Chapter 5
We are almost like children in a womb. One day we will be born out of this world into the safety and security of heaven. But, you see, we are already safe in the womb of Christ where he protects and nourishes us. I am not sure how much we will remember of our present life when we move on to the glory of God’s presence, because we are promised complete healing. But I do know that we will share in all of the glory of God and Christ and we will see things that will remind us of the reason we are there and the extent of the love of Jesus. All of this prepares us for what Paul now explains to us about how we are to live here on earth. If we have died with Christ and are now alive in him, this creates a behavioural expectation and new possibilities for the potential of how we might conquer sin and live under grace in way that pleases God and brings glory to him.
There is an echo of what God said to Cain in verse 5:
“You will be accepted if you respond in the right way. But if you refuse to respond correctly, then watch out! Sin is waiting to attack you and destroy you, and you must subdue it.” Genesis 4:7
Sin is not therefore some neutral force that we can chose to enter into or not, but an active force that works against us, which we have to battle against if we are to overcome it. Paul therefore gives us a principle that is to govern our attitude to sin and earthly things.
First of all, where are they? Are they external to us? No, says Paul, they are within us.
Each one of us is different. We have different temperaments and so that means we have different strengths and weaknesses. As we look at the list Paul will give us of sins, it is clear that hardly any believer will find that whole list relevant to them. There is within each one of us what is called, besetting sins. These are the sins that we are particularly prone to, that we might rightly call the weaknesses of our particular temperament. That is no excuse for us to indulge them, but it alerts us to the power that they can exercise over us.
Secondly, as we come to examine this set of sins, that we are to put to death, we are not to imagine that our particular besetting sins are any worse than those of anyone else. Nor indeed are we to see someone else’s sin as worse than our own. The Lord does not want us to look at the sins of another person and become self-righteous because we feel superior to that other person. For example, a person in a Christian fellowship may have a known sexual weakness that they battle against and be the butt of gossip within the church. Who is more guilty in the eyes of the Lord? The Lord abhors self-righteousness within the church because that is the sin of pride. The gossip is called to remove the plank from their own eye before speaking about the speck in a fellow believer’s eye.
We also have to remember that Paul is speaking to the whole church and not just addressing the individual believer. All of these sins will be present within the church and thus the whole body of believers is called together to put to death sinful and earthly things that are lurking within them. It is our responsibility in the church to encourage one another towards holiness so that together we are imitators of God. But this has got to be done in a way that is right:
- It can never be done in a self-righteous way, by one person’s or a group of people’s fault-finding other believers.
- Correcting one another has to spring from a heart of grace and not from a spirit of condemnation.
- The person who corrects a brother or sister in the Lord should be a mature believer. I am always impressed that in the story of the woman caught in adultery, and brought before Jesus, when he says, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” We are told that it was the older men who left first. Mature believers ought normally to be those who teach, correct and guide the church.
- There has to be consistency in the church. We ought to be stimulating one another by our good works and general disposition. There is nothing more contagious than a gracious life.
- The Word of God should be taught plainly in the churches. Too many preachers either spiritualise texts or avoid the practical teachings of the New Testament. We should be hearing the clear, wholesome word of God.
Let’s therefore ask the Holy Spirit to come into our individual lives and into the life of our church, and to make our hearts and minds sensitive to sin and especially the sin that easily besets us. It is possible that a whole church can be guilty of a particular sin or of tolerating a particular sin. Indeed it might be that a whole church is careless when it comes to sin, because it tolerates loose living among its people [when I refer to loose living I am not speaking only about sexual sin, but about a casual attitude to all sin – or a singling out of one or two sins while ignoring others. It is amazing to me how many churches will rail against sexual sin, but ignore the sin of obesity. Yet the sin of obesity is all too evident in so many Western Churches!!]. The church needs to be brought under the conviction of the Holy Spirit. However, generally, we need to invite the Holy Spirit to examine our lives and show us what it is in our lives that needs to be radically altered:
I believe that this is not an assessment we ought to carry out by ourselves, but clearly under the guidance of the Spirit. Like a car, that may have many things wrong with it when we take it in for repair, it is the most significant problems that have to be dealt with first in order to make it road-worthy. So too in our lives. We may examine our lives and feel that what is needed for us to do is to get more involved in the church’s life, and start going , say, to a prayer meeting. Perhaps the Holy Spirit wants us to deal with anger, which we have been justifying. Maybe we feel under conviction of sin, and that includes a long list of sins. We then look at our life and feel hopeless in the face of what we have to sort out. Be aware that Satan will also convict us of sin, in order to make us feel hopeless and diminish our relationship with God. Any conviction of sin that makes us feel hopeless is not from God and may come from Satan or from the malicious tongue of another human being. The Holy Spirit always makes us feel hopeful and leads us to repentance.
Invite the Holy Spirit to show you where to begin with the putting to death of sin in your life. The Spirit may do this directly to your conscience, through your reading of Scripture, through another person speaking to you or through teaching in the church. Whatever, you have begun on the road to dealing with that sin or sins, that to you are besetting, in the sense that they are strongly rooted in your character.
If a sin is lurking in you, this means that it has a strong place of influence in your life. Look at your life and ask yourself what has the greatest negative influence in your life and in your relationships within the church and with other people. So, having identified where to start what then must be done? Paul tells us that it must be put to death. What does that mean?
It must first of all be found guilty by you. We so easily accommodate sins in our lives by justifying them to our conscience, and even to God. We are told here that we first of all have to find what is wrong in our life, bring it to the bar and find it guilty and worthy of death. However, it is not always as simple as that. There are occasions when some people can expel a sin from their lives without any great effort, but that is not normally the case. Sin, like a prisoner under sentence of death will fight for its life. In this sense we see how sin is not just some neutral force, but is indeed a malicious, personal force within us that will not easily be put out of our lives.
We do have the power to get rid of sin. That power lies in part within ourselves and us having the desire to get it out of our lives. But we also have the power of the Holy Spirit who will, if he is asked, be active with us to put sin to death.
As I have already indicated, putting something to death is not something that happens overnight in most cases. To put something to death, is to starve it to death and deprive it of its energy and power. What is the best way to stop gossiping? By stopping doing it. By depriving this sin of its power over us. By asking the Holy Spirit to speak to our minds every time we want to do this or try to justify doing it. By depriving it of its influence, we are slowly putting it to death. But a remnant will always remain, ready to be influential in our lives, the moment we give it encouragement. I stopped smoking 30 years ago, having smoked since I was 12 years old – by the time I was 23, I was smoking 30 a day. When I was in my early 30’s and undergoing a time of considerable stress, I stared smoking again, telling myself that I would control what I smoked and could stop it at any time. I had opened a door, fooling myself that I was in control and found it incredibly difficult to stop smoking again. It is like this with any sin. We believe that we are in control, when in fact sin has such power that it actually controls us. It is simply a choice – either we allow ourselves to be controlled by sin or we submit ourselves to Christ and co-operate with him and allow him to have a powerful influence over our lives. That is why Jesus said to the disciples, “Watch and pray, lest you fall into temptation.” This side of eternity there has to be a vigilant watching over our lives, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We can never be at rest from our battle against sin.
What happens when we fail? We will feel disappointment and might feel defeated. But the Lord wants us to get back to the battle a wiser person and continue the fight. What happens when we fail often? The same principle applies. We must never tire in our desire to do sin to death. We might find this costly at times, however, there is another principle that we must examine.
Jesus indicated that when a demon is cast out of a person, they must not leave their lives vacant or seven other demons will enter in. To deal only with sin and not to replace it with virtue is dangerous. That is why Paul speaks of taking off or putting sin to death and putting on or clothing ourselves in goodness – one replaces the other and weakens the grip of what is negative by replacing it with something positive.
As we move on to the list of sins and virtues and look at them in some detail, I want us to resume the idea of dressing and undressing. As we do this I want us to look at one sin and be aware that Jesus is with us and want to help us “take off” that particular vice, whether in our own individual life or in the life of our fellowship. So as not to become too bogged down in sin, we will look at one sin and then one virtue, therefore after we have tackled taking off one sin, we will look at “putting on” one virtue, and so on. All the time we need to be aware, that for this to be successful, the following principles must be operative:
- We are doing this with Christ, and not alone, following the principle of, “Without me you can do nothing.”
- We are not putting anything off for another day. I was speaking to someone recently who is a heavy smoker and who knows it is wrong and harming her body. She was planning to stop it sometime in the vague, distant future, when it needed to be stopped NOW! The writer to the Hebrews tells us that now is the time to take action to change our lives.
- We must do this with a sense of permanence, not wanting to retain the negative influences of sin, and wanting to keep the positive influences or fruits of the Spirit.
- Finally, we have to be realistic. Some sin repels us but there is other sin that we do find very attractive. If we are to be honest, there is some sin that we love, are attached to and find attractive, otherwise we would shun it. I have just been walking round the garden. I do not particularly like weeding because it is a constant activity, and some of the weeds do look attractive. But to have a fine and attractive garden, the weeds need to be put to death – no matter how good some of them look. It is the same with all and any sin. We have to be prepared to be uncompromising in how we view sin – it is deadly to us and offensive to God, no matter how sweet it may at times feel to us.