PT-3 "Intro to Colossians 3:5-9a"

 

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/17/2017 10:41 PM

My Worship Time                                                              Focus:  PT-3 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,”

            We begin this SD with a quote from John MacArthur who wrote this right after the quote we read from Puritan Richard Baxter we used in our last SD. 

“To be a Christian is to die to self, to ambition, to ego, and to pride.  It is to bow in humble submission to Christ’s lordship.  It is to obey the Lord’s command expressed in Luke 9:23:  ‘If anyone whishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.’  It is to follow the example of Paul himself, who told the Corinthians, ‘I die daily’ (1 Cor. 15:31).”

            When we look at verse five and the words “consider…as dead” we find a term in the Greek, nekroo which means to kill or to put to death, and so this is a radical message from Paul here stating we are to make a decisive resolution to put to death, that is bringing the flesh under subjection to the Spirit-filled new disposition.

            Paul, like Jesus in Matthew 5:29-30 and also 18:8 is not talking physically to kill or cut off certain parts of the body as in the case of our Lord’s statement, but he is speaking as Christ was in a spiritual nature as Paul wrote about in Romans 8:13 “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.”

            Paul makes it clear in Romans 7:14-25 that the battle with sin is common to every believer as even Paul had trouble with it.  Things like doing things I don’t want to do, and not doing things I want to do is a part of this section in Romans and it is all about the believers struggle with sin.  Once a person becomes a believer his desire is to live a godly life following the Lord, while the flesh still desires to do what it had always done when the person was not a believer and that is why we are to, by the help of the Holy Spirit put to death the deeds of the flesh.

I hope to finish this introduction in our next SD.

4/17/2017 11:00 PM