Put on Your Grace

Bear with me. This is raw, unfiltered, unorganized and completely not thought through. Again, courtesy of my Tuesday night Bible study, which is quickly becoming the highlight of my weeks, so much so that I may have to request to have Tuesday nights off for July and August. This is Bible study, my friends, at its core.

Tonight, we continued our study in Colossians 3 with the idea of putting on the new man. How often do we just whip past that?

Yea, yea, put off put on, blah blah blah...

Hold the phone. Seriously. Stop. Think about that. Put on, like putting on clothes in the morning. The question was posed to the group.

Why this analogy? Why putting on clothes?

Shame on the writer in me for not stopping and thinking about that before.

One man in the group said, "It's an act of the will. Your clothes just don't fall on you, you have to choose them and actually put them on." The simplicity of that statement made all of us chuckle, but the depth of it caught many of us off guard. We choose this. Hello! We choose it. Excuses are now gone. I can't hide behind the "well that's the way I was made excuse" because, while that may be true, it is irrelevant. I am commanded, because of who I am in Christ, to put on attributes that reflect Christ.

More than that, I am to wear them. We have this willful putting on of the clothes, but we have to wear them. Would it make sense for me to dress in a nice black pant suit and then cover it up with grungy jeans and a holey t-shirt and then go to work? When the boss questions my wardrobe choice what do I say, "Oh well, I am wearing the right clothes underneath." Does that make sense?

No.

But how often do I do that? How often I hide behind the "Well, I am a really nice person once you get to know me" line! That's not how it is supposed to be. Someone should be able to meet me and say, "Wow! You are a really nice person" and then, after knowing me, be able to say, "Wow! What I saw was real." But it's all flip-flopped, and I am sure it is that way for so many of us.

That isn't how it is supposed to be! Put on your grace. Put on your compassion. Put on your humility. Put on your kindness. Put on your patience. Wear it proudly (if that ain't an oxymoron) and boldly! Quit running around in your old clothes with a Heavenly wardrobe at your fingertips.