Colossians 3:1-4 — Set Your Mind

Frank: Colossians three opens with something you would almost skip past if you were reading quickly. Paul says your life, your real one, is hidden right now. Hidden with Christ, in God. And I want to sit in that for a minute, because most of us walk around assuming the life we can see is the whole story.

Linda: Hidden, though, is a strange word to hear as good news. When I hide something it usually means I lost it, or I'm ashamed of it. So my first honest reaction is, why would I want my life hidden anywhere? That doesn't sound safe. That sounds like something's missing.

Frank: That instinct is exactly right, and Paul is going to turn it inside out. Welcome to Dig Deeper, by the way. Today we're in Colossians chapter three, verses one through four, four verses that quietly relocate your whole address. Linda, would you read it for us?

Linda: Happy to.

Linda: If then you were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated on the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, our life, is revealed, then you will also be revealed with him in glory.

Frank: Notice where Paul starts. Not with a command, but with a fact. "If then you were raised together with Christ." That little word "if" is not a question mark, it's not "maybe you were." In the Greek it assumes the thing is true. He's saying, since this already happened to you, since you were raised, now here's what follows. The command in verse one only makes sense because of a thing that's already done to you and settled.

Linda: Raised. That's the word I want to slow down on, because Paul says it like it's a past event I lived through. But I don't remember dying. I don't remember being raised. So in what sense did that actually happen to me?

Frank: This is the heart of the whole letter, and the church has a name for it. Union with Christ. When Paul says you were raised together with Christ, he doesn't mean you copied his example, or that you turned over a new leaf and started acting resurrected. He means something far stranger. Everything that happened to Jesus happened to you. Back in chapter two he ties it to baptism, and Romans six says it plainly, "we were buried with him," so that "we also might walk in newness of life." His death is counted as yours. His rising is counted as yours. You are bound to him so tightly that his history has become your history. You're not down here trying to climb up to a distant God. You're already joined to the risen Son.

Linda: So you're telling me the most important thing that's ever happened to me is something I have no memory of and can't feel. That's a hard sell. I'd like to be sold on it, but on a normal afternoon I don't feel raised, I feel tired.

Frank: We all do. And Paul knows that, which is why he doesn't ask you to feel it. Look at the verbs. You were raised. You died. Your life is hidden. Every one of them is settled, finished, done to you, not by you. Your feelings are not consulted. That's the mercy of it. If your union with Christ depended on the state of your afternoon, you would lose it every day around three o'clock. It doesn't. It rests on what he did, on the fact that God the Father counts you as belonging to his Son.

Linda: The union isn't something I generate by trying hard enough, it's something already true that I'm being told to live out of. So the command comes second, on purpose. Because the fact came first.

Frank: The fact came first. And once you see that, you understand where verse one is actually pointing you. "Seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated on the right hand of God." Now, we hear "right hand of God" and it sounds like a nice piece of religious furniture. To Paul's readers it was a throne-room announcement.

Linda: Unpack that, because "right hand" to me is just, I don't know, a direction. What did it mean to them that made it matter?

Frank: In the ancient world, the right hand of a king was the single most honored place a human being could occupy. It was the hand of strength, of blessing, of shared authority. The son who sat at the king's right was the heir, the co-ruler. The general who stood there wielded the king's own power. To be summoned to the right hand was to be handed the authority to act in the king's name. So when Paul says Christ is seated at the right hand of God, he's not giving you a map of heaven. He's telling you that the crucified criminal, thrown out beyond the city walls, is now installed in the place of highest honor in the entire universe.

Linda: The one they executed is running things now.

Frank: The one they executed is running things now. And here's the piece I love. That phrase, "sit at my right hand," comes straight out of Psalm one hundred and ten. It's a coronation song, written to be sung when a king took the throne. Israel sang it over their kings for a thousand years, and every single one of them died, and the throne stayed empty of the one the song was really describing. The song outran every man who ever sat in David's seat. It was a promise still looking for a person.

Linda: So Psalm one ten was basically an unfilled seat for a thousand years, and Paul's whole point is that the seat finally has someone in it.

Frank: That's it exactly. The song finally has its King. And that changes what "seek the things above" even means. It's not vague spiritual daydreaming, not floating around thinking pleasant heavenly thoughts. It's allegiance. You seek the things above because that's where your King actually sits and reigns, and your life is bound up in his. Calvin put it beautifully, that the right hand of God "is not confined to heaven, but fills the whole world." Christ isn't reigning from somewhere far off and irrelevant. His authority reaches down into the exact afternoon you're living.

Linda: I want to push on "set your mind on things above, not on the things on the earth," though. Because that "not" bothers me. Am I supposed to stop caring about my job, my kids, the bills? That sounds like Paul telling me to check out of my actual life.

Frank: It would, if "earth" meant your responsibilities. But that's not the contrast he's drawing. The problem isn't that you have earthly things, it's that some earthly thing has you. There's usually one thing we're quietly protecting. It gets our first thought in the morning and our last scroll at night. A career you're pushing past the point of health. A grudge you keep polished. A comfort you reach for the second you're bored. Paul's "not" won't let that thing sit unnamed. He's saying, if you were raised with Christ, your mind belongs somewhere else now, and whatever's got its grip on you down here has to loosen.

Linda: There's a name surfacing right now while you're saying this. A person I'd rather not think about, and when they come up my whole body tightens. And I know the honest thing is that I've been giving that grudge more of my mind than I've given Christ. I don't love hearing it.

Frank: That tightening you just described, that flash, that's the exact moment Paul's talking about. And the good news buried underneath is that you don't fix it by white-knuckling your feelings into place. You can't. Verse three again, "you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." He did the burying and the raising both. You didn't earn your seat above and you don't hold it by effort. So the prayer isn't "God, help me try harder to feel differently about that person." It's "God, you've already secured me, now loosen this one grip today."

Linda: The grudge feels big, but the seat's not depending on whether I win against it. Christ already sat down. My white-knuckling was never what was holding me up there.

Frank: Never. And that brings us to the strangest, richest word in the passage. Twice Paul uses one Greek verb, phaneroō. "When Christ, our life, is revealed, then you will also be revealed with him in glory." Phaneroō doesn't mean something new gets made. It means something already real, already there, finally comes into view. Your glory isn't manufactured on the last day. It's unveiled.

Linda: So the hiddenness isn't the end state. It's more like the wrapping still on the gift.

Frank: The wrapping still on the gift. That's exactly the tension Paul's holding. Every verb about what's already yours is finished. You died. You were raised. Your life is hidden. All settled. And then he adds the one verb that's still out ahead of you. You will be revealed. The reality is complete, the display is pending. You look in the mirror and see a tired face and a body that aches and fails, and Paul says, that's not the finished picture. There's a curtain that hasn't lifted yet. First John says the same thing, "now we are children of God, and it is not yet revealed what we will be."

Linda: And "hidden" finally makes sense to me now, the way you said it'd flip. Because there's another hiding way back at the start of the Bible, isn't there. Adam and Eve, in the garden.

Frank: You're reading ahead of me, and it's the connection that ties this whole thing together. When Adam and Eve sinned, Genesis says they hid themselves from the presence of God among the trees. That first hiding was pure terror. It was fleeing from God's face, guilty concealment, wanting to be anywhere he wasn't. Paul takes that very posture, that same word, hiding, and turns it completely inside out. Your life is now hidden with Christ in God. The hiding that started as dread becomes the safest keeping there is.

Linda: The garden buried us in fear. The resurrection buries us in safety.

Frank: The garden buried us in fear. The resurrection buries us in safety. And that's not a one-off trick, it's how God works throughout the story. He keeps taking the postures of our ruin and turning each one into the site of the rescue. Hiding, once dread, is now refuge. Exposure becomes covering. Distance becomes union. So when your mind starts racing tonight through the day's unfinished business, you have a line to hold onto, and it's not a strategy, it's a fact. My life is hidden with Christ in God. Not out in the open. Not up for grabs. Not depending on how today went.

Linda: And there's real weight in that for anyone waiting on something right now. A test result. A reply that hasn't come. A situation you genuinely can't fix. Because the passage says a day is coming that outweighs whatever you're staring at this afternoon.

Frank: There's a day coming that outweighs it. So name the thing you're waiting on out loud to God, and then say the one thing that's already settled underneath it. Christ is coming, and I belong to him. The same Christ who is your hidden life right now will be your revealed glory then. And here's the thing you can rest on. He does not lose what he keeps.

Linda: Let that be the thing you keep, then. Not the to-do list, not the grudge, not the waiting. My life is hidden with Christ in God. Say it slow before you sleep tonight and let it be the last thought you hold. The safest place in the universe already has your name in it, and no afternoon, however tired, can pry you out of it.

Frank: That's a good place to stop. Grace to you today.

Linda: This one's part of the Dig Deeper app, so if you're new here, look us up as Dig Deeper wherever you get your apps.