that this unity is formed in and around Truth, specifically the truth of the Word of God. In Colossians 3:12-17 we see the expression of such corporate unity played out in individual lives.

This is one more important reason why we must be attending and active within a local church if we are Christians. Putting on the new man is done in concert with putting on the new community. You cannot say that you are continually putting on the new man unless you are within that community. You are putting on something each day, what are you putting on, the old man or the new, the shackles of the culture or the shelter of Christ?