If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.
2 Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.
3 For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.
4 When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory.
5 Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry:
6 For which things’ sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience:
7 In the which ye also walked some time, when ye lived in them.
8 But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth.
9 Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds;
10 And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him:
Colossians 3:1-10
Let’s just bow in prayer. Heavenly Father, as we come before you this morning, we thank you for the opportunity that we have to look in your Word. Lord, we thank you so much for the promises that you have given to us.
We thank you for the fact that you have transformed our character and our life by the blood of Jesus in the power of your Spirit. Lord, I pray that you would help us to walk in your Spirit in obedience to your Word, conforming ourselves to the image of the one who redeemed us. And Lord, that you would help us to acknowledge him and seek to be used by him every day.
This we ask in Jesus’ name, Amen.
As we’ve been looking at the book of Colossians, the Apostle Paul began the book by reminding the church at Colossae and the Christians there of what it meant to be a Christian, the position in Christ, and all that Jesus had done for us. Then he began to come with a period of just warnings of false teachers that were already coming into the church in the first century of the church, during the lives of John and Paul and James and Jude, all of whom in the Scriptures write warning us of false teachers that would come in trying to undermine and destroy our faith, trying to get us to take our eyes off of Jesus, trying to get us to do that which would please the world and not that which would please God.
It’s sad to say much of Christianity today, if you look at it, has lost its power because we’ve taken our eyes off of Christ. And we’ve sought to appease the world instead of seeking to please God. It’s interesting how the world infiltrated the church and the church didn’t realize what was happening to it.
I remember when I was in biology class in high school, one day our teacher came and he’d gotten there late and we were supposed to be dissecting frogs that day. And so consequently, he asked some of us boys if we want to help scramble brains on frogs. And so he gave us a little pointed tool and told us, stick it up here, pull it around and then stick it down the spine, fold it around.
And what will happen is it will enable the organs to continue to function while we dissect the frogs so you can see them functioning. But the frog isn’t in essence going to be dead. Well, some of us weren’t so good at our thing.
And I happened to be one that missed the mark and I got the frog. And we were in groups of four. And so they had three of us, three of my group were girls and I was the only guy.
And so consequently, I got to do a lot of the cutting and a lot of the other stuff. As I began to dissect my frog, my frog all of a sudden became alert and tried to hop away. And to the terror of my classmates, what I wanted you to understand, I thought that I’d done it right, but the frog was still alive.
A lot of people in the church today think they’re doing it right, but the world is still alive. In the church. And it’s there trying to be used by Satan to destroy God’s precious bride.
Paul is writing here in Colossians and we talk about the various, some of the various things that come into the church that Paul is talking about. Mysticism, talking about legalism, talking about asceticism. Various things where people would replace those things and use them as the way that they would get to God instead of Jesus.
He now comes in this verse here to drive home the point, there’s a difference in you. If you’re a believer in Jesus Christ this morning, when you were purchased by the blood of Jesus, when you gave your heart to the Lord, when you accepted Christ as your Savior, and I want you to remember back to that day. And sometimes people say, well, I can’t name the day or the hour or the minute.
You know something, sometimes I think if you look back, you can see how God began to work in your life and transform your character. And all of a sudden there was that time where you said, yes, I want to walk with Jesus. But as you look back in your life and remember when you were transformed in your thinking, in your character, and you didn’t want to do the things that the world was doing any longer.
Maybe you’d been drinking or maybe you had been harboring anger and had a real issue with it. Maybe you’ve been doing some of the things that Paul lists here, but God had delivered you from them and you were a new creature. But all of a sudden Satan wants to come in and as Paul said, there are schemes and wiles of the devil.
There are philosophies of this world and its leaders and those of this world to try and undermine the faith. So how do we prevent our faith from being undermined? We need to allow our old nature to be put to death with Christ at the cross and understand what that means on a daily basis. Just like I hadn’t killed that frog, we created some real problems for our class.
If we don’t deal with daily taking our old nature and our sin and confessing it before God, so that as John tells us, He can be faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, we can begin to allow the world to creep in to undermine and try to destroy our effectiveness as a Christian. So what do we do to prevent that from happening? Well, Paul tells us, he begins in chapter 3 verse 20, he says, If then we are risen with Christ, seek those things which are above. Paul in the book of Romans chapter 6 talks about the radical identification with death, burial and resurrection of Christ that each one of us have.
Oftentimes I’ll speak on this when we’re having a baptismal service. And when you became a Christian, it’s when you go through the waters of baptism, what it’s doing is it’s showing that you’re identifying with the death of Christ. That you identify that He died for your sins and as He died for your sins, your sins were dead with Him.
No longer do they have the same power over you that they once did. They only can come in if you allow them in. But if you seek for God to help you, He will give you the power to overcome.
And so Paul tells us the thing that we need to do is identify with the burial and death of Christ, but also His resurrection. In chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul talks about that as he gives a brief outline of what the gospel is. In 1 Corinthians chapter 15, where he says that the gospel is this.
Jesus died according to the scriptures. He was buried according to the scriptures. He rose again according to the scriptures.
That is the gospel in three sentences. Christ dying for our sins, Christ being buried, and Christ rising again from the dead, gaining victory over sin and death. That we could have that same victory.
Jesus didn’t save us to fail. And Jesus didn’t save us not to be a witness for Him. And Jesus didn’t save us merely to escape the fires of hell.
But He saved us and redeemed us to be transformed that you and I could be what God intended us to be. A person to bring glory to His name. Someone that could be used by Him.
And someone who would be reflective of His character. You and I, when we experience salvation that is found in the new Adam, have the great privilege of being able to be brought back into the relationship with God that enables us to be overseers, if you would, of God’s creation in the sense that you and I are the ones that can show that this is God’s creation. And you and I are the ones that can reveal to mankind the truth about why man was created, why God desired to give us the ability to choose.
And when we chose wrong, God redeemed us because He loved us in spite of ourselves. So, Paul tells us, if you’ve been risen with Christ, which you are, if you’re a believer in Jesus, you’ve been risen with Jesus. What does that mean? Seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God.
What is the motivating factor of our lives? What is the thing that we desire more than anything else? And I’m not to say that there’s things that are wrong because you enjoy them, but what is your desire? What motivates you? We just came off of a football season and a lot of people are so enamored and caught up in the football, forget about Christ, even as Christians. And those that aren’t Christians, they don’t really have any desire. We’re coming into March Madness with basketball.
Mark Cahill just wrote an interesting little article in one of his, puts out a little article every week and posts it online. It was called Men with Balls, and it’s talking about basketball, football, baseball. And he’s saying that in that article, he talked about that when you’re a young child, when you’re like three or four years old, and daddy brings home a ball, he throws the ball and the child rolls the ball back and everybody claps.
But all of a sudden now we’ve got men that are 25 and 30 years old playing with balls, getting paid millions of dollars, and stadiums are filled so that we can clap and cheer for our team. But many of those people have no time for Jesus. It’s cute when it’s a three-year-old, but it’s disturbing and that becomes the main focus of adult’s life.
And if you ever watch some of the teams, people do the strangest things for their team. They’ll paint themselves the color of their team. They’ll dress up all kinds of strange ways to make fools of themselves for their teams.
But how many of us are afraid to talk to somebody about Jesus because it might make a fool of us in the eyes of that person? Why are people so willing to really be fools for something that is so irrelevant in the whole scope of life, but that which is so significant that God redeemed us, that we can be part of this process of sharing the gospel and of seeing people redeemed through the power of the gospel? We’re afraid to do it. I believe part of it is our focus. Paul says, focus on the things above, not the things believed.
When I find myself and I’m preaching, I’m not preaching to you, I preach to me. When I find myself the most ineffective and when things start to go wrong and when I have problems with my temper, which I can have, and when I have other issues in my life, what is it? I’ve taken my eyes off above and I’ve started to place them on the earth. And I begin to sometimes feel sorry for myself because, well, look at what I’ve got compared to somebody else.
You know what that’s called? That’s called envy. That’s something from this below. That’s not from above.
And there’s other things that can happen to me, where I get angry and it’s not righteous indignation. I’m angry because I feel I’ve been wronged. That’s from below, it’s not from above.
And when those things start happening in my life, that’s when I begin to struggle. So what do we do to keep our eyes on that which is above? Paul tells us, set your affection on things above, not on things of this earth. Our affection, our affection.
We just had some marriages in our fellowship, people setting their affections on each other. We are married, and some of you, my wife and I have been married a long time. Some of you seem time, some of you shorter time, some of you very short time.
You know what happens when you quit setting your affections on each other? Confrontation begins to happen and people start to drift apart. What’s the cause of marriages being broken up? Number one cause is lack of affection on things above. Second thing is a lack of affection one to another.
And if you don’t have affection to one to another, you’re growing further and further apart. Same thing with God. If we don’t show God the love that is in Him and that we’ve experienced in the past in our lives, when we got redeemed, what a joy it was to be saved.
A number of years ago, I had a study with my future son-in-law in a book that was called Finishing Strong. And the whole point of this book was not only how do you live your life, but how do you finish your life? And are you going to finish strong? On Sunday afternoons and Wednesday nights, we’ve been looking at the kings of Israel. And it’s amazing, none of the kings of the northern, when the kingdom split in Israel, none of the kings of the northern tribe followed God.
None of them. The closest that came was Jehu, but he even didn’t do the will of God. In the southern kingdom of Judah, where the throne of David remained, you had more of the kings that were good kings, and they followed the Lord at varying degrees.
But the amazing thing is, just about every good king of Judah started out worshiping God, tearing down idols, tearing down high places, but they didn’t finish strong. They allowed the world to creep in. And usually it came through pride.
The same sin that Satan had. Think of Uzziah. Uzziah, a young man who had a wonderful teacher.
He was abandoned by his own grandmother. Well, she was going to try and kill him, but he was stolen away by her daughter and her son-in-law, who was the priest. And her daughter was a believer in the Lord.
But Uzziah was raised by this godly man. But Uzziah, when he got to be older, he had been very good as a young man, tore down idols, done some things that he should have done. But it came to the end of his life, and he wanted to be priest and king.
And what Uzziah did, is he went in to offer incense to the Lord. He didn’t have the right to do that. That was the priest’s job.
And it was certain orders of priests’ job. And when Uzziah went in, they tried to stop him. But he wouldn’t listen.
I’m going to do it my way. And he went in, and God smote him with leprosy. And the man who started out good, ended up outside the camp.
He couldn’t even live in his own dwelling. He had to have a separate dwelling that was apart from those that he ruled. And his son began to rule in his stead, because he finished so bad.
You can look at others. We’re studying Hezekiah right now. One of the most godly kings.
One of the kings that is written about more than any other king in the Old Testament, other than David. You’ll find long passages on Hezekiah in 1 Kings, I mean in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles. You’ll find a long passage on Hezekiah in the book of Isaiah, dealing with his life.
He started out tremendous. He did more than any other king had done in destroying the wicked idolatry that had permeated Judah. Tore down high places.
Tore down idols. Burned idols. But before he even did any of that, he began to call the people to repentance.
Beginning with the spiritual leadership, and then all the way down to the people. And then as we talked about last Sunday, he went in and called all of Israel, even though most of the northern kingdom had already been taken captive by the Assyrians. There were still Jewish people in the northern kingdom.
He called them, as well as all that were in the southern kingdom of Judah, to come to Israel for Passover. And been doing since Solomon’s time. He did all these wonderful things.
But at the end of his life, pride filled his heart. And the Babylonians came and said, Oh, let me show you all of the things that I have done and all the things that I have got. How do we finish? What was the mistake Hezekiah made? He began to think that somehow he had more to do with the possessions he had than he really did.
God was the one. God slew the 184,000 Assyrian soldiers, not Hezekiah or his armies. God told Hezekiah, I will protect Jerusalem.
I will be there for you. Yet, Hezekiah began to think, well, you know, I’m pretty important. Look at all these things that I’ve got.
Paul tells us to keep our eyes focused on the things above, not the things below. Don’t allow the things of this world to have so much of your attention that that becomes your source of love instead of Jesus Christ. He says, set our affection on the things above and not on the things of the earth.
For ye are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God. He said, Paul is telling us this is the thing that you need to understand about being a Christian. You are literally dead to this world, but you’re alive in Jesus.
There was a sermon given a while ago that I had heard and was talking. The sermon was walking dead men. And if you look outside today and when you leave here, you will meet a lot of walking dead men.
They have physical life, but they have no spiritual relationship with God. And unless that changes, they will be eternally damned.
As Christians, we were in that state before we came to Christ. We were literally walking dead men and women. And then we were saved in Jesus.
And a transformation occurred. And the transformation was that now you should be dead to the world and you’re alive in Christ. You are now a new creature in Jesus.
That’s what the Bible tells us. And being a new creature in Christ, you have different values, different discernment, different understanding. You have a different perspective.
And we need to put it all into action. We had a service here, a funeral service, and we had an open casket at the front of the church. There’d be a body, and I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a funeral where there’s an open casket and people walk by and go, oh, he looks so wonderful.
He looks so great. I’m going, no, he’s dead. There’s no life in him.
You could take a needle and punch it in as far as you wanted. You’d get no response. What Paul is saying, that should be our reaction to the things of the world.
When temptation comes, we’re to look upward. And we’re not to be drawn into it. When Satan would come and try to destroy our faith, we’re to look upward.
And allow him to undermine what God is doing in our hearts and lives. We should be dead to those things. Because we’re alive in Jesus.
Just as the world is walking dead men, and you go out there, and unless they know Jesus, and unless they accept the gift of salvation that’s found in Christ, unless God’s Spirit begins to move in their hearts, they don’t want anything to do with God. Because they’re dead to God. You’re alive to the things of God.
And so we should look upward and realize where our life is. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory. What’s your hope of salvation? You know, Apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians because they thought the Lord had already come.
They’d missed it. And Paul wrote to them about Christ and his coming. And he talked to them about the importance of looking for that day.
When in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, they tried to measure the twinkling of an eye, it’s a nanosecond, it’s so small you can’t even, almost beyond measurement. And that’s how quickly that Paul says this transformation is going to occur, that you who once are inhabiting this body of clay will all of a sudden be transformed and given a new body and raptured to be a boy. Paul writes to Titus about where his hope is.
His hope is in Jesus. Now I want you to stop and think about Paul telling this to Titus. Paul writing this to the Church of Thessalonica.
Paul writing this here. I showed it to you before. Last Sunday I think I even showed it to you about Paul’s history.
Paul was on the road to probably becoming one of the head rabbis and one of the chief holders of seats of power in the Sanhedrin. He was being trained by one of the best two rabbis in Israel. He had the pedigree.
He had the intelligence. He’d done the studying. And he calls it all, everything that he would have attained in this world, according to all of that, he calls it done or miner.
It’s not good for anything but to be trampled on. He said, Christ is what’s significant. And Paul gave his whole life looking up.
Not looking back, not looking sideways, and not looking down. But looking up to Jesus. And when people would come and try to discourage him, dissuade him, try to tell him that he was speaking lies, not the truth, was Paul overcome by their harassment? No, he looked up to the point that he gave more of himself that’s recorded in Scripture than almost any of the other apostles.
You don’t have, I mean, they did, they did as well, but Paul was amazing. You know, if you go to speak to Orthodox Jews, the one person outside of Jesus that they can’t handle at all is Paul. Part of the problem is Paul with them.
And Paul was transformed. And Paul never looked back. We’re never to look back, we’re always to look up.
Because when you look back, what happens is you can fall back into that which God delivered you from. So Paul tells us in verse 5, I’m running out of time, but in verse 5 Paul tells us, Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth. That is strong language.
That’s not easy language. Paul is saying put to death. He’s not talking about physical death.
He’s talking about your old spiritual nature. You’re to set it aside. It’s to be treated as dead.
You’re not to allow it to rise up and tempt you and yield to those temptations. There’s a hymn that I wish was in this hymn book. It’s in the other hymn book.
It’s called, Yield not to temptation for yielding is sin. It doesn’t say that we’re never going to be tempted. But it’s our attitude towards temptation and it’s our attitude towards the world that will impact our walk with Jesus.
Paul is saying mortify, put to death. Treat the things of this world that used to ensnare you, enslave you, and draw you to them. Be dead to them.
If you used to indulge in alcohol, turn from it and have nothing to do with it. Be dead to it. If whatever it is that would keep you from Jesus, that’s of this world, be dead to it.
That’s what’s so confusing to me about many Christians today because it’s like they want to see how close they can get to the world and still be apart from it. I remember talking to a man a number of years ago and he was going to be holding evangelistic services in our community. His boss was, he was the front man.
And he came and spoke to the evangelical pastors group and he presented the gospel. The purpose of these evangelistic services was to people would feel the unthreatening, they wouldn’t come to church with you, but they might come to hear the speaker and the gospel would be presented and they could get saved. It sounds pretty good.
But the next week he met with the liberal ministerium group in town. And two young men from our church and myself went to that meeting too because I wanted to hear what he had to say. You know, his whole message changed.
Then he said, I know that some of you have a problem with the message that we present because it’s not the message that you think is biblical. But we just want to tell you that we’re not here to take anybody out of your church. We’re here to help them become better members of your church.
You know, most of you have extremely large churches and very poor attendance. We want them to come back. We want them to start giving.
We want them to be involved. There’s nothing about the gospel. It’s all about works and getting these people back into the work motion.
And I’m looking around and the questions that were raised were questions against the gospel. That night I called the guy and I asked him, I said, what went on today? I’m confused. What’s your purpose in coming? I thought it was to present the gospel.
But I’m looking around this room today and I don’t know the hearts of these men because I don’t know their hearts, but I’m listening to what they say. And I know the theological positions they’ve identified with. And I said, probably most of them in there need to know Jesus is their Savior too.
And yet there was no gospel presented. Nobody told me. You view that I’ve crossed the line of compromise.
I view that I want to snuggle up right next to it but never cross it. And I’m going, this is what Paul’s talking about, passions. You as a Christian are not to compromise your faith.
You’re not to sit there and look and see how close can I get to the world and still be okay with Jesus. But we’re to keep our eyes above and walk with the Lord and His power. That’d be like Adam in the Garden of Eden.
When he hid with Eve, and the Lord knew exactly where he was, but He said, Adam, where are you? Why was he hiding? Because he knew he had violated a trust and violated the Word of God and violated the truth of the Lord. And there was no way for him to snuggle up alongside and say, I’m just compromising a little bit. I only took one bite out of the fruit.
I only did one little thing. Paul was telling us, you want to walk in the power of Jesus, walk in the power of Jesus, mortify yourself to the world. Mortify yourself to the things of the world.
When God’s Spirit convicts you, and everyone in here is going to sin, if you were to hold to a theology that you become sinless when you become a Christian, that’s not biblical either. So remind us that when we become a Christian, we will fail. But it’s what we do at that moment of failure.
When we sin, what do we do? Do we want to dive deeper into the sin? Because we’ve got remembrances of what it was like before, and oh, I want to go back to that. Or are you convicted by God’s Spirit, which He does, and you confess it, and you turn from the sin. And you say, Lord, give me victory over this.
And help me to walk daily by side you. And may I walk in your Spirit, and may I look above, not below. I want to stop here.
We’ll be looking a little bit more into this next Sunday morning. But it’s really one of the most important things that Christians need to understand. How do we live our Christian life? How are we so we’re not deceived by vain philosophies of men, we’re not overcome by a world system that’s in opposition to God? And how do we become victorious for the Lord? You do not look down.
You do not look back. But you look up, and walk with Jesus. Let’s just close in prayer.
Lord, I pray that you would just help us to understand these truths. Lord, I pray that you would help us to apply these truths to our lives. Help us to see what it truly means to mortify ourselves to sin in this world.
Lord, may we walk in your Spirit, by your power, through your grace, to experience your work in our life. I ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen