The Hidden Life.
If we are true Christians, we have passed through a death of some kind, and our life, if we have one, is a hidden life, a life not seen by men, a life safe in the company and the custody of Christ.
I. Now, doubtless, there was a more visible and palpable contrast in the days of St. Paul, between the life of one who was and one who was not a Christian, than there can ever be in a country like our own. But though the contrast is more vivid in a heathen country than among the members of a Christian body, yet it is indeed not more real. In the hearts of professing Christians, Christ must either succeed or fail in introducing a new life, of which death must be the precursor.
II. Do you know anything of gradual dying to sin? You might have called the struggle by some other name. But you havestruggled with a cruel darling sin, and you feel the intense truthfulness of that description which represents the struggles and deed of dying, and the victory as a fact of death. And certainly, if this be so, you will already have overcome the great difficulty which blinds so many to the existence of the hidden life with Christ. The pure in heart are those who have the vision of God. And purity of heart is only granted to those who have conquered, or have died to all duplicity and all defilement.
H. M. Butler, Harrow Sermons,p. 344.
Spiritual Mindedness.
What St. Paul here urges is, indeed, the highest perfection of Christianity, and therefore of human nature; but it is not an impossible perfection, and St. Paul's own life and character are our warrant that it is nothing sickly or foolish or fanatical.
I. It is most certain that Christ requires us to be dead only to what is evil. But the essence of spiritual mindedness consists in this, that it is assumed that with earth and all things earthly, evil and imperfection are closely mixed; so that it is not possible to set our affections keenly upon, or to abandon ourselves to the enjoyment of, any earthly thing without the danger of the affections and their enjoyment becoming evil. In other words, there is that in the state of things within and around us, which renders it needful to be ever watchful; and watchfulness is inconsistent with an intensity of delight and enjoyment.
II. Consider, for instance, that lively sense of the beauty of all nature, that indescribable feeling of delight which arises out of consciousness of health and strength and power. Suppose we abandon ourselves to such impressions without restraint, and is it not manifest that they are the extreme of godless pride and selfishness? For do we not know that in this world, and close to us wherever we are, there is, along with all the beauty and enjoyment which we witness, a large proportion also of evil and suffering? The soldier has something else to do than to gaze like a child on the splendour of his uniform, or the brightness of his sword: those faculties which we find as it were burning within us, have their work before them, a work far above their strength, though multiplied a thousand fold; the call to them to be busy is never silent; there is an infinite voice in the infinite sins and sufferings of millions which proclaims that the contest is raging around us; every idle moment is treason; now is the time for unceasing efforts, and not till the victory is gained may Christ's soldiers throw aside their arms, and resign themselves to enjoyment and to rest.
T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. iv., p. 39.
Death and Life with Christ.
It is the Christian state that is here described; the state of the real Christian. And it is described in a twofold aspect, as a state of death and a state of life. The paradox is not peculiar to this passage.
I. "Ye are dead." This is strong language addressed to true believers. But it is very gracious language. In conversion the sinner does indeed die with Christ, being buried with Him by baptism into death, that like as Christ was raised from the dead, by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. It would thus appear that there are three stages of the death of believers. (1) In their original state of unconcern and unbelief, they are dead. (2) In their effectual calling by the Holy Ghost, they die. (3) And ever after, as long as they remain on earth, they are to reckon themselves dead indeed.
II. As it is said of those who live in pleasure, that they are dead while they live, so it may be said of you who believe in Jesus, that you live while you are dead. And your life is hid with Christ in God. Follow Christ now, from earth to heaven; from the scene of His agony here below, to the scene of His blessed joy in the presence of the Father above. (1) Your life is with Christ. It is, in fact, identified with Him. He is your life, and He is so in two respects. (a) You live with Christ as partakers of His right to live. (b) You live with Christ in respect of the new spirit of your life. (2) Further, this life, being with Christ, must be where He is. It must therefore be in God. He is your life. And where He is, there is your life. But He is in the bosom of the Father. Your life with Christ, therefore, is in God. For in His favour is life, and His lovingkindness is better than life. (3) Finally, this life with Christ in God is hid. It must needs be so, since it enters in within the veil. This suggests the touching ideas of security and spirituality, of privacy and of seclusion. Your life is not to be always hidden. "When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory."
R. S. Candlish, Sermons,p. 67.
The purpose of the Apostle is evidently to exhort the Colossians to live the highest possible life, the life of the resurrection, the life of heaven even on earth. To do that is here described in two words: "Seek the things that are above," "Set your mind, or affection, on the things that are above." Seek them in order to find and possess them. Seek them as goodly pearls, for they can be found; they have an existence. They are realities outside us, not mere thoughts and feelings and methods, but objective things which can be sought and can be found. The other word is, "Set your mind" think the things "that are above." For though they are realities outside us they have the power of being transmuted into thoughts and feelings. We have the faculty of changing them from outward realities into governing principles of character. We can think them, we can make thoughts out of them. They are the material out of which great ideas and great characters are formed. Then the Apostle mentions two reasons why we should do this, why we should seek these, and why we should think them. The one reason is, "that ye are risen with Christ." The other is, "that ye are dead with Christ*" Evidently "with Christ" ought to be supplied in thought in the third verse, for "if we die with Christ," he says in the twentieth verse of the first chapter. If we died with Christ not in ourselves, but in Christ we are risen with Christ, and we have died with Christ. And the things must come in that order resurrection first with Christ, death after with Christ. The other is the natural order. Men die first, and they lie in the world for centuries, but the resurrection comes at last, afterwards. The supernatural order is the reverse. We rise first from the natural into the supernatural, and then in that supernatural resurrection we die unto the natural life which we lived before. We rise first, we die afterwards. Every life must have these two aspects. It must appear, it must hide itself. It is so with every life, even the lowest. If it is a life it must hide itself. The rose tree in the garden lives and appears in leaf and flower, but it does so because its life is hid in the roots. And if it had no roots, unseen, hiding themselves under the surface, you would never see a leaf or a rose in sight. It is so with men. No man will ever appear great, will ever show signs of greatness of character, unless he has a hidden life. There is more hidden than appears. It is so with religion. A religion that is always on the surface is not a living one. A religion that is real will have a glorious manifestation in proportion as it has an equally glorious hiding.
I. Christ and the Christian are hid in the mystery of God's providence. In the development of the Church, in the progress of Christ's religion, in the persecutions, in the prosperity or adversity, in all the changing circumstances of the ages, Christ is there hiding Himself. Now, as Jesus, so we. We are hid. A Christian man is a hidden man. The world has never understood him. The natural man knoweth not the things that are of the Spirit of God. We must be spiritual men before we can understand a spiritual fact and before we can understand a spiritual person. Though it be a poor ignorant man that is dying calmly because he trusts the Saviour, there is a mystery in that death that the philosophers of this world do not understand. We are hid.
II. In the second place, Christ is hid in the sanctuary of heaven. He is gone far from us, into the secret pavilion into which only the High Priest can enter, into the presence of God. And when the high priest under the law entered into the holiest place, the ordinary priests had to leave the holy place in order that the high priest might be alone in awful solitariness, entering into the presence of Jehovah. Jesus Christ went straight from the cross to heaven through the rent veil, that is to say, His flesh. He went into the holiest place, and there He is. He has been there for nearly two thousand years. When He shall appear, we shall appear also, we shall be revealed also.
T. C. Edwards, from Sermon preached at Mansfield College.
On Living.
Nature means that without learning, powers and feelings grow and act. We see by nature. The power of sight is born with us. The eye as a matter of course is born, and as a matter of course sees light, and as a matter of course sees whatever light prints on it. When an eye does not see light, it has ceased to be an eye, though it often looks like an eye still. The eye that does not see light is, as an eye, dead. The image of God in man was once nature; and God's image, or nature, as a matter of course, saw and felt God's presence, for the nature of God in man naturally received that which was natural to it, and when this natural power perished, this eye was put out, it was dead; and man, as far as the true life went, was dead.
II. On that day death ends, when the life of God becomes incarnate in man, and man, born of God, is willing to lead a life in God's image. This is Christianity; nothing else is. Life, life victorious; life able to see God in this world; life able, as it were, to feel the presence of God in all things; life, that changes pain into glory, and bodily shame and death to a very present sense of heaven and God. The moment self is really cast aside, man's spirit acknowledges at once that a higher power is come, and tastes the joy of truth and strength, for Christ's sake; able to choose pain and know its good; and can see Christ the Sanctifier of pain, the Interpreter and Glorifier of sorrow and weakness, the Destroyer of the idolatry of the body, and all that belongs to it; pride of head, or pride of hand, or the lusts of the flesh; able to see Him the Lord of life, as higher motives come into sight, and base things please no more. So heaven is to the living no far-off dream, but a very present sense of life begun; and bodily death is no king of terrors, but a slight and vanishing trouble in the path, scarcely seen and never obscuring the beyond.
E. Thring, Uppingham Sermons,vol. ii., p. 278.
The World Within.
I. There will be found in all mankind a ceaseless effort to put what we do, and its effect, and what is thought of it, and what others do, and its effect, and what is thought of it, in the place of life, and to give it the name of our life, and their life. But the moment we think of it we see at once that what we and others call our lives, that is, the outcome that is seen, is as nothing compared with the infinite unceasing goings on in our own inward being, which are not seen. For one action or one word, that comes out, a thousand castles in the air, a thousand dreams or projects, a thousand reasonings and decisions, mental struggles, victories, defeats, backward and forward movements, take place within, that are not seen; and these are not the life, they are only part of that spirit, which is working itself out into a more perfect growth and habit of good or evil. Hence it comes to pass, what I am sure is true, that not infrequently the estimate formed of a man shall be one thing, and the effect of his life another. So different is life from actions, and still more from the judgment men form of the actions.
II. As if to put away from our hearts the idea of much work, and to make us value life itself apart from the long day's labour, Christ Himself spent thirty years of quiet preparation in a cottage home, and only three in public. Nor can we tell which was the more important; we can only say with certainty, each was perfect, each the half of the perfect whole, each incomplete without the other. But it is clear from this that the fierce pressure of consuming work is not the ideal set before man in the life of Christ, any more than it is in Christ's parable of the labourers in the vineyard. The silent thirty years are full of the glories of holy silence, and it is on the cross that the Redeemer draws all men unto Him. Learn to make the life within true and powerful. Measure yourselves, not by what you do, but by what you are. So shall you be like Christ.
E. Thring, Uppingham Sermons,vol. i., p. 277.
The Hidden Life.
Life is a mystery, however we regard it. The life of our natural body is a mystery. The inner life of every man is a mystery. The life of the Christian soul is a mystery. The Apostle tells us it is hid with Christ in God.
I. The immortal soul is dwelling as a guest in a material body. It is the very life of that body. What is the body without the soul? It is the soul which gives expression to the face. It is the soul which bids the tongue utter speech. But the soul which makes its presence felt in so wondrous a way at all the outposts of the body has inmost depths which a stranger's eye cannot penetrate. They are revealed to no eye but the Lord's. He has searched them out and known them. No inward thought is hid from Him.
And it is the inmost depths of the Christian soul of which the Apostle speaks. They are hid with Christ in God. A Christian soul scarcely needs even an Apostle's words to tell this. The same Divine spirit which illumined St. Paul's soul, and unveiled to him this deep suggestive truth, has access to the souls of all lovers of Jesus. They know that St. Paul speaks what is divinely true. Their own experience has taught them so. Each individual soul knows that its history is a sealed book to all but Christ. We can never thoroughly disclose ourselves to one another. There is an innermost shrine which cannot be entered by the closest human friend, an innermost shrine in which we hold communion with the Lord a communion which, indeed, constitutes the hidden life of the soul.
II. The truth of the life of the Christian soul consisting in its union with the Lord should be very precious to us. It is a truth of which men have different and varied experiences. For, as it is possible for men to grow in grace and in knowledge of their Lord and Saviour, so it is possible for some to enter into a closer union with the Lord than has been vouchsafed to others. It is possible that some in their religious life have not been as yet so richly blessed as others; but all who have the faintest yearnings in their hearts towards Christ may feel assured that the yearning is not so faint as to pass unrecognised by the Lord. He knows of the work begun in their souls. He knows that they are drawing nigh unto Himself. He will aid them to draw into nearer union still.
H. N. Grimley, Tremadoc Sermons,p. 1.
References: Colossians 3:3. Homilist,3rd series, vol. vi., p. 165; Preacher's Monthly,vol. vii., p. 333; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iii., p. 111; Church of England Pulpit,vol. v., p. 245.Colossians 3:3; Colossians 3:4. A. Barry, Sermons for Passiontide and Easter,p. 12 1 Chronicles 3:4. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 399; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. viii., pp. 160, 179; Spurgeon, Morning by Morning,p. 223; Ibid., Sermons,vol. xi., No. 617.