To Encourage You

Colossians 3:5-7 “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.  On account of these the wrath of God is coming.  In these you too once walked, when you were living in them.”

One of the possible tendencies when we read the Bible is to think it is speaking to or about someone else rather than us.  When we read passages like Colossians 3 above, isn’t it easy, especially if we call our self a Christian, to think about how this passage is talking about those other people who are so sexually immoral and greedy in this world?  Our minds can go so easily to someone we know is “living in sin.”  We can so easily have an attitude of thankfulness that we aren’t like that, because God’s wrath is coming on people like that. We can look around us and see so many people living in sexual relationships outside of marriage between a man and woman, which is the only sexual relationship that the Bible doesn’t characterize as a sin and cluck our tongues at those people who live like that. 

But Colossians 3 isn’t speaking about those “other people” out there. It uses the word “you” for a reason. It is very specifically talking to you and it’s talking to me.  It does this because each and every one of us has a problem with the things listed, and each and every one of us is being commanded about how to deal with it.  While our foolish heart is so quick to look at the speck in someone else’s eye, we can be blind to the log that is in our own eye.  We should never think that we are above the things listed in Colossians 3 that are described as of an earthly nature and therefore the kind of thing for which God’s wrath is coming.  That’s because the passage says we are to put to death what is earthly in us. Notice it doesn’t say, what could be, or what might be, but what most assuredly is.  We can’t say, like the infamous President Clinton quote “It depends on what the definition of what ‘is’ is.”  That’s because is earthly in you means just that. It is in you – and it is in me. 

Right here and right now we have a tendency toward sexual immorality, impurity, and covetousness, if not in blatant outward actions, then in our heart.  We are prone to lustful thoughts and to have our eyes linger in places they should not.  It was Jesus who said “everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). So easily, we can have “eyes full of adultery” (2 Peter 2:14), while at the same time being proud of our long-term marriage to the wife of our youth. 

So, what are we to do with such things – thoughts, temptations, tendencies?  Colossians 3 is quite clear – we are to put it to death, i.e., we are to show no mercy to it and kill it!  That means we aren’t to coddle it, play with it, and feed it. When tempted to look at what we should not, we are to turn our eyes elsewhere, immediately!  Jesus put it this way “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29).  Notice how He said, “your right eye,” not someone else’s. 

May God help us to read the Word of God in the way it was intended – a personal message for each one of us, rather than an impersonal message for someone else.  God help us from having the attitude of the Pharisee who prayed “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.” Rather, may we have the attitude of the tax collector in this account, who “standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner’” (Luke 18:11-12)!  Remember, it is the tax collector, rather than the Pharisee who was justified.  And Jesus would have us put our self in that tax collector’s shoes, for “it is the one who humbles himself that will be exalted,” and not the other way around.