A message on putting on virtue
“12 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13 Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. ”
Leanne is going to start high school in the fall. She’s a bit nervous because she’ll be meeting a lot of new kids. This high school brings together students from different K-8 schools. Leanne wonders whether these kids coming from other schools will like her. She wonders if she will be accepted.
Adults ask these same questions when they move into a community, start a job, join a Zumba class, or visit a church. Will people accept me?
This passage we will study this morning is all about the virtues that make us all feel welcome. We’ve been studying the fullness of Christ in Colossians and today we see that when we are full of Christ, we embrace others as he has embraced us. That’s the claim of this sermon: when we are full of Christ, we embrace others as he embraced us.
Last week we saw what we need to take off. We need to take off sins. This week, we see what we need to put on. We need to clothe ourselves with eight virtues. We will study five of them in our first point, which we’ll call warmth—compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. We’ll study two of them in our second point, which we’ll call forgiveness—bearing with each other and forgiving each other. We’ll study one of them—love—in our third point, which’ll we’ll call love. First, in verse 12, we see warmth. Second, in verse 13, we see forgiveness. Third, in verse 14, we see love.
First: warmth. Leanne is wondering whether she’ll experience compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, and love in high school. That’s what she’s looking for. That’s what we are all looking for.
Now we as God’s people are to offer these because we’ve received them from God; that’s what’s going on with these introductory words in verse 12, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved…” We—God’s chosen, holy, and dearly loved people—ought to treat others as God has treated us—with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, and love.
This language of being chosen, holy, and dearly loved comes from the Old Testament. God described Israel this way. Now He is describing people from all sorts of backgrounds this way—Jews and Greeks, barbarians and Scythians, slaves and free people, as we saw last week. God now has chosen, holy, and dearly loved people from all sorts of backgrounds but these people from different backgrounds didn’t always get along. This section is about God’s chosen, holy, and dearly loved people from all sorts of different backgrounds learning how to treat each other as if they were all chosen, holy, and dearly loved by God. That will take compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, and love.
We are studying the first five in this first point; verse 12, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” Paul puts these five together. Look up at verse 5, “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed.” That’s five sins. Look at verse 8, “now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.” That’s five sins. That’s intentional. Paul is contrasting the old way of life with the new way of life—get rid of those five, put on these five. That five is the old you. This five is the new you.
So, let’s see this five. The first is compassion; “clothe yourselves with compassion.” Compassion is about linking passions. This is about caring for others in such a way that what affects them affects you. This is what Leanne is looking for. She is looking for someone who will care enough about her to be affected by what affects her. She is looking for someone who will rejoice when she rejoices and who will mourn when she mourns. She is looking for someone who will take an interest in her. It’s what we are all looking for. You’ve already received compassion from God. Give what you’ve received.
Next is kindness. Calvin described this as making “ourselves amiable”—making it a point to have a friendly and pleasant manner. We put on kindness when we go out because we will be dealing with people. This takes work. It took work for refined Greeks to be truly amiable with crude Scythians. It took work for Scythians to be amiable towards those strange Greeks.
This is a call for us to put on kindness before we enter this facility or our workplace or school. It’s a reminder that we have an effect on people. If you could pull up our picture.
What you see here are before and after pictures. The photographer took the first picture and then said something kind about the individual and then took the second picture. The second picture is the effect we want to have. It’s what Leanne hopes high school is like.
Third is humility. Humility is not thinking poorly of yourself. Humility is thinking rarely of yourself. George HW Bush rarely spoke about himself. “Nobody likes the big I am, George,” his mother told him when he was little. “Don’t be talking about yourself.” During his re-election campaign against Bill Clinton, Bush’s advisers urged him to talk about himself to make himself more relatable. He did. He got a phone call from his mom telling him to cut it out. Whatever their gifts, more recent presidents have not been afraid to promote themselves. We are becoming a less humble culture.
The question for you in regard to humility is would you rather be in a group of friends who takes an interest in you or part of a group in which each person is trying to get you to take an interest in them? Humility is what we all want in others. It’s what we all need to put on ourselves.
The next virtue, gentleness, is related to humility. Gentleness flows out of humility. Gentle people don’t manipulate others. They don’t view people as a means to an end. They don’t use people because they consider these other people of equal importance to themselves.
The Romans scoffed at humility and gentleness. They thought they were fit only for slaves—slaves were the only ones who ought to consider others’ needs more important than their own. Christianity turned that on its head. Christianity says that God Himself looks out for the interests of others. In a very real way Christ considered my life more important than his own. He, who is in every way my better, chose to serve me. God serves. He is gentle and humble in heart. He calls you and I to become more like Him.
The final virtue is patience—compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Accountants know that clients require patience. Parents know that children require patience. Employers know that employees require patience. The fact of the matter is all people require patience. Each of us could have a sticker on our forehead that says, “patience will be required.”
Patience allows you to keep doing good in the middle of irritations. Neil Plantinga, the
previous president of our denomination’s seminary, said that “patience is like good motor oil. It doesn’t remove all the contaminants. It just puts them into suspension so they don’t get into your works and seize them up. Patient people have, so to speak, a large crankcase. They can put a lot of irritants into suspension.”
Patience people see the same irritants as impatient people, but they don’t get stuck on them. They keep doing good even as those irritants continue to float around. Impatient people focus on the irritants. The irritants get into their works and seize them up.
God is patient with you. There are any number of irritants that you throw His way that He could choose to put the focus on. He chooses to put the focus on doing you good. This is a call to treat others as you are being treated.
Now I’m not always going to show compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience in my family or to you, and you aren’t always going to show them to others either. This brings us to our second point: forgiveness. The two virtues here are forbearance and forgiveness; “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another.” These two are essential for any relationship. They play a huge role in premarital counseling because if two sinners are going to stay married and want to stay married for life, plenty of forbearance and forgiveness will be required.
Forbearance is what we do with what’s strange to us that isn’t sin. Maybe someone talks quite loudly in social situations. That’s not a sin. That requires forbearance. Maybe your coworker has distracting mannerism. Those aren’t sins. They require no more attention from you than to bear with them. Many of the issues newlyweds face are simply matters for forbearance—two people who do life differently coming together. Many of the issues that churches face are simply matters for forbearance—people doing life differently coming together. Giving them more attention than that disrupts relationships. That was true in Colossae. That’s true among us.
Forbearance is what we do to anything that annoys us that isn’t a sin. Forgiveness is what we do when we are sinned against. Now confrontation, confession, and reconciliation are specific to each situation but forgiveness is always required; that’s verse 13, “Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” You aren’t called to forgive anyone in your family or in this church because they deserve it. You are called to forgive these people because Christ forgave you. It’s not about them. It’s about what Christ did for you. It’s about whether your heart is set on Christ. He forgave you at great cost to himself. “It is not fitting for one who has experienced the release and joy in benefiting from Christ’s forgiveness not to extend that joy and release to others,” as one author put it.
Forbearance and forgiveness have become lost arts, and as a result we are becoming an increasingly lonely people. In 2000, Robert Putnam put out a rather famous book called Bowling Alone. It’s about the breakdown of the nation’s social fabric. The title comes from the fact that, at that point, more Americans were bowling but they weren’t joining leagues or teams. They were bowling alone. Americans were doing more alone because they were wary of relationships. “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another,” no longer seems attractive or even conceivable to many people. CS Lewis wrote about that; “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” That’s no way to live but I fear statistics show that is how many of us are living.
Leanne is nervous about going to high school because what if she does something stupid? Well, then people ought to bear with her. What if she straight up sins against someone? Well, then they ought to forgive her, and she ought to do the same to the other kids. That makes for a great school. That makes for a great church. So that’s seven virtues down—compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, and forgiveness. Let’s close with love. That’s our final point: love.
Paul spoke about these virtues in terms of clothing. You clothe yourself in them. “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves…” It’s like little kids going out to play in the snow. You put on their snowpants. You put on their boots. You put on their neck warmer. You put on their coat. You put on their gloves. You put on their hat. You clothe them and send them out in the cold. So, you are going out where there’s other people? “Put on kindness honey. Put on kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, and forgiveness. There’s people out there.”
This last piece of clothing is love; verse 14, “And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” You can think of love as the layer you add to your clothes. You add love to your snowpants—to your kindness. You add love to your boots—to your forgiveness.” Love goes on all of them. As one translation puts it, “over all the other clothes put on love.”
Love is the best. “Ain’t no doubt in no one’s mind that love’s the finest thing around,” as James Taylor put it. Love is one of the major themes of the Bible. It is what all the commandments shoot for. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” It is what God shows to us, “for God loved the world in this way: He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Love is the best. “Love, baby, love—that’s the secret!” as Louis Armstrong put it.
Love is also the necessary for binding the different people together. Love is the necessary ingredient for unity in a family and in a church. You can’t have unity without love; verse 14, “And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” Uniting Jews who grew up under the law of Moses with Gentiles who knew nothing about Moses would leave to interactions that called for compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, and especially love. Uniting people who grew up doing their wash by hand with people growing up with smartphones leads to interactions that call for compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, and especially love. Uniting people who send their kids to Christian school with people who send their kids to the public school with people who homeschool their kids leads to interactions that call for compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, and especially love.
That brings us back to Leanne who is starting school this fall. She is looking for compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, an openness to forgiveness, and love. Now she can’t control how others treat her. Her mom will tell her that. She’ll also tell Leanne that what she can control is herself and so she must show compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, and love. She shouldn’t just show those only in hopes of getting that back from others because that’s not promised. She should show those because that’s how God has treated her. She can put those clothes on because that’s what God has placed on her. All she’s doing is putting on Jesus. “Put on Jesus, honey, there’s people out there.” “Put on Jesus, church, there are other chosen, holy, and dearly loved children of God here.” Amen.