Ask two hundred people who loves to run and about five hands go up. That is normal. But watch a two-year-old in a nursery — the moment they can stand, they run, because it feels good. Open a door for a five-year-old and they are gone. Running is the most natural thing a body does, right up until it isn't.
Jeff Sullivan is fifty and teaching himself to run again. He has to; there is an Army fitness test with his name on it. He likes the idea of running. He has finished a marathon and a 50K. And every single time, it is miserable. Have you ever heard of runner's high? "It's not real. I've never experienced that."
So now there is a warm-up. Twenty minutes of it, for a twenty-minute run. Kicking his heels, swinging his arms, walking strangely up the block to wake up hips that have gone stiff from years of sitting. "I must look ridiculous to my neighbors."
Nothing is broken. He was simply conditioned, one year at a time, until the thing he was built for became the hardest thing he does. Drop a hundred-dollar bill in the parking lot and start a race for it, and most of us would tell you to keep it. The only reason left to run is a dinosaur.
That, he said, is the honest shape of Colossians 3:5.
A list nobody argues with
Paul writes: Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature. Then he names it — sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, greed. Then he goes again: anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy language, lying to each other.
Here is what is strange about that list. Nobody reads it and thinks, actually, I would like to keep a few of those. Nobody defends the greed that means you can never stop working, never have enough. Nobody is glad about the thing they said and cannot unsay — why did I even say it that way? We do not want them. We hate them.
And we cannot seem to kill them.
So the question is not whether you agree with Paul. The question is how. And for that, Jeff said, you have to go back a few verses.
Set your heart. Set your mind.
Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.
He says it twice on purpose. Heart, then mind — because those two get so tangled that most of us cannot tell where our wanting stops and our thinking starts. Paul will not let you file one under feelings and skip it. It begins in the internal life. It begins with desire.
Jeff's mother played piano, and she had a rule: all four boys would learn. An hour of practice a day, every day, unless you could get away with skipping it. The rule worked. He learned. He got, by his own description, passably bad at it. And the day he graduated, he never touched a piano again. The structure was outside him, so it ended when the structure did.
His son was never made to take a lesson. Then, headed off to college, he decided he wanted to play guitar. Nobody assigned it. He sat in his room with YouTube tutorials, found someone to coach him, played every chance he got. Today he plays in his church's worship band.
Same family. Opposite outcome. The difference was not discipline — the piano had far more of that. The difference was desire. Jesus said it plainly: where your treasure is, your heart will be also. What you put your heart into is what you will invest yourself in, and you will find the way there.
Sin doesn't make you bad. It makes you dead.
But then, where does the desire come from? Because if the answer is "want it harder," we are right back to the warm-up.
Jeff quoted a line from Louie Giglio that stopped him: Sin doesn't make you bad. It makes you dead.
Sit with that, because almost all of us have quietly filed sin somewhere else. A disease to heal from. A problem to correct. A character flaw to work on. Every one of those framings assumes the patient is alive and needs improving.
Colossians says something else. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
Which changes what kind of help you need. If sin is a flaw, the cure is effort — and you already know how that has gone. If sin is death, then the only thing that touches it is someone who can conquer death.
That is what the cross was. Not a good man martyred; history is full of those. The Son of God saying, I will take the sins of the world upon myself. The sky going black. The ground shaking. God putting his wrath on the thing that was killing you.
You were never going to out-train a grave.
What that looks like on a Tuesday
Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
Look at that list again. Every item is an interior thing that radiates outward. Not one of them is a task you can finish and check off.
So — and this is the sentence most likely to rearrange something — the disciplines are not the goal. Reading your Bible is not the goal. Learning Scripture, serving, giving, showing up: none of these is the destination. They are how you teach your heart to become the destination. Becoming love. Becoming humility. Becoming forgiveness. Becoming kindness.
Which is why gathering matters more than attendance does. Singing is how you set your heart. The Word read aloud is how you set your mind. Forgiving the person in the next row is how it gets worked in. These are the instruments Christ uses. Do not take them lightly, and do not skip them.
And then the last verse stops being a memory-verse slogan and becomes a description: whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus. Your work. Your family. Your hobbies. Your running.
Because he is not merely in your life. Paul says he is your life.
