What’s the Key to Handling Difficult Relationships?

A Few Thoughts to Consider

Do you struggle to get along with others?

Maybe you have issues with your spouse, children, or those you work with. If so, what’s the key to having good relationships? Colossians 3 and 4 provide some answers. These sections focus on how believers should live in light of their new identity in Christ. Because Christ is supreme, Paul calls Christians to set their minds on things above, putting to death sinful behaviors and clothing themselves with virtues like compassion, kindness, humility, and love.

Colossians 3:1-3 says, ¹ “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. ² Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. ³ For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Peter O’Brien writes, “Because the readers have been raised with Christ, their lives are to be different: they have no life of their own since their life is the life of Christ. So their interests must be his interests.”^[1]

For someone who has been raised with Christ, the natural progression should be to do as Verse 5 instructs and “put to death what belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desire, and greed, which is idolatry.” In place of these attitudes, they should, as verses 12-14 state, ¹² “put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, ¹³ bearing with one another and forgiving one another if anyone has a grievance against another. Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you are also to forgive. ¹⁴ Above all, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity.”

In verses 18-22, Paul shows how this changes every form of relationship—both family and work. As David Garland writes, “Paul’s main concern is not that these virtues be joined together in a perfect unity. Instead, he is concerned about diverse individuals—Greek, Jew, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free—being joined together in one community.”^[2]