Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. (Colossians 3:9-10)

St Paul seems to like the idea of “putting on a piece of clothing” as a way of understanding being in a transforming relationship with Jesus Christ.  In Romans 13:14 he urges his brothers and sisters in Rome to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”  Clearly this is not like ordinary clothing where the fabric covers our outer skin only.  Such clothing keeps the body warm but only by preventing the body’s own heat from escaping so rapidly.  Putting on Jesus Christ is, for St Paul, an entirely different kind of clothing, because it involves God warming us up from inside our hearts.  This is the “new nature” of which he speaks in Colossians—the Apostle reading for today.  “Put on the new nature” he says. 

How are we to understand this?  Perhaps we understand well our human nature.  The “new nature” does not do away with that.  When we put on Christ our human nature is not substituted by His own divine nature; no, it is united to it.  In the Incarnation, that we shall celebrate very soon, we know that Word united Himself to our flesh.  He did this, as Fr Emmanuel explained last Sunday, to break down the wall of enmity between humankind and God, an enmity of our own creation through sin.  When the wall of division was torn down by the death and resurrection of Christ, humanity could once again be united to God.  This is what “putting on Christ” means for the baptised. It means that we can attain to the new nature of the union between humanity and God that we lost in Eden through our disobedience.  Though Christ’s obedience unto death, even death on a cross, he made it possible for us to be reborn with this divine-human nature.  We can put on this piece of radiant clothing as soon as we invite the Holy Spirit into our lives.  This is an inner clothing, as we have seen, not an outer clothing.  This is the clothing of a living Person, even Christ Himself, who makes all things new.

With this in mind, it becomes impossible for a baptised Christian to live an old life according to the old ways of a corrupt godless human nature.  The context for both texts we have heard from the writings of St Paul is the new life that we must choose to live daily and the old life that we must renounce and reject.  God gives us by the Holy Spirit the inner power, the warmth, the tongues of flame, the divine wind … but we have to put kindling to that flame, sails to that wind.  We cannot offer that which is unworthy, unworthy that is of both God and us.  We must live in that newness of life and reject the corruption of the old.  It’s quite a list that St Paul gives us and sobering too …

• No fornication, (sexual promiscuity we might say today)
• No impurity
• No passion (… that means disordered or evil desires)
• No envy of material goods (or covetousress)
• No anger (by that we mean rage or wrath …. of course we should be angry with sin, but never the sinner, including ourselves)
• No malice or wickedness
• No bad talk about others or foul unbecoming language
• No lying

How can we put on the new nature, which is Christ, and live like this?  Of course, we cannot by our own strength and powers or by our own insight and wisdom, but only by His.  I suspect that most of us think, however, that we make a quite a good job of avoiding the sins that ruin our new born status as children of God.  Well, maybe we do, but only to a point.  As we mature spiritually, we realise that both the devil is subtle and so is our sinning.  Evil can hide behind the mask of goodness.  Lucifer, after all, was the most beautiful of all the angels before his fall, the Light-carrying angel in fact …. but then he got blinded by his own beauty in self regard, the first true narcissist, and he fell into corruption. 

Always then we must be on our guard in case any slightest shred of self-regard infects our righteous deeds, our new nature.  It is a like a diabolical moth that quietly eats away at the cloak, unseen most of the time, until the garment lies in tatters.  As soon as we begin to neglect our spiritual lives the moths begin to nibble.  Then, the Holy Spirit gradually withdraws and we find that we no longer have the living Christ to clothe us, but only our own putrefying flesh.  What I am saying is that when we are clothed in Christ, when we put on that new nature, we have to be continually on our guard to make sure that we care for the cloth and not ruin it by bad behaviour, bad speech and by a return to our old ways. 

So, off with the old and on with the new, but it is daily that we must thus reclothe ourselves.  Daily we must confess our sins.  Daily we must thank God for His great benefits and our salvation.  Daily we must ask to be filled with the Holy Spirit.  Daily we must take up our Cross and follow Christ.  In this way, we shall keep our baptismal garment clean, shiny and new … and if we endure to the end, then yes, we shall be saved.  Then it will become impossible ever again to lose our coat of many colours which is Christ, the perfect image of God in Man, the perfect God-Man Himself, the One whom we are called by grace to become, a little Christ, a Christian.