The language most Christians use to describe spiritual growth is the language of addition. We add prayer to our schedule. We add Scripture to our habits. We add service to our week. We accumulate spiritual disciplines like tools in a kit, and we define growth by the size of the collection. The problem is that nothing has been removed. The old self — its assumptions, its default loyalties, its habitual responses — remains fully intact beneath the accumulated disciplines, quietly shaping everything the disciplines are supposed to change.
Colossians 3 uses a different metaphor entirely. Not addition. Exchange. Not accumulating — stripping off and putting on. The old self is clothing that must be removed before the new self can be worn. And the exchange is not a one-time event accomplished at conversion — it is the daily act that makes daily renewal concrete and embodied. Every morning is a new opportunity to take off what belonged to the old life and put on what Christ has provided for the new.
| Colossians 3:9–10 Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. |
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