In Richard Muller’s Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms – which I know everyone is now frantically writing down so that you can rush out and buy it – he mentions one phrase that was used among the protestant scholastics was a Latin phrase that translated means, “Holy Scripture has spoken, the issue is decided.” What was emphasized in such a phrase was the final authority of Scripture. That is, if indeed there was debate concerning some issue and the Scripture had spoken clearly concerning that issue, then there was no need for any more debate. The argument or conversation could be laid to rest because the final authority – Scripture – was clear. Therefore, it didn’t matter what someone thought, if the Scripture was clear, the issue was decided. This is one of the implications of recognizing the Bible as God’s holy, inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word. If to say “The Bible says” is the equivalent of saying “God says,” then whenever the truth of Scripture is clear, there is no debate needed. God has spoken; we must simply accept it. God has spoken; we can put our hands over our mouths and simply bow our knees.
There are certain other pronouncements that you expect to stop all need for further action. For example, you might see doctors in an emergency room working frantically and exhausting themselves in fighting to save someone’s life, but once the pronouncement is made that someone is dead, everyone can stop. Just as there’s no need to argue once the teaching of Scripture is stated, so there is no need to keep fighting for life, for example, after the pronouncement of death is stated.
I don’t think anyone would argue with that. No one goes to a funeral home with a defibrillator, yelling, “Clear” as they rub the paddles together and approach the dead body. The person has died, there is no more to do.
Yet that reality is why Colossians 3 can be quite confusing to us. The reason is because Paul begins verse 3 of that chapter saying, “For you have died.” Now, that’s something that you don’t expect to hear with a second person pronoun. Perhaps, “He has died,” or “She has died” we expect to hear, but not “You have died.” And if we ever do hear someone say that to us my guess is that we all hope we’ve not lost our ability to speak at that point so that we might dispute such a declaration.
But even supposing that we’re ever in a place to hear such a declaration to us, someone saying, “You have died,” then my guess is that the last thing we would expect is for that to be followed by an exhortation. You don’t tell a corpse to mow the grass, for example. Yet, after saying, “For you have died” in 3:3, Paul follows with consistent exhortations throughout the rest of Colossians. And specifically in the text we’re looking at this morning – 3:5-11 – Paul begins by saying, “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you,” and then lists a number of sins. How does he put these two things together? Let’s think through this for a second, and then we’ll see what he wants us to do in our text this morning.
We mentioned this when we looked at Colossians 2:6-15, but it’s good to get this in our minds again. When we are born into this world, we are born enslaved to sin. We are under sin’s dominion, as if sin is a powerful king, reigning over us, making us serve its desires. This is why Paul says in the text we heard read earlier in the service from Ephesians 2 that we “were dead in the trespasses and sins in which [we] once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience – among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Eph 2:1-3). We were enslaved to sin’s dominion, carrying out our sinful desires.
And the reason sin had dominion over us and we were enslaved to sin is because we were guilty and deserving of death. Sin can only enslave and exercise its reign over those who are guilty and sentenced to death.
But then something marvelous happened. Jesus Christ came into the world and for all who would believe in him, he took our punishment for us. He served as the representative and substitute for all who would believe in him, and he took the penalty for our sin and guilt, by dying on the cross and bearing God’s wrath for us. Therefore, for those of us who have placed our faith in Christ, he is our representative, meaning that whatever he does, counts for us. Legally, it’s as if we’re in him, his work counting for us.
Therefore, when he died, sin’s penalty was met. Just as someone sentenced to death for their guilt under the law is not sentenced to die a hundred times, but only once, so we have died in Christ because he was our representative, and we were “in him.” However, because he was not only our representative but our substitute, we didn’t actually die. That is, the minute you place your faith in Christ, your heart doesn’t stop beating and you fall over dead. But the minute you place your faith in Christ, you are counted as one who has died in Christ as the penalty for sin.
What this means, then, is that since we were enslaved to sin, mastered and controlled by it because of our guilt and deserved to die, now we are enslaved to sin no longer and no longer under its dominion. This is why Paul writes in Romans 6:6-11, “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Therefore, we’ve died to sin, and we are alive because Christ has been raised never to die again and we are united with him by faith.
But the problem is, just because sin is no longer our master and we are no longer enslaved to it, necessarily obeying the desires of our flesh, nor have we yet glorified. That means that though Satan, sin, and death are no longer our masters and we are no longer enslaved to them, they are still very real, and we continue to be tempted by our passions within us that are enticed by sin.
So, we’re in a position where fighting sin is possible. We’ve died with Christ, and sin no longer has dominion over us. Yet, we’re in a position where we must continue to fight against sin. And we will be in this place of needing to fight against sin until we die or Christ returns. Therefore, the main truth we find in Colossians 3:5-11 is . . .
This is why Paul says to those who have died (3:3), “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” and again, “But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth” (3:5, 8).
Again, Paul couldn’t make this exhortation without first showing them that they’re not enslaved to sin, but now he wants them to see that they must fight. Simply put, sin has no place in the Christian life. Now, by that, I’m not saying that Christians will never sin. Of course we will. We will not perfectly obey Christ until we have our resurrection bodies. But believers will be marked and identified as those who fight sin in this life, realizing that it has no place in the life of one who has died to sin and been raised with Christ.
Therefore, when Paul makes these lists of things that we must put to death and put away in our lives, he’s not being exhaustive. He could have listed every sin imaginable. But he lists a few that perhaps were most prominent among the Colossians, or perhaps most common among all people, or just were a good representation of sin as a whole. In verse 5, he lists mainly what could be labeled as the lusts of the flesh. He notes sexual immorality and impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness. That is, for the believer, we must not accept any kind of sexual indulgence outside of the intimacy between a man and a woman within marriage. Sexual indulgence in any other realm is unacceptable. We must fight our passions, our evil desires, and our covetousness. As believers, we cannot let our evil desires and passions guide us. We cannot covet, wanting someone else’s possessions or spouse. That is idolatry. That is desiring something above God and what he has been pleased to give you.
Yet, let’s admit that our flesh cries out for these things. I don’t read this list and say to myself, “Really? People are tempted with this?” And I don’t imagine you do either. Rather, we read this and know the strong pull of these things on our lives, don’t we? This is why we’ve promoted “Covenant Eyes,” for example, something that sends a report to your accountability partners concerning things that you look at on the internet. It’s why I also have a Friday phone call with a brother in the church where he and I give a report concerning whether we’ve allowed our eyes to look upon anything we shouldn’t have, in whatever means. You see, holiness is not found in having few temptations, but in fighting against our temptations. That is, we are not holy because we do not find certain things tempting. We pursue holiness when we fight against those things that do tempt us. And let’s be honest, the reason Paul lists these things in verse 5 is because he knows they are tempting for us. We are tempted by lusts, passions, and covetousness, aren’t we? This is why some of us have to remind ourselves to have tunnel vision as we go into the grocery store because there are sexual images on every magazine cover posted at every corner in the store and others of us have to meditate on the reality that we have what we need in Christ when we go into someone’s nice house or to someone’s wedding or hear a report that someone is pregnant. We are tempted with these things, but we must fight against them.
And I’ve just listed have the items in focusing on verse 5. We also have problems with our tongues, don’t we? We are tempted to bear anger and wrath against others, to hold evil in our hearts toward them, to slander them, and speak against them, aren’t we? You might find yourself coveting what someone has, and the next thing you know, you’re bitter toward them, having malice in your heart, and then start speaking ill of them. We must not be willing to accept that as believers, but must fight against it, and we must fight against it until we die.
But Paul not only tells us that we must fight against these things in our lives, but he also reminds us of reasons why. He first reminds us that . . .
Paul tells us to put to death what is earthly in verse 5, and then he notes in verse 6, “On account of these the wrath of God is coming.” You see, there is coming a day when Christ will return, all men will stand before him, and some will be thrown into an eternal lake of fire. It’s a horrifying picture. Paul tells us that the reason that day is coming is because as responsible individuals, we have done these kinds of sins.
And this is a reminder to us that those who practice these sins without repenting and fighting will indeed face God’s wrath on that final day. Now, we might say, “Hold on a second.” Why do we need to be reminded of that? After all, perhaps we profess faith in Christ this morning. Well, the answer is that person to person we do not know who genuinely has exercised saving faith in Christ apart from what we see. This is the point James makes in his epistle. Those who have faith will show it in their works, even as Abraham showed that he believed as he willingly took his son Isaac to sacrifice him.
And one way that faith is shown in this world is by our fighting against sin. Again, I am not saying that if we sin, we’ll face God’s wrath. We all sin. I am saying that if we refuse to repent when we sin and fight against it, then we are showing ourselves not to belong to Christ. Therefore, it is a frightening statement when someone says, for example, “I’m tired of fighting against the temptation to live as a homosexual.” The reason it is frightening is because what marks believers is their willingness to keep fighting to put to death and put away such things. And, don’t think this is unique to homosexuality. We are always fighting sin on some front. The person who says, “I’m tired of fighting gossip. I’m just going to give in to it and be true to who I am” is as deluded and as in danger of facing God’s wrath is judgment as the person who says this about homosexuality. Simply put, as Christians, we can’t stop fighting. And if we do decide we will stop fighting, then we are not giving evidence that we are truly believers.
Second, Paul reminds us that . . .
Again, we’ve touched on this in explaining Paul’s statement: “You have died,” but he mentions it again in our text this morning. After telling us to put to death these things for God’s wrath is coming, Paul writes in verse 7, “In these you too once walked, when you were living in them.” Then he notes in verses 9-10, “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.”
Paul reminds us again that something has happened. We put these things to death and put them away because we already have put off the old man. That is, we’ve already been freed from sin’s dominion. We once walked in these things, but we don’t have to any longer. And we can walk away from them because not only have we been freed from sin’s dominion and put off the old man, but we are actually now being conformed to the image of Christ by the Holy Spirit who works powerfully within us.
One of the great lies of the enemy is that we are helpless in the face of sin. So, again, taking homosexuality (and I mention this because this is the area where this seems to be most proclaimed) people who profess Christ and then give themselves over to this lifestyle seem to do so proclaiming, “This is just who I am,” as if they are helpless to do anything else. Paul, however, reminds us, this is not who we are but who we were. We once walked in these things when we were enslaved to sin, but we don’t have to anymore.
Do not convince yourself that you are helpless to sin and give in to it. That is simply a lie. Remind yourself that because of Christ’s work for you, you are not enslaved to sin, and fight it as one who does not have to continue to walk in these things.
And, finally, Paul reminds us that . . .
Interestingly, after giving us these exhortations to put to death and put away these sins, Paul ends by writing, “Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all” (v. 11).
Now, what does he mean, and why does he include this verse here? In light of what Paul has mentioned to this point, it seems that he is emphasizing again here what he’s emphasized earlier, namely, that in Christ all things are held together (1:17). That’s why he’s all. And by mentioning that he’s “in all,” no doubt he’s reminding us that our brothers and sisters are united with Christ so that they are in him and he in them. The end result of that, is that things that might have divided us before like being Greek or Jew, slave or free, etc. can no longer serve to divide us, for we are united in Christ.
And when we recognize that sin often (if not always) affects our brothers and sisters in Christ, then indulging in sin fails to demonstrate love for God, ourselves, and our brothers and sisters in Christ. This is why our pursuit of holiness is that which is done corporately. We labor together, and in one another’s lives because we love Christ and one another.
But I want to end this morning by reminding us of some good news. If you have not been fighting to put away these sins, we can start now. Let us confess our sins to our Lord, and we will be forgiven because Christ has lived, died, and been raised for us. Let us turn from them, ask others to help us, pray for us, exhort us, etc., and let’s fight sin. As those who have died to sin, let us fight to put it to death. And let’s continue to fight and encourage one another in the fight until we die or Christ returns. And let us proclaim these realities as we come to the table this morning. Amen.