Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. (Colossians 3:12-14)
In the paragraph immediately before this one, Paul and Timothy laid out what could be called the negative side of living as God’s children; the things that are no longer to be part of our lives now that we are in Christ. This passage is the positive; it’s the things that become part of our lives specifically because we are “God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved.” Our behavior, in other words, ought to come from our identity. From remembering who we are.
The metaphor Paul and Timothy use here is clothing. “Clothe yourselves,” with these virtues, the text says. In Revelation 19:8, clothing is similarly used as a metaphor for righteous acts, with the additional point that this “clothing” is given to the church. It’s not something we can obtain ourselves.
Clothing is not something that I only occasionally have on. I put on my clothes in the morning and wear them all day long. People generally don’t see me without clothes. (There are a couple of exceptions, notably my wife and my doctor. Metaphors are not intended to be exactly correlated in every detail.) In the same way, even though compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness and love are not really characteristic of my natural self, the people I interact with, and especially my brothers and sisters, should not see me without them. They are the right clothes for a son of God.
I think it’s important that the Scripture doesn’t say here that I should change my innermost heart to be like Jesus, which I can’t do, but that my outward behavior should reflect the character of God. But wait a minute! Isn’t that hypocrisy? There are certainly elements in our culture that would argue it is, but I don’t agree. What this passage is talking about is not acting one way in public and another in private, which would be hypocrisy, but about acting always the way a son of God should act, even when I don’t feel like it.
Contrary to what much of our culture would claim, acting with sincerity does not mean doing whatever I feel like doing. It means recognizing what I feel, acknowledging it before God, and then acting on what I know rather than what I feel. Doing whatever I feel, letting my passions control me, is not sincerity, nor is it freedom, despite what the world claims; it’s slavery. In fact, I would even say that being driven by my passions is the most oppressive form of slavery there is.
Both freedom and sincerity lie in doing what I know is right, even when I don’t feel like it. They lie in basing my actions on what Jesus wants, not on what I want. This is the “clothing” Paul and Timothy are talking about. And, surprisingly, I’ve discovered that when I act the way Christ commands, my desire starts changing as well.
I am a son of God. More than that, God has given me his Spirit, so that even if I don’t always feel like he’s really my Father, I can still behave like I’m his son. I can dress in a “child of God” suit. And according to the Scriptures, that’s the clothing I should be wearing.