“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. 8 But now you also, put them all aside: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive speech from your mouth. 9 Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices, 10 and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him— 11 a renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all.”
I don’t know what the seminary homiletics professors would have to say about choosing a phrase from a different passage of scripture for a title to the passage on which one is preaching.
I also don’t know what those same professors would say about the construction of that last sentence.
The nice thing is that once you’ve passed their classes and graduated with your degree in hand you may then begin breaking all the rules and finding clever ways to get your point across without fear of someone marking your sermon all up with red ink.
My title, “The Body of This Death”, you may recognize from the final verses of Romans chapter 7.
There, Paul has been recounting the believer’s ongoing struggle with the flesh. If you’ve studied it you know that is where Paul laments that the things he knows he should do he finds himself not doing, and the things he knows he should not do, and even hates, he finds in himself the tendency to do.
Then he goes on to explain:
“I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. 22 For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, 23 but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?”
Now I want to be careful not to get too much into a teaching of Romans 7 here, since we are studying the third chapter of Colossians. But some things that are contained in this chapter, if they are made clear, will benefit us a great deal in the study of Colossians 3:5-11.
CARNAL CHRISTIANS?
We’ve all heard the term, ‘carnal Christian’, haven’t we? It is usually employed by people in the church referring to someone else. No one wants to think of themselves as a carnal Christian. Actually, if you think about it, by virtue of their gossiping the ones who are labeling the others are quite possibly more carnal in their thinking than the ones being accused.
Personally, I am not certain any such thing exists. What is a carnal Christian, anyway?
Well, ‘carnal’ comes from the word ‘carne’. It means flesh or fleshly. Now since being a Christian is a spiritual thing, I don’t know how someone could be a fleshly Christian. That’s sort of like saying ‘a concrete sponge’. That doesn’t mean a Christian cannot act according to the flesh; in fact, that’s the problem in Romans 7.
But if a person is a true, Spirit-filled believer in Christ, he can not be a fleshly Christian. He can only be a Christian in whom the flesh occasionally manifests its evil desires and tendencies.
That is when the Holy Spirit convicts and the believer repents and confesses and God is faithful and righteous to forgive and continue the ongoing work of sanctification.
The only way a person can be a carnal Christian is if they are only a Christian in the religious sense; that is, in name only as they go about attending church and doing religious things but there is no spiritual birth. In that case they really are carnal. They are still of the flesh and remain spiritually dead, so they are members of a Christian organization but they are carnal.
Now there have been debates in the past and I suppose they continue in places, as to whether Paul was describing a Christian in Romans 7 or a non-Christian. Is he, they ask, describing himself as a believer; or before he was a believer?
Well there need be no debate, the question is put to rest in the very text. This is absolutely a true Christian Paul is describing, because an unsaved person who does not have the Spirit of Christ in them would not have a struggle. They would not mind sinning and they would have no power over sin even if they did mind. They would not be concerned about doing the will of God or pleasing Him, and they would not feel the burden of the struggle that Paul describes.
Another false belief that goes around is that once a person is a Christian the old self either dies right away or fades away as the believer matures. This is also put to rest in Romans 7 when Paul says in verse 17,
17 So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.”
and verse 21,
21 I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good.”
So we have a picture here not only of Paul but of every born again, Spirit-filled believer in Christ still living in this world.
We, by virtue of the new birth, have the Spirit of Christ living in us and giving life to our spirit. We have the Divine Nature which was imparted to us at salvation.
We also, by virtue of the fact that we are still in this fallen flesh and have not been glorified yet, still have the fallen human nature, which is altogether sinful and unable to please God.
The difference now is that we desire to please God and in the power of His indwelling Spirit we are able to put off the old man, to say no to the lure of sin, for it is no longer our master. It is not that we will now never sin, but that when we do we have an Advocate with the Father and a Deliverer.
That is why after Paul asks the agonizing question, ‘…who will deliver me from the body of this death’, he immediately and joyfully answers his own question with, ‘Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Now let’s go to our text.
REMEMBER WHO DIED
Our first order of business in coming to our text verses, I think, would be to observe that Paul says ‘Therefore’, and glance back to be reminded what he has just told us.
You have died, your life is hidden. Isn’t that a strange sounding assertion?
He talks about you as having died, but then immediately talks about you as having life.
Well we know what he means, don’t we? You have died to one kind of life but you have been given a new kind of life.
That is really going to be his main point of emphasis in the following verses. You have died to your old life as was signified in baptism, in going down under the water.
You were testifying in that step of obedience to your Lord, who commanded that new believers be baptized, - and incidentally, this is why He commanded it; not because it is necessary for salvation but because it is a testimony to others that you have been saved – you were testifying that old things, that is your old life, have passed away, and in coming up out of the water you testified that new things, that is your new life, have come.
You were raised spiritually into newness of life in Christ. So now you are testifying to that spiritual work in the act of physical baptism.
Paul has said in verses 1-4 that you are raised up with Christ, that your new life from Him is safely anchored with Him in God in the heavenly places, and when He comes back and is revealed in His glory you will also be revealed with Him in glory.
So He died for you, you died in His death, and He rose in power and gave you resurrection life. That is the doctrinal truth. That is the spiritual fact.
Now as he goes on beginning with our verse 5, he is going to teach us what is to be the life response in the one of whom that doctrine is true.
“…consider the members of your earthly body as dead…”
Then he goes into this list which pretty much speaks for itself. It is a list of the things that come out of the fallen, sin-mastered life to which you have already died. So we needn’t spend time putting each of those words under a microscope; let’s use our time focusing on his main point.
You are reckoned dead to the mastery of the fallen flesh, so here’s what you need to do now with the flesh in which you still walk.
Reckon the members, the hands the feet the eyes and ears, the mouth, the mind the heart, reckon or consider those things to be dead to the things that mark sinful flesh.
That’s not something he could ever say to the unsaved. People of the flesh and the world who do not have the Spirit of Christ are incapable of not sinning, which makes me wonder why the church has spent so much time and energy trying to legislate morality, instead of just preaching a clear and loving gospel so the Holy Spirit can use that message to draw men and women to Christ. I’m just sayin’…
Let’s go back to Romans for a minute. Look with me first, at Romans 6:8-14
“Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, 9 knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. 10 For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. 11 Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, 13 and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. 14 For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.”
Hear all that talk about your members? Yield them to God now, he says, as instruments of righteousness. What is an instrument? It is a tool, is it not? Unless it’s a musical instrument in which case it is also placed in the hands to be used.
If your members are yielded to God, then who is using them as instruments? God!
Ok, back to Colossians 3.
Paul is very practically and simply admonishing these believers, as he also does in his other letters, to do away with the things that are characteristic of the old life they have died to.
I said I wasn’t going to look closely at the list, but there is something I want you to notice about these things he names.
There are actually two lists; one in verse 5 and one in verse 8.
Notice that his list in verse 5 has to do with the inner man; things that come from the heart and mind. Immorality, impurity, passion (which is lust, or inordinate affection), evil desire and greed which amounts to idolatry.
Of course we know these things eventually find their physical manifestations if not subdued, but they are all expressions of the condition of the heart.
Do these things exist in the church? Well, we would be naïve to think that they do not, wouldn’t we? And since the second list in verse 8 has to do with actions and attitudes toward others, we would in all honesty have to agree that those things absolutely exist in the church since we’ve witnessed them and occasionally been guilty of them, and if they do then so do the heart conditions of verse 5.
This is going to sound like a sidebar, but I’d like to just share a couple of thoughts with you about the present weakness of the church in our society.
There are probably a lot of other illnesses that could be named and I am not proposing that these are the only problems, but they apply in one way and then another to these verses of our study, so I offer only these thoughts to you today.
First, there is, I believe, a great deal of carnality in the church. I believe that there are very many people coming into the church in these past few decades who are not being taught or encouraged to let go – put off – the fleshly behavior and desires that marked them as an unbeliever.
This teaching of mortifying the flesh and reckoning our members to be dead to the deeds of the flesh is not popular because of the fear of offending people and losing them.
Now I’m not saying that this sort of neglect goes on everywhere, but here is my second thought related to this portion of Colossians. I took a break and went to my computer and perused a sermon website because I was curious to know how other preachers were approaching these same verses of our text.
Think about it, look down quickly over verses 5 through 11 again, and listen to me.
I scanned just one web page with a list sermons on it, and went no further. Because with only a few exceptions, the sermon titles themselves, based on verses 5-11 of Colossians 3, indicated that the sermon themes covered pornography, dating, petting, being thankful (this was a “Thanksgiving” sermon), making New Year’s resolutions (Yes, this was a New Year’s sermon), controlling TV watching in the home, and then there were a few titles that indicated they were written by Shallow Hal himself; one was about the proper spiritual attire to wear to church.
Folks, if people aren’t being fed anything but dry bread and bitter herbs why would anyone expect them to keep listening, much less absorb the true content of the text?
How do we get off track lecturing the young people about dating from a passage of scripture that calls those very same young Christians to live a lifestyle that characterizes the one who has died to sin and been raised to new life? If they catch that, won’t that pretty much take care of the dating and petting questions?
Ok, enough of that, if I haven’t made a point I’m not going to so let’s go back to the text.
BEING RENEWED
One more look in Romans, go to chapter 12 verses 1-2
“Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. 2 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.”
The last thing I’d like for us to look at today is this statement of Paul’s in verse 10, about our new self “…who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him…”
Again here, two things. First, observe that in this passage Paul is admonishing his readers to mortify the flesh, reckon themselves dead to the deeds and desires of the flesh, then here to put off the old man and put on the new – so it is undeniable that we as born again believers have a responsibility in this sanctification process. There is duty. There is accountability.
Since God has made you new, act new. C.H. MacKintosh wrote:
“What claim has sin upon a dead man? None! Well, then, God looks upon the believer as dead - dead with Christ, and risen again; and his power to deny the working of sin consists in his reckoning himself to be what God tells him he is.”
Secondly, the wording suggests that there is something God is continuing to do also. You are being renewed. In Romans 12 he says to ‘be transformed by the renewing of your mind’.
Notice he didn’t say ‘transform yourselves’. It is the Holy Spirit who is transforming you. Your transformation is a spiritual work and must be accomplished by the Spirit of Christ. The ‘renewal of your mind’ part is a combined effort in the process of transforming you.
So this is where I was going with it. Here is another instance in which we see both the assurance that God is continuing to do His spiritual work in the believer, and at the same time we hear the call to cooperate with the process and ‘partner’, so to speak, with the Spirit.
Isn’t it amazing that God would call us to life, bless us with the riches of Heaven and everlasting life, promise that His ultimate and irresistible purpose is to make us over into the image of His Son, and actually give us the privilege of working with Him in the process?
You may remember the television commercial from a few years ago; I haven’t seen it for a long time but the kids still say it every time we coat our chicken in Shake-n-Bake. The little girl greets her dad as he enters the kitchen and proudly announces, “We made Shake-n-Bake an’ ah halped!”
Well, it’s sort of like that. We know the little girl did very little and had to be supervised in what part she played. We know that He is the vine and we the branches and that apart from Him we can do nothing…
…but He privileges us with the invitation to daily remember whose we are and dutifully put down the flesh and put away the old life while He does the larger work of transforming us into the image of Jesus.
Why would anyone cling to a lesser gospel? Why would anyone pass up this wonderful truth to pedal a gospel of earthly, fleshly comfort?
This last and vital thing and then I’m done. Once again the Apostle finishes his admonition by bringing it all back to the main purpose, the main goal of it all.
Verse 11 basically says, it’s not about you, it’s not about us, there are no distinctions between us at the foot of the cross, but this renewal you are undergoing is ultimately to demonstrate that Christ gets all the glory.
Christ is all and in all.
Be reminded of what was said back in chapter 1
“And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, 22 yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach—“
Why was this done? Why did He give Himself? Why did He reconcile us? So He might present us before the Father holy and blameless; because in the unending eternity for which we were prepared we will be the living demonstration of the irresistible, unfathomable love of God, for His alone is the glory.
"The love I bear Christ is but a faint and feeble spark, but it is an emanation from himself: He kindled it and he keeps it alive; and because it is his work, I trust many waters shall not quench it." - John Newton
