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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
‘If ye then he risen with Christ.’
Col_3:1
But how can it be?
I. There is a spring within you, a hidden force, an action of the Holy Ghost—an upward movement always at work, which, if you do not check it, will raise you. Every one has it. And its power is immense. They say that in nature the feeblest tendril has been known to spring a rock; much more in grace, the Divine Spirit within a man—how small soever—would move a mountain! Christ rose by the power that was in Himself. And we all have the secret of that ‘risen life’ within us, if only we will not thwart the rising.
II. Obey the resurrection-voices that are speaking now to your dead soul.—There are thousands of resurrection-voices in the air. Every leaf speaks resurrection. Every daybreak speaks resurrection. With a command always comes a virtue. Use the virtue, and you can obey the command, whatever it be, however else impossible. God says, ‘Rise!’ Echo it—‘Lord, I rise!’ and you will rise.
III. All by union with Christ.—When Christ rose, you were there. Mystically, you rose in Christ. That is a deep mystery. But believe it; it is true. You will rise because He rose. Your ‘risen life’ is in His ‘risen life.’ Is not this what it means, ‘Risen with Christ’?
Illustration
‘There is one of you who is always living in the grave of some fond memory. You cannot lift yourself up from the death of that departed one. Your thoughts hang, impotently and impatiently, on days that will never come back again; and you are wellnigh as buried, perhaps more buried, than those who lie in their quiet resting-places! And some of you have your whole minds entombed in some present cloud of sorrow, which gathers around and presses upon you on every side, and makes life to you as dark as a sealed sepulchre! And more still are wrapped and encumbered by a thousand little daily cares, which bind them down as effectually as if those cares were the soul’s grave-clothes! And some of you are in the trammel of the spell of some master-mind which is stronger than your own! And some of you are held by an affection which your conscience condemns! And some, by some mere fashion, or a pleasure, which you despise, which yet has woven around you its silken, but adamantine chain! And some have all spiritual energy, and real, loving religion killed by controversy. They are buried in the abstruse. Faith is lost in abstractions, and growth in mere cold doctrine! And some again never rise above their own hearts. You want resurrection, an Ephphatha! an act of Omnipotence, the grace of a resurrection.’
‘
‘If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.’
Col_3:1
I. A wonderful fact.—There is indeed a very notable oneness between the actual experience of Christ and the spiritual experience of the redeemed.
(a) Dying with Christ, then, means the crucifixion of the old man with Him.
(b) Buried with Christ—the destruction of the whole body of sin.
(c) Raised with Christ—the great quickening which results in freshness of being.
In other words, Christians, in and through Christ, are severed from the old life of fallen nature, and lifted up to the new life of purity and happiness.
II. A practical duty.—St. Paul enjoins those who are baptized into Christ, and buried and raised with Him, ‘to seek those things which are above.’
III. A sublime encouragement.—Christ was ‘received up into heaven.’ All our happiness descends to us from Him. Believing in Him, we ‘rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.’ What, then, will be our bliss when we see Him in the glory which He had with His Father before the world was? and what our dignity when we are made like Him? We know not now; but the mere thought is ecstasy!
Illustration
‘ “Christ is risen—He is risen indeed.” The Greek Church asserts the fact popularly, not only in the church but in the street. The Czar of all the Russias comes out of his palace, and, seeing the sentinel, kisses him and says, “The Lord is risen,” and the soldier says, “He is risen indeed.” One cabman in the street gets off his stand, and another gets off his sleigh, they embrace, and the one says to the other, “Christ is risen,” and the other answers, “He is risen indeed.” There the man in the street has only one thing to say that Easter morning, that Christ is risen. Now we Westerns are not so minded, but I hope this Easter morning you sing up the old song in your hearts. It is not only assertion, it is something more—it is a hymn of joy; and I hope that every one of you will sing up in your heart this morning the old song of the Church, “Christ is risen—He is risen indeed.” ’
RESURRECTION POWER
The ‘power of His Resurrection’ suggests wholesome doctrine.
I. If we are ‘risen with Christ’ we have left our grave-clothes behind us, as Jesus left His in the tomb. He did not go about during His risen life with the garments of death clinging to Him. Christ calls upon us to show forth to the world that we have done with the grave, that we are walking ‘in newness of life,’ in the power of His Resurrection.
II. During our Lord’s forty days’ post-resurrection sojourn He appeared ten times only to His followers.—The inference is that the ‘risen life’ of Christ was spent chiefly in communion with God. And the spiritual life of His people will suffer because of the stress of earthly things, unless they get more into contact with heaven and God, unless they, like Him, anticipate the Ascension, and ‘in heart and mind thither ascend.’ In this busy age, especially, we have need to restore our souls by communion with God.
III. This ‘risen life’ ought to be practically manifest in its blessed activities.—‘Seek those things which are above.’ In that one word ‘Seek’ we have expressed the outward life of Christian effort; we have expressed also the true aim of a consecrated life—‘those things which are above.’
—
Archdeacon Madden.
Illustration‘You must have remarked, in studying the Epistles of St. Paul, how he identifies the Christian with his Lord, in His Crucifixion, His Death, and His Resurrection. He identifies the Christian with the Crucifixion of Christ. Referring to his old self-life, he says, “I am crucified with Christ”; he also uses the peculiar phrase “the old man” in reference to his former self, and speaks of it as being crucified. This “old man,” meaning the old corrupt, sinful self, is to be crucified, so that it can no longer dominate the “new man.” The believer must so identify himself with his Lord’s Crucifixion that he is to reckon the corrupt body of sin, the old evil life, as crucified with Christ. He identifies the true man of God with the Death of Christ. “Ye died” (Col_3:3); “Planted together in the likeness of His Death”; “Reckon yourselves dead indeed unto sin” (Rom_6:5; Rom_6:11). In Col_3:5 you have the word “mortify,” showing continuity of teaching on this point. This is the Apostolic doctrine as regards the believer’s attitude to sin: he is dead to it. He identifies the Christian with the Resurrection of Christ: he is risen with Christ. Buried with Christ, and raised with Him too. The life which we now live 2in the power of the Son of God is equivalent to a resurrection from the dead—it is a “risen” life.’