Weekly Pursuit – Week 3 of December
Verses:
Col. 3:10-11 “…Put on the new man, which is being renewed untom full knowledge according to the image of Him who created him, where…Christ is all and in all.”
Excerpts:
Fallen man uses culture as a substitute for God. We need Christ to replace every element of our culture. This does not mean that we should despise culture. Rather, it means that we should love Christ. If we are filled to the brim with Christ, there will not be any room in our being for anything else. We should neither hate our natural being nor treasure it. Instead of trying to hate the natural being [which is to practice asceticism], we should follow the Lord’s word to deny ourselves. To deny the self is to ignore the self, to forget it, to pay no attention to it. Instead of either hating the self or loving it, we should simply refuse to pay attention to it. However, if we would keep from paying attention to the self, we must concentrate on something better than the self. This is the reason we need a vision of the extensiveness of Christ. If we see this vision, we shall concentrate our entire being on the extensive Christ, who will then fill us and occupy us. Because we are filled with the extensive Christ, we shall have no need of Judaism, Gnosticism, mysticism, or asceticism. Our being will be occupied with the vast, unsearchably rich, extensive Christ. Spontaneously this Christ will come in to replace every aspect of our natural human life with Himself. (Life-study of Colossians, pp. 426-428)