Abundance

"Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts." Colossians 3.16

During my morning devotions, this phrase leapt off the page: "Let the message of Christ dwell in you richly..." What does it mean for something to dwell in us richly? What does that look like, in the cut and thrust of everyday life? Our secular-materialist worldview conditions us to think in terms of monetary wealth, with many possessions of the finest quality and multiple options for how we spend out time (our scarcest and therefore most precious resource). Yet that is as unsustainable as it is superficial.

So what is living richly all about? Paul points us in the appropriate direction, as he continues with a reference to key features of the Christian lifestyle: encouraging each other to grow in grace and wisdom, praising God with all our creativity and sincerity, grateful for his mercy to us in Christ. All of this has nothing to do with what we have, it is all about what we are becoming, it is not to be found in the wealth of our possessions but in the grow of our character, the development of our gifts, our gratitude to God and our generosity to others. The good news is that it is both sustainable and profound.

A bonus of heavenly citizenship is that God's Kingdom exists eternally and so we shall never run out of time - or any other of the resources that ultimately matter. This means that rather than living desperately, we are free to be fully alive - wherever we find ourselves on the spectrum of mortality. We find access to this inheritance through putting our trust in Jesus and he will release us from the cycle of works into the rhythms of his grace.