At the end of July, 1974, I began boot camp in the U.S. Navy. I had grown up in Northern California, and for the most part I was used to doing what I wanted. This was true for most of us who were together in the barracks on that first morning. Most of us were individualistic to an extreme. We didn’t like being told what to do; we thought our own plans and ideas were about as good as anyone else’s. But our first morning in the Navy began very abruptly. Drill instructors woke us up by throwing metal garbage cans on the cement floor, yelling at us to get up and get dressed, and then they literally chased us out onto the parade ground. And they lined us up in front of a big sign that said: “Welcome Aboard. You are now men of the United States Navy. The tradition of the service demands your utmost effort. Give it cheerfully and willingly.” The basic idea was: “You are now part of the U.S. Navy. Act like it.” Paul is saying something very similar in this passage. In verses 1-4, he has been stressing that this world is not our true home, that our citizenship is in heaven: “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.... For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.... Put to death, therefore....” This word, “therefore,” shows that he is drawing a conclusion. It’s important, when we’re reading Scripture, to pay close attention to words like this. They tell us why the author is saying these things in this particular place. One of the greatest dangers, as we read Scripture, is taking things out of context, and transitional words like this help us stay on track. These ethical instructions that Paul is giving do not stand on their own. They grow out of the things he’s been saying throughout this letter. And, in particular, they follow naturally from what he said at the beginning of this chapter.
What he’s saying here is this: we live in this world as representatives of God’s kingdom, and our lives must be consistent with our citizenship. We’re not citizens of this world any longer. We’ve died and been raised with Christ, and our new life is now hidden with Him, at the right hand of God the Father. But this isn’t just a theological truth. It affects the way we live our lives in this world. The theological truth is essential; these instructions are really meaningless apart from the truth of our citizenship in heaven. But the theological truth is not meant to stand on its own either. Several years ago I read a review of a new book on New Testament theology; the reviewer said “this needs to be thoroughly discussed.” Theological truth is not something we spend our lives discussing over coffee. It affects the way we live our lives, and if it doesn’t affect our lives, we haven’t properly understood it. Our citizenship in heaven is to transform the way we live in this world. Our lives must reflect our citizenship.
Notice, first, that before we were in Christ, we lived like citizens of this fallen world. Paul says, in verse 7: “you used to walk in these ways.” Here it is in the New Living Translation: “You used to do them when your life was still part of this world.” Paul is assuming that there’s a difference between the way they live now and the way they lived in the past. And he’s also assuming that when they were citizens of this world, they lived like it. It’s important to realize that he’s describing a general approach to life here. Not all of them were involved in all the things he lists. Not all of them were sexually immoral. But his list is not only about outward behavior. It also addresses the condition of their hearts: “lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry.” They all lived as citizens of a fallen world. Some of them may have lived morally upright lives, but they were still guilty of lust, evil desires and greed. They were all guilty of idolatry, because they worshiped and served something less than the one true God.
There are many similarities between this letter and the letter to the Ephesians. Ephesians seems to have been a circular letter, and it may have been sent out to all the churches of the region, along with Colossians and Philemon. At any rate, there are many parallels between these three letters. Here’s what he says in Ephesians about their past life: “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath” (Ephesians 2:1-3). We used to follow the ways of this world, we lived as citizens of this fallen world. And we lived under the certainty of God’s coming wrath. “Because of these [these things that characterized our lives when we were citizens of this world] the wrath of God is coming.”
The second thing to notice here is that as citizens of God’s kingdom we’ve received a new nature: “you have taken off your old self and put on the new self” (vv. 9-10). This new self “is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” Paul is not just interested in behavioral change. He’s not trying to turn them into moralists. Their behavior matters, but Christian holiness is a transformation from the inside out. He says similar things in many of his letters. He tells the Corinthians in his second letter (5:17) “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” Or this, from the end of Galatians: “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is a new creation” (Galatians 6:15). The Galatians were concerned with outward conformity, they were seeking to be saved by doing good works. Circumcision was the first step in obedience to the Law, so for the Galatians, circumcision was central. But Paul says it’s not important in itself at all. What counts is this new nature, which is being renewed in the image of its Creator. Christian holiness is a transformation from the inside out.
This new nature that we’ve received is part of our citizenship in heaven. On that first morning in boot camp, we still had all of our individuality intact. We were dressed in civilian clothes, and some of us had long hair. The sign we were reading didn’t seem to fit us at the time: “Welcome Aboard. You are now men of the United States Navy.” But by the end of the day we were all clean shaven, dressed in Navy dungarees, and we all had short hair. All our civilian clothes had been boxed up and sent home. By the end of the day those words didn’t seem so strange. God hasn’t just told us to live as citizens of His kingdom. He’s given us a new nature to fit that kingdom. He’s given us the clothes we need to live as His people.
But having this new nature doesn’t automatically lead to holy living. God has made us citizens of His kingdom, and He’s outfitted us for living as His people, but there’s nothing automatic about the process. This leads to the third thing in this passage: we live as citizens of heaven by taking concrete steps of obedience, trusting in God’s power. Our assimilation to Navy life didn’t end with our new outward appearance. Over the next nine weeks, we were involved in daily training to turn us into functioning members of the U.S. Navy. God gives us a new nature, and then over the course of a lifetime He trains us to live as members of His kingdom.
I struggled for a considerable time after I became a Christian. I didn't grow up in a Christian home and was in boot camp within a month of my conversion, with almost no knowledge of the Bible or how to live as a Christian. I wanted to be faithful and I wanted to grow, but I didn't know what to do or where to turn for help. In those early months, I read through numerous pamphlets from various organizations, and it seemed that each one had a different solution to my dilemma. According to one, I just needed to let go and let Jesus do it all through me, but I couldn't tell exactly what that meant or how to do it. According to another, I simply needed to pray for, and believe that I had received, the filling of the Holy Spirit, so I prayed for this over and over again. Another person told me that what I needed was to receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit, and someone else told me that I needed to crucify the self. In the end, after trying all these solutions and more, I found myself still floundering.
It's not that all these suggestions were completely wrong. But they didn't tell me what I needed to know. I needed to know how to live as a Christian. I needed to know how to order my life to grow more into the likeness of Christ, and all the advice I received suggested that if I had the right experience, I would begin to live the Christian life more-or-less automatically. I remember several times walking back to my barracks, crying out to God, asking Him to take over my life, fully expecting Him to do so. But nothing ever happened, and I continued to flounder for more than a year.
Some years ago I learned that J.I. Packer had similar experiences in his early Christian life. Here’s part of his testimony: “What I seemed to be hearing... was a call to deny personal self, so that I could be taken over by Jesus Christ in such a way that my present experience of thinking and willing would become something different, an experience of Christ himself living in me, animating me, and doing the thinking and willing for me. Put like that, it sounds more like the formula of demon-possession than the ministry of the indwelling Christ according to the New Testament.... We used to sing this chorus: ‘O to be saved from myself, dear Lord, O to be lost in thee; O that it may be no more I But Christ who lives in me!” (Introduction to The Mortification of Sin, by John Owen, p. 9).
He goes on to describe how this was to work in practice: “Consecration meant total self-surrender, laying one’s all on the altar, handing over every part of one’s life to the lordship of Jesus. Through consecration one would be emptied of self, and the empty vessel would then automatically be filled with the Spirit so that Christ’s power within one would be ready for use. With consecration was to go faith, which was explained as looking to the indwelling Christ moment by moment, not only to do one’s thinking and choosing in and for one, but also to do one’s fighting and resisting of temptation.... At that time I did not know that Harry Ironside, sometime pastor of Moody Memorial Church, Chicago, once drove himself into a full-scale mental breakdown through trying to get into the higher life as I was trying to get into it; and I would not have dared to conclude, as I have concluded since, that this higher life as described is a will-o’-the-wisp, an unreality that no one has ever laid hold of at all, and that those who testify to their experience in these terms really, if unwittingly, distort what has happened to them. All I knew was that the expected experience was not coming. The technique was not working” (pp. 9-10). His experience was like mine: he cried out to God over and over, assuming that he was doing something wrong. But the experience never came.
The process is not automatic. We have a new nature, but at the same time we are given clear instruction on how to grow in Christlikeness. Much teaching on the subject of holiness, or the deeper life, is an attempt to find a shortcut, or a more-or-less automatic way to grow to Christian maturity. It’s based on the expectation that at some point God will take away our self-will and just live the Christian life through us, with no effort on our part. And these kinds of teachings always lead us down a dead end road. They lead us to pray and hope for something that God doesn’t choose to give. What I needed most as a new Christian was the very thing I was not finding.
We live as citizens of heaven by taking concrete steps of obedience. First, this includes the negative step of saying “no” to certain things. Look at verse 5: “Put to death... whatever belongs to your earthly nature.” Or verse 8: “But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these.” “Do not lie to one another” (verse 9). The first step in discipleship is saying “no” to things that will lead us away from the Lord, things that are displeasing to Him, things that will undermine our relationship with God. How do we decide what these things are? Paul lists a few, but his list is not exhaustive. Notice his words “whatever belongs to your earthly nature,” and “all such things as these.” He’s just giving a few examples. He says, in Galatians 5, that “the acts of the sinful nature are obvious,” and then he gives a long list, which he concludes with the words, “and other kinds of sin” (New Living Translation). We don’t need to be in anguish over which particular things belong on the list. Most of them are obvious. But the right question is not, “am I allowed to do this?” We need to ask, instead, “where is this going to take me? Which direction is this headed? Will this lead me closer to the Lord, or is it taking me away from Him?”
This negative step is what Jesus is talking about in the Sermon on the Mount, when He says: “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away” (Matthew 5:29). Here is how this whole passage reads in The Message: “Let’s not pretend this is easier than it really is. If you want to live a morally pure life, here’s what you have to do. You have to blind your right eye the moment you catch it in a lustful leer. You have to choose to live one-eyed or else be dumped on a moral trash pile. And you have to chop off your right hand the moment you notice it raised threateningly. Better a bloody stump than your entire being discarded for good in the dump” (Matthew 5:29-30). His point is not that we should literally maim ourselves, but that we need to be ruthless in removing things in our lives that lead us into sin. We need to “put to death,” or mortify, anything in our lives that has become a pathway to sin.
That’s the first step. We say “no” to those things that are inconsistent with our lives in Christ. Living as citizens of heaven means laying aside things that are in conflict with God’s sovereign rule in our lives. But Paul goes beyond this negative step. Look at verses 12-14: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive.... and over all these virtues put on love.” The whole point of saying “no” to the first list is to then say “yes” to these other qualities. It’s always tempting to begin defining our Christian lives by all the things we don’t do. The purpose of this first step, though, is to allow us to cultivate positive Christlikeness.
While I was living onboard the U.S.S. Piedmont, I had a friend who believed it was sinful to use musical instruments in worship. This, over time, became the defining idea in his Christian life. It was the thing he talked about when he talked at all about spiritual things. And he was very proud of his obedience in this area. But it got him into trouble. There weren’t a lot of choices for corporate worship on the ship, and all the available opportunities involved some use of musical instruments. This was so intolerable to him that he eventually cut himself off from corporate worship altogether. The interesting thing, though, is that he made very little attempt to live a consistent Christian life in any other area. But he considered himself superior to all the rest of us, because of this one area. When we define our Christian lives negatively, as he did, it often leads to some strange results and inconsistencies. He was perfectly comfortable listening to (and being influenced by) the music of Black Sabbath, but he couldn’t sing praise choruses with us, accompanied by a guitar.
This second step involves cultivating positive virtues. We don’t wait until we feel like acting in Christlike ways. We step out in obedience. We act in Christlike ways, whether we feel like it or not. Part of our trouble with the Christian life is that we so often overestimate the importance of our feelings. Our feelings are an important part of our humanity, but they are not at all reliable as indicators of what we should do. The interesting thing is that when we act in obedience, our feelings will follow eventually. Paul says we need to put on these Christlike characteristics; but he doesn’t say we need to feel these things all the time. We take these concrete steps of obedience, and over a lifetime we find ourselves cultivating godly habits. Eugene Peterson has wise counsel in this area: “Feelings are great liars. If Christians only worshiped when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship that went on. Feelings are important in many areas, but completely unreliable in matters of faith.... We live in what one writer has called the ‘age of sensation.’ We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different, namely, that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting” (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p. 50). We act in obedience, and eventually our feelings will follow along.
But we don’t do all this trusting in our own ability. We act in faith, trusting in God’s transforming power at work in us. We believe what Paul says in verses 1-4, that our true citizenship is in heaven, that God has made us part of His kingdom. We recognize our own powerlessness, our spiritual poverty. But God is at work in us, and He enables us to do the things He calls us to do. So we step out in obedience, trusting Him to carry on His work of transformation in us. There’s both an active and a passive side to this. We’re active, in the sense that we are taking concrete steps of obedience, in response to God’s Word. But we’re also passive, in the sense that we recognize our absolute need for God’s help and intervention.
The last thing we need to notice is this: all the virtues Paul lists here are ones which enable us to live together as a body of believers. He emphasizes that “Christ is all, and is in all” (v. 11). The false teachers were setting up artificial distinctions among the believers, so Paul wants to stress their oneness. “The new creation... is a society where the barriers that separate us from one another in this world are abolished.... Here there cannot be the deep divisions, national and traditional, tribal and geographical, social and cultural, that largely distinguish us from one another” (Lucas, p. 147).
They are to clothe themselves with “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience,” all qualities which will reinforce their oneness as a body. They are to “bear with each other and forgive.” And above all else, they are to “put on love.” These aren’t the qualities we hear about in a political campaign. They’re not the sorts of things you’ll be taught in a business seminar. They’re not necessarily the qualities which will make us effective in accomplishing all our goals in this life. But as citizens of heaven, what we’re called to is Christlikeness. The positive qualities we’re to be cultivating over a lifetime are the attributes of our Lord Jesus Christ. We’re called to be like Him, and the more we become like Him, the more we’ll be enabled to experience unity in the church.
This is what it means to live as citizens of heaven. To persevere over a lifetime in cultivating Christlikeness; saying “no” to all those things that are displeasing to Him, taking concrete steps in obedience to His Word, and trusting only in the power of His Spirit to transform us into His image. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily hinders our progress. And let us run with endurance the race that God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, on whom our faith depends from start to finish. He was willing to die a shameful death on the cross because of the joy He knew would be His afterward. Now He is seated in the place of highest honor beside God’s throne in heaven. “Think about all he endured when sinful people did such terrible things to him, so that you don’t become weary and give up” (Hebrews 12:1-3, New Living Translation). May God enable us increasingly to model the life of His kingdom in this dark world.
