The resurrection of Jesus is one of the most verified and consequential events in human history. But the apostle Paul, writing to first-century Christians in Colossae, pushes the meaning of resurrection beyond a historical fact to be celebrated and into a personal reality to be lived. He insisted that those who belong to Christ have not merely heard about a resurrection — they have experienced one. And that changes everything about how we live.
The Resurrection That Already Happened to You
In , Paul writes that Christians “have been raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised him from the dead.” That verb tense matters. This is not a future hope only — it is a present identity. And Paul’s language makes clear when this happened: in the same event in which we died with Christ and were buried with him.
echoes this precisely: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”
Death, burial, resurrection. The pattern of Jesus becomes the pattern of our own story. Baptism is not a formality tacked onto the end of belief — it is the moment of union with Christ in all three movements of the gospel. We go under the water identified with his death; we come up identified with his resurrection. As Paul puts it in , we who were dead in our trespasses, God “made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses.”
That forgiveness is not merely a legal transaction. It is a resurrection.
Living from a Higher Plane
If the resurrection has already begun in us, then our daily life must be shaped by that reality. Paul makes this connection immediately as Colossians 3 opens: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” ().
The word “set” is not passive. Paul is calling for deliberate, sustained mental reorientation. Not an occasional glance heavenward, but a fixed focus. Many people who come to faith find that little changes afterward, and the reason is often exactly this: the mind was never truly redirected. They responded to the gospel but continued navigating life entirely from a street-level view — driven by the same fears, the same desires, the same measures of success as before.
But we have been raised. That means we have been given access to a different vantage point, and Paul urges us to actually live from it. To ask, in daily decisions, what matters to the one who is seated above. To let his priorities become ours.
The Old Self Does Not Come Back Quietly
New life in Christ also demands that we take sin seriously — not as a threat to our standing before God, but as something fundamentally incompatible with who we now are. Paul does not suggest that the old patterns dissolve automatically. In he commands: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you.” The old self must be actively mortified, not merely forgotten.
He lists the kinds of things that belong to the old life: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, greed, anger, slander, lying (). These are not abstract vices — they are the texture of ordinary life for much of humanity. And Paul’s point is that for those who have died with Christ, these things no longer fit. puts it plainly: “Our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.”
You cannot claim the old self is dead while continuing to live as if it is not. The death was real. The burial was real. The resurrection was real. Which means the break with the old life must be real too. This is not accomplished in a single moment, and Paul is not calling us to perfection overnight. But it must be a committed, ongoing work — not something perpetually deferred.
Clothed in the New Self
The good news is that Paul does not leave us simply with a list of things to remove. The new self has its own character, and it is beautiful. “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other. As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love” ().
Notice the center of gravity in every line: the Lord. We forgive as the Lord has forgiven. His peace rules in our hearts. His word dwells in us richly. We do everything in his name (). The new self is not self-generated — it is modeled on Jesus, remade in the image of the One through whom all things were created (; ).
This is what it means to be a Christian. Not merely to believe facts about Jesus, but to have died with him, been buried with him, and risen with him into a genuinely new kind of life. A life that seeks what is above. A life that puts the old things to death. A life that wears the character of Christ.
The resurrection of Jesus was not the end of the story. For those who belong to him, it was the beginning of ours.