During my
morning devotion I was reading some prayer devotions by the Scottish Theologian
Donald Baillie. "Let me keep in mind how uncertain is my
hold on my bodily life. Let me remember that here I have no continuing city,
but only a place of sojourn, and a time of testing and training. Let me be in
this world but not of it. Let me be as having nothing yet possessing all
things. Let me understand the vanity of the temporal and the glory of the
Eternal. Let my world be centered not in myself but in
Thee."
Colossians 3
states, “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. For you have died, and your life is hidden
with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will
appear with him in glory. Put to death therefore what is earthly in you:
sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is
idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too
once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away:
anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to
one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and
have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of
its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised,
barbarian, Scythian, slave, and free; but Christ is all, and in
all."
During my random readings I
have read a small book by Edwin Abbot called,
Flatland. It
is a satire about the nature of hierarchy in his culture in which, the
narrator is a square - literally. He is a square that lives in a
two-dimensional world called Flatland. In a dream one day, he visits a
one-dimensional world called Lineland and he tries to persuade the king of this
world that there’s another world beyond his own. After his persuasive attempt
he ends up concluding, “It seemed that this poor, ignorant monarch as he called
himself was persuaded that the straight line, which he called his kingdom and in
which he passed his existence, constituted the whole of the world and indeed the
whole of space. Not being able either to move or to see save in his straight
line, he had no conception of anything out of it. Outside his world or line,
all was blank to him. Nay, not even a blank; rather all was
nonexistent.”
In Colossians 3
we are called to think outside our normal perspective, to look at ourselves from
another dimension, another world. Paul calls us to remember our true home and
calling in Christ and in light of that to think and to live as if our home is in
another place.
In Jesus.
Brown
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