Colossians 3:5-11 "A Call to Kill and Put Away Sin"- Jimmy Alexander

Well, good morning, and turn with me if you will to Colossians chapter 3.

Colossians 3 · chapter mention

Colossians chapter 3.

Colossians 3 · chapter mention

And today we will be looking at verses 5 through 11.

Colossians 3, verses 5 through 11.

Colossians 3:5–11

And this passage is a Christian's call to kill and put away sin.

So if you remember last week, Wyatt's sermon on Colossians 3, verses 1 through 4, Paul has reached a turning point in his letter.

Colossians 3:1–4

So Christology has been established in chapter 1, the sufficiency of Christ has been laid out in the beginning of chapter 2, and false teachers have been exposed at the end of chapter 2.

It is only fitting then that Paul would now turn his attention to practical Christian living.

If it's true that Jesus is all we need, and there are people who are trying to convince us otherwise, what do we do?

What's our response to all this?

Which is why Paul says in chapter 3, verses 1 through 4, seek the things that are above.

Set your mind on heavenly things.

So our response to false teaching, to corruption in the world, in persecution is what?

It is to seek Christ and set our minds and our affections on him.

But Paul doesn't stop there.

If he merely stopped at that command, we might be left wondering, okay, Paul, I get it.

I should be seeking Christ, but what does that mean?

Should I just sit around all day thinking about God?

What does this look like in real life?

And that is exactly what Paul explains in the rest of this chapter.

He practically shows us what it looks like to seek Christ in the things above.

And it starts with putting off our old nature, as we will see here in verses 5 through 11.

But then it involves putting on the new nature that we have in Christ.

We see that in verses 12 through 17.

And then it involves walking faithfully in God's original design for us in marriage, parenting, and even in the workplace, as we will see later in verses 18 to the beginning of chapter 4.

So today we will start with putting off.

And the Bible always starts with the negative, it always starts with repentance.

That was the first words of Jesus' ministry repent.

It is the putting away of idols.

And you cannot serve two masters.

You can't pursue both sin and Christ.

You can't put on new clothes if you're still wearing old clothes.

You cannot have heavenly thoughts if your eyes are fixiated on worldly things.

There is no revival until there is reformation.

Yet many people try.

As Leonard Ravenhill once said, everyone wants to be clothed with power, but no one wants to be stripped of self.

So we must put off if we have any chance of putting on.

You cannot seek heavenly things above if you do not kill earthly desires that are below.

And I have met many people in pastoral ministry who say, God isn't with me.

I don't feel Him.

I'm always miserable.

And the first question we should ask is, what sin are you indulging in?

What carnal things are you pursuing?

What idols are you worshiping?

That is the starting point.

You have no chance of enjoying God until you have first stopped drinking poison.

And so starting in verse 5, Paul starts with an aggressive command.

He says, put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you.

So the command here is simple: put to death, kill, murder things that are earthly in you.

Believe it or not, Christians can commit justifiable homicide.

As John Owens once said, he said, be killing sin, or sin will be killing you.

Now this doesn't mean suppressing or trying to control evil acts and attitudes.

It literally means completely exterminate.

Now, this command, it implies two things.

One, first, it implies that believers still have earthly desires.

This idea that we can become sinless or reach perfection on earth, it's garbage.

The moment that God saved us, he didn't make us perfect.

Legally, he declares us perfect, thank you, Jesus, but practically, he starts us on this journey of sanctification.

A journey where God slowly but surely decreases our love for sin and increases our love for him.

So from the moment he saves us until the day he calls us home, we will be at war with sin.

But we should always be growing in godliness, not perfectly, but progressively and in frequency.

Secondly, this command implies that in Christ, we now have the power to kill sin.

Okay, before Christ, we had no power over sin.

It had its way with us.

Sin worked us like a puppet.

But now that we have the Holy Spirit, now that we have Jesus on our side, along with the full armor of God, we now have the ability and the enabling grace to look at sin and say, No more, you will not rule over me.

Now this begs the question, what earthly things are in us?

What are some common attitudes, desires, passions that still linger in us?

What things exactly should we be killing?

Well, I'm glad you asked, says Paul, because he gives us a detailed list in the middle of verse 5.

He says, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetedness, which is idolatry.

So I love how Paul gets specific here.

The Puritans did a good job of this too.

We are so guilty of kind of generalizing sin.

Okay, we're in the habit of saying, well, we're all sinners, right?

And not really digging deep into specific categories.

So if a preacher stands up and says, You are a sinner, I really don't feel that bad.

But if the preacher stands up and says, Stop gossiping, that's really evil and damaging, now I'm convicted.

And so Paul starts with one of the most core sins since Genesis 3, sexual immorality.

What does that mean?

It refers to any sexual action or desire outside of God's standard for sexual purity.

God invented sex.

He designed it to be between one man and one woman in a lifetime covenant before him.

Sex is an awesome thing.

God invented it for the purposes of procreation, for intimacy and enjoyment.

The perversion of this then would include fornication, prostitution, adultery, homosexuality, pornography.

It goes beyond action and it includes lustful thoughts, ideas, fantasies.

According to 1 Corinthians 6 18, sexual sin it defiles more than just our physical bodies.

It has spiritual significance.

Next is impurity.

This means filth, defilement, uncleanness.

This includes any activity, thought, word, or action that does not conform to God's will for our life.

This could be participating in music, shows, or movies that are vulgar.

It's joining in on something that God deems unclean.

Next is passion.

Okay, this refers to a strong physical desire.

It is any bodily desire which leads to sin.

It could be sexual in nature, but it also includes overeating, drugs, or alcohol.

It's the idea that your body craves something and you're going to passionately pursue and satisfy that desire.

You're not led by the Lord, but you're led by your physical cravings.

Next is evil desire.

So desire itself is not a bad thing.

We desire things that God has given us to enjoy, such as food, water, friendship, sleep.

Evil desire always refers to things that God has forbidden, such as the desire of revenge, the desire of selfish pleasure, the desire of being unequally yoked with an unbeliever, the desire to hurt someone, and the list goes on.

And next is greed.

This is an intense, selfish desire for wealth, materialism, power.

I want more authority and glory and recognition.

It also carries the idea of exploitation, hurting or harming others for the sake of gain.

So this would include fraud, embezzlement, lying on taxes to get more money.

Next is covetedness.

This is a sin that involves having a strong desire to have that which belongs to another.

So it could be someone's wife, someone's stuff, someone's position or status.

You see someone or something, and in envy and jealousy, your heart says, I want that.

I wish I had that.

And Paul sums all of these things into one category, idolatry.

We often think of idol worship as bowing down to a golden calf or worshiping a statue.

But idolatry simply means loving something that isn't God with all of your heart, mind, soul, and strength.

It's taking anything that isn't God and making it an ultimate thing.

Here in America, we might not worship statues, but we sure do worship our pleasures, our feelings, and ourselves.

And so when we participate in things like pornography, or when our thought life is consumed by trying to find a boyfriend or girlfriend, or when our desire is to make a name for ourselves, when we put our ultimate hope in the sides of our bank account, or we scroll through Facebook, coveting everyone else, trying to keep up with the Kardashians, we are committing idol worship.

In these moments, we are basically saying, I will not bow down and put all of my attention, all of my desire and hope into something that is not the creator of the universe.

And Paul gives us a sobering reminder about idol worship in verse 6.

Look at what he says.

He says, on account of these, the wrath of God is coming.

This is both a warning and a correction.

It's a warning because if you continue to cherish and adore such things, you might find yourself on the wrong side of the fence on judgment day.

But this is a warning because as 1 John says, that true children of God, they do not go on living a lifestyle of habitual sin freely and delightfully.

Christians do sin.

I'll be the first one to raise my hand and say, man, I've got lots of issues.

But we don't live there.

We don't live there joyfully and successfully.

God is coming someday soon to banish all idol worshipers to a place of eternal torment where the flame never ends, because they refuse to give glory to the one true Creator.

But this is a correction for us as believers.

Because when we do fall periodically into idolatry, we're reminded as God's children that his wrath is coming against such things.

And we don't belong to God's wrath.

We don't belong there.

His judgment has passed over us.

So why would we participate in behaviors, actions, idol worship that God will one day destroy?

Why esteem the murder weapon that killed our beloved Savior?

And Paul reminds us in verse 7 that we all once walked in such things.

These used to be normal, routine tendencies.

Who here can say that they never had a sexual thought that was outside God's standard?

Who here can say that they never looked at a beautiful home or someone's lifestyle and you said to yourself, I wish that was mine?

Who here can say that they never made a choice in life from the motive of greed or personal glorification?

Paul says that Christians once walked in these sins.

As Christians, these things may occasionally mark our life, but we don't need to live there.

We don't stay there.

We can't because that is not who we are anymore.

Before Christ, we cared only about ourselves, walking in darkness, chasing after every sinful impulse and appetite.

That was our previous way of life.

The life we walked before God raised us from the dead and placed us in Christ.

But now that Christ has lavished his grace on us and given us new life, a new trajectory, so we must, look at verse 8, put them all away.

Sin is like a weed.

It always rises its ugly head.

And the moment you think you overcome a sin, another one sprouts back up.

And once you have perhaps subdued it, another area of sin arises in another department.

It's kind of like the whack-a-mole game.

One pops up and you hit it here, and another one pops up over here.

And we have the spiritual resources, God's enabling grace to put away sin.

And here's what this looks like.

Let me get real practical for you.

Maybe you're watching a show, and something scandalous pops up on that show, and it creates in you sexual desire that's not good.

You can take that desire, rise in the power of the Holy Spirit, and say absolutely not and throw it away.

Or maybe a good friend of yours gets a job promotion and you get jealous, you get envious, and the thought rises in your mind, I wish I was her.

Or worse, I kind of hope she fails.

You can, by God's strength, take that thought and say, Nope, I will not entertain you.

You will not rent space in my mind, and I will choose to rejoice in what God has blessed her with.

Or maybe you start a business and your profit takes off, and you got all this money coming in, and you start thinking to yourself, I want more money.

I want to buy a bigger car, a bigger house, and there's this feeling of greed and discontentment.

Take that desire, rip it out, and say, that's not who I am.

That's the old man.

Whatever you give me, Lord, let me steward it well for your glory.

Church, we must put these things away.

They are unfitting, and worse, they will draw our affections away from the Lord.

And if we refuse to do so, sin will take us to very dark places, isolated, lonely roads that promise freedom but produces death.

Put them away.

Shut them out.

And don't say this is impossible.

2 Peter 1 promises us, it's a promise, for God has given us everything we need to live a godly life.

We have access to God through prayer.

We have God's abundant word.

We have the help of the fellow saints in the church.

We have God's Spirit in us to kill and crucify sin.

There's no excuse.

We need to stop acting like defenseless victims when God has given us sainthood in spiritual armor and spiritual power from above to cast down imaginations and every proud thought that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.

And now Paul gets a second wind here, and he gives us an even more detailed list in verses eight and nine.

He says, Anger, wrath, malice, slander, obscene talk from your mouth.

Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices, and you have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.

So here Paul gets more relational.

These are sinful traits that tend to manifest in relationships.

There is a connection here between evil desires and how we relate to people.

Okay, the idea that you know sin only hurts yourself is a lie.

It affects everyone around you, how you interact with your friends, your coworkers, your spouse and children.

And so the first thing Paul mentions here is anger and wrath.

This has to do with rage, seeking revenge, the loss of control and emotions.

It is motivated by pride, I am personally offended, or control.

You're not acting the way I want you to act.

And instead of speaking the truth in love, being graceful and forgiving, we boil over and respond destructively.

The next is malice.

This has to do with wishing harm on others.

You're driving down the road, someone cuts you off and flips you the bird, and you think to yourself, you know, I hope that person gets into a car accident.

The person who is malicious is often resentful, cynical, harsh, cold, relentless, and to be honest, very unpleasant to be around.

They're often stuck in the past, always seeing the worst in others.

And next is slander.

Slander is so high on God's list of wrongs that he included it in the Ten Commandments.

It has to do with shedding people in a bad light.

It is actually the word blasphemy.

Slander is simply lying about someone with the intent of causing others to view that person negatively.

You speak behind someone's back, make stuff up.

You know, I saw Rick the other day walking out of Kroger, he had a brown bag, pretty sure it was a bottle of liquor.

I think that guy's a drunk.

It's a form of bearing false witness for harm when you have no evidence or basis.

Next is obscene talk.

This refers to culturally inappropriate gestures or jokes.

It's vulgar speech.

You're just trying to fit in with the guys, be cool or be funny.

So you make crude sexual jokes, you grossly mock government that God has sovereignly put in place, or you participate in racial shit.

Then there's just outright lying to others.

You exaggerate to make yourself look better.

You minimize information to make light of something significant.

Or you omit important facts to try and hide something.

Or you just outright lie to cover something up, make yourself look smart, or gain social acceptance.

Church, these are things that we should be putting off.

This isn't a complete list, but it paints a broad enough picture of behaviors, attitudes, and actions that we should be putting away.

And why do we put them away?

Why do we resist such things?

Well, Paul tells us in verse 10.

He says, 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.

So why do we kill sin?

Why keep ourselves from idolatry?

Why do we put away such behaviors?

Because, reason number one, that is our old self.

This is a description of you before Christ.

That's the old Jimmy.

Do you really want to go back to that old man?

That man was lost, blind, hopeless.

Where is the power of the gospel?

Where is your Christian witness?

If you say, hey, Jesus has changed my life, but you continue to live no differently than before.

As Martin Lloyd Jones once said, even unbelievers expect the Christian to walk and talk differently.

And secondly, if we truly are Christian, we have the new self that God has graciously given us.

The old nature is still there.

He lingers and he prowls, but there is a new person in us, a new nature, and the two are at war.

And when the cashier gives me more money back than what I paid, why is it that a part of me says, take the money and leave, play dumb?

But another part of me says, do what is right.

Honor the Lord, glorify Christ with honesty, and give the money back.

Why is it when I get home from a long day of work and Molly asks me to change Judah's diaper, part of me says, Don't you see that I just got home?

Can't you see how hard I worked today?

Why don't you do it?

What are you doing that's so important?

But another part of me says, love your wife as Christ loves the church.

Help her.

Lay down your life for her.

What's going on here?

It's the flesh and the spirit at war.

It's the old nature and the new nature at odds.

And Paul tells us here that we have a choice.

A choice to silence the voice of the flesh and embrace our new nature in Christ.

A choice to either grieve the spirit or be led by the spirit.

A choice to either put off the old Jimmy, who is depraved in foolishness after the image of sin, or walk in the new Jimmy, who is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator.

Which one are you feeding?

Which one are you feeding?

Because whichever one you feed is the one that will lead.

And Paul, as a conclusion, he reminds us in verse 11 that this new life, this Christ life, it has zero divisions.

It has no room for fighting, bickering, or discrimination.

It seeks perfect unity.

Look at verse 11.

Here, that is in the new man, there is not Greek and Jew circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian Syntian, slave free, but Christ is all and in all.

And so the Jews during this time, they really struggled with this.

They had all kinds of cultural standards.

Samaritans were considered dogs.

The Jew and the Gentile barrier were strong.

Leopards were cursed outcasts.

And it's no different today.

Today there are all kinds of barriers between people.

We view people through cultural broken lens.

And our old man, the natural man, is all about this.

If you're poor, you must be stupid.

If they're rich, they must be a greedy, stuck-up snob.

If they're from the Middle East, they must be a terrorist.

If someone has a tattoo, they must be a criminal.

And when we view people this way, there are preconceptions.

And when there are preconceptions, you best bet there's going to be fights and divisions and slander and malice.

And so Paul reminds us: hey, this is not how God's kingdom works.

This is not how the new man or woman operates.

There is only one people of God, rich or poor, black or white, fat or skinny, short or tall, Christ is in all and through all.

And so God's gospel, it doesn't discriminate.

God's kingdom will be filled with people from all kinds of backgrounds and cultures.

There is only one salvation, one Lord, one eternal kingdom, one people of God united upon one truth.

Revelation 7.9 says this after this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number.

And here it is, from every nation, from all tribes and people and languages standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands, crying out with a loud voice, Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.

And so the new man or woman is concerned about new things.

We're concerned about the things above.

Our eyes are fixed on Christ.

We are looking ahead to the new heaven and earth, and we strive to live in the new life that Christ purchased for us.

And therefore, we kill every kind of sin that sprouts up, whether it's sexual immorality, evil desires, covetedness, greed, anger, malice, or lying.

And when we fall, which we will, we kill it again and again.

And we rise back up in God's grace and move forward in godliness as we become more and more fit for the kingdom.

We flee temptation and we kill sin because our life is not our own anymore.

We've been bought by the precious blood of Jesus Christ.

We have been given the most precious thing in the universe, a relationship with the living God through faith in the Son of God.

And it is our job then to guard this relationship at all costs and destroy anything that tries to attack, compromise, or dilute our fellowship with the true and living God.

So, proclamation church, our conclusion and application is obvious.

What is it today that you need to put off?

As we went through the list of sins mentioned here in God's Word, hopefully the Holy Spirit put his finger on some areas in your life.

The purpose of that conviction isn't that you would merely be aware of it and passively say, Welp, I guess I'm a sinner.

Not at all.

The point of that conviction is that we would receive God's grace and then stand up, put on the full armor of God, enlay the sin that so easily entangles us.

Romans 6, verses 12 through 14, listen to this.

Romans 6:12–14

Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its desires.

Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life.

And offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness.

For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.

And if you're going to be nonchalant about this, here's what's at stake: your Christian witness, your Christian joy, the effectiveness of your ministry, your sweet fellowship with God, which is your greatest good.

Do you really want to be indifferent about these things?

Do you really want to test God and keep on experiencing the misery of quenching his spirit?

Wouldn't you rather, as Paul says, walk in the new person who is being renewed in the knowledge of its creator?

There are some of us in this room that are missing out on a deeper, richer relationship with Christ simply because there is sin that we are refusing to let go of.

Do not delay.

Kill the sin that God has exposed this morning.

Because if you don't, as John Owen once said, that sin will linger and it will do two things.

It will weaken the soul and deprive it of its health and strength.

And secondly, it will darken the soul and deprive it of its comfort and peace.

Church, our passage today is a sweet call to repentance.

A call to take a life inventory, to look at the garden of your life, and identify the poisonous weeds that are making us spiritually depressed and uprooting them.

By God's grace, may we have the strength to do that so that we can walk in the new life, the abundant life, the joyful life that we have been given in Christ.

And which Paul lays out in the verses ahead.

Church, let us pray.