Colossians 2:20 Meaning If You Died with Christ From

Die before you die: the self is let go of before the body ends Sufis repeat this as a saying of the Prophet. A person's old self can end while they are still walking around, and the rules built to hold it in line lose their job. Many keep obeying anyway, out of habit, guarding an empty house long after everyone has moved out.

Taqlīd: going along with what you were handed Al-Ghazali left his teaching post once he saw he had inherited his beliefs instead of finding them. Rules taken this way sit on the outside of a person, like a coat borrowed from someone bigger. They can be kept perfectly for years while nothing underneath them ever moves.

Actions are lifeless forms, and sincerity is their soul: an outward act needs something inside it Ibn Ata Allah wrote this line. The same act done twice can be full one time and hollow the next, and only the person doing it knows which. When observances get kept for the look of the thing, the shape stays flawless while nothing lives in it.

Dhawq: tasting, knowing something firsthand Al-Ghazali used this word for knowledge you have lived through yourself, the way tasting food differs from reading the menu. Someone who has been through it no longer needs a checklist of behaviors to prove they belong. The checklist was scaffolding, useful while the building went up, unnecessary once it stands.

Ḥurriyya: freedom, being owned by nothing Sufi teachers describe freedom as no longer being held by anything other than God. A person tied to a hundred small requirements is answerable to whoever set them, and their day fills up with small permissions and small fears. Once that tie loosens, many of the same acts continue, and they come from the person rather than from a rulebook.

Freedom that never reaches your beliefs will never reach your behavior, and you will go on living as though nothing changed.

A person's standing can change completely while their nervous system keeps running the old instructions, and those instructions still set the state, and the state still governs what they will touch and attempt. That is how someone who died with Christ to the whole system of the world goes on behaving like a man under audit.

Expired rules keep their grip because they were absorbed rather than examined, and absorbed rules feel like facts. What ends it is a decision carried into action, an act the old rule forbids, chosen on purpose with retreat cut off. Until then a person pays the full price of a bondage that was already cancelled.