MERRY MONDAY BY PARRIS-
“Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.”
Col.3:8
WORDSWORTH:—‘Be ye good trees. Now, in the world’s eye, is your winter; to men ye appear like dry sticks. Your life is hid with Christ. Ye are dead in appearance, but not dead in reality; dead as to show of luxuriant leaves, but not dead in your spiritual root. Your root is Christ. His coming will be your summer. Then ye will put forth a glorious foliage. Ye will appear with Him in glory. And the leafy fig-tree of this world will be withered by His coming.’
Paul had it right when he talked about “taking off the old man” and “putting on the new man in Christ Jesus”. It’s amazing how much we are unaware of how much we tend to filter everything through the old man and his way of thinking. ‘You looked at me wrong’, or ‘the text sounded rude’, ‘your ignoring me’ and so on. We need to change our language. Union with Christ by faith is the condition of a real communication of life. “In Him was life,” says John’s Gospel, meaning that “in Him were all things created, and in Him all things consist.” Expositor Bible says, “John says we have to abide in the vine and derive all of our life dependent on union with the Divine, and upheld only by His continual energy, The creature must touch God or perish. Of that energy the Uncreated Word of God is the channel-As the life of the body, so the higher self-conscious life of the thinking, feeling, striving soul, is also fed and kept alight by the perpetual operation of a higher Divine energy, imparted in like manner by the Divine Word.”
Creating an ongoing God-consciousness the rest of our life is challenging. Have we put on the new man and wear him daily or just on Sunday? Do we live in Him, by Him, for Him? So the question comes home to each of us-‘am I living by my union with Christ?’ Christ comes to take over, change our personalities, thought processes and our behavior patterns. The result should bring us a inward joy and peace we never had before.
Expositor Bible goes onto to say, “Paul would insist that all true Christianity operates a death to the old self, to sin, and to the whole present order of things, and endows a man with new tastes, desires, and capacities, like a resurrection to a new being. These heathen converts-picked from the filthy cesspools in which many of them had been living, and set on a pure path, with the astounding light of a Divine love flooding it, and a bright hope painted on the infinite blackness ahead-had surely passed into a new life.”