I acknowledge the Lord's presence and ask His blessing on our study of His Word this morning. And now, Father, we come thanking you that you, the fount of every blessing, are pleased to be here with us and to minister to our hearts and to enable our hearts to respond that we might give ourselves without reservation to you.
We thank you for the death and resurrection of your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and for the blessed truth that we'll examine this morning, that we died with Him and we live in Him. We pray that you, by the Spirit, will open our hearts to the truth. Be our teacher today. In Jesus' name, amen. I invite you to open your Bible with me to Colossians chapter 3. On September 7, 1988, patrolman Gary Dockher answered a 911 call.
In the midst of his response, the man he was talking with, Lister Derringer, pointed it right at his forehead and pulled the trigger. For the next seven and a half years, he lay in a hospital bed in a coma. At times he was able to respond by blinking his eyes. At other times, it was as though he was not there at all. His family prayed. It's a Christian family. They prayed that God would heal him, that God's will be done.
Earlier this month, they came to the point of believing that it must be God's will for him to go home to heaven. They faced a difficult choice. His lungs were filling with fluid. And then in that last moment, when it seemed that every hope was gone, he spoke. And for the first time in seven and a half years, he acknowledged his family, knew them by name. He has no recall of what's happened over the last seven and a half years. He might want to go back to sleep. I don't know.
There are some aspects of it that aren't very pleasant. But what a miracle to know of a man who after seven and a half years of unconsciousness would come back to life. They called it a miracle. And it is a miracle of sort. But I want to tell you this morning of a greater miracle than that. I want to remind you of someone who was cruelly crucified and put into a grave who was not just in a coma, but who was dead. And after three days in the grave, he rose again from the dead.
He came back to life. Now that, my friend, is a miracle. The apostle Paul is referring back to that when he writes what he does in chapter three, verse one. If you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. With this verse and the following paragraph, the apostle turns a corner in his letter and begins now to show the church the practical ramifications of what they believed.
This verse and the three following it serve as a coupling, tying together the doctrinal portion of the book with the practical application. The word if is in that particular sense in the Greek language, which does not imply doubt, but it really implies certainty. If then you have been raised up with Christ, and that is the case, is what the apostle is saying. Or since then, you have been raised up with Christ.
The Colossian believers, you see, had been told that they needed something more than what they had. They needed to gain, said the false teachers, some secret mystical knowledge of God, a superior knowledge beyond what they had at that time. And they were told they would get that knowledge through mystical experiences, through the worship of angels and the rigid ascetic denial of the flesh. The apostle sees this teaching for what it is, an attack against the gospel of Christ.
And so he writes to affirm the fact that in Christ, believers are complete. We need nothing more. We have died with him. We have been buried with him. We have been raised from the dead with Christ. What more could believers possibly need than what Jesus Christ has done for us? But when he states, as he does in verse 1, that we have been raised up together with Christ, what does Paul mean by that?
He means that the resurrection we have already undergone entails a new position and a new obligation. And I want you to think about those twin truths with me this morning for a few moments. In being raised up with Jesus Christ, we believers in Jesus have a new position. What is said about us in this verse is something that is essentially true about us. Something that is essentially true.
It says something about who we are fundamentally inside, regardless of what our feelings may be at any given moment. There are times when I don't realize that I'm a citizen of the United States. I just forget it. I take it for granted. There are some times when I'm ashamed of being a citizen of the United States because of some things that our nation does or says in the world. I have different feelings about being a citizen of the United States.
But that does not change the fact that fundamentally I am a citizen of this country. Likewise, there are times when I forget what it means to be raised up with Jesus Christ. Or I have other feelings and I wonder, did I really experience the resurrection? How could I live the way I do and respond the way I do if I'm alive in Jesus Christ? And what Paul says about us here is fundamentally, essentially true about us no matter what our feelings may be at any given moment.
Not only is it essentially true, what he says about us is eternally true, regardless of the manner of living that we may exhibit at some point in our lives. It is possible for one who has been raised with Jesus Christ to live on the level far below that, to live in the flesh and not in the Spirit. That does not change what the apostle says is eternally true. You see, we have a new position and that position is unchangeable.
It is a standing that God gives us by grace, that we are so identified with Jesus Christ that we have been made alive in him. But what does this mean? Well, obviously it's not referring to the physical resurrection. Because well, I say obvious because I can look out there and you can look up here and you know we don't have a new body yet.
When he says that we have been raised with Christ in the sense that it's a historical act done once and for all, he's not talking about the physical resurrection. Anymore than he's talking about a physical death when he says in verse 20 of chapter 2, since you have died with Christ. He's not talking about physical death there, nor is he talking about physical resurrection in chapter 3 verse 1. Now that's coming. It's coming.
And one day we who believe in Christ will be raised up with him physically. But here he's talking about another truth. It is the spiritual resurrection. From our death in sins, Colossians has a twin epistle. Do you remember what it is? We talked about it months ago now. The book of Ephesians is a twin epistle with Colossians. You find many of the same themes in the two books. Turn back to Ephesians for a moment. In Ephesians chapter 2 it says, and you were dead.
Paul doesn't say here you were dead with Christ. He says you were dead in your trespasses and sins. He's going back to another truth, and that is that we were united with Adam by our natural birth and in his sin as well as ours we're dead. We are dead spiritually in our trespasses and sins. He says we walked in them. We lived in them. The spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience, the spirit of darkness, controlled our lives and we walked after what that spirit wanted.
We indulged the flesh. This is all past tense. When you were dead spiritually, you lived like it. But verse 4, God being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, and when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you've been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
The apostle in Ephesians as well as in Colossians is reminding us that though we were spiritually dead at one point and separated from God and lived like it, now we have been united to God. We have been joined to Jesus Christ. A miraculous change has taken place as real as the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. This change has brought about an indissoluble relationship between ourselves and Christ. How was this accomplished? It was accomplished by the work of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit who participated in the resurrection of Jesus Christ in bringing him back from the dead is the one who has imparted to you and to me new life, resurrection life, God's eternal life. Alexander McLaren writes about this truth with these words. Scripture speaks of a three-fold life, that of the animal nature, that of the intellectual and emotional nature, and that of the spirit which lives when it is conscious of God and touches him by aspiration, hope, and love.
This is the loftiest life. Now listen. Without it, a man is dead while he lives. With it, he lives though he dies. One who has not experienced spiritual resurrection may walk on the face of this earth for 20 or 50 or 100 years and be dead. There is a miracle of resurrection that takes place when one believes in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a resurrection of the spirit inside of you. The Holy Spirit regenerates you.
He imparts life to you at that moment, and that life brings you into a new position that can never change. You can be never less than you are as far as God sees you right now in Jesus Christ. So when the apostle says, you have been raised up with Christ, remember that entails a new position. But secondly, in being raised up with Jesus Christ, we have a new obligation.
The apostle says, since you have been raised up with Christ and have a new relationship, a new position with God, keep seeking the things above. Notice that this is a command. It is a command in the present tense, which means it's to be a habit of our lives. Since we have a new position in Christ, we are alive spiritually, we have an obligation to keep seeking the things above. By the things above, he means those issues that are related to the heavenly realm.
The things above in this verse stand in contrast to those things mentioned in verse 22 of chapter 2, where he talks about the things destined to perish with the using, the material things of the world. They also stand in contrast to what is said in chapter 3 verse 2, where he mentions the things that are on earth. The things that are on earth are the things that are here and now. Those are the things that our culture craves.
Those are the things that our own hearts will focus on if we don't remember that we have a new obligation as new people. We are to lift our gaze above the here and now and to seek after those things that are of the heavenly realm. A.W. Tozer, that prophetic preacher, now with the Lord over 30 years, wrote these words, things are for us only what we hold them to be, which is to say that our attitude toward things is more likely in the long run to be more important than the things themselves.
Our obligation is to lift our eyes off of the things of the earth, not to seek after those things, not to focus on those things. We have to deal with them because we live in the here and now. But our focus, our gaze, is to be on those things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Now the ethical outcome of this, Paul is going to talk about for the rest of this book.
But as he begins to point us in the direction of what kind of a life we ought to live in a world like this, he emphasizes first of all the heart disposition. Keep on seeking the things above. He talks here about the direction of our desires, our ambitions, our outlook. As one who has been resurrected from the dead spiritually, we are to maintain this gaze now upon the things that matter to God the most.
Curtis Vaughan says, and I paraphrase him, the believer's allegiance to Christ must take precedence over all earthly allegiances. We have earthly allegiances that are not unimportant, but there is one allegiance that takes place over them all, and that is the allegiance to the one who stands at the right hand of God. It is the Lord Jesus Christ in whom we live, and we are to keep seeking those things above where Christ sits at the right hand of God. How can you do that this week? How can I?
We need to ask God to show us where our gaze has slipped to the here and now, and we are focusing on those things, and ask him rather to lift our eyes that we might seek those things that are eternal and that matter the most. Let's bow together. Plus our congregation this morning, all of us struggle with this. What were you thinking about when you came in this morning? Can you remember? Can you think back? That might be a hint to you as to where your gaze is, at least at this moment.
Our obligation as those who have a new position is to seek the things above. Would you ask the Lord to refocus your spiritual eyes that you might seek after the things that relate to heaven? Father, I pray that this will be our experience today, that you will fulfill in our lives this duty that we have. We will not be like believers who live in the world and after the flesh, but we will be believers who are living according to who we are in Christ.
May our gaze and our seeking this week reflect who we are in Christ. May it be true in our families, may it be true in our private times, may it be true at work. In Jesus' name, amen. We're going to have our offering in just a moment. Before we do that, I want to say this to you.