SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/15/2017 7:51 PM
My Worship Time
Focus: PT-1
“Intro to Colossians 3:5-9a”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossians
3:5-9a
Message of the verses: “5 Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry. 6 For it is because of these things that the wrath of God will come upon the sons of disobedience, 7 and in them you also once walked, when you were living in them. 8 But now you also, put them all aside: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive speech from your mouth. 9 Do not lie to one another,”
A couple of things come to my mind as I read over these
verses, and the first one is Romans 6:11 “Even so consider yourselves to be
dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
In Colossians Paul names some sins that believers are dead to, and in
Romans Paul does not name sins, but states that all believers are dead to sin. Next thing that I was thinking about comes
from verse six where we see the words “the wrath of God,” and this reminds me
that wrath is one of the attributes of God.
Paul is saying here that living the risen life involves
putting sin to death, but Paul had just said that that had already been
done. Romans 6:6b tells us “that our old
self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away
with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin;” I think that what we are
talking about here is sanctification, actually the three phases of
sanctification which is once we are saved we are positioned in Christ and when
God sees us He sees Christ. Secondly as
we live out the Christian life we are becoming sanctified as we learn to walk
with Christ in our daily life. Thirdly
we will be completely sanctified once we get to heaven to be with the
Lord. MacArthur states “We have died to
sin’s penalty, but sin’s power still can be strong and our flesh is weak.” This is the reason that we need to continually
put sin to death. How do we do
that? “For if you are living according
to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds
of the body, you will live (Romans 8:13).
In our study of John’s gospel, the 18th chapter we have been looking at a man named Annas who was Israel’s high priest for a while until the Roman’s told him that he could not do that anymore. However he was still influencing the next high priest. Sin is just like that as once a person is saved from sin the flesh still thinks they are in control, but in reality that is not the case and as Paul writes in Romans 6:11 “we are to consider ourselves to be dead to sin.”
I will close with a story that illustrates how we can in
our daily life put to death the deeds of the flesh. It was probably 25 years ago that while
attending the Moody Bible Institute’s Founders week that I heard Dr. Steward
Briscoe talk about this very subject, and he put it in a way that I still remember
it today. He was from England and was in
the armed forces while there and he had a, what he called a Sergeant Major who
was over him. This man was the sort of
man who made his troops do everything by the letter, and it seemed that he
enjoyed doing this to the point that it was driving Briscoe a bit crazy. Finally came the day when he was discharged
and as he was walking across the camp that he was stationed in after his
discharge he ran into the Sergeant Major and his first response was to come to
attention, make sure his pockets were not sticking out, and then he began to
think; “This man is not ruler over me anymore,” and so he took his pockets and
put them inside out and continue to walk through the camp. As you read this story you get a picture of
what we as believers are to do when the flesh tempts us. I am not saying that this is easy, but by the
power of the Spirit we can do this.
4/15/2017 8:29 PM
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