First Presbyterian Church
Wichita Falls, Texas
March 20, 2011
BAD BEHAVIORS THAT ALWAYS BETRAY YOU
The ABCs of Spring Cleaning: Part 2
Isaac Butterworth
Colossians 3:1-17 (NIV)
1 Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3 For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
5 Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. 6 Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. 7 You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. 8 But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. 9 Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. 11 Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.
12 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13 Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
15 Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
The first church I ever served as pastor was a hundred-member congregation in a small central-Texas town. My predecessor, whom I never met, was reportedly very hard on sin. He preached against it with fervent intensity, and, apparently, he viewed many things as sinful that you and I might regard as innocent: things like reading slick-covered magazines, going to movies on Sunday, dancing, or playing cards. These were things of which he disapproved, and he told the people not to do them. Whether they followed his counsel or not, I don’t know.
You might give a name to this approach and call it something like ‘rules-based Christianity.’ Some people call it legalism, a form of religion that requires strict adherence to certain standards of conduct. Those who practice it are often seen as judgmental toward those who do not comply. And despite the fact that the Apostle Paul and other New Testament writers contend against it, it is not uncommon among Christians.
Jesus encountered legalism among the Pharisees. He called them ‘whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones’ (Matthew 23:27). Paul asked the Colossian Christians, ‘Why...do you submit to...the rules [of this world]: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”’ ‘Such regulations,’ he said, ‘have an appearance of wisdom..., but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence’ (Col. 2:20-23).
And that’s the point. The Christian life is an inside job. You can’t restrain ‘sensual indulgence’ by imposing rules. If there is no change within, you can dress up the outside all you want; it won’t make any lasting difference. I heard an old preacher say one time, ‘You can scrub a pig till he glistens and tie a pretty bow around his neck. But let him go, and he’ll be right back in the mud. It’s his nature.’
So, it’s our nature that has to change. It’s the heart that has to be converted. Look again at the passage we read from Ezekiel today, and you’ll see this. When God wanted to restore his people Israel, he focused not on their outward behavior but on their inner status. ‘I will give them an undivided heart,’ he said, ‘and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws’ (Ezek. 11:19f.).
It’s not that God no longer cares about our keeping his laws; he does! It’s not that he no longer concerns himself with what Paul calls ‘sensual indulgence;’ he does. It’s that ‘restraining sensual indulgence’ and carefully keeping God’s laws cannot be established on a foundation of external rules. Jan and I have friends who train their dogs to be disciplined. They can tell them to go to their room, and they will hustle to do so. But they lie in the doorway with their paws just over the line into the outer room. They comply with the demand, but their hearts aren’t in it.
God doesn’t call us to external conformity but to inward transformation. It’s a matter of cause and effect. What effect is God looking for in us? When we know the answer to that question, we’ll know the cause that leads to that effect. So, Paul starts Colossians, chapter 3, with a statement of cause: ‘Since you have been raised with Christ....’ Now, if having been raised with Christ is the cause, what is the effect? It is this: You will ‘set your hearts on things above, where Christ is....’
If you have not been raised with Christ -- in other words, if you are still ‘dead in your transgressions and sins,’ as Paul puts it elsewhere (Eph. 2:1) -- you can clean up the outside all you want, but the inside remains unchanged. Jesus once said, ‘First clean the inside of the cup..., and then the outside also will be clean’ (Matt. 23:26).
But now here is an inescapable reality. Even if you have been given a new heart by God -- even if he has removed the heart of stone and given you a heart of flesh, as he puts it in Ezekiel -- you still struggle with sin. ‘You died,’ Paul says in verse 3, by which he means ‘you died to sin,’ and ‘your life is now hidden with Christ in God.’ But still, you wrestle with old temptations...and new ones! Why is this?
Paul explains it here in Colossians 3. He takes you into the soul’s closet, so to speak, that place where you decide each and every day what your spiritual attire will be. While you have a new nature, what he calls here in verse 10 a ‘new self,’ you also still have the old nature, what he refers to in verse 9 as the ‘old self.’ And these two are at war with each other. In fact, Paul says in Galatians 5:17, ‘The sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other.’
So, what are you going to do? If you let the ‘old self,’ or your ‘earthly nature,’ choose your wardrobe, the effects you’ll see in your life are pretty grim. You might might find yourself trapped in sins of the flesh, some of which Paul identifies here when he talks about ‘sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry’ (v. 5). Or, you might find yourself involved in sins of the spirit, things like ‘anger, rage, malice, slander,’ and so forth.
It’s sort of like wearing a certain uniform or even a type of armor. You dress for the occasion. And so, Paul says, ‘As God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience’ (v. 12). Elsewhere, he says, ‘You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self...and to put on the new self’ (Eph. 4:22, 24). And, in Romans, he strikes the same theme: ‘Let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.... Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ’ (Romans 13:12, 14).
What Paul is saying is: the old clothes no longer fit! Why dress like the dead when you belong to the living? You see this really clearly when you put two verses in Colossians side by side. These two verses are in two different chapters, but they belong together because they begin two successive paragraphs. One is Colossians, chapter 2, verse 20, and the other is Colossians, chapter 3, verse 1. They are separated by only three other verses. Let me read them without the intervening verses:
‘Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules?’ That’s Colossians 2:20. Now Colossians 3:1: ‘Since...you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is....’
Do you see the symmetry? ‘Since you died with Christ.... Since...you have been raised with Christ....’ In other words, since you’re dead to this world and its values and since you’re alive to Christ, dress like it! Act like it! Yes, you have an ‘old self,’ an ‘earthly nature.’ But you also have a ‘new self;’ ‘your life is now hidden with Christ in God.’ God has given you ‘an undivided heart and put a new spirit in [you]; he has removed from you your ‘heart of stone and [given you] a heart of flesh’ (Ezek. 11:19). Now you can ‘follow [God’s] decrees and be careful to keep [his] laws,’ not because they’re imposed on you from the outside but because now your new nature is consistent with them! They fit! In fact, you’re underdressed if you’re not clothed in the righteousness of Christ!
But what do you do with the ‘earthly nature’? What do you do with your ‘old self’? You ‘put to death’ whatever belongs to it! Isn’t that what Paul says in verse 5? ‘Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature.’
If what the people told me is true about the pastor before me in my first church, I would have to say that, as sincere as he was, his approach was ineffective. We don’t just give up bad behaviors; we put to death the old self. Now, granted, the old self takes a long time to die! The truth is, it won’t die until we do. Our old nature is a lot like nut grass. So deeply is it imbedded in us and spread out so extensively in our lives that it will take many attempts over time to pull it out, and it is so powerful that we must rely on God for the strength and will yet again and again to attack the root of it.
Paul says as much in Romans 8:13. He writes, ‘If you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.’ The ‘sinful nature’ is what Paul elsewhere calls the ‘flesh.’ By ‘flesh’ he does not mean our physical body, although the body is the theater for a good deal of the activity of the flesh. What Paul means by the ‘sinful nature’ or ‘flesh’ is a spiritual principle within us that is corrupt -- that is, it is ruptured; it is broken -- and, therefore, it is opposed to God. If we indulge this brokenness -- if we live out of its dysfunction -- we will die. But, Paul says, ‘if by the Spirit’ -- and note those words, ‘by the Spirit’ -- ‘if by the Spirit [we] put to death the misdeeds of the body, [we] will live.’
It is our duty to do this, but it is God’s power that will accomplish it. If you and I were sent into battle with no understanding of the conflict, with no map, no weapons, and no allies, we would likely perish. It is a chilling thought. But the truth is: Each and every day life thrusts us into a battle in which our soul is engaged. We need to know whose side we’re on, we need to wear the uniform that identifies us with Christ -- that is, ‘the armor of light’ -- and we need to be armed for conflict. Paul says in 2 Corinthians, chapter 10, ‘The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world’ -- no surprise there, huh? ‘On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ’ (vv. 4f.).
My friends, if ever you and I look again upon reading our Bibles and praying as nice, religious practices but not essential to our survival, let’s look again. Time with God is not ‘quiet time;’ it is time practice field. And if you don’t ready yourself for battle daily, you will sleepily reach into your closet, and your ‘old self’ will pick out the clothes you will wear that day. And you will step on the battlefield with the dark clouds of defeat looming over you. Don’t let this happen to you! ‘Put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.... Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ.’ ‘You have died with Christ, [and] you have been raised with Christ.’ Live like it!
