Colossians 3:1-4 — Set Your Mind

LINDA BROWN: There is a line in today's passage that I want to hear read slowly, because I think most of us hear it fast and miss what it's actually claiming. "Your life is now hidden with Christ in God." Not your future life. Your life, present tense, the real one, is somewhere you cannot currently see it... stored, kept, out of reach. I find that either deeply comforting or slightly alarming, and I honestly haven't decided which.

FRANK EDWARDS: Both, I think, and Paul would be fine with both. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, it is good to have you with us. Today we're at Colossians chapter three, verses one through four, which is the hinge of the entire letter. Two chapters of argument end, and the shape of an actual life begins, and the first thing Paul says about that life is that you can't see most of it yet. Let me read it, and then we'll go looking for it.

FRANK EDWARDS: "Therefore, since you have been raised with Christ, strive for the things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory."

LINDA BROWN: "Therefore." Paul is finishing a thought, not starting one, and I always feel a little like I walked in late when a passage opens that way. What is he wrapping up? Because the "since you have been raised" part sounds like a conclusion somebody else already argued for.

FRANK EDWARDS: He has been arguing for it for two chapters, and mostly by tearing something down. As we talked about earlier in the series, the trouble in Colossae was a religion of restriction. Paul actually quotes its slogans back at them at the end of chapter two: handle not, taste not, touch not. Fasting, calendar-keeping, angel-worship, a spirituality that promised depth and delivered a longer list of don'ts. And he calls all of it worthless against the flesh. So the chapter break falls at exactly the right place, because chapter two is demolition and chapter three is construction, and when a man turns from tearing down to building you learn a great deal from the first tool he picks up. Paul does not pick up "stop." He picks up "seek." Strive for the things above. Set your minds there. Into a culture of rule-counting he drops a positive command with a pulse in it. So here's my question for you. Sitting in that room, hearing "set your minds on things above" right after "handle not, taste not, touch not"... what does it sound like?

LINDA BROWN: It sounds like rule number forty-one. Honestly. "Don't touch that" becomes "think about heaven instead," and I have just traded one thing I'm failing at for another. Sell me on why this is the alternative to the pile and not one more thing on it, because from where I'm sitting it reads like a nicer don't.

FRANK EDWARDS: The difference is the ground it stands on. Every one of those Colossian rules was a ladder... effort climbing toward a God who stayed at the top and stayed distant, and you found out where you stood by how far you'd climbed. Paul's command rests on the opposite footing. Look at the grammar. "Since you have been raised." "For you died." Both of those are finished. The verb for "you died" is what Greek calls an aorist, the tense for a single completed act at a point in the past, the way you'd say "the door shut." Not "you are dying," not "you must die daily." Something happened to you, once, in the death of Jesus, and it cannot be undone. And in his rising you were raised. That is the doctrine the church calls union with Christ, and it means his history is now your history. Romans six says it plainly: buried with him, raised with him, so that we might walk in newness of life. So the seeking is not how you get the status. The seeking is what the status does when it's alive. You lean upward because you already live upward.

LINDA BROWN: A tense. You're hanging a lot on a tense. Isn't that just semantics? Whether Paul wrote "you died" or "you're dying," I still wake up with the same temper and the same habits, so why does the grammar change anything about the actual Wednesday morning?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because of who can and cannot be prosecuted. Think about what a death does, legally. A dead man is beyond accusation. You cannot serve him with papers, you cannot demand payment from him, you cannot try him for a crime the court has already executed him for. The account is closed. Paul says in Romans, "anyone who has died has been freed from sin," and he says it in his own voice in Galatians: "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." So when the enemy of your soul reads your record back to you... and he will, probably this week, probably late at night... the answer is not "I'm working on it." The answer is that the man who owed that debt was put to death in Christ's death. What lives now lives in him. That is not semantics. That is the difference between a defendant and a free man.

FRANK EDWARDS: And that is why verse three is built the way it is. "You died, and your life is now hidden." The security in the second half rests entirely on the death in the first half. Take the death away and the hiding is wishful thinking. Leave it in, and the hiding is simply what follows.

LINDA BROWN: The safety is borrowed from the death, then. I'm secure because the person who owed everything isn't here to be collected from anymore, and what's left of me is filed under someone else's name. Which... is a strange kind of comfort. But it is a comfort.

FRANK EDWARDS: Borrowed, and never called back in. You've got the logic exactly, and "filed under someone else's name" is closer to Paul than you might think, because that is where the passage goes next. Where is the file kept? "Where Christ is seated at the right hand of God." Paul isn't giving directions. He's describing a posture.

LINDA BROWN: Here is where it turns for me, actually. Seated. Why does it matter that Christ is sitting? I'd have said "standing at the right hand" and never noticed the difference.

FRANK EDWARDS: A first-century listener would have noticed instantly, because sitting was a guarded privilege. In a Roman household, in a synagogue, in any royal court, standing was the posture of the servant, the petitioner, the person still waiting on the verdict. The room could be full of people on their feet, and only one man in it had the right to sit. So "seated" is not rest as in tiredness. It's the posture of a ruler whose work is finished and whose authority no one in the room disputes. And the right hand sharpens it further, because the seat immediately to the king's right was reserved for the one who shared the king's power and acted with it. Calvin puts it wonderfully in his commentary: "As to the right hand of God, it is not confined to heaven, but fills the whole world." That seat governs everywhere. So put the Colossians back in the picture. They're being told to climb toward a distant divine realm through fasting and rules. Paul answers: the one you belong to is not a petitioner on his feet. He is enthroned, and your life is anchored to him. What does that do to all the striving?

LINDA BROWN: It ends it, doesn't it? If he's seated and finished, then I sit down too. The work is done, the file is safe, I can stop trying to think about heaven and just... coast. Which I would very happily do.

FRANK EDWARDS: You sat down one verse too early. [laughs softly] Paul still says seek, still says set your minds, and he means it. The point is not that you stop seeking. The point is where you seek from. Ephesians two says God has "raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms." So Colossians says Christ is seated above and go after what's there, and Ephesians says you are already seated there with him. Those aren't in tension. One is the pursuit and the other is the security underneath it. You seek from a seat, not toward one. The false teachers had people on their feet, straining, hoping to earn a chair. Paul says the chair is yours and now go live like someone who has one.

FRANK EDWARDS: And then he tells you what's in the chair with you, because "hidden" is the strangest word in the passage. The Greek is kekryptai, and it means far more than "out of sight." It's the word for something stored away deliberately for safekeeping, sealed up, put where a thief cannot get at it. It's a treasury word. And Paul has used it one chapter earlier. Colossians two, verse three: in Christ "are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." Same root. So follow that. If all God's riches are kept in Christ, and your life is now kept in Christ, then you are stored where the treasure is stored. Same vault. Same lock.

LINDA BROWN: Kept is the word I want to hold onto out of that, because "hidden" makes me think of something misplaced, and "kept" makes me think of something somebody chose to protect. Those are very different feelings about the same closet.

FRANK EDWARDS: Kept is the older feeling in Scripture, too. When Moses asks to see God's glory in Exodus thirty-three, the Lord says, "I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by." Tucked away by God's own hand, sheltered, because unveiled glory would be too much to bear yet. Paul is saying every believer now lives in that cleft. And Malachi has the Lord speaking of "the day when I prepare my treasured possession," a people reserved, guarded, kept for a coming unveiling. God does not hide things to lose them. He hides what he treasures, and every hidden thing he keeps is destined to be brought out.

LINDA BROWN: There's someone listening right now refreshing an inbox. Waiting on a test result, or a reply that hasn't come, or a decision that keeps not getting made. That's where the mind actually sits for most of us, and it is not "on things above." So what does "set your minds above" even do in that exact moment? Because I can't make the result come faster by thinking about heaven.

FRANK EDWARDS: You can't, and Paul isn't asking you to. He's asking you to look up from the screen and name one thing that is already settled while everything else isn't. The result is unwritten. The reply hasn't come. Christ is seated. That verb does not refresh. Nothing about that outcome is waiting on your waiting. And notice what the passage does with the waiting itself, in verse four: "When Christ, who is your life, appears." The waiting has an end already written into it. So the mind set above isn't a mind that's stopped caring about the inbox. It's a mind that has found the one fixed point in the room and keeps glancing back at it.

LINDA BROWN: [quiet] I'll say the harder version, though. There is a thing my mind circles back to when the house goes quiet. Everybody has one... a grudge you rehearse, a number you're gripping, a habit you reach for at night and wouldn't say out loud. "Set your minds above, not on earthly things" means I don't get to keep that in the shadows and keep this too. That's the cost in the sentence. It's not abstract for anyone who's honest.

FRANK EDWARDS: It isn't, and I'm glad you named it plainly, because a mind that's set on Christ cannot also be quietly ruled by that thing, and Paul knows it. But watch where he puts the power. He does not say "try harder in the dark." He says "you died." The man who was ruled by that thing is gone. That is the aorist again, doing its work at eleven at night. So the phone goes in the next room, or the word "I forgive them" gets said out loud before it's felt, or the honest number gets given even though it costs something... and none of that is you fighting your way toward safety. You already have it. You act from safety, not toward it. That's the only order in which any of this works.

LINDA BROWN: Hidden also means I can't see it, though. That's the part I keep bumping into. Some mornings I don't feel raised, I don't feel kept, I feel exactly as earthly as everyone else on the train. What do I do with a life that's supposedly the truest thing about me and is invisible to me?

FRANK EDWARDS: You take Paul's word for where it is, and you wait for verse four. "When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory." John says the same in his first letter: "we are now children of God, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when Christ appears, we will be like Him." The world does not see it. Some days you barely feel it. That was always going to be true of a hidden thing, and it is the nature of treasure to be out of sight for a while. But the security of your life does not rest on your grip or your feelings. It rests on the fact that Christ is seated, his work finished, and you are kept in him.

FRANK EDWARDS: And there's a longer story under it. In Eden, life was forfeited, and Adam was driven out of God's presence, and every ache in Scripture after that is the longing to dwell again where God dwells. Colossians says that longing is answered, and answered better than Eden, because your life isn't just near God now. It's inside his. Hidden with Christ in God. What is sealed now will be unveiled then. The treasure comes out of the vault.

LINDA BROWN: Appears. That's the word I'm keeping from all of it. He appears, and I appear. The hiding isn't the last chapter, it's the safekeeping before the last chapter... and I have been reading "hidden" as a loss when Paul meant it as a lock.

FRANK EDWARDS: A lock, with the key in the hand of the one who's seated. You are not waiting to become his. You already are. Kept, and glory coming. That's the one idea I'd want anyone to leave with today. Linda, you carry us out.

LINDA BROWN: Paul can do it better than I can. "Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God." Not the deadline, not the group chat, not the thing you said wrong today. Those are real, and they do not hold your life. He does. Let that be the thing you keep tonight, the last thought before sleep instead of the running list.

FRANK EDWARDS: Dig Deeper is free, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I.

LINDA BROWN: Thanks for reading along with us. We will see you next time.