the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Day by Day Devotional - Year 5 of 5
Colossians 2:20-23; ; Colossians 3:1-7
What we should or should not do is determined by what we are. Now our two-fold position has just been described (vv. 12, 13).1. We are dead with Christ (v. 20), dead to the rudiments of the world; we can no longer take for our rule of life the principles which govern this world, with its moral or religious pretensions, and its estimate, so often false, of what is right and wrong.2. We are "risen with Christ" (Colossians 3:1). As people of the realm above, let us think of the things above, let us apply the principles of that place in even the most ordinary circumstances down here.
Yes, you are dead, v. 3 confirms once more, and the new and imperishable life you now possess is "hid with Christ in God". "Therefore the world knoweth us not" – that is to say, it does not understand us – because it did not know Him (1 John 3:1). But when Christ is manifested, then all will know what our secret was.
Although our life is in heaven, we still have with us on the earth those "members" so dangerous morally, in other words, our lusts. Let us regard as dead all these guilty evidences of the old man. Because of them, "the wrath of God cometh upon the children of disobedience"; because of them, that wrath fell on our perfect Substitute.
