An Illinois Pastor writes:  “A friend found his woodland home overrun with mice – too many to exterminate with traps.  He bought a few boxes of D-Con and placed them around the house, including one under his bed. 

       That night he couldn’t believe his ears.  Below him was a rodent feeding frenzy.  In the morning he found the boxes licked clean.  He used a second dose.  Again, the mice went for the flavored poison like piranha.  In the days that followed, all was quiet.

       Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s good for you.  It can be deadly.  So today we are talking about avoiding poison.

       In Colossians 1 and 2, Paul talks about what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.  We have died and have been raised with Jesus.  The result, as Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, is that we are now a “new creation.”

       We are new people in Christ.

       But that doesn’t mean that we always act like new people.  For there are thoughts, there are feelings; there are attitudes and habits which point to a very different and defeating reality.  We seem to lack power to really change. We are discouraged by our human nature.  So we believe in Christ’s victory, but we don’t feel  victorious.  We know ourselves too well for that. 

       Well the good news if that we are not alone.  Believers have always faced a gap between their identity in Christ and their performance in the world.  For example, the Heidelberg Catechism comes from 1563.  And question 60 asks: “How are you righteous before God?”  The response is the Catechism is “Only by true faith in Jesus Christ.  In spite of the fact that my conscience accuses me that I have grievously sinned against all the commandments of God, and have not kept any one of them, and that I am still ever prone to all that is evil…”

       Does that sound like the voice of your conscience four and a half centuries later?  It sure sounds like mine.

       Believers have always faced this issue.  The believers in Colossae were no different.   So, in chapter 3: 5-10, Paul tells them and us that there is another step we need to take now that Jesus has made us a new creation.  That step is to be what we are.  And it begins with putting to death parts of our lives that are still controlled by the old way of doing things.

       Listen to God’s word from Colossians 3: 5-10.  Today we will focus on verses 5-7. We will look at verses 8-10 at a later time.  Listen to God’s word.

Colossians 3: 5-10

       An old revival preacher used to tell people: “The point isn’t how high you jump when you get religion.  The point is how straight you walk once you hit the ground.” 

       Paul agrees.  In Paul’s letters, the theology about what God has done is always followed by application – the practical consequences of what God has done for our daily lives and relationships.    

         Last Sunday we saw how we are “seek the things that are above.”  That’s Colossians 3: 1-4.  But now, Paul says that we can’t seek the right things unless we get rid of the wrong things.  So in verse 5 he says that we are to “put to death” certain things in our lives.

      Paul writes: “Put to death, therefore the parts of you which are of the world  immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and the covetousness which is idolatry.” 

       In this verse, Paul is saying that certain things can keep us from receiving God’s fullest for our lives.  So if we wish to follow God, we have to get these things out of our lives.  We must “put theses things to death.”

       The verb nekrōsate, literally means “put to death” or “execute.”  That’s very strong.  We aren’t simply to practice depravity management and try to control evil acts and attitudes.  We are to wipe them out.  We are to completely exterminate the old way of life. 

       Paul uses an imperative tense here.  We need to be urgent about this interior “search and destroy mission” or we may end up defeated in our desire for true discipleship. 

        But wait a minute!  If what Paul has said about us being new people in Christ is really true, then why is there anything left in us for us to kill off?  If you are new, shouldn’t you automatically act new?  Aren’t Paul’s words here a contradiction?    

       No.  It’s like what happened some years ago when I upgraded a computer.  I put in a new chip and a new motherboard.  It was therefore a new machine with a new operative center.

        The problem was that it took a while for the peripherals – the mouse, the printer, and the keyboard to get the message of newness and to agree to work in the new system.  It took a lot of effort.  Ultimately, some of the peripherals had to go altogether.

        It’s the same with us and what Paul calls “the part of us that are of the world.”  These “peripherals” either need to get in line with the new operating system – the Holy Spirit in our lives – or they need to go.

       Now the first things on the list in verse 5 are sexual.  Sexual immorality translates porneia from which we get the word pornography “to write about porneia.”   This is the most general Greek word for illicit sexual intercourse.  It includes adultery or extra-marital sex and fornication or pre-marital sex. 

       The next word, “impurity”, is the Greek akatharsia. This means uncleanness in ideas and words. It’s our thought life.  To these Paul adds passion and evil desire or lust.

       I do not know why Paul focuses first of all on these sexual sins.  I means, he could easily have chosen other sins like greed or envy.  In fact, he talks about these things in verses 8-10. 

       But Paul starts with sex.  This may be because sexual sins are visible and the damage in this area is very evident.  Twisted sexuality was the obvious, stinking cesspool of corruption in the Roman Empire of Paul’s day.  It was something his Colossian readers could clearly understand. 

       In any case, it’s a good place to start.  For you may not get Victoria’s Secret.  But if you get a right handle on sexuality in actions and in attitudes, you will know a key to victorious Christian living – what I call victorious secret.  I know that’s bad but you won’t forget it.

       Sex is a wonderful gift from God.  It is much more than a physical appetite.  It is a spiritual expression where, the Bible tells us, a man and woman become one – not just physically but spiritually.  This kind of spiritual power requires the kind of spiritual commitment and responsibility we call marriage. 

       Our sexuality is one of God’s precious gifts.  But this basic, core drive is also one of the first things to go off kilter when we are living apart from God.  As C.S. Lewis observes, “Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse.”  Sexuality can control us if we do not submit it to the lordship of Christ. And if it controls us, it will ultimately destroy us.

       A Frenchman, J. Henri Fabre, devoted his entire life to the study of insects.  In one graphic account, he describes a bee-eating wasp, the Philanthus, who has killed a honeybee.  He writes, “If the bee is heavy with honey, the wasp squeezes its crop ‘so as to make her disgorge the delicious syrup, which she drinks by licking the tongue which her unfortunate victim, in her death-agony, sticks out of her mouth at full length…At the moment of some such horrible banquet, I have seen the wasp, with her prey, seized by the mantis: the bandit was rifled by another bandit.  And here is an awful detail:  while the Mantis held her transfixed under the points of the double saw and was already munching her belly, the wasp continued to lick the honey of her bee, unable to relinquish the delicious food even amid the terrors of death.”

        That’s what sexuality becomes to some people – something that rules them all the way to death. It’s the honey they are eating even as they are being swallowed alive. 

       The last thing on the list in verse 5 is the greed that, Paul says, is a form of idolatry.  Pleonexia is basically the desire to have more.  The Greeks defined it as the sinful desire for what belongs to others.  It has been described as ruthless self-seeking. 

        Pleonexia is, therefore, a sin with a very wide range.  If it is the desire for money, it leads to theft.  If it is the desire for prestige, it leads to evil ambition.  If it is the desire for power, it leads to sadistic tyranny.  If it is the desire for a person, it leads to sexual sin.

       Such desire, says Paul, is idolatry.  The essence of idolatry is the desire to get.  A person sets up an idol and worships it because he or she desires to get something from it.  And it is idolatry because if means that you want something so much that you are willing to disobey God to get it.  Anything you are willing to disobey God to possess has become your true God – no matter what you say on Sunday morning.

       Then, in verse 6, Paul writes that it is because of these things – the fornication, the impurity of thought, the lust and the greed that the wrath of God comes.

       Now, by wrath, Paul does not mean that God is like those guys who make obscene gestures or even pull guns on the freeway.  That kind of anger is the word thumos from which we get our words thermometer and thermal.  That is red-hot anger – the kind that sweeps over people when they lose control and punch someone in the nose.

       That is not the word Paul uses for the wrath of God.  The word is orge.  Orge is settled and controlled.  It is not explosive but reasoned and restrained.

       This whole idea of the wrath of God can be very hard for people who have only considered the “gentle Jesus meek and mild” and who have never met the Jesus who is the righteous judge.  Other’s meet the Jesus who is the righteous judge and don’t like Him for exactly that reason.

       British philosopher Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote in Why I Am Not a Christian:  “There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that he believed in Hell.  I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.  Christ certainly as depicted in the gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to his preaching.  You do not, for instance, find that attitude in Socrates.  You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him, and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation.”

       Well Socrates could afford to be “bland and urbane.”  Socrates wasn’t anybody’s savior.  To Socrates it did not really matter if people accepted his words or not. 

       But Jesus isn’t a sage, a philosopher, or a detached observer.  Jesus is the God who loves us.  Jesus’ words are not advice.  They are the urgent call of a father warning his children away from danger, of a mother searching for her children in an earthquake darkened house.  They are words that matter.  They are words of life.

       God cannot leave us in ignorant bliss because God knows that we need Him.  And because God loves us, He must set His face against anything and everything that separates us from Him.  That “setting of the face against” is what we call wrath. 

        God’s grace is not infinite.  In the words of R.C. Sproul, “God is infinite and God is gracious.  (So) we experience the grace of an infinite God.  But grace is not infinite.  God sets limits to His patience and forbearance.  He warns us over and over again that someday the ax will fall and His judgment will be poured out.”

       But note from Colossians 3:6 that Paul isn’t just talking about a future judgment.  He’s talking about a judgment that comes in the present tense.  In other words, God’s wrath is not just a future promise for some people.  It is a very present reality.

        Now does this mean that God hits people with lighting bolts?  Well He may.  But we also need to note from Romans 1, the verses Janet read, that God’s wrath does not always take the form of action – the famous lightening bolt from the sky.  God’s wrath can also take the form of inaction. 

       Romans 1 tells us that God can simply withdraw the gracious power of His lordship and allow other lordships and the flavored poisons served up by those lordships to have free rein.  He can “give people over” to the consequences of their own behavior.  And for many, as Paul points out in Romans, the D-con under the bed is sexual.

       That was certainly the experience of the Colossians.  Paul says in verse 7 that many of them once walked in a way that merited God’s wrath.  But they must do that no longer – because that is no longer who they are.

        Let me remind you of what Paul writes to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 he writes: “Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor passive homosexuals nor active homosexuals nor thieves for the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.  And such were some of you.  But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”

       Do you see the hope and the promise?  Some of the Corinthians were previously drunkards, adulterers – but they were cleansed, set apart, in the powerful name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the recreating spirit of God.   The same thing is true of the Colossians.  The same is true of us.

       God loves us just as we are.  Therefore, the church is to be the place where we can be open about whom we are and not be condemned.  But God loves us too much to leave us just as we are.  Therefore, the church must never accept and condone what Jesus intends to transform.

      I realize that putting to death parts of our lives which are of the world and overcoming temptation are very difficult.  Jacques Von Allman in his book Preaching and Congregation, states that preacher must “always preach out of a good, healthy sense of his own sinfulness,” and I am certainly doing that.  But with God’s help, it is possible to set our minds on the “things above” -- even though it is a process that takes our entire lives and is full of temporary setbacks.

       So before you leave here this morning, ask yourself, “What is it that makes me feel defeated or discouraged about myself and my relationships?”  Don’t generalize.  Be definite.  Ask God to expose to you what got you pinned down.  Then take these things one by one and pray, “Gracious Lord, thank you for showing me what keeps me from the victorious life.  I surrender it to you.  I claim Christ’s defeat of that on the cross.  I accept the same power that raised Him from the dead to be different.  Thank you for living your life in me.  I give you complete control to make me the person you want me to be.”

       That’s essential.  We must pray for God’s help in putting these things to death.  With God’s help, we are much stronger than they are.  Without God’s help we are their victims.  Without God’s help, if we move away from one sin we fall into the arms of another one that is waiting to catch us -- and often this second sin is the sin of pride for having avoided the first sin -- the pride that Jesus condemned in the Pharisees.  Without God, there’s just no winning.

       You will not do it easily.  Twisted sexuality, for example, won’t go down without a fight.  I have talked with too many people who struggle in this area to believe that it can be fixed by simply saying, “Shape up!”  Sexuality especially runs very, very deep.  It runs so deep and its claims are so strong that you will not do it all until you take God at His word and are determined to obey.  And you will not do it alone.  Come and talk.  There are loving people here who can help you.