A man named Carl had made a wreck of his life. By his own reckoning, he was a lapsed Christian trying to find solid ground again. He had destroyed a thirty-year marriage. His adult children wanted nothing to do with him. The people who once respected him now avoided him.
Carrying all of that, he walked into a men's small group one evening — not knowing a single person in the room. It was time for a new start, or at least a desperate attempt at one.
The group leader was a man named Mike. Experienced, genuine, the kind of guy who made people feel at home. Carl and Mike hit it off immediately — swapping jokes, matching wits, recognizing in each other the potential for real friendship. When the night ended, Mike went home, pulled out one of his favorite books, and wrote a personal note inside the front cover.
This was something he did for all the men in his group, so Mike could hardly wait to give it to his new friend the following week.
When he did, Carl's face changed. His eyes widened. He offered a quiet “thank you” and made a fast exit.
Weeks and then months went by, but Carl didn’t come back to the group.
Mike's inner critic took over. Who do you think you are? You should stop with the corny stuff. He’d wanted to help someone find Jesus, but instead he felt like he'd pushed someone further away. He quietly decided he would quit leading the group at the end of the year.
Most of us can relate to one side of that story or the other.
Maybe you're Carl, trying to turn a page, reaching for something new. But you keep finding that your old life follows you like a shadow into every room you enter.
Or maybe you're Mike — genuinely trying to love people well, only to be met with rejection and left wondering if you've misread everything.
Both experiences point to the same ache: the gap between the life you’re hoping for and the one you’re experiencing.
The Apostle Paul wrote to a church in Colossae grappling with something similar. They had encountered the gospel, begun to believe it, and were trying to figure out what it actually meant for how they lived. In Colossians 3, Paul lays it out with unusual directness.
Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven.
~Colossians 3:1
Paul isn’t giving them a motivational speech, he’s giving them a clear sense of direction. He’s telling them they have a new identity. He’s saying you are not who you used to be. The old version of you — the one built on fear, selfishness, pride, bitterness — has died. A new self has been given to you. Now live from that.
It’s tempting to turn that into a checklist of ways to get closer to Jesus. If our old life was built around certain behaviors, then this new life must mean replacing them with better ones: be less angry. Lie less. Lust less. And when you fail, try harder.
But Paul isn't describing a behavior modification program. He's describing a transformation that goes deeper. One that reaches down to the level of our identity.
He uses an almost violent word — nekrosate, which means "make dead," or "slay utterly." It’s strong language for how we're supposed to treat our old patterns of living. But it’s not about suppressing bad habits. Paul is telling us our old self has no claim on us anymore. We belong to something new.
When that new life takes root, it doesn’t mean we suddenly become perfect, shiny, rule-following people. New life changes us from the inside out…. But what does it look like?
Paul spells it out in verses 12 through 14: tenderhearted mercy. Kindness. Humility. Gentleness. Patience. Making allowance for each other's faults. Forgiveness. And above all, love — the kind that holds everything else together.
These aren't rules we follow or virtues we perform. They're the natural texture of our lives when we genuinely encounter grace and let it change us from the inside out.
Author and pastor Dallas Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy, draws a line between two very different versions of the Christian life. One is organized around sinning less — as if the goal is a clean moral record. The other is organized around transformation — becoming, through genuine relationship with God, the kind of person who naturally desires what is good.
A life aimed at “sin management” is exhausting and, more often than not, isolating. You become preoccupied with your own performance, guarded with others, and quietly terrified that someone will see through the effort to the mess underneath.
A life aimed at transformation looks different. It's less tidy— it requires honesty about your brokenness, vulnerability in community, the willingness to be known. But it produces something the first approach never quite can: genuine freedom. And it tends to make you generous with other people, because you know what it cost for grace to reach you.
Paul's vision for transformation in Colossians 3 is communal at its core. The new clothes he describes — mercy, kindness, love, peace — aren't worn in private. They're worn in relationship. The peace of Christ, he says, is meant to rule in our hearts as members of one body. The Word of God is received both together and personally — like attending a concert and later sitting alone with the music. We need both, but we cannot skip the concert.
Now, the rest of Carl and Mike's story. You didn’t think it ended that way, did you?
Carl eventually ended up in his therapist's office, hollowed out. He told her he didn't know a single person in his life who thought well of him. She pushed back, hard — there must be someone. Carl searched his memory, running through every relationship he had damaged or destroyed, until he landed on one name. The newest one. Mike.
He went back to the group. Mike, still guarded from the earlier rejection, was cooler than Carl remembered. But they sat together as the men shared, and when it came to Carl's turn, something broke open. He told the whole story — the marriage he had ruined, his estranged children, the humiliation that followed him everywhere. He said, through tears, that he kept trying to start over but couldn't escape himself.
Mike didn't have a prepared answer. He just found himself saying: It's okay. You're with us now. You belong here.
Carl almost couldn’t contain himself and he said he had something to tell Mike. Mike interrupted him, apologizing for coming on too strong with the book and the note. He said he understood if it had felt strange.
Carl's face calmed. He reached into his wallet.
He had torn out the page from the book with Mike’s note. He’d been carrying it every day, looking at it when he had nothing else to hold onto.
Mike had written, simply: I can tell you are a good man.
Carl hadn't heard those words in years. He had trouble believing them. But he had kept them anyway — because even the possibility that they were true was enough to keep him going.
That is what the new life in Christ looks like when it moves through people.
Not a list of sins avoided. Not a performance of virtue. Not a series of rules to follow.
As a way of being — one that flows from knowing you have been seen, named, and called good by the One whose opinion is the only one that finally counts.
You may be Carl right now. Carrying something heavy, wondering how anyone could know you and still want you around.
Or you may be Mike — questioning if the small, earnest, sometimes awkward ways you try to love people are making any difference at all.
The answer to both is the same: new life is real. And it almost always arrives through someone willing to write the note.
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