Put To Death What Is Earthly

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Wanted to just share a bit of this past weekend.

We had a men's retreat on Friday night where we went up to uh Bailey, Colorado, which is like out on 285.

And uh it was it we had what like 23, 24 guys there.

And I I have to say it was one of the most special things that I've experienced in in my time in ministry.

Uh and I I'm so I'm so grateful for that time.

And it uh I was walking, we were walking back down a trail after a morning hike where we read our Bibles at the top, you know, church retreats.

And uh was walking back down with um one of the guys and he said, I I can't believe a church of our size.

I'm looking back at just the this many, just such high-quality men who were who are a part of it and were willing to come out and participate in this.

And I was just like, I I can't believe it either.

I was just so overwhelmed with gratitude.

And um uh I I I want to let you know a bit about how that came to be.

Um, there are two men in our church who are both not here today because they have COVID, and both were unable to come on the retreat because of COVID.

COVID was this thing that was going around a couple of years ago.

You'll hear about it.

Um and uh it was such a shame that they weren't able to come.

Their names are Brandon Gossett and Ed Fuller.

Ed Fuller has been a part of this congregation, a part of our church for like a long time.

Ed's super old.

I hope he's watching this online.

Um uh but since if you guys know the for any of you that know the history, back when it was Masters Bible Church, before it was L2, and before it was RCD, another couple years we'll change our name again.

Uh and uh uh something like a a vintage clothing store.

That's a cool church names should sound like vintage clothing stores.

Um and uh so anyway, uh Brandon and Ed were golfing together, and they were just talking of like we we want to bring the men together in our church, and so they they came up with this retreat and really just handled the logistics.

The us as an elder board were able to just kind of like show up and and teach and join in on the community.

It was just something that was really birthed from a heart from the men in our church to care for one another.

And we experienced that.

Uh, that really came to be.

And I think that that is um, we're meant to encourage one another.

And life takes a lot of courage.

Uh, and we we get courage from from one another, and and uh that was just experience.

And so I just wanted to share.

It uh my heart is so full of of gratitude and um thankfulness for uh that experience, and I think it will be really fruitful for our church as well.

So anyway, mark your calendars next year.

I'm sure we'll do it again.

Uh hopefully Ed and Brandon golf again around April.

Um okay, uh, we're continuing through Colossians this morning.

Uh so let's pray and then we'll move into our text for the day.

Holy Father, we thank you for your loving kindness towards your church.

We praise you uh for our ability to gather together, hear one another sing, and have our hearts knit together in love by staring at the same thing.

Lord, you make us a body together, you knit us together as we hold fast to you, who is the head.

Lord, I pray that today we would learn how to participate in that holding fast to you, both in our own hearts so that we become good members of this body that you've called us to be, and communally, so that we develop a culture that looks like heaven, that looks like a slice of your kingdom from the future, has been brought back here as ambassadors for the work that you have done and accomplished in Christ.

Father, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So throughout the whole story of Colossians or the whole letter to the Colossians, Paul has been working through the same theme.

And the theme is that Christian maturity comes from understanding what Christ has accomplished on our behalf.

That's the gospel.

Christian maturity, the way that you mature as a Christian, is not by adding in extra religious practices.

It's not by uh making sure that you're a part of a group of people that just fits these certain qualifications or looks just like you in some way, but that Christian maturity comes from holding fast to Christ.

And so this young church in Colossae that Paul is writing to, where he's never been and never had the chance to visit them, but has heard reports that they've received the gospel, he desires their maturity.

And so he writes this letter to constantly to encourage them to be coming back and holding fast to Christ, who is their hope.

That Christ is the center of their lives, is how they become mature people and a mature church.

Now, Paul explains this gospel and this picture of who Christ is throughout the letter, and we see this beautiful image of Christ, who he really is, as the one from whom, through whom, and to whom all things are.

And as the letter continues, and as we saw last week, Paul shifts into this mode of exhortation for us.

How do we not just understand or know this image of the gospel, this picture of the goodness of what Christ has accomplished for us, but how do we actually participate in it?

And last week Paul said to set your minds on the things that are above, where Christ is.

And this week he's becoming more practical.

And he is showing us how we in our lives participate in the pattern of the gospel.

And the pattern of the gospel is this: it is Christ's death and his resurrection.

And this is the pattern of Christian change.

That we put to death that which is earthly in us, which is his initial call today, and that we take on the new life that Christ has accomplished for us.

Because of what Christ has done, we have become a new creation.

And that is settled on the cross at his resurrection.

And with that message, Paul is saying, Paul is not making an addition here, where he's saying something like, you know, that gospel that I've shared, that's wonderful news of how you get into the door.

But now I'm going to show you the things that you need to do in order to remain in, or in order to uh uh earn this new creation that you may want, that you may one day become.

That's different than what Paul is saying.

What Paul is saying is you are a new creation.

What Christ has accomplished is effective for you.

Therefore, take it up.

Therefore, walk in it, participate in it, so that this very pattern of the gospel, which we see demonstrated at this cosmic scale in Christ Himself, we might, at our very everyday, ordinary, human scale, participate in that same pattern of the gospel.

So he gives us two lists this morning.

This morning we're looking at the list, these two lists that are particularly about death.

How do we participate in the death of Christ?

And that is by putting off the old self, these patterns of the flesh.

And then next week, Paul will shift and he'll show us how we participate in the pattern of the life of Christ and what it is that we take on and put on in our hearts.

So today is about death.

These two lists are lists of sins that he gives to us.

And we'll see a first list of sins that has to do with things that we do personally, that are our own actions that we do in our own hearts and sometimes act out in our lives.

And the second list has to do with how we act communally.

Now, what you'll notice if you kind of were to it, because it's one of those things where it's like, why didn't he just smash these together into one list?

Here's my theory, and we'll see this as we work through the text.

I think that Paul hadn't visited Colossae, but he understands that there's kind of two types of churches.

There's these two sorts of pitfalls.

One church is, on the surface level, just kind and gentle and has compassionate hearts for one another, but they're allowing the reigning of sin in each other's lives as though our own personal holiness doesn't matter.

And so, in that sense, it may appear like a peaceful thing to be a part of, but actually under the surface, it's dying and decaying because there's no personal holiness that's being sought after.

And then there's another type of church which understands a high calling and a high priority for personal holiness.

But what that becomes is a church of people who are judging and backbiting each other, who are gossiping about one another and who are tearing each other apart because they have lost sight that it is not their personal holiness that holds them together, but it is Christ.

So I think he puts it in these two lists, perhaps because he doesn't know which one Colossae is, but he could make a pretty safe bet that it's one of them.

And so we are going to look through these to understand how we prioritize not just our communal peacefulness or communal unity, but also the personal holiness of each other.

And likewise, how we prioritize not just the personal holiness of one another, but how we move with compassionate hearts and care as we are centered on Christ.

That do both of those categories make sense?

I didn't hear any of you.

Okay, good, okay, good.

If you said no, I'd start again with my intro.

But I do it twice as fast and twice as loud to see if it was easier to connect with.

All right, so let's move into this first list about our what we're taking off personally.

Colossians 3, 5 says, put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you.

Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

All right, let's focus on this first phrase.

Put to death what is earthly in you.

This is a weird thing to translate.

What it says more literally is put to death your members which are of the earth.

Now, Paul often talks of sin being contained in our members, the members of our body.

We are the member body metaphor is something that Paul uses all the time.

We we, you know, that's why we have church membership.

You're members of the body, and your hand is a member of your body, as is, you know, your finger or your eye.

But also Paul thinks of the members of our body as those particular dispositions that we have.

You know, sometimes there's there's an aspect of your personality which is only brought out around certain people.

Sometimes that you're around someone who you're intimidated by, and so you start to act in this certain way, and that member sort of comes out.

Now, the point of seeing the way that Paul talks about us is to help us understand that our sin and these patterns of sin in our lives that we're called to put off are things that are both in our minds and in our bodies.

So that these are patterns of behavior that we habituate in our agreement with them and in our participation with them.

So that Paula is saying that there are these earthly patterns, these things that just seek the things that are below, that just seek the prideful aspects of your life.

And those are patterned in you, in all your members.

So he's giving us a pathway for how to how to cut these off and how to put to death those things.

This means that our putting to death of these things is not something like an event that we will just do this morning.

You know, you will you will make a decision and you will put it to death, but it's something that's contained in the whole aspect of your being, in all these parts.

And so you will be, you will be putting to death in your life where these sinful practices are.

That's why once he's established this way that we put these things to death, saying this is something that you will be consistently doing, he gives us a taxonomy of sin.

Because if we're going to look out into our lives, we need to be able to name clearly what those sinful patterns are, those modes of being in the earth.

Because then we can start to participate in the killing of them.

So we need these words.

We need the categories that Paul is giving us.

We need the category of sexual immorality, of impurity, of passion, evil desire.

That way we can name those things.

You know what I was really acting?

I was acting covetously.

I found myself in a mode of being which was passionately seeking out a wicked desire, and that's formed this way of meditating in my mind that is against the Lord.

Okay, well, one quick note on this.

Nobody's actually thinking this, but we'll all pretend.

I know what you're thinking.

Thinking, James, last week, didn't Paul say that I've already been put to death with Christ?

Yeah, nobody was actually thinking that.

But here's what he said.

For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

If I have died, then why am I now putting to death?

Okay, we have to think it at different levels here.

What Christ has accomplished for us on the cross is our righteousness.

But he accomplished that so that we might live out this righteousness in our lives, where your life takes place, bound in space and time, which moves forward at a rate of one minute per minute.

That was just for Kyle.

You guys will meet him.

For you have you have died.

The way that we participate in the death of Christ is by seeking to put to death those things in us and those patterns of behavior which war against him.

So let's look at this list.

Colossians 3, 5, but just the list.

Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

There's a bit of a pattern that's in this list.

You can see that it moves kind of from the outside, these at these external actions like sexual immorality, and then that marches internally to your heart.

And in that pattern, we see that Paul is trying to help us follow upstream what our actions are doing, so that we might cut them off from the stream of our heart, and that we might put to death these things that are earthly in us.

This is different from just behavior change or behavior modification.

This is behavior modification as a part of the narrative of how we put to death what is earthly in us.

Oftentimes we we separate those things completely.

We can have minds that say our behavior is completely separate from our beliefs.

But that's not true.

Or we can have a model that's just one-directional, like the band, one directional.

I think that's it.

And it's just only from our heart out into our actions.

But Paul is saying these things are contained in our members.

So that means that our actions, this the patterns that we participate in, also flow up to inform our heart.

So there's this little hack that Christians will do where we'll say, it doesn't matter if I change my behavior, because I just need my heart to be in the right place.

In fact, if I really seek a change of behavior in this, then I'm doing things backwards because I'm not addressing my heart, which is the thing that really needs to be addressed.

No, uh Paul uh Paul is not so divided within himself as that.

He is not so separate from the patterns that he participates in.

He realizes that the things that he does form him and expose him.

And so he needs his heart to change along with his behaviors, because he's one person.

Okay, we've seen the pattern.

He begins with sexual immorality.

Now, why does he begin here?

First of all, the word is pornea, it's often translated fornication, and this refers to any sex, any sex or sexual activity that takes place outside of the covenant of marriage.

So that means that it refers to hookup culture, it refers to homosexuality, it refers to having sex with your girlfriend or boyfriend or fiance, you know, even engaged people.

So, like one of the main things uh whenever I do premarital counseling, engaged is not married.

Uh it means uh uh pornography uh or even lust that we would participate in with Instagram or uh the other social media apps.

But the the lust that can be cultivated in our heart through those processes, this word captures all of them because it's a it's a narrow thing.

It's saying that the boundary for sex is marriage.

So all that falls outside of that, you can clearly understand, uh, is outside of the range.

Now, for Paul, I think he begins with sex and he often begins with sexual immorality, because for Paul, it's not the worst sin.

You know, it's not he doesn't begin here because this is the worst of all possible sins.

He begins here because it's it's an archetypal sin.

Insexual immorality is the pattern of sin generally, because the pattern of sin is a relational denial of our covenant with the Lord.

The pattern of sin is an adulterous pattern, where instead of seeing, Lord, we are in covenant with you, which means our hearts and our minds and our bodies belong to you, we break that relationship and then we misuse our relationships at this level, at the level of our own bodies, at the level of our own minds.

And so in sexual immorality, we see the whole pattern of sin.

So it's something that you can clearly look at and understand in your life and in your heart.

This must be cut off.

Because in this misusing of myself for the relationships that I've been called to, I am denying the relationship that I've been called to with the Lord.

Now, this leads to impurity.

Impurity is, in a sense, an effect of sexual immorality.

It's a contamination of our minds.

So that we we know that a meditation on sexual immorality or a consumption of pornography or participation with someone who is not our spouse, that these things corrupt our thinking.

And they can lead to incredible depths of shame, which cause us to not seek to put off the old self, but actually cause us to seek to identify more deeply with the old self, to try and engage with patterns that confirm we are still that old man.

We are still this one who is a slave to sin.

And that impurity corrupts us and it draws us more and more deeply into this pattern.

It can also lead to a self-justification, where we are rather than receiving what the Lord calls sin as sin, we begin to justify the pattern that we would like to participate in in our lives.

And we start saying things like, Is this really immoral?

Does the Bible really say that there should not be any sex outside of marriage or there should not be any lust or pornography outside of marriage?

Does did he really say?

That's a good that's a good phrase to remember.

Where did that come from?

Satan.

That's right, the garden.

Did God really say?

Say.

If you start asking yourself the question, did God really say?

Probably not going down a good road.

Especially if it's about something that, like, you know, you know he said.

Impurity.

These develop passion and evil desire.

See, impurity is just a little corruption, a little corruption that comes from the participation in the action.

Passion and evil desire are kind of two sides of the same coin.

Passion is like an active pursuit.

And evil desire is more of a passive disposition of the heart.

So your heart is disposed toward sexual immorality.

And then you seek it out passionately.

It becomes something that you're almost compelled to engage with and compelled to seek out.

Now, what are these things ultimately?

Paul couches this all.

He ends this list right where the Ten Commandments ends.

That this is covetousness.

This whole story is one particular thread of covetousness.

He started with sexual immorality, I think because it's an archetypal sin.

It's the picture of sin generally.

But he could have drawn the same path with greed, with he could have uh he could have drawn this same path with anger or malice or vengefulness, that it all results in, or it all comes from covetousness, which is idolatry.

Now, covetousness is a self-centeredness that tries to pattern the whole world around our desires and sees as the height of fulfillment our desires being fulfilled, putting us at the center of the world where God belongs.

And it results in idolatry because it teaches us to relate to God as someone who is there to give us what we want.

And we will serve all sorts of other gods who promise to give us what we want.

That could be our that could be our marriages, that could be our children, that could be our work, it could be uh the escape of uh pornography or or the the I I I think less I'll just share this because it may be helpful.

I think less of pornography as as an escape than I than I once did.

I I think of it more as a seeking seeking to confirm my own shame.

I think that that's often what's happening with pornography.

But this is a covetousness which denies the place of God in our lives and teaches us to use the good things in the world as other gods, which we seek to wring out some sense of salvation from.

Paul shows this warning in verses six and seven.

In these you too once walked when you were living in them.

So he's saying, look, remember, these this pattern should sound familiar.

This is the way we walked and the way that we once lived before Christ.

With Christ, there is a before and an after.

There is a taking in of what he has done and a practicing of this that we can say, because of what Christ has done, I put away the old man.

But on account of these, the wrath of God is coming.

Now, that ver that phrase is coming, it's kind of ambiguous because it can have these two meanings.

And I think that he intended us to see both of these meanings.

Is coming at one level means that this will take place in the future.

The wrath of God is coming upon the world because of our engagement with this pattern of sin that's grounded in our covetousness, our denial of who God is.

So we know that when Jesus returns, he will return as a judge and he will make sure that his wrath is known and revealed in the world, that there will be no sin that goes unpunished, that it will be punished in yourself, or it will be it will have been punished in Christ on the cross.

But his wrath is coming, and it will be terrible and fierce.

And there's this other sense in which his wrath is coming, means that it is present now.

On account of these things, these are uh the uh conditions that cause God's wrath to be revealed even now in the present world.

What he means by that is that the sin itself, in the ordinary ramifications of the sin itself, is the wrath of God.

Paul says in Romans 1 that the wrath of God is now being revealed.

And so we see that you can see it in the very pattern that Paul has shown here, that the engagement with sexual immorality, it goes upstream to an impure, evil, passionate, desirous heart that that is uh full of idolatry, that is grounded in idolatry and can no longer see God as God.

So the very wrath of God is revealed in our participation with sin itself, in the ramifications that sin leads to.

We have the capacity, by participating with sin, to continually corrupt our hearts, our worldviews, our modes of being in the world.

And Paul is saying, in Christ, you have the opportunity to put that away.

You can put that down.

This is part of the good news of this passage is that these things, once you were cursed to walk in them, and that you could only live in a swirl of idolatry.

But now, because of what Christ has done, you can put those modes of being to death.

The wrath of God is coming if you don't, but his grace is sufficient for you to be able to put it away.

Now he moves on to a description of how we as a community act towards one another so that we put away those things that that lead to our death.

By by putting these things to death, we will live.

He says, excuse me, in verses eight through nine, but now you must put them all away.

Anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth.

Do not lie to one another.

Now, we can see that this list, this is this second list, you can imagine uh this community, a community full of anger, wrath, malice, slander, obscene talk, lying to one another.

To me, I I grew up in the car business.

This kind of sounds like a car dealership.

A little homey.

Let's move through this list.

Anger and wrath.

Now, as Christians, we need to have within ourselves the capacity for anger to be drawn out of our hearts.

We need to be able to look into the world and see injustices and experiences in our own lives and not be cold or stoic with regards to them, but to have anger pulled out of our hearts because of them.

But that's not what Paul is talking about here.

He's not talking about an anger that's pulled out of our hearts because of the injustice in the world.

He's talking about an anger that flows from our hearts because of our own covetous, evil desires.

He's talking about a pattern or a disposition in your heart in which whatever happens in the world, anger flows from it.

Now, you can recognize these things in yourself.

For me, it often comes out in impatience or if something's moving slowly, more slowly than I would like.

Often it's a child.

This anger or wrath gets cultivated in us.

Now, some of you, you don't even know it about yourself.

You just think you live in a very difficult world with a very difficult life.

And I bet you do.

But the reality is that's not what's pulling your anger out.

Your anger is flowing from you, from your own heart, because you live a life in which the center, the center of existence is your desires being met.

That's an idolatrous and covetous life.

Now, this results in malice.

Malice, this trans it's a tough thing to translate, but it's kind of this uh you can imagine a creative consideration of how to be wicked towards one another.

That you're you're you're you're scheming and contemplating and considering how is it that I could manipulate or take advantage of or make this person feel the hurt or pain that that I have felt, or how could I how could I work in order to uh uh you know create a feeling of of badness or shame or wickedness onto this person?

That's a that's a heart of malice.

And I want you to consider your your thought life.

Where does your contemplation sit?

Where does it rest?

You know, when there's uh when you're when you're feeling that anger, what it where does your creativity go?

That's malice.

And this moves into uh these things kind of uh this list kind of moves out into the community because they are marked by slander and obscene talk.

Now, slander that means that you're you uh slander being a part of a community that that slanders means no one gets to be themselves in that community.

Everybody has to posture and play a game and be on either offense or defense.

This is not the way a church should be marked.

This is not what the people of God should look like.

We should not be slanderous or gossiping about one another.

We should be seeking to defend and uphold people's reputations.

We should be gracious with one another.

We should seek to be building one another up, not just to each other's faces, but behind each other's backs.

Obscene talk is a way of normalizing these impure and angry and malice-filled modes of being, so that it just becomes the pattern of our language together.

These are the barbs that you throw at one another, the things that we say to one another, not in order to communicate or to share, but as weapons to cut down or to bring down to some level.

Slander and obscene talk.

And finally, Paul says, do not lie to one another.

Now, what is uh this is this isn't true, I don't think this is true anymore, but like growing up in Christian culture, we it was always said, like, what uh you know, what does the outside world think of Christians?

They would think that we were, does anybody know the word I'm thinking of?

Hypocrites.

Hypocrites, yeah.

Survey says.

That's what I'm gonna do now when I say, Do you know what I'm thinking?

Which is not a fair question.

Uh I I don't know that that would be true anymore.

I don't think hypocrisy would be the what people would say now.

I think it would be like they're not hypocrites, that's the problem.

They like they actually believe these backwards, terrible things.

But we ought to be a place that is marked by truth to one another.

We are a city on a hill, the light of the world.

Now, do you know how refreshing it is, how incredible it feels to be in a place where you speak truthfully to one another?

Where you can walk in and you can you have the sense of I can be myself here, I can I can settle into my own body here.

You can know when you're in a place that's not like that, when you're in a community that's not like that, because you'll experience a sort of double thinking in your own mind.

You'll you'll be uh considering what the person is saying, and then you'll be considering what your perception is, and then you'll you'll doubt your own perception a little bit, and then you'll try and contort yourself a bit to fit into some sort of program, and there's there's this tightness and rigidity.

It often becomes humorless.

You know, there's no jokes.

That's a terrible thing.

But when people are are truthful with one another, there's this knowing of of each other.

You know, this is what's let me show this in the text.

In a place like that.

Well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Why do why are we able to participate in truth and honesty with one another?

Because we see that we 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.

We understand that something for each of us, for the body of Christ, has been put to death on the cross.

And so, how do we relate to and love and see one another?

How do we learn to see one another?

Last week I shared this quote that I it keeps coming up, so I I think I really like it.

Takes me a while to know if I like something.

Oh, and it says to love someone is to see their destiny truly.

You know, we learn to see each other as the as our destiny.

And our destiny is the glory that we will share with Christ.

We learn to see one another like that, as ones who have put off the old self.

And then we understand that we are in a process of being renewed.

Being renewed in the knowledge, being renewed in knowledge after the image of our Creator.

So that as we grow in understanding of who God is, how he relates to us, how he's shown himself to us in Christ, then the engagement with that relationship begins to transform us into the image of him.

And that image of him, this is the strange thing about Christianity.

We are all holding fast to the same head.

We as a church, we become a body by holding fast to the same head.

This is what makes a people.

This is why, if you want to preserve your family, if you want to preserve what a family is, you you need to celebrate things together.

You know, it's like one of the best tools we have.

Don't miss birthdays, things like that.

Because those holding fast to these, to these rhythms and patterns of celebration, that's what forms us into a people.

And so we do that weekly.

We hold fast to the head by patterns of worship and celebration of who he is.

It makes us a people.

But when we become that people, you as a as a member don't vanish into that.

But your idiosyncrasies, the the image of godness that that is in you is is formed and developed.

And that can only take place in a community that is formed by truth and that cares about each other's holiness.

You you need to consider considering can't consider.

It's a word I just made.

You need to consider that caring about one another's holiness is a defending of the person that God made them to be.

Because our lack of holiness dissolves us and corrupts us into these deformed things that almost all look the same.

But are seeking to encourage one another and rebuke one another and call people away from patterns of sin and hold, seek to hold fast to this new man that we have in Christ as a defense, it's a preservation of the goodness that God has built into his people, your friends, the ones you love in this body.

What is this community like?

I think I just discovered this in the in the preaching of it, which happens sometimes.

It doesn't seem that connected to just like this these uh moral commands, but I I think I see the connection.

In verse 11, he says, here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave free, but Christ is all and in all.

He says that when we hold fast to the head, all of these ordinary things, these ordinary dividing lines that would have torn us apart, these ways that we would have assessed.

And in these things, these are not just, you know, you can't think of these things as just nationalities.

These are modes of being, these are ways of participating in the world.

The Greek understands that they have the highest culture in the world.

That is their self-conceit.

Because Alexander the Great conquered the whole known world and Hellenized it.

And then even when Rome conquered the rest of that known world, the Romans didn't make it Roman.

The Romans became Greek.

You know, they their cult the Greek culture was just unstoppable in its power and its its sort of infectiousness.

It's like this viral sort of culture that if you get close, it becomes you.

So the Greeks understood this about themselves.

Our mode of being is the highest mode of being that there is in the world.

I cannot relate to a Jew.

And the Jew understands themselves as the only people who have the oracles of God, as the ones who have an understanding of what morality, what righteousness, what a good life is, who have the promises of God for the narrative of redemption that God is working in the world.

And so they can look at the Greeks and see, congratulations on this little philosophical story that you're telling, but ours is the real story of the universe.

And we know how to participate in that, in these patterns.

These are modes of being which would separate people.

Circumcised and uncircumcised, this is showing that these are modes of being.

Barbarian, that is, everyone who is outside of the Greek-speaking world.

Scythian, this is even this is more particular.

This is the worst type of person that you could be.

It's the most fringe player that they had in their vocabulary.

The Scythians were known to be like cannibals and have no morality, and they were these, this, you know, I don't know if they were actually like that, but that was that's what it meant to be like that.

I never met one.

And then while these cultures would be divided, there was one line that moved down through all of them, which is slave and free.

Now, this is particularly interesting for this letter because this letter was carried to the church in Colossae with another letter, which is also in scripture, letter to Philemon.

The letter to Philemon is a short little letter that Paul wrote on behalf of a friend of his who he had met and who had become a Christian.

That friend's name was Onesimus.

I sometimes call him onesie, because that's how it's spelled.

And Onesimus was a runaway slave.

And Paul had become friends with him.

And Paul is sending this letter to the Colossians with this letter advocating to Onesimus's master, Philemon, saying, I know that he had run away, but I asked that you would receive him back into your household, and that you would receive him not as a slave, but as a brother.

And so this letter is being out read out loud.

And this final thing that Paul says is there is no slave and free.

And so you can picture Onesimus' back, they're in Philemon's house where the church is meeting, and they both together hear in Christ, there is no slave and there is no free, but Christ is all and in all.

And they must both think back, what pattern of life will I live in?

Will I live in a pattern of malice and anger and backbiting?

Will I live in a pattern that distorts the relationships that I am a part of?

Or will I put off the old man?

Will I take up the new life that Christ has given?

Will we live in truth with one another?

This is their call then.

It is our call now.

I encourage you this week, sometime, maybe tonight, before you're going to bed, revisit Colossians 3, 5 through 11.

Learn this taxonomy of sins and consider where is it in my life that I can name these patterns and then seek to put them to death?

Trust that in seeking to stop doing something, you're not missing your mind.

But you're actually participating in putting those things to death.

All right, are there any questions today, Carlos?

Cool.

Can purity of heart become an idol?

So it depends on what your heart is purely set on.

Purity of heart in Scripture, it means unity.

A pure heart is actually the opposite of an anxious heart.

An anxious heart is divided.

It serves many masters.

It serves God and something else.

And so a pure heart is one that's united, where it seeks first the kingdom of heaven and trusts that all those other things will be added to it.

You know, it puts the Lord, Jesus, in his proper place and says, He is the one who defines me.

It can it I could imagine that the here's the way that purity of heart could become an idol.

It could become an idol when we would think something like, My, uh once I receive this united focus on Christ, then I will deserve for Christ to give his grace to me.

And now we've used one of the benefits of the gospel as a means of undermining the truth of the gospel.

And instead, we're what we're doing is we're saying the power for a pure heart lies within me.

And then once I accomplish that, that will put God in my debt.

And that's what an idol, that's what the relationship to an idol is.

Purity of heart's an interesting one because it's uh it's like faith, it has an object.

So I would say this: a heart that is purely focused on Christ and the gospel can never be idolatrous.

So don't worry.

Seeking to know Christ and to see his beauty and the goodness of his grace towards you, and the looking clearly at him, this is not a, I need to be aiming at this less, because I'm worried that in my aiming at him I will I will become idolatrous.

You cannot become idolatrous of Christ.

He is the one place which can hold your purity of heart.

He is the one thing which can hold all of your desires, the truth of your focus.

This is the good news of who he is.

So understand the gospel pattern.

That can help you diagnose any idol, but I wouldn't be worried about an idol of purity of heart when you understand that purity is a clear focus on the Lord.

Now, our time of communion is a way of remembering and proclaiming the death of our Lord.

And in participating in this as members and with our members, we are proclaiming the death that Jesus accomplished for us.

And we proclaim it and participate in it as a way of reminding our hearts, this death took place, and it is mine.

So I will seek to participate in that death in my life, knowing that it leads to resurrection and to the only true hope that we have.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11, 23, for I have received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Holy Father, we pray that you would bless this meal, that in our proclamation of your death we might find the reason to be putting to death these things which are earthly in us, which keep our hearts from you.

Lord, would you reform the patterns of our lives so that we are made anew in the knowledge of our Creator, and that in that we might become a community of people that are marked by your spirit.

Lord, let us be united in that way, no longer divided along these boundaries that that we would choose for ourselves, but united in you.

We lift this up in Jesus' name, Amen.