Seek the Things Above
1 If then you were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated on the right hand of God. 2 Set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are on the earth. 3 For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ, our life, is revealed, then you will also be revealed with him in glory.
The practical half of the letter begins from a fact rather than a demand — you died, and your life is somewhere else.
If then you were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above. The conditional is not a doubt but a premise: chapter 2 established the burial and raising Colossians 2:12, and everything asked from here rests on it.
The two verbs are worth keeping apart. Seek is the outward act of pursuit; set your mind in verse 2 is the inward orientation, the settled direction of attention. One governs what a person goes after, the other what they think about when nothing requires them to think about anything.
And the location is specified twice: where Christ is, seated at God's right hand — so the aim is not abstraction or otherworldliness but a person in a particular position.
Verse 3 gives the reason in two clauses of enormous compression. You died — the sentence that answers the whole ascetic program of chapter 2, since a corpse cannot be improved by rules. And your life is hidden with Christ in God, which places their real existence out of reach of anything the teachers could grant or withhold.
Verse 4 dates the disclosure: when Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you will also be revealed with him in glory. What is hidden is not lost, only not yet shown.
settled What this mark means