Daily Bible Reading 22nd 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.
You will notice that the exhortations to mutual forbearance in Christian love and to mutual forgiveness are once again rooted and grounded in what God has done for us in Christ (v 13). God has forgiven you, Paul says, so you must bear with and forgive one another. We are debtors to God, bankrupt debtors, who have been freely forgiven in the Cross; how can we therefore hold grudges against one another? We must rather conform to the death and resurrection of Christ and put off anger, rage, malice, slander (v 8) and put on forbearance and forgiveness. Jesus' parable of the two debtors (Matthew 18:21-35) comes to mind in this regard. The servant is forgiven his immense debt by the King but then he goes and pursues the paltry debt he is owed by his fellow-servant.
Then the master called the servant in. 'You wicked servant', he said, 'I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?' In anger his master turned him over to the jailers until he should pay back the last penny. 'This (said Jesus) is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.’
The second thing to notice is that forbearance and forgiveness go together. It is all very well bearing with one another but, even as one grits one's teeth in the face of some grievance, refusing to become angry, it is so easy to allow a sullen resentment against that person to build up and fester beneath the surface, which is perhaps worse than an outright raging. It is to ensure that such a sullen concealed anger does not get a foothold in the heart that forgiveness must accompany forbearance. Do you see that all of this is the outworking of the love of Christ (v 14) within the individual and within the fellowship? It is love which binds all these graces and virtues together, producing the fullness of holy and godly living. It is love, Christian agapae love which binds all believers together and leads them on to perfection in the corporate life of the fellowship, as God's new redeemed humanity.