Clothe Yourselves with Christ

 

Scripture: Romans 13:13-14 (NIV)

Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.

Devotion:

There's a particular honesty that comes with daylight. Things done in the dark — words spoken in a drunken haze, appetites indulged where no one's watching, grudges nursed in secret — rarely survive the sun's exposure. Paul knows this, and he uses it to press his readers to decide.

Paul has just said, in the verse before this one, that "the night is nearly over; the day is almost here" (v. 12). The point isn't a vague call to "be your best self." It's that the new day has already dawned in Christ's resurrection, and believers are told to dress—and live—like people who know it. Acting in line with the coming day, before it's fully arrived, is simply what it means to belong to it already.

The command that anchors the whole passage, "clothe yourselves," translates the Greek endysasthe — the ordinary verb for putting on a garment. Still, one Paul reaches for again and again to describe something far deeper than clothing. He uses the same word in Galatians 3:27 to describe what happened at baptism: "as many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ." And again, in Ephesians 4:24, of "putting on the new self, created to be like God." In Paul's hands, clothing isn't decoration — it's identity, publicly worn. An actor "puts on" a role and becomes, for a time, someone else entirely. Paul's command is that kind of total: not to admire Christ from a distance, but to be dressed in him so thoroughly that he becomes what people see first.

This exact command has changed a life or two. Augustine, wrestling in a Milan garden with a will he couldn't master, heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read" — and opened to this very passage. He later wrote that at the moment he finished the sentence, the darkness of doubt dissolved. Whatever we make of the story, it captures something true about the verse itself: it doesn't merely describe a change; it seems able to work one.

And the two halves of Paul's command depend on each other. It's not enough to strip off carousing, immorality, and jealousy and leave the closet bare — self-effort at subtraction never holds for long. The clothing has to be replaced, not merely removed. "Do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh" follows the positive command, not the other way around: the appetites lose their grip only where something greater has already been put on.

Prayer:

Let us take up this verse as the great St. Augustine did. May it be our rallying cry to live above the temptations of our age. May we truly know what it means to be clothed in Christ and live that way in our day-to-day lives. Help us to change our lives from self-seeking, sin-infested living to living a pure and holy life by the power of Jesus. May our lives bring glory to the name Christian. Amen