Kill Your Old Man

Happy Daylight Saving Day! For much of the country this is the unofficial introduction to Spring, but here in Florida, Spring has exploded all around us. There is new life popping up everywhere. We’ve already had to mow a couple of times. The funny thing about Fall and Winter in Florida is that it can be so mild that those old dead leaves cling onto the tree all the way through winter and it isn’t until those new leaves begin to pop out that it finally forces the dead leaves to let go of their grip and fall to the ground.

That’s not unlike the Spring of our new life in Christ. Our old dead nature clings on tightly until the new growth in Christ pushes it aside to make way.

Colossians 3:1-4, “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.“

You died with Christ and you were raised with Christ. So now Christ is your life. Paul said the same thing in Galatians 2:20. “I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loves me and gave himself for me.”

And with Christ as our life, we have hope not only for today but into the future knowing that when Christ appears, we who died with him and were raised with him will also reign with him. This is such a reassuring verse as we head into these practical steps of how to live the Christian life, because our struggle and work will not be completed until we see him face to face. So here in these verses we have the beginning of our connection with Christ, being united with him in death. And the final culmination of our union with him being finally and perfectly made like him in glory.

Teresa has this habit of getting a new book and reading the last couple of pages when she is only a few chapters into the story. It drives me nuts. But that’s what Paul is doing here. He’s turning to the end of history and showing us how the story ends. And in the middle of a difficult time dealing with suffering and the struggle of living as a Christian in a fallen world this can bring so much peace. “Set your mind on things that are above.” Christ is our life and we live in him and when all is said and done we will be glorified with him. So how do we live in light of this truth?

We saw last week that we are supposed to have new passions about the things of the Kingdom of God and that those new passions will be revealed through renewed thoughts about the things of the kingdom.

This week, Paul is going to take that root idea of Christ being our life and flesh it out in some practical ways and he is going to show us how to get away with murder. Today, we’re going to kill our old man and destroy the evidence in Christ.

Motive: Self-Defense

First things first, with any good murder, we need a motive. As we’ve discussed before, we’re very close with our sin. We cling to it and continue in it. Why? Because we love it and it gives us pleasure. However, this feeling is not mutual. Sin does not love us, our flesh is abusive and seeks to destroy us.

Consider this an intervention. You are in an abusive relationship with your sin. He keeps slapping you around and beating you up but you make excuses for him and lie to yourself thinking that things will get better. Sin is an abusive husband and a dangerous friend. Consider the fact that your sin not only aims to destroy you forever, but he insults and dishonors your Father and killed your best friend, Jesus. I’ll tell you right now, if we are ever going to be rid of our sin, we have to stop making friends with it! And we must develop a deep hatred for it and disgust toward it.

In your self-interest, you need to arm yourself and be prepared to defend yourself.

We can see this way back in Genesis. When God was speaking to Cain, he was speaking to all fallen mankind, he said, “Sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.”

If we jump forward to 1 Peter 5:8, we see our sin equated with our adversary and Peter warns, “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”

This means that we can’t get complacent about sin. This is a war! We must fight it daily. Romans 8:12-13, is my favorite, it says, “So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” We are not debtors to the flesh! We don’t owe that old man anything! And if we continue to live with him, we will die.

Therefore, we are commanded to constantly kill the sin that remains in our lives. Verse 5, “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you.” This is not optional. There are no pacifists in the war against sin. It is kill or be killed out here. Either sin dies or we die. And we will never be done with this command as long as we live. We go on killing sin as it attacks us day in and day out. We do not settle with sin. We fight and we kill.

John Owen said it masterfully in his little book The Mortification of Sin. “Do you mortify? Do you make it your daily work? Be always at it whilst you live; cease not a day from this work; be killing sin or it will be killing you.”

This reminds me of the Israelites as they entered the promised land under Joshua’s command after 40 years of wandering in the desert. God told them to enter into the land and take it. Drive out all of their enemies and do not settle with them. Don’t let them remain with you! But what did they do? God gave them that first victory in Jericho and then they started to mingle with the people and they enjoyed their spoils and pleasures and eventually they just settled in to the pleasures of sin rather than pressing forward to the promises of God.

Our sin has been marked by God as a sacrifice. He’s telling us to go and claim the land that is already ours. Jesus already did the dirty work. Sin is as good as dead. Jesus took care of the final victory at the cross. Our flesh is a wounded enemy. Paul is just telling us to finish the job. The old man is bleeding out in front of us. Let’s put him out of his misery.

Kill Your Sin

Paul doesn’t belabor this command and he doesn’t give us any instructions on how to carry out the task here in Colossians. He simply says, “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you.” and then he goes on to describe some of those earthly things. We need to look at some of Paul’s other writings to get the murder weapon.

What do we kill?

But first, I want to make one quick point about the object of our violence. Whose sin are we supposed to kill? Are we putting to death what is earthly in our brother or sister? Are we killing the sins of our wife or our husband? Are we waging war against the flesh of our neighbor? No. This is a personal and radical war. We are called to do violence against ourselves.

Jesus talked about this in two different places in the book of Matthew in Chapter 5 and in Chapter 18. He says to his listeners that in their struggle with sin, if your hand or foot or eye causes you to sin, what should you do? Cut it off or pluck it out! Why? Because it is better for you to enter life crippled or lame or blind than to be thrown into the eternal fire whole.

Now before anyone starts to sharpen their knife to commit bodily harm, this is figurative language. The point that Jesus is making is that sin is serious business and we must take serious and radical action to rid ourselves of sin. There is violence in the Christian life, but it is violence towards our old way of life.

How do we kill our sin?

So what is our weapon in this war against sin? Let’s look one more time at that verse in Romans 8:13, “For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” So the method of putting to death the deeds of the body is by the Spirit.

This is one of those paradoxes. We are commanded to do it, but it’s not us that does it. If you go into this battle in your own strength then you will fail. This can only be done by the Spirit. Now the Spirit is not a tool or a weapon. He is God. Put to death the deeds of the body by means of God, the Spirit. The Spirit is the decisive killer. That’s the paradox: you do it; but you do it in such a way that it is He who does it. That is the difference between a moral self-help program and the Christian life.

How do we do this? How do we engaging the Spirit to do what is commanded of us in the word? Well, it helps me if I think of this as a war against sin. In this war, what is something that all soldiers should be equipped with? We don’t just run into battle in our underwear right? No, we need armor. Can anyone tell me where to find the armor of God in the Bible? Ephesians 6.

All of the pieces are important as we are commanded to put on the whole armor of God, the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, gospel of peace shoes, the shield of faith, and the helmet of salvation. But there is only one offensive weapon with which we can strike a final blow to sin, that is the Sword of the Spirit, which is the… Word of God.

So we are called to kill our sin by the Holy Spirit with the Word of God. The practical question remains, how? I see the key verse for this in Galatians where the believers were being tempted into legalism by some false teachers and Paul had to remind them how they first believed and how the Christian life is done. Galatians 3:3-5, “Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain? Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?”

Victory over sin in this life is a Spirit-produced miracle. So Paul is asking: How does the Holy Spirit flow with this miracle-working power in our lives? How does the Holy Spirit act in our lives? And he gives two options: by works of law or by hearing with faith. And this is a rhetorical question. The answer he expects is clearly not by works of law, but by hearing with faith.

Notice that he says hearing with faith and not just faith. That is because the Spirit comes and works this miracle in our lives, killing sin, not just “by faith” but by “hearing with faith.” What is heard with faith that causes the Holy Spirit to spring into action in our lives? It is obviously the word of God.

In other words, when the word of God — the Sword of the Spirit — is heard and believed, the Spirit is moving with vigorous, sin-killing action. You are connected to the Holy Spirit by the word of God and faith. When the plug of your faith goes in the socket of God’s Word, the Spirit is flowing. And when he flows, he kills sin.

This isn’t hard to understand so let’s not make it more difficult than it needs to be. We kill sin in the same way that we were saved. This is not some advanced Christian 301 class. Faith, not works, is the way we are made right with God; and faith, not works, is the way we send the Holy Spirit to tear through our lives and kill sin. This is how you become a Christian. And this is how you grow as a Christian.

So to fulfill the command of Paul to kill sin in our hearts and lives, we believe the promises of God found in the word of God. Promises like, Hebrews 13:5, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” or Philippians 4:19, “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” There is nothing magical about the promise. It’s not like chanting an incantation. They are special and powerful because of the God who makes the promises. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:20, “All the promises of God find their Yes in [Christ].”

Connecting to those promises in faith allows the Holy Spirit of God to put to death everything that is worldly in us. We never outgrow our need to live by faith. We began the Christian life by trusting in God to forgive our sins and give us his righteousness. And we finish the Christian life by trusting in God to kill our flesh and to shape us into the image of his Son.

Finish the Job

Next, Paul is going to give a list of different sins which we battle against in the flesh. This not supposed to be an exhaustive list. He leaves some of these off and adds others in similar lists in Romans, Galatians and Ephesians. Paul is speaking directly to the Colossians and their unique struggles and he is further emphasizing that when he says, “what is earthly in you,” he’s not talking about some other person or thing that is out there. But he’s making sure that we point the finger in here as a matter of the heart.

Let’s look at them together, “sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming.” Now I don’t know about you, but it sounded to me like Paul was getting ready to slip into some fingerpointing at the world like he does in Romans 1 and 2 when he talks about the wrath of God, and that would be easy to do, right?

I could pretty easily take these sins one by one and I could point out ways that they are broken in our world day by day, but no one needs that. It is plain to see. We do this far too often when we see the Bible talking about sin. We get that look on our face that says, “Yeah, you tell them. Those so and sos really need to clean up their act.”

So before we can start to feel holier than thou Paul catches himself and throws in a gut shot for good measure before beginning his list again. Continuing he says, “In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another.”

Keeping the illustration of how to commit murder going, once you have a motive and do the deed what comes next? You’ve got to burn any evidence that sin was ever there. It’s time to clean your house. All of the Old Man’s things are still strewn about everywhere and it’s easy to be reminded of him and to start to feel sorry for him.

But this is war and your sin is the enemy. You were commanded by your Captain to destroy their stronghold and now is not the time to feel remorse for your actions, instead it is time for the troops to drop in and to round up all of the leftover insurgents and get rid of them.

There is no turning back. The war continues and we must fight until every last remnant of our Old Man is destroyed in Christ. There is a mission to complete and we must be diligent in it.

Maybe you don’t see the importance of this assault on the flesh. I want to show you from one of Jesus’ parables of the Kingdom in Matthew 13:24-30.

This is what he said, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”

Now before you check out because we just started talking about gardening let me bring you back. The disciples were confused too. They weren’t sure what this story had to do with the kingdom of heaven. So they asked Jesus a little bit further down in verse 36, and Jesus explained that He is the one who sows good seed, and the field is the world. The good seed are the sons of the kingdom, Jesus’ followers, while the weeds are the evil ones who do the will of the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.

What’s going to happen to the weeds? Jesus says, “Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”

Just in case you thought Jesus was all about love and peace and happiness. Not towards sin he’s not! He’s violent toward sin. But, I read that because it should be a terrifying thought that you might be a weed. Our God is a holy and consuming fire and no one can stand against his wrath. Paul said here in Colossians that the wrath of God is coming against these sins, and they are all things that we’ve done. So in case you start to think that you have reached the goal, you haven’t. Remember these words of Jesus that he has an expectation of holiness for the sons and daughters of his kingdom.

Now, there are two responses to hearing this. Some might get puffed up with pride thinking that they are wheat, and others might fall into despair and may even want to go to legalism as a way to make sure that they are not a weed.

Before you start to get puffed up with pride, listen to what Paul said to some in Romans 11 who were starting to get arrogant thinking that they were better than the Jews because God had now grafted Gentiles into the vine.

Paul says in Romans 11:17-22, “But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you. Then you will say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast through faith. So do not become proud, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness. Otherwise you too will be cut off.”

There’s no room for pride and no ground for boasting. Behold the kindness and severity of God. That is one of those paradoxes that no one likes to talk about today because God’s severity makes us tremble. It always reminds me of the line from The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe. Susan and the others are getting ready to meet Aslan and Mr. Beaver explains that Aslan is a great Lion.

“Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion" "Safe?" said Mr Beaver, "Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

But for the other side who shrinks back in fear at the prospect of being a weed, never feeling that they will measure up. Always feeling as though there is one more work that must be done in order to be counted among the wheat, take heart in the fact that you were planted in the good soil by the steady hand of the Son of God.

You place your assurance in the fact that you did nothing to merit your salvation. It is for the glory of God. And as we saw, it is not you who will clean up the mess of your heart when it comes to sin. It is the Holy Spirit in you. Romans 8:14-16 says, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”

Put on Clean Clothes

Finally, after we have a solid motive for engaging in war and we’ve carried out the execution by the Spirit and put aside all sin through the Spirit, then what?

Let’s read the rest of Colossians 3:9-10, “Seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.” Paul is turning the page to show us the end of the story again. He says since you’ve done away with that old man and stripped off those garments stained with the flesh, God has clothed you in clean and fresh clothes. You have a new nature and it is being renewed in knowledge.

Remember last week when we talked about setting your minds on things above? Here it is again. The new self is nourished and renewed in knowledge of the things of heaven and it is being polished every day to look more and more like the one who made it. We with unveiled faces are being transformed from one degree of glory to the next. What a great ending to the story and one that should fill us with hope as we deal with the dirty work of killing sin by the spirit.

Paul is going to launch from this point into a discussion of what those new clothes look like in comparison to our old flesh. But as we finish today, let me encourage you again to be connected to the Word of God so you can detect the sin in your heart and put it to death by trusting in the promises of God’s word and leaning on the power of the Spirit. It will get messy and it won’t always be pretty, but we can look forward to the day when we will be gathered together as God’s wheat and will shine like the sun in the kingdom of our Father.

I’ll leave you with this final word of encouragement from the book of Jude where believers were dealing with the flesh in their life and the corruption coming from false teachers in their midst. Jude 21-25 says, “keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. And have mercy on those who doubt; save others by snatching them out of the fire; to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh. Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.”