Well, it is the week after Labor Day, so I’m going to take a cue from Wal-Mart and Hobby Lobby, and start talking about Christmas! How many of you have a favorite Christmas movie? Call out your favorite. Did anyone say A Christmas Carol? You have a lot of versions to choose from if that’s yours—everything from Mickey’s Christmas Carol to Scroog’d, to the Jim Carrey version that came out a few years ago. But all of them share the same basic idea: a mean, greedy, selfish man gets a visit from the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. He gets to evaluate decisions he had made in the past. He gets to listen in on what people think about the person he is. But what really causes him to change is when he sees a vision of his own funeral. He sees what his old life had led up to. He hears how he is remembered. And once he sees the death of his old self, he decides he is going to rewrite his own obituary. And from then on, he becomes kind, generous, and beloved.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. It’s way too early to be thinking about Christmas movies. Who do we think we are—the Hallmark Channel? So let me switch gears and talk about a real life Ebenezer Scrooge.
His name was Alfred. Alfred’s family was well known in the weapons manufacturing industry. Alfred’s father built underwater mines for Russia. Alfred himself was famous for developing new types of explosives. He had 355 registered patents for detonators, blasting caps, and smokeless gunpowder. In 1867, he invented dynamite. He had built a tremendous family fortune and had built almost 100 factories to keep up with the demand for explosives and munitions.
In 1888, Alfred’s brother Ludvig died from a heart attack. But a local French newspaper mistakenly reported that it had been Alfred who had died. The headline read “The Merchant of Death is Dead!” And it went on to say, “The man who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before died yesterday.”
It wasn’t long after that Alfred sat down to rewrite his will. He stipulated that the vast majority of his estate, the equivalent of $265 million in today’s dollars, would go to the establishment of annual cash prizes that would go to those who, “in the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” The most prestigious of the awards was the peace prize—awarded to the individual who has “done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace.” The Nobel Peace Prize remains to this day one of the greatest honors that can be given to a human being.
You see, Alfred Nobel—for that’s who we’ve been talking about this entire time, got a glimpse of the death of his old self. And like Scrooge, it gave him an opportunity to write a brand new ending for his life. And today, no one remembers him as the Merchant of Death. Instead, they remember him as the promoter of peace.
Both the fictional Ebenezer Scrooge and the real-life Alfred Nobel were given an opportunity to rewrite their life story after being declared dead. Today as we observed the ordinance of baptism, we get to celebrate with five people who have been declared dead, and now have the chance to live a brand new life.
If you are physically able, please stand for the reading of God’s Word, from Colossians 2:10-13:
and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. … having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses,
Colossians 2:10,12-13
Pray…
This passage in Colossians 3 really builds off an idea Paul introduced in Colossians 2:12, which you have printed on your notes page. This is the same phrase we have printed on our baptism shirts here at Glynwood. When someone trusts Christ to be their savior, we recognize the commitment he or she has made with the ordinance of baptism. We don’t believe that it is the ceremony itself that saves someone—it is just the outward sign to the faith community that they have already been saved. We think water baptism—baptism by immersion—is the best way to symbolize the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. And it also symbolizes our own death and burial. Colossians 2:13 says we were dead in our sins, but God has made us alive in Christ. So this morning I want us to look at what gets buried, and then what gets raised, according to Colossians 3.
What Gets Buried (vs. 5-11)
1. Sin: The obvious (v. 5) and the not so obvious (v. 8) The key to understanding this entire passage is in verse 3: For you have died, and your life is hidden in Christ in God. For the Christian, the old sinful nature is dead. We are no longer identified by our sin. We have been pronounced righteous in Christ.
But this doesn’t mean that we stop sinning. To those of you who got baptized this morning, you need to know that every day of your life from now on will be a constant battle to put to death those sinful habits and behaviors that used to define you. That’s why Paul has to say “Put to death those things that are earthly in you.” He make two lists—one in verse 5 and one in verse 8. I’ve labeled these the “obvious” and the “not so obvious.” Or subtle, because not so obvious wouldn’t fit on the line in PowerPoint.
In the obvious column, Paul really zeroes in on sexual sin.
5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you:[b] sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.
This doesn’t mean that these are the only ones you have to worry about, and it doesn’t mean that they are automatically worse than any other sin. Keep in mind that Colossians is a letter written to a specific people at a specific time, so this could just mean that there were some specific issues related to sexual sin going on in Colossae. So in this list, with the exception of covetousness, which is the desire for material things, everything else on this list deals specifically with sexual sin.
Just like today. We live in a society that is saturated with sex. Sexual desire isn’t sinful. In fact, it is the way God wired us. And sex within the boundaries of Christian marriage is right and good and healthy. But it is Satan’s most basic strategy to take a good thing, created and blessed and instituted by God, and twist and pervert it into something evil. And that is what he’s done with these sexual sins.
I don’t want to make the entire sermon about this, but I feel like we need to unpack the first one “sexual immorality” a little bit, because it is so important for today. When I tell you the Greek word that is translated “sexual immorality,” you’ll immediately see the connection. Are you ready? It’s porneia. Its where we get our word for pornography. And it is so pervasive in our world today. Every men’s bible study that I have ever been a part of has involved men confessing battling porn. Every youth disciple now I’ve ever led or hosted, this has been an issue that has come up with the guys in our group. And I’m afraid that we’ve worked so hard at establishing that our bible studies are a safe place for people to be real and share their struggles that we stop with just sharing the struggle. “Yeah, bro—we’ve all been there.” “Hey man—we understand. We’re here for you. Thanks for being so honest.” And we sympathize, and we put our arms around each other, but we don’t fight.
Men, we have to fight this. Paul uses the strongest language possible here: put it to death. Do what you need to do.
Now, while God’s people can certainly have trouble with the sins listed in verse 5, it seems to me that the second list in verse 8 more often can be our undoing.
8 But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth.
The reason being that it is far more difficult to justify sins like greed, lust, and immorality, than it is to justify sins like anger, rage, or slander. Sometimes we even justify sins like slander in the name of “sharing a prayer request”! Oh, how we need to see our sin as God sees it; and get serious about dealing with sin in our life!
1 John 1:9 is a great promise from God’s Word. It says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
Confess (homologeo) means “to say the same” You see, its more than just admitting what you’ve done. It means saying the same thing about your sin that God does. It means we face the darkness of our sin in light of the holiness of God. That we do not make excuses for our sin or justify our sin or blame someone else for our sin. We see it as God sees it and acknowledge it as the evil and wicked thing it is.
• It’s not a shortcoming. It’s sin.
• It’s not an accident. It’s an abomination;
• It’s not a flaw. It’s a moral failure.
• It’s not weakness. It’s wickedness.
• It’s not a bad choice. It’s a fatal choice.
We have to hate sin as much as God does. The Puritans understood this. Anyone who’s ever had to work with their son or daughter through Jonathan Edwards’ 17th century sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” had had to wrestle with the fact that we are far more prone to coddle sin than to hate it. Edwards’ language makes us really uncomfortable today. I saw this from a friend of mine this week, who’s trying to reconcile what her daughter is reading with how we always talk about God today:
“The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being drunk with your blood.”
We don’t talk about God like this anymore, and we don’t talk about our sin like this anymore. But confession means saying the same thing about our sin as God does. And if we don’t, it will kill us. That’s why John Owen another Puritan preacher, put it this way:
“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.”
--John Owen
So the first thing that gets buried is our sin.
The second thing that gets buried is hypocrisy. Verse 9 says
9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self[d] with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.
You might be asking, with all these sins and attitudes Paul talks about, why does lying to one another get its own verse? Why is that such a big deal? The Greek word translated “lie” is “pseudomai,” You know what “pseudo” means, right? If you describe something as “pseudoscientific,” you are talking about something that’s trying to sound scientific, but it really isn’t. So “pseudomai” is pretending to be what you are not. And that’s hypocrisy. And I think it gets its own verse because its so easy to lie to each other in church. Its so easy to lie to yourself in church.
Let’s say you’ve had a crummy week. Nothing has gone right. There’s tension between you and your spouse. You yelled at your kids on the way to church. But you get to church, and someone says to you, “How are you, Brother James?” What’s the first thing you say?
Fine.
How was your week?
Great!
And if you aren’t willing to admit that everything is not fine, and your week was not great, do you think you’re really going to deal with what’s going on with your life? Do you think things are going to get better? Church, let’s put to death lying to one another. Let’s put to death the idea that we are supposed to try to prove to each other how wonderful our lives are. Stop lying to each other.
[Illustration: hosting Alcoholics anonymous, and the one thing that brings those guys together on Thursday nights is that everything isn’t fine. Their first step: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.”]
Friends, becoming a Christian doesn’t mean that you instantly, automatically have everything together. That’s why verse 10 says that the new self is being renewed instead of “has been renewed.” Every one of us is a work in progress. And baptism means we put to death lying about being a work in progress. None of us is better than the other - v. 11
Which leads to the next thing that gets buried. Along with sin, along with hypocrisy, Paul says that we are to put to death any sense of Superiority.
11 Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave,[e] free; but Christ is all, and in all.
We do this by recognizing that . . .
A) There is no racial superiority - “no Greek or Jew”
B) There is no religious superiority - “no . . . circumcised or uncircumcised” (No feeling of, “We’ve been here longer than you, or we were charter members, etc)
C) There is no cultural superiority - “no . . . Barbarian or Scythian.” The prejudice against barbarians was based on culture, not race. “Barbaroi” originally referred to those who spoke a language other than Greek, which just sounded like “ba ba ba ba” to the Greeks. Scythians were the Colossian equivalent of migrant workers. They were Mongol nomads who moved from one seasonal pasture to another in central asia.
D) There is no social superiority - “no . . . slave or free”
These are all the things that get buried. What we take off. But in verse 12, Paul turns toward those things that we put on. Just as each of our baptismal candidates came out of the water and put on a set of dry clothes, in verses 12-17 Paul talks about the things we put on in Christ. And notice that these aren’t abstract ethical ideals. These are real-life attitudes that we put into practice as believers.
What Gets Raised (v. 12-17)
• The Character of Christ (v. 12-13): 12 Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience,
• The Love of Christ (v. 14): And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
• The Peace of Christ (v. 15): And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.
• The Word of Christ (v. 16): Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
As you grow, you should expect to fall more and more in love with God’s Word. Today, you might hear about people who have read the Bible all the way through, and you are thinking, “Well I could never do that. I’ve never been able to understand the Bible.” And up to this point, you haven’t been able to, because Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:14 that the natural man cannot understand the things of the spirit, because they are foolishness to him .
• The Lifestyle of Christ (v. 17) And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
A common question for Christians, especially new Christians to ask is, “So, now that I am a believer, does that mean that if I really want to serve God I need to quit my job and go into the ministry? And the answer is, “maybe.” Surrender to God means that if God calls you to do that, you need to answer him. But God may not call you to do that. He may call you to keep doing exactly what you are doing, but to change who you do it for.
