Daily Bible Reading 21st July 2025 // Colossians 3:12-17
12 Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
These five graces (v 12), which Paul urges are to characterise our lives, are not natural. They are not produced, worked up by our own innate ability. They are, rather, the fruit of being in Christ, the fruit of the Spirit, and they show us how we should/how we must behave towards one another, in the fellowship of the Church (although it is clearly not limited to the fellowship of believers). Lives of compassion, kindness, lowliness, gentleness and long-suffering are the outworking of the family characteristics of the new creation, the new humanity, which Christ has brought to be. This is where the old man has been put off and the new man has been put on. Now, you might imagine that this new humanity/society which Christ has recreated by his death and resurrection would be idyllic/a heavenly existence without difficulties and squabbles within the fellowship. Paul, however, is not so naive. In what he urges (v 13-14), we see, once again, something of his realism and we see the paradoxical nature of Christian experience in this life. The life of the age to come has to be lived out in this fallen and sinful age. As noted previously, the tension between the 'already' and the 'not yet' is never fully resolved in this life (Romans 8:23). So, even within the body of Christ, perhaps I should say, particularly within the body of Christ, there will be real or imagined slights and grievances. Paul does not pretend otherwise. How very practical and realistic Paul is! It is exactly because there will be those within the fellowship who will, either wittingly or unwittingly, cause us hurt or injury, or who we will grieve (remembering that we as often as any other can be the source of strife!); it is exactly because of this that we see the need for mutual and reciprocal long-suffering patience, which endures wrong and puts up with the exasperating conduct of others rather than flying into a rage or sullenly desiring vengeance.