You can read today’s passage by clicking on this sentence.
Over the last few days we’ve been thinking in different ways about being ‘in God’, and here’s another perspective on it. We are to ‘clothe ourselves in love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.’ We, hidden with Christ in God as we are, can only clothe ourselves in love because God, who is love, enables us to love as we live in him. Again, reading this passage, it is feasible that I should decide that clothing myself in love is something that I must do, a decision, or series of decisions, resulting in actions which show that I am clothed in love. It may be that this is what writer of Colossians was getting at, but as is my wont, I want to argue for a slightly different reading. I think, following from yesterday’s passage, the writer is exhorting those who heard and read the letter to return again to a place of submission to God, that our gentleness, patience, humility and other positive relational characteristics would flow from a renewed sense of who God is, who we are, and what we are called to be and do for him.
Again, this isn’t a free pass for us not to bother with behaving in a way that imitates the character of Christ. We do have a role to play in living life as Christians, but the single most important thing I think most of us have to do is also the hardest thing for most of us: we have to accept that God, rather than ourselves, or other people, is who we really need. If God really is my strength, my refuge, my deliverer, my shield, then I am not my strength, my refuge, my deliverer, my shield. I can be strong. I can be purposeful. I can be of use to God in the building of his kingdom perhaps, but these are as nothing compared to the strength and purpose of God, his overwhelming desire for relationship with me, his pursuit of reconciliation, not just with me, but with the whole of the world, which has already been successful. I am important to God. My life is his. He has clothed me with love. Now I have the opportunity to live for him today.