Living a Transformed Life I – Colossians 3:5-11

What needs to be chiseled away in your life?

Michelangelo’s series of unfinished sculptures illustrate lives trapped in the block of sin that imprisons each person.

Author Theodore Order, looked on these four figures that Michelangelo called “The Captives” and wrote:

“When I looked at those partial figures, they stirred up in me a deep longing to be completed—an ache to be set free from that which distorts and disguises, imprisons and inhibits my humanness, my wholeness. But as with those statues, I cannot liberate myself. For that I need the hand of another.”

Of course, “the hand of another” in the believer’s life is Jesus Christ. He alone transforms and completes the Christian (Col. 2:10). Christ has given us new life, and the believer’s objective is to conform his life to the image of Christ. The transformation of our lives is the genuine expression of spirituality.

Today’s message entitled “Living a Transformed Life, part 1” comes from Colossians 3:5-11 where we find two vice lists of five actions each that believers are to consider themselves dead unto. In part two in our next session we will see the attraction of the Christlike virtues that are to characterize the believer in Jesus Christ.

Paul’s exhortation to set our hearts and minds on things above (v. 2) finds concrete expression in the verses which follow. With the old life gone and the new life a present and future reality, believers are to discard behaviors typical of the old life and display behaviors characteristic of new life. Paul is concerned that believers keep Christ at the center of their spiritual experience.