Colossians chapter three. This is the fourth week of our series on your changing body. We look at not only how to grow as a church, but how to grow up. What maturity looks like. Colossians speaks of that in terms of the resurrection of Christ. Jesus is alive and the resurrection kills sin in the lives of his people. Colossians chapter 3, If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. Therefore, put to death your members which are on the earth, fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. Because of these things, the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience, in which you also once walked when you lived in them. But now you must put off all these, anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth. Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old man with his deeds and have put on the new man, who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of him who created him. Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and in all. Let's pray. Father, write the truth of resurrection on our hearts this morning. You turned our grief to dancing. You set us free from sackcloth. You delivered us from the gates of death because you have done all of these things for your son and united us to him in his resurrection. Father, help us then to undergo a death like his, to consider ourselves as dead to the 10 sins listed here and as alive in the new Adam who is renewed in knowledge after the image of the Creator. Father, help us to grow up, to be the church You're calling us to be, the resurrection people You're calling us to be. We pray these things in the name of Your beloved Son. Amen. Because the Son of God is alive, we are here this morning, and we're not at the coffee shop. the movie theater, the gun range, or our other favorite haunts. Jesus lives, and that's what gathers us to come and sit in a room and sing praise to him and hear about him. Because Jesus is alive, we need to apply his resurrection to our life. We need to let his life drive out the things that bring death. Jesus lives and he tells us to be rid of things that kill, sins that bring death to us. Paul tells us, first of all, that you have been resurrected with Christ. At least that's how I phrased it on the outline. Paul, with greater wisdom, makes it conditional. He says, if you were raised with Christ. First question you should ask yourself on Easter morning is not, did Jesus rise from the dead? He did. There is no doubt, no possible legitimate doubt about that. Matthew tells us how the guards were bribed to say, we fell asleep on duty. Typically, as I understand it, the penalty for falling asleep on duty is death. And these guys are going to be walking around Jerusalem saying, yeah, we fell asleep on duty and the disciples came and took the body because they had this big plot. Chief priests must have given them quite a little bit of money. Anyway, Jesus is alive. We don't ask, is Jesus alive? We ask, am I alive with Jesus? If you have been raised with Christ, says Paul. And then he tells us in the next part of the chapter, in the rest of the chapter, what you look like if you've been raised with Christ. What you do if you've been raised with Christ. If you were raised with Christ, Colossians 3 describes you. And if you haven't been raised with Christ, then this passage sounds a bit foreign. As you say, put off anger, wrath? No. I have a lot of things I ought to be angry about. Put off covetousness? No. I really want that new toy. And I'm not going to stop wanting it just because some ancient text tells me to. If you recognize yourself in Colossians 3, you can say, yes, I've been raised with Christ. And if that's you, if you have been raised with Christ, then you should live the resurrection life. by doing the things described here. The first of those things is to set your mind on things above. Well, to seek the things which are above, to set your mind on those things. To seek something, of course, means to look for it. Paul doesn't mean we walk around saying, where's heaven? Where are things above? I can't find them. Where are they? How do you look for things above? To seek those heavenly things means to live toward them, to direct your life and your desires toward the things that are in heaven, specifically as contrasted with the things that are on earth. Read a great article recently, talked about the advertising campaign that the state of Florida has engaged in. In the old days, Florida billed itself as the carrot at the end of a well-lived life. You make your money, do your daily grind in New York. Once you have enough money, you get out of New York and you move to Florida. Life is much nicer in Florida. But we are not seeking Florida as the carrot at the end of a well-lived life. In Wyoming, people seek Arizona as that carrot. Not true. Seek the things which are above. We're seeking something better than Hawaii, better than Florida and Arizona, better than the Garden of Eden. that thing which we are to seek because Jesus is alive is Jesus and the place where he is, which is heaven at the right hand of God. We seek that, Paul says, because we died. You died. You stopped caring about the things of earth. If you die with Jesus, No longer do you live for anything in this world, whether that's the new car, the new phone, the new house, retiring in Florida, that trip to Hawaii, whatever it is. You had to die in terms of your body parts, slavery to sin, is what he says in verse 5. Put to death your body parts, which are on the earth, and their desire for fornication, uncleanness, and illest, ten different sins. He says you died in terms of your attachment to and desire for these things. And what does that mean? Well, if you're dead to something, it no longer makes any difference to you. The funeral industry makes every effort to sell coffins, but only to the living. They don't go to the corpse and say, you really want the nicest, super duper deluxe coffin. No, he doesn't. The corpse died to all that. He doesn't care what he's in. You go to the living and say, Grandma needs the super duper extra deluxe coffin. You died in terms of your body parts slavery to sin, such that if you are really united to Jesus in the resurrection, when these 10 sins that he lists, covetousness, idolatry, blasphemy, anger, when these come knocking, you say, nothing in me wants to sin that sin. I am as dead to that as a dead dog is to dog food. I don't care at all about those sins. There is nothing in me that has the slightest desire to do these sins. Now, Paul admits that this life is hidden. That even you don't see it and the world certainly doesn't see it. To all appearances, we look like any other American consumer. But your life is hidden, he says, with Christ in God. Your life is hidden. You don't even see it yourself. Christian life is hidden from the world. and it's hidden in a certain sense even from you. Paul is shoving into a single word a longer description of the hidden life from Psalm 27 and Psalm 31. Psalm 27, you all, I think, know these verses. One thing I have asked of the Lord that I shall seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple. For in the day of trouble, he will conceal me in his tabernacle. In the secret place of his tent, he will hide me. He will lift me up on a rock. You hear that? Your life is hidden with Christ in God. David describes that as being concealed in the tabernacle, hidden in the secret place of the tent. You read on a little further in Psalm 31, he says, Oh, how abundant is your goodness, which you have stored up for those who fear you and worked for those who take refuge in you in the sight of the children of mankind. In the cover of your presence you hide them from the plots of men, you store them in your shelter from the strife of tongues." You store them in your shelter from the strife of tongues. Those of you who sometimes have the misfortune of having the radio on, the television on, the phone on, the computer on, You witnessed the strife of tongues. Today we call it Twitter. But it was just as real in the days of King David, just as real in the days of Saint Paul. The strife of tongues is a thing. And it's a thing that's happening all around us. And the Christian gets to opt out. You are hidden in the heavenly tabernacle. You are hidden at the right hand of God. He hides you in his tent, in his shelter, from that strife of tongues. Your real you is in heaven. Your life, the part of it that actually matters, is with God. And there you are safe from all of the dangers that people worry about in this world. And the very petty, oh, maybe the car won't start. Maybe the toaster will break, right? The really dumb things that people worry about all the way up to the Marxists taking over our country, the election stealers, the this and the that. Your life is hidden, safe, protected from those things. You died to sin and your life is hidden with Christ in God. In the day of trouble, He conceals you in His tabernacle. Now, as I said, it's a real hiding. Your real life is, in a certain sense, hidden even from yourself. As you continue to get up and do your daily round of things that the non-Christians around you also do, they get up, they eat breakfast, they go to work, they go home, they take a shower and go to bed, just like you. But that is not the sum total of what your life is. You died and your life is hidden. The real you is in heaven. Paul says that hiding will come to an end when Jesus returns. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. And the day of trouble is over when the strife of tongues ceases. Jesus will come out of the heavenly tabernacle and He will bring your life with Him. And in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, you and I will be changed into glory. Something we can't even imagine. Eye has not seen, ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man the things God has prepared for those who love Him. Jesus is our life. He gave us life, and we live for Him. When He returns, we will look at one another in shock, as what it is to be a Christian is actually manifest before our eyes. Oh, that was the real you? Well, I'm really sorry I said such and such to you. And I did such and such that I thought so poorly of you. You will appear with Him in glory, and so will everyone in the pews around you. And that's why we have to get along here on earth, as Paul is going to talk about later on in the chapter. We'll talk about that next Sunday. If you really believe that your real life is not subject to the foul weather and foul culture of earth, but is instead tucked safely away in heaven, you will begin to consider yourself dead to sin. When the sins come knocking, you will be able to say, I'm dead to that. Nothing in me wants to answer the door. Nothing in me wants to buy your product. Nothing in me wants to do these things that sin is telling me to do. The resurrection teaches you to kill sin. Put to death therefore. Put to death because you died with Christ, because you will be glorified with Christ, because you are hidden with Christ. Put to death what is earthly in you. your body parts that are on the earth with their desire for sin built into them. James Bond, right, has that license to kill, and the Christian has a duty to kill. Not to kill the enemies of the state, but to kill the enemies of our soul. We have to put on the new man, just as Adam had to put off his fig leaves and put on the bloody skins. You have to be clothed with Christ too. So Paul addresses really two sets of sins. Lust and greed is the first set, and then lies and slander are the second set. And these are just representative. The resurrection teaches us to kill all sins. whatever kind, but he lists ten sins and call back to the Ten Commandments as a way of saying any sin, any violation of any commandment of God, you have a duty to stab the knife into it and kill it. He lists these five sins, mostly relating to sexual sin, fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. These things are all around us. We all know that we live in a culture that has gone completely crazy on the topic of human sexuality. And Paul did too, to a certain extent. And he says, Jesus is alive, which means you have to put to death these sins within you. He seems to say the violation of the seventh commandment, fornication, uncleanness, passion, and evil desire, These things come from covetousness, the 10th commandment. You want something that is not yours. Or you want too much something that would be okay, except for the fact that you want it way too much. There's two kinds of ways to go wrong with covetousness. Desire, covetousness can be out of order. A desire that's out of order because of its intensity, or because of its object, or both. There is no right amount of desire for your neighbor's wife. That's a desire that's out of order, both in its intensity and in its object. It's okay to want a new car and to go out and buy a new car. That's not a sin. But if you're willing to sin in order to get the new car, if you're willing to steal, for instance, in order to get the new car, you are coveting. Covetousness is being willing to sin to acquire that object of desire. There's no correct amount of desire for immorality, impurity, or passion. They are all evil desires, says Paul. And that includes covetousness. The consumer economy tells us that greed is good. God tells us that it's bad. The resurrection of Christ is here to tell you that you died to that covetousness, which is idolatry. And with that, he takes it right back around to the first commandment. Covetousness means worshiping something other than God. Covetousness means desiring something in this world and making it your God. This is the thing that will satisfy me. The new car. The neighbor's wife. whatever it is, to think that it can take the place of God and to treat it as your God is an act of idolatry. What do we do with these sins? We have to kill them. Put to death. Consider yourself dead to these things. How do you do that? Well, you have to set your mind on the things above. Seek the things that are above. I don't live for what this world offers. And that's how I'm able to say no to passion, immorality, impurity, and all the rest. You kill these things by reconceptualizing them. And Paul tells us two ways to reconceptualize them. The first way is to think of them as targets of God's wrath. Because of these things, the wrath of God is coming. We might think of these sins as normal, as acceptable. Everyone's doing it. The people around me are doing it. I'm doing it. It's not a big deal. No one has a problem with watching this TV show. No one has a problem with an Amazon wish list 800 items long. It's okay. Paul says, no, stop thinking of these things as okay. Don't look around at the world and say, yep, the world is doing it. In Hollywood, this is considered normal. He says, think of those things as targets of God's wrath. Look at your sins and say, this is the kind of thing God hates. This is the kind of sin He does not want me engaged in. immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire. God says no. He says stop. He says those sins make him angry. Sin is not normal. Sin is a target of God's wrath. If you can teach yourself to think that way, to think this is the thing that my God hates, That's the first step toward killing sin. And then he says, you should also reconceptualize it and think, this is not who I am, that is who I used to be. In which you also once walked when you lived in them, but now you must put them off. You used to walk in them. The ex-smoker sees the cigarette and he might think, oh, that tastes good, I want that. But he also thinks, oh, back when I was a smoker, I couldn't breathe. I couldn't run. I couldn't go hiking. I couldn't stop coughing. Everything I owned stunk, right? And he goes through the list of, here's why I am no longer that thing. It's why I swore off the cigarette. That's you, brothers and sisters. You can say, yes, I used to do those sins. You should say, I used to do those sins, meaning, now, I don't. That's my past. That's not me. And Paul tells us, at greater length, how that's not you, but first he lists five more sins. Anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth. Don't do those, put those off. Reconceptualize those in the same way. God hates it when I'm angry. Some of us have lived with anger for so long. It's just the normal background music to our lives. I get out of bed because I'm angry. I go to work because I'm angry. I yell at my family because I'm angry. And I'm just angry. I would rather be angry than deal with the thing that's making me angry. That's not normal. That's not acceptable in the Christian life. Put that to death. Think of that as the target of God's wrath and something you used to be. I used to be angry. Now, I am at peace. I used to have malice and blasphemy. My mouth used to spew filthy language. I don't do that now. The word rises. I bite my tongue off if I have to, but I don't say that word. Filthing language out. Paul lists these ten sins as representatives of the kinds of things that the resurrected Christian does not do. And so if you look at these sins and say, oh man, I live in fornication, uncleanness, and passion. My life is full of anger and wrath. Again, have you been raised with Christ? Do you trust Jesus as the one who rose from the dead and who saves you? If you can say, yes, I definitely trust Jesus, then you need to attack these sins. Most of these sins are not going to go away on their own. The way you will truly reconceptualize them, by the way, is to share them with a trusted person in the body of Christ. Especially someone with some authority over you who will help you to stop sinning these sins. Don't walk in anger or covetousness or any of the other sins here. Why not? Well, because they are who you used to be. And Paul deploys this concept of the old and new man. Do not lie to one another since you have put off the old man with his deeds. All right, I ranted last week about no church membership for those under 18. I have another rant that I'm not quite as passionate about, but your translation very likely says in this verse, Colossians 3.9, you have put off the old self. That is a terrible translation. That is extraordinarily misleading. It's not the old self and the new self. Paul did not talk about the self. He talked about the man. Now, the gender-neutral bozos read that and they say, oh Paul, male Christians have an old man, female Christians have an old woman. Male Christians put on the new man. Female Christians put on the new woman. And so we'll just say the old and new self, so no one has to worry that they have to get a sex change to be a Christian. That is completely and totally not what the text means. The old man is not the way I used to be. The old man is Adam, our first father, the sinner, the one from whom I got my sin nature. That's the old man. That's your former identity. With sinful humanity coming down from the old man, that is, from Adam. You're supposed to put that off. You no longer identify with Adam. Yes, I'm the fruit eater. Yes, I'm the one who didn't guard the garden and drive out the serpent. Yes, I am sinful by nature, and I'm happy to be sinful by nature. I like it this way. All my friends are. We've all heard people tell us that. I'll go to hell because that's where my friends are. That's the old man talking. Put off the old man. That is your Adamic identity. You have put on the new man. Who is the new man? The new man is Christ. You are clothed in Christ. I mentioned a moment ago Adam being clothed in fig leaves. God said that's not good enough. You have to put that off. put on the skin of this animal that I'm going to kill so you can live and have clothing. Adam had to be clothed in something better than what he could make in order to stand in the presence of God. You do as well. If you've been raised with Christ, you have to be clothed with Christ in order to reconceptualize your identity. The one who's still in Adam who is still part of the fallen sinful human race is never going to be able to put off the 10 sins. You're just not. That's still who you are. You can't say, that's who I used to be. The new man, to put on Christ, that's no longer who you are. You don't walk in the 10 sins. Instead, you are renewed in knowledge according to the image of the Creator. You put on that new man, Christ, the one who knows everything. You're returning to the original image of God, which Adam was before he fell. That's the promise of Easter. Put on the new man. I said the last four or three weeks, We have knowledge and we have community to help us in our quest for maturity. Christian maturity is built on knowledge, it's built on community. Paul tells us, in the new man, in Christ, you have knowledge. You know that these sins are bad and that you should put them off. You know that you died to these things. And therefore you know what you need to know to grow up to maturity, he says, when your identity is converted to Christ, you are identified with him, not with the ethno-cultural class distinctions that the world runs on. He lists three pairs of these things, four pairs, Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian and Scythian, slave and free. He says, in Christ, those eight identity markers go away. Now, obviously, what does he mean by that? In other books, in Philippians, for instance, he tells us he's a Hebrew and proud to be a Hebrew. He doesn't say, now that I'm in Christ, I can't tell you whether I'm slave or free, whether I'm Hebrew or Greek, whether I'm this or that. Rather, he's saying that in the new humanity that you put on in Christ, these things are no longer the core of your identity. make your living, or you don't define your life based on your ethnicity, your culture, your class, you don't do that. Your life is built on something more fundamental, which is your identity with Christ. So the Greek and Jew, we know what those are, right? The two major cultural categories that Paul was familiar with. Everywhere he traveled was Hellenistic. They spoke some Greek. They knew something of Greek culture there. That's why he writes his letters in Greek. But he is a Jew ethnically, and he makes a big deal out of that. And he goes to the Jews, the Book of Acts tells us. But the circumcised and uncircumcised, same thing, an identity marker that's like Jew and Greek. The barbarian and the Scythian barbarians are people who didn't speak Greek. The Greeks called them barbarians. It was not a compliment. The barbarians who lived even further away, the furthest known limits of the world at that time, were the Scythians who lived in what's now Ukraine, the area north of the Black Sea. Paul says, it doesn't matter if you're a Scythian or a barbarian, a far barbarian or a near barbarian. It doesn't matter if you're slave or free. what your socioeconomic status is if you are in Christ. The foundation of your identity is not your sin, nor is it Adam and his legacy. The foundation of your identity is Christ, and these ethno-cultural class distinctions don't matter in the heavenly tabernacle where you're hidden with Christ. Now he says elsewhere, yes, you have to live in the world, and if you're called as a slave, stay a slave. If you're called as free, stay free. Right? He wouldn't tell a barbarian that the barbarian had to be Greek. He refused to tell Greeks that they had to be Jews. He did not attempt to tell people to change their ethno-cultural class status. But he says that is not the most fundamental marker of who you are. You have a life beyond that, above those things, earthly reversals, being sold into slavery, being made into a Scythian or a Jew. None of that matters for your fundamental identity if you are in Christ. Christ is all and in all. We aren't denying that there are things besides Jesus in this world, very important things. but they are things he created. What Paul means is that Jesus is the most important one, the one who makes everything else worthwhile. That's who Jesus is, and he is all in all. You see him everywhere. His work is everywhere. He is in every member of the new man, the new humanity. The old Adam was in you by birth. Christ is in you by conversion through his spirit. When you're born again, he dwells in your heart. He's alive, and if you've been raised with Him, set your mind where He is, because that's where your true life is, too. Let's pray. Father, we thank You for our ethnicity, our culture, our class, but we thank You that those things are not the defining feature of our identity, that we are no longer in Adam, because in Adam all die. but in Christ, all will be made alive. We thank you that we are united to Christ in a death like His, and that we will surely be united to Him in a resurrection like His. Help us to put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge, in righteousness, and in holiness, just like you, the Creator. Father, we thank you for the privilege of being raised with Christ, of seeking heavenly things. Help us to get our minds off earthly things, to not live for these things, to talk about them exclusively, to truly have our hearts set in heaven, have our treasure in heaven, and to want to talk about heaven and the Lord Jesus who is there, seated at your right hand. Father, we thank you that Christ is risen. And we pray that each one here would rise with Him. We ask these things in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.