Title: Dead or Alive

Series on Colossians

II The Man in Christ

A Challenge

Text: 3:1-11

Introduction

When you go to work or school or the supermarket, are you aware that you may be surrounded by dead people. Of course all the signs of physical life are present. Their hearts and their brains are working and if you gave them an electrocardiogram, or an electroencephalogram they would be positive for life. But spiritually they are dead in trespasses and sins. Unless a man is born again he cannot enter the kingdom of God, the kingdom of the living. By the grace of God, you through repentance and faith have been raised from the dead. There are a number of dramas and movies about the walking dead. It is the science-fiction genre and these zombie stories are quite popular. This is ironic because men are walking among the living dead every day and do not realize it. This passage, the beginning of our consideration of the man in Christ, is all about life. As Alexander Maclaren reminds us, “Life in all its forms, animal, rational-emotional and spiritual, is dependent on union in varying manner with the Divine, and upheld only by His continual energy. The creature must touch God or perish. Of that energy the Uncreated Word of God is the channel—’with Thee is the fountain of life.’ As the life of the body, so the higher self-conscious life of the thinking, feeling, striving soul, is also fed and kept alight by the perpetual operation of a higher Divine energy, imparted in like manner by the Divine Word.” The highest form of life is spiritual and is achieved only by conscious union with Christ. Without it, a man is dead while he lives. With it, he lives though he dies. Thus we look at this life through the lenses of our prospects, our participation, our practices, and our prejudices.

I Our Prospects

Basic to this entire consideration is the message of verse 4, When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Being united to Christ means we live in hope and expectation of our eternal salvation. We have a choice. We can either live in faith and look at earth from heaven’s point of view or live by sight and look at heaven from earth’s point of view. Earth’s point of view is dismal, but the view from heaven is glorious. This choice should not be difficult because as Warren Wiersbe said, “Satan promises you glory, but in the end, you receive suffering. God promises you suffering, but in the end, that suffering is transformed into glory.” In an old anecdote there was a town where a well known man was dying. As he lay in his lovely home, the best doctors surrounding him, he whispered, with a note of despair, “I’m leaving home, I’m leaving home.” Across town there lay a solitary figure in surroundings bare. Her modest home contained only the most threadbare of life’s essentials. In her eye was a gleam. Before she died she was heard to say, “I’m going home, I’m going home.” Jesus focused our attention on hope for the future when He said in Matthew 6:19 and 20, Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. A famous psychiatrist loved the story of the man who was shipwrecked on a South Seas island. He was honored as King and given a throne. After a while he learned that his kingship was temporary, and he was king for a year. Then he found out what happened to the previous kings,. After a year they were all taken to a certain island and abandoned to starve. So while he was king he busied Himself sending workers to that island to make it ready. His carpenters made boats, his farmers transplanted fruit trees to the island, his farmers grew crops, his masons built houses. This is what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 6. You are a king now, so what are you doing to prepare for the future? Christ must be your life now if you want to appear with Him in glory.

II Our Participation

So how do we participate in the life of Christ now? The answer is in verses 1-3, Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. At the center of all blessing is the death and resurrection of Christ. We died with Him and we arose with Him. Therefore the victory is ours. As Paul has already made clear that there is no material cure for a spiritual ill, that neglect of the body will never heal the soul’s sickness but will aggravate it, that heaven-born individuals cannot gain satisfaction from earth-born remedies. Christ, he alone, is the answer. If we already possess the answer we must not, as the false teachers suggested, look elsewhere. Instead we must participate in this new life, We do this first of all by gathering the priceless treasures of the things that are above, where Christ is. Your heart speaks of what you love. Do you love eternal things more than temporal ones, heaven more than earth? What the heart seeks, the mind will follow. Have you ever heard humorous comments about people who claim to be “in love.” Their minds become preoccupied. They can think of nothing else. In the “Merchant of Venice” Shakespeare writes, “Love is blind, and lovers cannot see, The pretty follies that themselves commit.” When a person seeks God with his heart his mind is set on things above. However these are not the kind of people who forget about their duty in the here and now. On the contrary, they are very practical, for the graces that have been granted through their heavenly mindset enable them to gain victory in their struggle against sin and the world. All this is possible because they died and their lives are hidden with Christ in God. The fact that we died with Christ should motivate us to look upward all the time. Because we died with Christ we also live with Him. Because we died with Christ unbelieving people cannot see what we are really like and the false teachers did not understand that that the Colossians had already gained transcendent spiritual knowledge and life, and thus had no need of their false teaching. Also, because we died with Christ we are eternally secure, hidden protectively from all spiritual foes. As we read in I Peter 1:4, the blessings of salvation are an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you. It should be our highest goal and our greatest privilege to set our minds and hearts on that promise of eternal inheritance.

III Our Practices

To suggest that such a life-altering spiritual experience would bring anything but a total change in lifestyle would be nonsensical. Thus Paul reminds the Colossians and us as well that the result should be a complete reversal of our natural behavior. He says in verses 5-10, Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Since we are joined to God in Christ we must become like Him. Because there has been a reversal in our treasure, there must also be a reversal in our tactics. Before, we lived for ourselves, but now we live for Him. Notice that whereas Paul says we died with Christ to sin in the past, now we must act in putting to death the sinful tendencies in the present. He divides the things we must avoid into two classes, the past and the present. Professing Christians have left behind the sins of the past. These were flagrant sins: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and idolatry. It’s not that genuine Christians never commit any of these sins, but rather that to be received into the body of the church they must have renounced these practices and publicly abandoned them. But, says the Apostle, there are other sins still present. These are the sins which are generally considered less flagrant by men, but not by God. Modern Christians are quick to pride themselves on getting rid of sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and idolatry. They are more likely to overlook sins like, anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy language, and lying. A close examination of Christian lives outside the church and its fellowship will probably reveal many of these transgressions. They were still present in the lives of the Colossian believers and also in the twenty-first century fellowship. There is within all of us such an ingrained propensity for evil, that we can never escape it in this present life. The only thing that will deliver us from it is the resurrection. But what is the solution now? We must strive against such tendencies and recognize the power that has been granted to us through Christ’s death and resurrection. We will not be perfect, but we can overcome, we can improve, we can conquer and rid ourselves of these weights and sins that hinder our race. We can, as the author of Hebrews says in 12:1 and 2, throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles…and run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

IV Our Prejudices

One of the byproducts of sin is prejudice. We see plenty of prejudice in our society. People of different races and ethnicities, different social classes, different abilities, different social classes and different religions are hated, scorned, and considered inferior. James scolds the Christians to whom he is writing for the way they treated the poor. Paul warns about this in verse 11, Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. Here means in Christ. There is an old Hymn that begins, “In Christ there is no east or west, in him no south or north; but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth…In Christ now meet both east and west, in him meet south and north; all Christly souls are one in him throughout the whole wide earth.” Paul describes some of the tensions in Colosse which were Jew versus Gentile, slave versus free, and other ethnic mistrusts. How interesting that the one letter Paul wrote exclusively concerning this matter is Philemon. He was a wealthy slave owner in Colosse and a slave named Onesimus had run away. Under the ministry of Paul he became a Christian believer. Paul sent him back to face his aggrieved master, and strove in his letter to effect reconciliation between these two Christians. Because of the spiritual debt Philemon owes to Paul, Paul pleads with Philemon to take Onesimus back. Paul notes that because of his conversion, Onesimus is being returned “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother.” In the course of the Epistle Paul also says, “If he has done you any wrong or owes you anything, charge it to me.” Just as Jesus says to God the Father on our behalf. If Jesus loved us while we were yet his enemies, how can we scorn others who are different from us? We were strangers and He took us in. Can we do less? The hope of heaven changes our prospects, our participation, our practices, and our prejudices. If Christ is in all, then, when we have done something for the least of His brethren we have done it for Him.