Please take your Bibles and turn with me to Colossians chapter 3 verses 12 to 17.

We have Bibles available in the pew in front of you in the pocket underneath the front pew for you and if you choose that one is page 1,4002.

Colaions 3 verses 12 to 17.

And so, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness,

humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another, and forgiving each other,

whoever has a complaint against anyone, just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. And beyond

all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity. And let the peace of Christ rule

in your hearts to which indeed you were called in one body and be thankful.

Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you,

with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs

singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. and whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord

Jesus Christ, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.

Now what you just heard was a description of the way people live for whom Christ is all and in all.

For you to see that from the text, we need to back up to verse 9 and walk into this text through verse 11. So let me do that with you.

Start at verse 9 and walk through the gateway of verse 11 into the description of the new community which

Tom just read.

Verse 9 says, Christians have laid aside or taken off like a garment have laid aside the old self with its practices.

In other words, what happened to you at conversion was that you, like a butterfly, as it were, sloughed off, sloughed off the worm-like cocoon of your old self and took wings.

Or to put it positively, verse 10, Christians have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge

according to the image of the one who created him.

So in conversion, a negative thing happened

and a positive thing happened. The negative was that there was a sloughing. I wanted to think snake slough, but that didn't sound like a good illustration, so I got

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