Colossians 3 - Things to Kill

Grab your shovels.

Colossians 3:5-7 - ^"5Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. ⁶Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. ⁷You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived."

^"5Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature:" - A mentor of mine used to remind us "anytime you see the word 'therefore,' you need to find out what its "there" "for." Paul is reminding us that we have died to ourselves and we are hidden in Christ, therefore we need to put the sin that is in our lives "to death." Sin is everything we do according to our earthly nature which is our flesh, or, as Paul wrote earlier in the Chapter, our desires for temporary things.

"sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry." - Here, Paul runs down the list of things we need to kill in our lives. Let's take a moment and define these.

• Sexual Immorality - Anything done sexually outside of the limitations God has defined within Scripture.
• Impurity - Quite simply, sin.
• Lust - Intensely desiring after something or someone that does not belong to you. In most cases, this has to do with our sexual natures.
• Evil Desires - Anything that doesn't fall under the realm of lust, falls under this one.
• Greed - The desire for more, and more. A feeling of never being satisfied.
• which is Idolatry - God is our all sufficient source for everything. When we desire more than God, he loses the number one spot in our lives and whatever we replace him with becomes an idol to us.

^"6Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. ⁷You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived." - The Bible teaches that God is storing up his wrath for the day of judgment. (Rev. 19:15) and that we, as Christians, are not appointed to suffer God's wrath. (1st Thess. 5:9) However, one day, God's wrath will be poured out upon the world and sin will be put to death forever. We don't know when that day will be, but the Bible is very clear that it is coming soon.

We used to walk in sin, but after our new life was hidden in Christ, we have put our sin to death and we no longer live the life we used to live.

A movie line that illustrates this well, comes from a scene in the movie Twister where Bill Paxton says of his character, "See honey, there was an evil Bill, and I killed him." That is exactly what we did when we died to ourselves for Christ.

See, there was an evil Brian, and I killed him.