We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his people in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

—Colossians 1:9b-14 (TNIV)

Here we see the kind of life perspective a resurrection faith produces; it is an eternal perspective, not a temporal one. Notice where the emphasis is for Paul. He seeks to know God and his will as best he can. He acknowledges this kind of knowledge is only possible by the work of the Spirit living in us. Paul seeks to live a life worthy of the Lord for all that the Lord has done for us in his death and resurrection. What is it that Christ has done? He has rescued us from the darkness of our sin, from the alienation and separation from God that it causes, and brought us into the kingdom of light. In other words, through Christ’s blood we are no longer alienated and separated from God. We have been rescued from our sins by God himself.

No wonder Paul cared little about what happened to him or his body in this lifetime. For example, he writes to the Corinthians that he would much rather be away from his mortal and broken body and be with the Lord he loves. But Paul acknowledges that he still has work to do here, the work of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 5:1-10). Here he tells the Colossians that they are to give joyful thanks to the Father in any and every circumstance because what we have to deal with in this life is temporary. This doesn’t play well with modern ears because we have become a people of instant gratification. God, however, is a God of eternity, not instant gratification, and part of growing in grace and faith is to learn that we are to be hopefully patient as we await our final redemption and new resurrection bodies.

Here is the essence of the Gospel. Our sin has alienated and separated us from God, the Source and Author of all life. This perforce leads to death. But God himself has taken care of the problem of sin himself. He became human and died to pay the penalty for our sin, satisfying both his holy justice and holy love for us. As a result, we are no longer separated or alienated from God. We are reunited with Life itself, now and for all eternity. But this will be accomplished in God’s time, not our own. Until that glorious day comes, we are to live joyfully and with hope, resisting our urge to be instantly gratified and trusting God knows what he is doing, even when we cannot fully comprehend or apprehend his will and designs for his creation and us. When we have this kind of hope and faith, we see immediately why Paul writes so joyfully to the Colossians here. This is what it means to have a proper relationship with Christ, one in which we acknowledge that he is God and we are not.

This is what it means to have an eternal perspective of life. Does your faith allow you to have this kind of understanding about life and your relationship with God?