Colossians 3:5–11 and the Hard Work of Living the New Creation
Paul has just said something breathtaking in Colossians 3:1–4. Believers have been raised with Christ. Their true life is now hidden with Christ in God. And when Christ appears, they too will appear with Him in glory. That is not decorative language. It is Paul’s way of saying that Christians already belong to God’s new world, even while they still live in the middle of the old one.1
But Paul never leaves theology floating in the air. He never treats truth as something to admire from a distance while ordinary life goes on unchanged. He brings it down into daily life—into desires, habits, words, relationships, and the life of the church. So after lifting his readers’ eyes to Christ, he says, “Therefore put to death whatever belongs to your earthly nature” (Col. 3:5). That “therefore” matters. It tells us that what follows is not a separate moral lecture. It grows directly out of the new identity believers already have in the Messiah. The command rests on the gift. The imperative grows out of the indicative.2
That means Paul is not saying, “Kill your sin so that you may become God’s people.” He is saying, “Because you already are God’s people in Christ, put to death whatever still belongs to the old age.” This is the same pattern we see in Romans 6:11–13. Believers are to consider themselves dead to sin and alive to God, and therefore they must no longer hand themselves over to sin as its instruments. Grace does not make obedience unnecessary. Grace makes obedience possible and fitting.
What Must Die
Paul’s language is severe: “Put to death.” He does not say, “manage sin better,” “tone it down,” or “learn to live with it.” He says it must die. Yet this view is not because Paul thinks the body is bad or that creation itself is the problem. He is too deeply shaped by Genesis for that. The world is God’s good creation, and human beings were made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26–27). The problem is not embodiment. The problem is that human desire has been twisted. What was meant to be ordered toward the Creator has turned inward on itself.3
That is why Paul’s first list in verse 5 hangs together the way it does: “sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry.” These are not random sins pulled from a moral handbook. They are connected forms of disordered desire. Sexual sin is one expression of it, but Paul does not stop there. He goes deeper and names greed as idolatry. That is a shocking but accurate diagnosis. Idolatry is not only bowing down to carved images. It happens whenever some created thing—money, pleasure, status, control, appetite, or security—is treated as ultimate. At that point, the problem is no longer simply bad behavior. It is false worship.4
That is why Paul says the wrath of God comes because of such things (Col. 3:6). He is not describing divine irritability or a loss of temper. He means God’s holy and settled opposition to all that corrupts His world and deforms His image-bearers. These practices belong to the old humanity, the old world still in rebellion, the world that is passing away. Christians cannot treat them as harmless leftovers. They are signs of a realm already marked for judgment.5
Paul then reminds the Colossians that this used to be their life: “You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived” (Col. 3:7). That matters. The church is never a community of people who were naturally better than others. It is a community of rescued individuals. Christians do not look at these sins as spectators. They remember that, apart from grace, this was once their world too. That memory should make the church humble, patient, and honest.
The gospel does not merely pardon the old humanity; it creates a new one.
The Sins Churches Often Excuse
Then Paul makes a move that still confronts the church today. He shifts from sins of desire to sins of community: “anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other” (Col. 3:8–9). This is deeply important because churches often become very alert to some private sins while quietly tolerating bitterness, verbal cruelty, gossip, deceit, and habits of speech that tear people down. Paul will not allow that division.6
For Paul, speech is never a side issue. Words help build or destroy a community. Anger that is fed and cherished poisons fellowship. Malice corrodes trust. Slander damages people made in God’s image. Lies fracture the very bonds that are meant to hold the body of Christ together. That is why Ephesians 4:22–32 sounds so similar. There too Paul speaks of putting off the old self and putting on the new and then immediately applies it to truthfulness, anger, speech, kindness, and forgiveness. Christians show their new humanity in how they speak to and about each other, not just in what they avoid.
This point lands with unusual force today. We live in a world where outrage is rewarded, contempt is fashionable, and falsehood spreads faster than correction. The church cannot embody the peace of Christ while speaking the language of the old age. If the gospel truly creates a new people, then our words must begin to reflect that new reality.
Taking Off the Old, Putting On the New
Paul explains the command by reminding believers of what has already happened to them: they have “taken off” the old self with its practices and “put on” the new self (Col. 3:9–10). The image is that of changing clothes. Believers have stripped off the old self and put on the new.This is not self-improvement. Paul is not talking about polishing the old humanity until it becomes acceptable. The old humanity belongs to Adam’s world of rebellion and decay. What Christ brings is not a repaired version of the old order but the beginning of a new creation.7
That is why Paul says God is renewing the new self in knowledge according to the image of its Creator (Col. 3:10). The echo of Genesis is unmistakable. God created humanity to bear His image, but sin distorted that calling. Now, in Christ, the Creator is at work restoring true humanity. And the model is not simply Adam as he once was but humanity reshaped around the crucified and risen Messiah. Romans 8:29 says God is conforming believers to the image of His Son. In other words, Christ is not only the Savior of humanity. He is the pattern of renewed humanity.8
Paul adds that this renewal happens “in knowledge.” But he does not mean secret information for the spiritually advanced. Colossians resists that sort of elitism all the way through. True knowledge is not a hidden technique. It is the deepening recognition of God’s will and purpose in Christ (Col. 1:9–10). It is the growing awareness that Jesus is Lord, that His cross and resurrection have broken the powers of the old age, and that His people must now live accordingly.
Christ Is All
Paul reaches the social climax of the paragraph in verse 11: “Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and is in all.” This is one of the boldest lines in the letter. Paul does not mean that ethnicity, history, culture, or social location simply vanish. Jews remain Jews and Gentiles remain Gentiles. Slaves and free individuals still lived in very different social conditions in the Roman world. But none of those distinctions can now function as grounds of superiority, spiritual privilege, or access among the people of God.9
That matters because religion so easily turns into a system of ranking. It creates insiders and outsiders, the advanced and the ordinary, the clean and the questionable, the natural belongers and those who must prove themselves. Paul cuts straight through that instinct. Christ alone holds the church together, not ethnicity, class, tradition, education, or religious performance.
“Christ is all and is in all.” That is the heart of the passage. Christ is the center of the new humanity, the source of its life, the one in whom it holds together. The moment the church begins rebuilding status systems around money, tribe, class, race, respectability, or theological pride, it quietly returns to the old humanity. Paul says the church must not allow that, because God calls it to be the first sign of His renewed world.
So Colossians 3:5–11 remains a sharp word for the church today. The gospel is not less than forgiveness, but it is more than forgiveness. It is the beginning of new creation. It calls believers to put to death what belongs to the old age, to put away what destroys fellowship, and to live as people whose lives are already hidden with Christ in God.
The church’s calling, then, is not merely to speak about the future. It is to live that future in the present. It is to show, however imperfectly, what human life looks like when Christ is Lord. That means saying a firm no to desires that have become idols, a hard no to speech that tears others down, and a hard no to every status game that denies the equal dignity of those who belong to Christ.
Because Christ is our life, the old humanity must go.
The gospel does not merely pardon the old humanity; it creates a new one. Because Christ is our life, the habits of the old world no longer belong to us.
Footnotes
- James D. G. Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996); N. T. Wright, Colossians & Philemon, Tyndale New Testament Commentary (IVP, 2015). ↩︎
- Douglas J. Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon, 2nd ed., Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024); Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon. ↩︎
- F. F. Bruce, The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984); Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon. ↩︎
- Wright, Colossians & Philemon; Marianne Meye Thompson, Colossians and Philemon, Two Horizons New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). ↩︎
- Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon; Bruce, The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians. ↩︎
- David W. Pao, Colossians & Philemon, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012); Thompson, Colossians and Philemon. ↩︎
- Thompson, Colossians and Philemon; Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon. ↩︎
- Bruce, The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians; Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon. ↩︎
- Wright, Colossians & Philemon; Thompson, Colossians and Philemon; Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon. ↩︎
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