Transcript

Speaking to some exceedingly practical things that we haven’t talked about in a long long time, at least not in a concise packaged way and I want us to look at it again tonight. Colossians 3, beginning in verse 5. He says there,

5 Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry. 6 For it is because of these things that the wrath of God will come upon the sons of disobedience, 7 and in them you also once walked, when you were living in them.

Now he begins in verse 5 there with the word “therefore,” which, of course, means it’s connecting to the flow of exhortations or truths that he’s already given the church, and let’s think about those once more and set that platform up and then go further.

He talked about our mindset in verses 1 through 3, look at it again there, verse 1, ” Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.” Now we pointed out how we had to have our minds on earth, we have to be aware of earthly things and have our lives, and make our plans, and raise our children, and take care of our homes, that’s certainly pleasing to the Lord, but though we have our minds on earth, we don’t set our minds on the earth. Our real abode is heaven. Our permanent kingdom is God’s kingdom, his heavenly kingdom. Our real priorities and our real values come from heaven. So we’re focused on heaven though we’re living out down here.

He talked about there in verse 1 how we’ve been raised up with Christ, and I gave you some examples. We could talk a long time but I just mentioned three things. In particular we’ve been raised up out of condemnation. You were once in Adam, the first Adam. You inherited from Adam the depravity of sin and wickedness. Adam was your federal head and in Adam you were guilty and condemned before a holy God, and through the merits and abilities of Christ, through his power you’ve been saved and now you’re in the new Adam, the second Adam, Jesus, and in the second Adam, Jesus, no longer are you in the sphere or the state of condemnation. He’s raised you out of that. You’re on a different plateau. You’re in a different place.

You’ve been raised up with Christ, verse 1, out of condemnation, out of corruption. At one time all you had and all you knew was the limits of your physical existence, a physical network, if you will, or a physical reality that’s going to decay and rot and depreciate and fall apart and dissipate and corrode and corrupt forever in the grave, but Christ has raised you out of that. Though your physical body you’re still packaged in will continue that degeneration, there is a new man that will get a new glorified body one day and you’ll live forever with a new body with the Lord in heaven.

So in Christ you’ve been raised up from corruption, then the futility of life, which ties into all the things we’re talking about. No longer are you enslaved to a life existence focused on the lust of this world and the ends of this world. Now we live down here like a lot of me live, we bleed like other men bleed, we function in many ways like other men function but there’s something different about us in that we are anchored into a higher purpose. We don’t have to function just in the mindless, base futility of life that other men function in.

He talks about in verse 1 that heaven is where Christ reigns and so we would want to set our minds where our King and our Lord is reigning today. His reign is yet brought to bear in the full on planet earth, though as I said in the message earlier today, he’s active right now on planet earth. You don’t see all the ways he’s active in judging men today but he is. He’s active saving men. We don’t always see all the activity he’s involved in in saving men, but he is. He’s active on earth but his reign is not fully established on earth, but it is fully established in heaven. That’s why our heart is there. When we sang that chorus just a while ago, “Fly to Jesus,” if you are walking with the Lord and walking in the Spirit, there’s a part of you that said, “I’d just be fine to fly on to be with Him right now. There’s just a part of me that would like to be there with Him now.” That’s the reality of the child of God and that’s the way our minds should be set.

Then he said we’ve died with Christ. Then he says in verse 3 our lives are hidden with Christ in God. What a picture that is. We are hidden with Christ in God and as A. T. Robertson said, that’s a security no hellish burglar can break in and get you. Nothing can get you in that, hidden with Christ in God, so should not your mind be on Christ and the things of heaven?

Christ is our life and finally, verse 4, we will be revealed with Christ. There is coming a day when God’s going to manifest his Son before all the universe in all of his glory and we’re going to reign with him in the fullness of glory.

Now with all of that foundation, we come to a second type of very practical exhortations beginning in verse 4 and he begins in verse 4 just commanding us or mandating some things to us. Now here’s the way we are right now. John MacArthur has got a quote I want to read to you that I think kind of puts it in one of the best perspectives you could have as to how we’re down here wrestling with sin though we still fully and only belong to Christ and are his. He says it this way, “Sin is like a deposed monarch who no longer reigns nor has the ability to condemn but works hard to debilitate and devastate all his former subjects.” That’s good, isn’t it? You’re the former subject of this deposed monarch and he still has some influence and he still drags you down but he no longer owns you or has final rule over your eternal destination, Jesus does now.

Romans 8:23 talks about the fact that “we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit,” we’re saved, the first works of the Spirit have begun in us, and he says “we ourselves,” here’s the word, “groan within ourselves.” Now why are we groaning within ourselves? Why is there a general pattern of Christians who are grieved about their lives? Do you know why there’s a general pattern of Christians being grieved? Because generally every day you deal with sin and it grieves you. It bothers you. It’s not who you want to be but it’s still there working on you. There is a grieving. I’m not saying there’s never any pleasure in sin but it’s not long-lived pleasure for a child of God because the moment that sin causes you pleasure, the next moment it causes you grief.

We groan within ourselves, notice what he says or listen to what he says, Romans 8:23, “waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body.” There is a groaning in us as we wrestle with sins that keep pulling us down that says, “Oh, God, that I would have my new glorified body that is fully promised to me, it’s as sure as if I have it now, though I don’t have it now. Oh, that I had it now so that this pull and these passions and these lusts and this sin would never come to fruition in my life again.” Amen? Isn’t that what the child of God feels? How Paul words it here.

Now he writes to the church at Colossae and in the context of their Greek culture, to be honest, I was thinking earlier about the discipline issue that we have before us today and I thought about how I or any of us could fall into any grievous sin if it wasn’t for the grace of God and the way the Lord works through so many in so many things in our lives to keep us from those places, and I thought of how when I was a little boy just growing up, there were things that boys sneaked and did that were wrong but today are just flaunted publicly all the time. I just thought can our culture get any more vile and any more unclean and any more impure? It’s a scary thing to raise kids in this culture but, parents, we have to be careful, you cannot legislate the evil out of your children. Your rules and your legalisms will not change your children’s heart, only Jesus can do that. Now we should have some rules, don’t misunderstand me, we should have convictions in our homes, don’t misunderstand me, but we don’t trust in them. Amen? We trust in Jesus. We plea with our Lord to change our children’s hearts as so much is on our children, but I’m saying all that to say this: the reality is if you study the historical context of places like Colossae and Philippi and Rome and Ephesus in the New Testament era, it was worse. The corruption, the wickedness, the immoralities, the vileness, the uncleanness of the culture was worse than what we have today.

So in that context, he writes to these relatively new believers and some of them probably are struggling and falling back into things that they should not be falling into. So first of all, I. he gives them a mandate about these things they’re falling into. A mandate. He says in verse 5, “Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead,” then he lists them, “immorality, impurity,” and he goes on. Now, you see, there still is an unredeemed humanness that I have with me today and you have with you today. Now there has been the redemption, in a sense, fully of your spirit and these things are hard to divide and don’t get real specific on me here, I’m trying just to make a point, there is an unredeemed humanity we carry with us in this journey but we are to declare, it’s an aorist tense mandate here, consider yourselves. It means once for all draw a line in the sand and consider you are no longer the child of sin. You are no longer the child of darkness. You are no longer owned by and enslaved to and under the lordship of Satan and this lust and the immoralities of this world. Do you declare that in your own heart? Do you draw those lines in your own life? Sometimes you have to draw that line over and over again but it’s a mandate, kill this thing in your life and, of course, in verse 3 he talks about we’ve died and our life is hidden with Christ. So there’s a mandate to consider it that way.

Romans 8:13 is a good cross reference, “for if you are living according to the flesh,” in other words, if your lifestyle and life purpose is what fleshly people would say is their purpose and lifestyle then, “you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” Those are the two different types of people. There is one group of people who are just living this life and whatever their appetites and desires are with some natural conscience and restraints factored in, but that’s not a whole lot, and they just live their lives like anybody else lives. Then there’s another group that are strange to the world. There’s been a spiritual regeneration happen in them and they are in the pilgrimage. They are in the progressive sanctification and the struggle of putting to death the deeds of the flesh.

Do you ever wonder why Paul said, “I fought the good fight”? He said it at the end of his life. He didn’t say, “I finished the fight,” he said, “I just kept fighting it,” and that’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to keep fighting the old unredeemed flesh until the day you go to glory. It’s a fight and you are to consider it dead. You’re to consider, “This is not anything that I’m to answer to, I’m not owned by it, I’m not controlled by it, it doesn’t rule my destiny anymore. That’s not who I am. But wait a minute, I see it and struggle every day.” It doesn’t matter, that’s not who you are if you belong to Christ. Consider yourself as dead, he says.

Romans 12:1-2 is a great cross reference to what Paul is saying here. “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice,” that’s a picture of death, which is “acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” So he’s exhorting these Colossians, it’s a mandate now, it’s an aorist tense, consider it done, that’s no longer who you are. In other words, live like the new true you you really are. That’s what Paul is saying.

Well, he mentions particular things to consider themselves dead to and they overlap somewhat. First of all, he says immorality. It’s fornication in the King James. It’s the ancient Greek word “porneia,” we get the word “pornography” from it, but it has a broad application. It means “any illicit immoralities or sexuality that is not pleasing to God.” You’re no longer to consider yourself owned by and given over to that kind of thing.

1 Thessalonians 4:3 says, “this is the will of God, your sanctification; that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality.” Now he’s writing to Christians who are coming out of a culture, and I know it’s true in the Corinthian context, that historians tell us that some of the men in the Corinthian church when they were saved, had had a new wife every year for the last 20 or 30 years, and it was, in reality, just a new partner for illicit immoralities is all it was every year. So they’re coming out of that and so the Apostle Paul writes to people like that and the culture of Colossae could not have been a whole lot different to these Greek, Roman, ancient Greek Romans and that kind of vile corrupt culture. Consider yourself dead to that now. You must go in a different direction. That no longer is the reality of who you are.

Then he uses another word, impurity, which means just a filthiness or an uncleanness. It’s a little bit broader than the first word he used that’s translated “immorality” in the New American Standard, because this filthiness means your heart and your mind and, of course, that’s the place it always starts is the battle for the mind. The mind is the control center of the Christian. One of the greatest gifts I have ever been given is the call to preach because I need the hours and hours a week meditating on the word of God to help me with my mind, and you need it too. It helps keep things cleaner than they would be, and he says that’s where you need to be fighting, fighting in your mind and in your heart, and certainly not letting it go past there.

Then he uses the word for passion, and that means the passions that are let loose in the unredeemed bodies that we live in. Then he uses the word here evil desire. These are all things you are to consider yourself dead to. That’s the mental side of these same passions that are let loose in our bodies.

So here we have clear instructions from God that the culture we live in at large not only do they ignore these teachings, they celebrate the uncleanness. In my lifetime, I have seen us go from maybe to some degree an ignoring and maybe not an addressing things like the vileness of homosexuality, to we live in a culture today that adamantly applauds that perversion. But he’s saying to you, “They may have no choice.” You see, a person doesn’t applaud that wickedness because they’re free, they applaud that wickedness because they’re enslaved and can’t change. We have the choice. Those who know Christ can begin to battle in the other direction. They can consider themselves dead to those passions and those evil desires and that impurity and that immorality, the words Paul uses here, and they can begin that journey in another direction.

Byron Paulus is a man who has worked with Life Action Ministries and he shares a brief testimony about getting on a commuter flight and the copilot announced to everybody who was already on the plane getting ready to taxi out from the gate there and he said, “By the way, when the captain comes on, let’s all give him a round of applause because he just found out his girlfriend is pregnant with twins.” He says everybody on the plane starts clapping but me, and I had a sick feeling in my stomach. Just a disregard for the values and the morals that Christians ought to be upholding. That’s the kind of culture we live in.

I remember reading not long ago where one of the television actresses, I don’t even know what she plays on anymore, but she had appeared in a pornographic magazine and they interviewed her about doing that and she said, “Well, I’m just a good Southern Baptist Republican from Texas.” She may be a typical Southern Baptist from Texas but she’s not a good one. But that’s the culture we live in and that’s the culture the Colossians were in.

Now he continues on and says consider yourselves dead to these things, that’s no longer who you are, that’s not the true new you. Though you may wrestle and struggle and may get pulled down, you don’t stay down. You repent and go in the other direction. Then he says in verse 5, to “greed, which amounts to idolatry.” Greed or covetousness, this is something of the root of all others. It’s what I want, when I want it, the way I want it. Instant satisfaction. Our culture is immersed in that, isn’t it?

Then he says, “which amounts to idolatry.” All of this is just the sin of idolatry. When you find yourself struggling with the lust of the flesh, maybe it’s in your mind, hopefully it’s not taken fruit in your life, and if it is, you need to repent of it and consider yourself dead to it and do whatever it takes not to be tempted by it again. You’re to consider yourself dead to that stuff, but where it starts is an idolatry in the heart. That’s why he ends with this word “idolatry.” It’s all an idolatry. You set yourself up as Lord. You set your desires up as king. You set your intent and your lust up as ruler in your heart. He says it’s not to be that way and you’re to consider yourself dead. That’s the way you were before you were saved and you had no option, you were enslaved to that old nature, but now you have a new nature and you can begin a pilgrimage in the other direction. It’s interesting, through the years when you find idolatries, you always find sexual sin because a man’s morality tends to always dictate his theology. He walks in certain, or we should say a man’s immorality that he walks in tends for him to take the word of God and massage it and manipulate it to support his immoralities. But it all is about idolatry ultimately.

So he gives a mandate, “Consider yourself dead to these things.” Now he goes a step further, now he gives some motivation as to why a child of God would do this and have this perspective. He says in verse 6, “For it is because of these things that the wrath of God will come upon the sons of disobedience.” Now the idea of wrath here is simply the holiness of God stirred into activity against sin. Here’s what he’s saying: the God that you are no longer enemies with, the God who has chosen to favor you by sending his Son for you and redeeming you without any merit that you’ve gained whatsoever, God did it all through his Son, that God that you now love, that God that you’re learning to adore, that God that you now joy in, his very being, his very nature which is perfection, is stirred against those kind of sins. So what he’s saying is you are radically contradicting the family when you walk in these sins. Do you get that? You are radically walking in the antithesis of what your God is, the one you love more than anything. It’s God when he gets around these things is stirred to retribution and wrath. So listen, he’s not writing from the perspective of you as a Christian saying, “Oh no, I don’t want retribution and wrath. I will not do these sins.” That’s not at all what it’s saying, it’s saying this is the God who saved you through the grace of his Son, who keeps you safe forever, it can’t change, so why would you want to walk in the things that so is offensive to him and stirs his wrath to punish those who don’t know the grace of Christ? Why would you go against the family like that?

Think about the different position we’re in. Unbelievers, John 3:36 says, the wrath of God abides on the unbeliever. John 2:5, unbelievers are storing up wrath for themselves, the Bible says, on the day of wrath. Now contrast that to believers. Believers, 1 Thessalonians 1:10, believers are delivered from the wrath to come. Did you hear that? Not because of your performance but because of your Savior. You’ve been delivered from that wrath to come. 1 Thessalonians 5:9, for God has not destined us for wrath but for obtaining salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ. His point is how can those who’ve been delivered from wrath commit the type sins that will bring the wrath of God on the unbeliever? You’re in radical contradiction to the reality of who you now truly are as a Christian when you walk in those things, and that’s why we have compassionate, and I might add, very longsuffering and with every effort confidential church discipline, because if a person openly as lifestyle walks in these sins, they are radically radically contradicting everything we’re supposed to be projecting to the world.

I received word just not long ago that a church quite near by, a quite large church had a divorce and sort of wife swap situation and just within a few weeks, the new couple was singing in the choir as if to proclaim to everybody, “This is what our God is.” I’m telling you what, it’s vile wickedness for the church of the Lord Jesus Christ to knowingly allow that type of thing to be promoted because it is totally in radical contradiction to who our God is. Now do we all wrestle? Yes. Do we all struggle? Yes. Do we all sin? Yes. But to the one who will not wrestle and fight and repent but openly walk in gross immoralities, that is unacceptable.

Folks used to say, “Now wait a minute, preacher, the church is a place for sinners.” It is not. The church is a home for repenting sinners. There’s a big difference. Repenting sinners who keep being humbled, who keep being broken, who keep saying, “O God, help me! Oh brothers in my small group, pray for me. Hold me accountable. I slip here and I slide and I stray but I want to keep being brought back. I don’t want to pass certain lines and pass certain boundaries where I’ll dishonor my Lord in a public way.” You might say, “Well, pastor, if you do church discipline, then you might come after me one day and you might throw me out of the church.” That’s a terribly unfair and terribly harsh way to say something when we have on record for many many many years now the most, I think is confidential, kind and compassionate effort to help sinners who need to come to repentance. It never becomes a public issue unless a person is just brazenly obstinate and willful in their rebellion. If a brother or sister would just give of the smallest indication to a church leader or a small group leader, whoever is trying to deal with them, that they’re going to try, then amen we’re going to work with them. Amen? We’re going to strive with them and we’re going to pray with them and we’re going to love them and we’re going to help them. But when they cross those lines into just brazen public lifestyle, then we’ve got to do something that like the Bible teaches we must do because as Paul is saying this here – I want you to get this – the nature of our beautiful God we love has no reaction but wrath against that kind of sin so we can’t walk in it. We can’t walk in it, it radically contradicts the family nature and the family name.

Well, in verse 7 he says, ” and in them you also once walked, when you were living in them.” I’m not going to spend enough time there or a lot of time there, but he characterizes what they once were, you once used to just walk like this. It was just who you were. It just marked who you were. You were just living in these things. Now you walk a different way, you have a different purpose. Though you might wrestle with some of those old things, it’s no longer the walk of your life. It no longer marks the reality of who you are.

My, my, my, haven’t those things caused enough trouble for the child of God already? Think about how your sins have troubled your life. Think about how your past perhaps has brought distresses into your life. I found this little paragraph years ago, “Remorse for past failures or sins deprives many Christians of the joy that should be theirs. A man in his middle years has withdrawn from people in his church because he feels so bad about his past infidelity, a sin that broke up his home. An elderly woman needs counseling from time to time because she can’t forget an affair in which she was involved in more than 50 years ago. A young lady is under the care of a psychiatrist because she can’t forgive herself for having had an abortion.” Now in reality they should not be wallowing in that guilty, they should be joying in the freedom of Christ, but my point is hasn’t sin cost us enough trouble already? That’s what he’s saying. Draw a line. Consider yourself dead to that.

In his book, “None of these Diseases,” Dr. S. I. McMillen points out that his experience confirms that sin and the things that go with sin cause the great majority of illnesses that are in the world today. He says a large percentage of human disease and suffering which is directly traceable to worry, fear, conflict, immorality, dissipation and ignorance, to unwholesome thinking and unclean living. He said a sincere acceptance of Jesus Christ would at once wipe out more than half of the difficulties, diseases and sorrows of the human race. That’s true.

Listen to what Spurgeon said. Nobody can say it like Spurgeon can say it. “Christian, what have you to do with sin? Has it not cost you enough already? Burned child, will you play with fire? What, when you have been in the jaws of the lion, will you step a second time into his den? Have you not had enough of the old serpent? Did not his poison enter all of your veins and will you plant the hole of the viper and put your hand upon his den a second time? Oh, don’t be mad. Don’t be foolish. Did sin ever yield you real pleasure? Did you find solid satisfaction in it? If so, go back to your old drudgery and wear the chain again if it delights you, but inasmuch as sin did not give you what it promised to bestow but deceived you with lies, be not a second time snared by the old fowler. Be free and let the remembrance of your ancient bondage forbid you to enter the net again.”

Real quick, some conclusions for practical application. Two words. Real practical, two words. Avoid. Avoid. There are two categories, if you will, two areas you need to be avoiding. Clear Bible. Clear Bible. 1. Sinful people. Now is that hard? If you’ll avoid sinful people, you’ll find yourself more easily considering yourself dead to immorality, impurity, evil desires, greed which amounts to idolatry. The Bible says 2 Corinthians 6:14-18, I don’t have time to turn there. I was going to do it but it says you don’t have anything in common with unbelievers. That doesn’t mean you are harsh and snobbish and there are people sometimes you live with who are unbelievers, sometimes people you have to work with that are unbelievers, but this is saying the people you choose to be your running mates in life. Avoid those intimate associations with unbelievers.

Sinful places. There are places you don’t need to go as a child of God. You just don’t go there. Did you hear me? You just don’t go there. You don’t go in that room. You don’t go to that place. You don’t go to that fellowship. 1 Peter 4:1-5 if you want to jot that down and look at it. It talks about the associations that you had as a lost person and whatever associations you had with those kind of evil environments, that’s enough. Consider you’ve got your full of that. You’re to go in a different direction now.

So avoid sinful people, avoid sinful places. Secondly, actively is the second word. Actively. Actively seek service. What’s one of the most amazing things in the world? If you’ll go into your small group and tell your small group leader, “I want to get busy. I want to be responsible for others. I want to get involved in the discipleship, in the evangelistic efforts of this small group.” It’s amazing how that kind of environment and that kind of commitment will help guard you from the things you ought to be dead to anyway.

Secondly, active in seeking accountability. Who are you accountable to? Who do you talk to about your weekly or daily quiet times on maybe a weekly basis, something we used to do a whole lot of and I know it’s being revived some by a lot of our men even now? Are you accountable about your time in the word? Are you accountable about Scripture memorization and meditation? Are you accountable about outreach and trying to go with somebody to share the Gospel or to reach out to others? These are simple things but they’re powerful things.

As a matter of fact, I would almost assure you that if you will actively avoid sinful people and sinful places, if you will seek service and seek accountability, 75% of this text will be fulfilled if you’ll observe those two things. Things you should avoid. Things you should actively seek. So Paul says that should be our new lifestyle, dead to certain things because we’re now alive to God and his kingdom and his principles and his purposes.