Nov 22, 2024 Explanations Need Experience – Words of Grace – November 22, 2024
We need explanations to gain understanding, and sometimes we need experience to really know the truth.
Colossians 1:9-10 teaches this connection between explanation and experience. There we read that we are filled with knowledge, wisdom, and understanding so that we can walk according to Christ. By doing so, we increase in the knowledge of God. It seems that we hear truth with understanding enough to take steps of faith and obedience, and in so doing we come to a fuller knowledge of that truth and of God himself.
The past few weeks I have had conversations with people about Colossians 3, our union with Christ, and its implications for our lives. They are wondering how we can be united to Christ’s death and still struggle with sin. And how we can be raised with Christ and not have more of his power and peace in our lives.
This week as I reread this chapter, I realized that union with Christ is meant to be more than understood, it is to be experienced. And that by experiencing it, we come to understand it more fully.
Colossians 3 tells us we have died with Christ and have been raised with Christ. Then it tells us to put sin to death and to put on the things of Christ. How? We ask. How does sin still live in us and how do we put it to death by the power of Christ’s death. How do we put on the character of Christ by the power of his life? Explanations, please!
If you are struggling to get your mind around this gospel reality of union with Christ and its impact on your life of holiness, let me encourage you to start with the understanding you have and ask the Lord to give you grace to experience it. Take steps of faith to put sin to death and put on the life of Christ. I believe that as you do, you will come to understand union with Christ more deeply, and to know him more intimately.
The explanations need experience to lead to real knowledge of Christ.
This Sunday at Grace Community Church we will once again explain union with Christ and the call to live from that gospel reality. Our prayer is that we will then put the truth into practice so that we may know Christ and share in his holy character.
-Scott