No Quarter

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And we're going to be reading today verses 5 through 11.
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I was commenting to Andy prior to the message.
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This is a lot to get through and it may end up being two messages.
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We'll have to see how it goes.
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I have set it up as one message, but I've done that before and it turned into two.
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So we'll let the Lord lead in that regard because we do not want to rush the subject.
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In fact, this is not only one of the most important parts of Colossians, it's one of the most important parts of the Bible in regard to our applying it to our lives and living out the Christian life.
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And so we definitely do not want to rush our time.
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Before we read, I want to give just a few preliminary comments.
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There is an expression which has been used in the military as well as in other communities and forms of service.
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And the expression is, no quarter.
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No quarter means, in our vernacular, to show no pity.
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If you are in battle with an enemy, you don't give them a house, or you don't give them food, or you don't give them shelter, you give them no quarter.
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That's what the term means.
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And what Paul is going to show us today in this text is that the greatest enemy that we have to face as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ is the enemy of abiding sin.
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What some of the Puritans called besetting sin.
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The sins that continue to plague our lives.
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The sins that we continue to struggle with on a daily basis.
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And might I say, the sins that we often make friends with.
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And Paul is going to say about those sins that we ought to show them no quarter.
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Show them no mercy.
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Show them no pity.
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But rather to mortify them.
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Utterly kill them.
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So let us stand and hear the word of God.
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Paul begins his paragraph with the word put to death.
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So we will begin there.
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Put to death therefore what is earthly in you, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness which is idolatry.
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On account of these, the wrath of God is coming.
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In these you too once walked when you were living in them.
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But now you must put them all away.
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Anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth.
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Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.
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Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all and in all.
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Father in heaven I pray as we advance upon this very important text and seek to draw from it your truth and seek to make application in our walk that you would by your mercy and grace keep me from error.
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For Lord you know I am a fallible man and I am capable of preaching error.
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But for the sake of your name, for the sake of my conscience, for the sake of your church, Lord may you speak today through your word.
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May your spirit be the teacher.
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May Christ increase and I decrease.
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And Lord may we all leave changed today.
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For the believer I pray that we would be changed in regard to our affections, particularly those sins which we have kept and continue to keep.
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But Lord for the unbelievers who are here today, of Lord there certainly are many in a room this size who have not yet bowed the knee to Jesus Christ, that they would see that the very sins that we commit are the reason for the wrath of God which is coming upon the world.
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And Lord that the only way to escape that wrath is through the Lord Jesus Christ.
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And it's in this we pray.
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Amen.
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There are certain sermons that I look forward to preaching.
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And there are certain sermons that I do not.
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Sometimes because the subject matter is difficult.
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Sometimes simply because the text itself is difficult.
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And sometimes because it's just something that's hard to talk about.
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And quite frankly when it comes to the subject of besetting sin, the subject of abiding sin, that is one of the most difficult things that we discuss as believers because so many of us have so many different ideas on what that even means and what that looks like and how we ought to deal with it.
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Some don't deal with it at all.
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Some have taken the approach to simply let go and let God.
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I'm going to keep doing everything that I've always done and maybe at some point God by His mercy and grace will strike upon me a new desire and I will actually begin to see some positive change in my sanctification.
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But I'm not going to seek any progress in that area.
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Sometimes we hear the term, and maybe you've heard the term, hyper-grace.
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I don't like that term because I think grace is pretty great.
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But there are those who do exactly what Paul says not to do in Romans chapter 6.
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In Romans chapter 6 Paul poses the hypothetical, shall we continue in sin so that grace should abound? And his answer is meganoita in the Greek which means certainly not or may it never be.
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In the King James it says God forbid.
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Shall we continue to sin so that grace will be increased? Paul says don't even think that way.
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That's the way foolish people think.
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And as Christ bears the ones who have Christ within you, you're not foolish.
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So don't think like fools.
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Right? So Romans 6 deals with this.
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And you have those on the side who say we're going to continue to sin so that grace can abound and just slap Paul in the face.
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I remember I've told the story before of the man.
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I have one of my dearest friends in high school went to college and while he was in college he had a roommate and the roommate would watch TBN all day long.
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Now first of all that's bad enough.
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But that was his expression of Christianity.
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He would watch television preaching and then at night he would go on to the internet.
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Now this is way before Facebook and all these things.
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This was back when there was AOL chat rooms and things.
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And he would go on to these chat rooms and he would find young women who were willing to have illicit rendezvous with him.
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And he would leave the house to go on these rendezvous and say to my friend as he was leaving the house I'm going to sin so that grace can abound.
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You see that's the type of foolishness that's on the one side.
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But then there's an equally dangerous side.
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And it is the side of legalism that says if we just establish these rules and we live by these rules and we set these standards and we hold the standards as tight as we possibly can and we don't drink and we don't chew and we don't go out with boys that do.
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And what happens is we become happy little Pharisees who pretend we never deal with sin.
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And yet often in communities like that you find some of the most heinous sins are hidden behind the walls of the closet door.
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And so as Brother Andy often laments there are two ditches.
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The ditch of licentiousness is the ditch that says it doesn't matter what we do.
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And the ditch of legalism that says the very thing Paul said in chapter 2 doesn't work.
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That if all you deal with is the flesh that it will actually be of no value in stopping the indulgences of the flesh.
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So we find ourselves at a place where we have to find the right way because the one way doesn't work and the other way doesn't work either.
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So what then shall we do? And we come to chapter 3 of Colossians and Paul addresses this very thing.
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Last week we read verses 1 to 4 and we studied verses 1 to 4 and as I said last week verses 1 to 4 function as a bridge from Paul's teaching against the false teachers of Colossae and he's going against what they had taught and if you remember what they taught they taught about vain philosophy and about Jewish law keeping and about paganism and the things that were being taught.
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There were things like angel worship, things like asceticism, which is monkery, which is the separating yourself from all things and abusing yourself to the point of trying to find sanctification in that and Paul said all those things are no good.
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None of that is going to actually deal with the desires of the flesh.
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It's not going to solve the problem.
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So you come to chapter 3 and he begins to build a bridge to his application and in chapter 3 verses 1 to 4 he in fact does build that bridge and if you remember what he says, he says, If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God and not earthly things.
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So Paul makes a distinction.
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He says as Christians we are to have a unilateral focus and the unilateral focus is seeking after the things of God.
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Seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.
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That is to be our single-minded pursuit and he says if we do those things then we will be doing what Christ has called us to do.
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But the problem is we often do not do those things.
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Often we do not seek the things that are above and one of the biggest issues we face is we seek earthly things.
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That's the definitive distinction that Paul makes.
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He makes a distinction between that which is transcendent and that which is terrestrial.
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That which is above and that which is below.
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And he says while we ought to be seeking that which is above, that which is transcendent, we often focus on the things that are terrestrial, things that are below, things that are here and we make that our focus, we make that our goal and what ends up happening is rebellion and sin.
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And you have to realize and I'm sure that you do that in our modern culture sin is not taken seriously at all.
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Sin is a punchline.
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We play with sin.
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We joke with sin.
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We make excuses for sin.
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We harbor sin.
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We quarter sin.
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Sin is a part of our entertainment.
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It is a part of our routine.
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It is loved.
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We take pride in sin.
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We treat sin like a friend.
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So much so that when someone even says that something is sinful, it has become almost an illusory joke.
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We don't say that sinfulness is things like fornication.
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No, we say sinfulness is a really good dessert.
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Oh, that was so sinful.
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That's how we even treat the word.
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And if you utter the three-letter word sin in the modern context of the academy or any other type of social engagement that's outside of the church, if you say the word sin, it's almost always going to be received with some form of laughter.
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Oh, you really think that's a sin? And who cares if it's a sin? You really think that's a sin? What does sin even mean? Oh, that's just your opinion.
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You get to decide what is and is not sin.
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As a result, we hear the command of Scripture, which we're going to read and study today.
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The command of Scripture is to mortify sin, and we immediately become uncomfortable.
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Do you know why we become uncomfortable? Because we've made sin our friend, and we don't go around killing our friends.
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So the text says kill sin, mortify sin, put sin to death, and we say, but I like him.
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Now, you don't all sit there like a bunch of pious gasbags.
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You know that I'm telling the truth.
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You may not like it, but this is the truth, that we make friends with sin.
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Therefore, when the Bible tells us not to sin, when it calls us to repent of sin, we don't want to because we love our sin.
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And maybe it's not this sin.
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Maybe it's another sin.
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Maybe the sins I talk about today, like sexual immorality and lust and things like that, maybe that's not what really is your issue, but maybe your issue is hatred.
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Maybe your issue is gossip.
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Maybe your issue is slander.
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Maybe your issue is something that we won't even talk about.
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And then we go to an even more insidious problem, and that's this question.
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And I'm not going to lie, this is the question that's plagued me all week.
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As I sit and prepare and pray and read and study and write and then read more and write more and study more, I come back to this question.
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As a Christian, the desire should be to kill sin.
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But even if that desire is there, which it should be if we are believers, how can we do such a monumental thing? There are those of us who have been Christians for decades.
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There are people in this room who have been Christians for half a century.
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And yet if I went to those people, or if they came to me and said, do you still deal with besetting sin? Only the liar would say, no, I've reached sinless perfection.
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And then by lying, he demonstrates himself to, yes, be a sinner.
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If I asked the perfect man or woman among us to stand up, you would all remain seated and I would have to find me a seat.
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No one would dare stand and argue for their own absolute impurity, or purity rather, your absolute cleanliness.
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All we need do is take a videotape of the thoughts of your very minds and play them on this television screen.
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And how many of us would not run out screaming, this may not be what you came here to hear today, but is it not the truth? That if I could stick an SD card in your ear and pull out all of your thoughts for just 24 hours and put them on a computer and post them to Twitter.
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Or maybe if I just took your internet history.
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So I have to ask the question, is this just pie in the sky? Is what Paul's saying here something unrealistic and therefore meaningless? Because he says, mortify the sin.
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Mortify what is earthly in you.
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We're going to talk about what that means in a moment.
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But he's basically saying, kill sin.
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Is this unrealistic? Is this a meaningless command? Is this a command we should just ignore? And that's what I've been struggling with all week because I know it's not.
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There's no reason to think this is a meaningless command.
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But the next question is, well, how do we do it? By God's grace, he actually tells us in this passage.
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I hope I get there today.
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But if I don't, preview for next week.
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Hey, that might bring you back.
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Because if we just talk about the bad, maybe next week we can talk about the good.
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Because what we have here is we have two issues.
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We have first the command to mortify sin.
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And then the question is answered of how to do that.
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The command is actually found in verses 5 through 9.
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And then how it is done is actually found in the latter part of verse 9 down to verse 11.
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So Paul knows what he's up against.
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Paul knows what he's addressing.
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He's addressing something that is going to raise a question.
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Therefore, he answers the question immediately.
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So let's look first at the command.
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The command in the ESV is put to death.
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Now for those of you holding a King James Bible, it uses the much more emphatic word.
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And I do like this word, the word mortify.
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The word in the Greek is nekrosate.
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And nekrosate comes from the root word nekros, which is the Greek word for death.
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We're familiar with words like necromancy, which is trying to speak to the dead.
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That's where that word comes from.
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So nekrosate is the idea of putting something to death.
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And he says put to death.
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In the ESV it says put to death therefore.
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Now the word therefore, if you're not familiar with biblical structure of language and how grammar works in the Bible, it also works this way in English.
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Anytime you use the word therefore, it means that you're basing your argument on something that came before.
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This therefore that.
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This is the logical conclusion of what has come before.
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Well what came before? What came before was he says seek the things that are above, not the things that are on the earth.
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That was the whole position of last week.
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Seek the things of God, don't seek the things of the earth.
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And then he says therefore put to death that which is earthly in you.
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The King James Version says mortify your members which are upon the earth.
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So the King James focuses on the idea that sin is a product of our members.
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Our members being our body.
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Put to death therefore what is earthly in you.
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And you say well what is that? What is earthly in me? What is it referring to? Well Paul doesn't leave it to chance.
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Paul doesn't make you have to wonder.
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Paul doesn't leave you in a condition where you have to take a quiz or come up with five good answers.
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Because he gives you five good answers.
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Actually he gives you ten.
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And if you look really closely he gives you twelve.
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Because he gives you a list of five and then at the end of the first list of five, he gives you a definition of the fifth one which actually creates a sixth one.
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Then he gives you another list of five and at the end of the fifth one of the second list, he goes on to explain that one further and adding another one to the list.
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So he actually gives us twelve things that are earthly.
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A twelve point sermon would last a while but I am going to talk about them.
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Because we need to understand these things.
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Because I'm going to tell you something.
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Half the things on this list people don't think are sins anymore.
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Half the things on this list they do parades to celebrate.
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Half the things on this list are things that we, I have people come to me and say well pastor do you really think this is a sin? Yeah it like says it.
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And not to be sarcastic and crass but can you read? One of the biggest problems we have is we believe that sin is something we determine.
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And what has happened with the way that we determine what sin is, is we've got to the point where nothing is sinful except offending someone else.
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We've got to the position that the only way that you can truly be offensive is if you offend somebody else by telling them they're wrong.
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Murder three thousand babies in the womb every day, that's wrong.
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How could you be so sinfully oppressive to tell them that it's wrong to murder three thousand babies? See that's how it works.
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We literally have found what Isaiah said was going to happen.
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Because Isaiah said woe unto them who call evil good and good evil and who replace light for darkness and darkness for light and replace the sweet for bitter and the bitter for sweet.
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We've taken the sweetness of the word of God and we've replaced it with the bitterness of the world and we've said bitter is good and sweet is bad.
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We've taken the light of God's word and we've replaced it with the darkness of the world and we've said darkness is good and light is bad.
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We've literally said evil is good and good is evil.
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We're codifying it into law.
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Just this last couple of weeks a law has gone into place in one of the states where a parent, if they do not allow their child to receive surgical and medical treatment to affirm their gender that they believe that they are, not determined by their genetics but determined by their emotions.
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If the parent chooses to not allow the child to engage in medical procedures that will affect their entire life, then they can be removed from the home.
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They say, oh he's talking about politics, I might get mad.
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Listen, I'm not talking about politics, I'm talking about evil.
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And I'm just as much willing to say something about the red as I am the blue, just to be clear.
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I remember going to preach outside when Donald Trump came to town, Mike and I went down and preached outside the event.
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Mike preached and I handed out tracks.
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And somebody said, why are you here? We're Christians.
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No, you're Republicans, it's not the same.
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You can be a Republican and be lost, you can vote for Trump and be lost.
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Or whoever they put up.
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This is not politics, this is right and wrong.
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And right and wrong is determined by the word of God.
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And if we won't say it, if we're afraid, oh I have to toe this party line, then we fear men more than God.
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It's the absolute truth.
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So Paul says, put to death therefore what is earthly in you.
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What are those things? What are the things we're supposed to put to death? We're going to look at the first five.
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The first five are actually found in verse 5.
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And he spits them out quickly.
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And I think of it like this.
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This is not a list which is intended to be all encompassing.
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This is not a monolithic list like this is only what is earthly.
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These are examples, these are primers for a larger issue of sin.
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And if you want to know where some other lists are, go over to 1 Corinthians 6, you'll find a list there.
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And there's some things in that list that aren't in this list.
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And if you go over to Romans 1, and you find that list, you're going to find some things there that aren't here.
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So if you just want an all encompassing list, come to my office later, I'll give you a copy of, this is actually true, I'll give you a copy of our Constitution.
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In our Constitution, we listed them all out.
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Took all the different lists and put them out.
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And you know what? That still doesn't.
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That still doesn't give them all.
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It just gives all the ones that are named.
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And we just did that as part of a statement we were writing.
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This is what the Bible calls sin.
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All of these things.
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It's a pretty long list.
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But actually what we find in these lists is we find principles.
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And the principles behind what is being said is what really matters.
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And that's what I hope to show you is the principles in this list.
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Because you'll notice the five things he mentions in the first list.
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Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, covetousness.
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And he defines covetousness as idolatry.
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Right away, five things, right? Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness.
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Okay? But what is the heart behind that? All of those things.
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All of them, if you look at them, all of them are things that we bear on the inner man.
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You know what Jesus talks about? He talks about that which is inside of us is what really matters.
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We talked about this a few weeks ago about people who worry about what foods they eat.
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It's regarding the Levitical law and the dietary law.
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And Jesus said it's not what goes into the body which defiles the man but what comes out.
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Because the heart of the man is actually the issue.
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And by the way, we're reformed here.
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That means we're part of the reformed tradition.
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Which means we believe in the depravity of man.
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And we believe in the depravity of man because of what the Bible says.
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It actually says that man is, he has a heart that is desperately wicked.
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Who can know it? And you all know that's true because again, the SD card.
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Come, let me show it to you.
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Alright? And the problem is even as believers, we still struggle with that.
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What are the five things? Sexual immorality, the word there is pornea.
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It's actually porneion, it's a form of the word pornea.
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And it means to engage in illicit sex, to commit fornication.
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Sexual immorality, fornication and other sexual sins, it lists prostitution.
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In case you're not hearing the word pornea is where of course we get the word pornography.
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What is pornography? Pornography, it attaches the word grafe, which means an image or writing.
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Pornography is to take illicit sexual behavior and give it life on a page or on a screen.
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That's what pornography is.
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It didn't exist in this time on photos because they didn't have cameras.
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But it did exist in writings, drawings.
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And this is the first thing.
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The first thing in the list.
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In fact, if you go through the list, go back to 1 Corinthians 9 or 6, go back to Romans 1.
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Find these lists, you'll notice one that tends to come up in every list.
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It's this one.
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And have we not, as a culture, absolutely just thrown this one out? And let me just be quite frank with you.
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It's not just in regard to same-sex relationships and homosexuality and all of that.
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The church has sanctified fornication for a long time by ignoring it.
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Because we will say, yes, the letter people are wrong.
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LGBT, right? We'll say that with boldness.
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But sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman? Pastor, you just know that's the way things are.
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Back in the 60s, they had the sexual revolution, right? Where the idea of sex to be kept within the bound of marriage was something that was universally understood as a righteous thing.
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And when it was done outside of marriage, it was considered an unrighteous thing.
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But then the sexual revolution comes along, and what happens? It becomes a joke.
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And guys who preach like me are dinosaurs.
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I had a lady call me that one time.
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Actually, she called me a caveman.
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For eight years, I worked in the public school system as a substitute teacher, worked several days a week as a substitute teacher.
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And I ended up having lunch many of those days in the room where the other teachers had lunch.
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And I exercised my prerogative in eavesdropping.
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I would just sit and listen to them talk, very, very rarely engaging with the conversations, but listening well.
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And I remember one time I had the temerity to speak.
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And I said something to the effect of discipline or children or something.
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And the lady said, Mr.
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Foskey, that's caveman thinking.
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All right, well, you know what? Yeah, okay.
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We mock our ancestors.
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We mock the Puritans as a joke.
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We mock our ancestors in the faith.
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And yet when you actually go and read what they had to say on these things and you study some of these men, you find a wisdom that is not even anywhere touched by what is being produced today.
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In preparation for this, I was looking at the mortification of sin by John Owen.
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I have several quotes from him that I'm not going to be able to get to today.
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I can tell by my time.
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But on the mortification of sin, John Owen speaks with such clarity and with such reality.
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Because he doesn't make it fake.
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He actually asked the question, if it's all done by the Holy Spirit, if sanctification is a work of the Holy Spirit, does that mean I don't contribute? Or what do I contribute and how do I contribute and what do I do? Like he deals with real life questions.
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And man, this is hundreds of years old.
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And what do we do? Watch TikTok videos and think we're smarter.
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We think we're outdoing that in wisdom because we watched a 10-minute YouTube video.
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And hey, I'm on YouTube and all that stuff, so I'm not saying it's all bad.
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I'm just saying we find ourselves in a very difficult place where we think we're the tip of the spear.
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We think we're the best.
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We're the smartest.
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We're the wisest.
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Because we understand things like germ theory and antibiotics.
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Yeah, they didn't have that 100 years ago, and yeah, that's pretty cool.
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But wisdom has been replaced with worldliness.
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And the expectation of living the Christian life as a life which daily puts sin to death has been absolutely expunged from many churches.
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The sermon I'm preaching now would not be welcome in many churches.
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Because I would be told this sermon would run people off, and it might.
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And if you're here today for the first time, at least come tell me why you're leaving.
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But seriously, if you're here, know that we love you, and we want you to stay, and we love you, and we want you to hear the Word of God.
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But we will never seek to entertain you into staying.
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We will preach the Word and pray that God works on your heart.
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But I don't tap dance, so sexual immorality is a sin.
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And by the way, porneia is widespread.
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I did not mean to make this whole sermon about sexual immorality, but again, it's in every list.
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I can't help but to keep mentioning it's a widespread issue.
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It does not just mean sex outside of marriage.
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It does not just mean adultery.
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It does not just mean acts of illicit homosexual behavior.
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It's all of that.
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Anything that is not kept within the bound of marriage is sexual immorality.
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So if you're not married and you're having sex, you are living in sin right now, and you need to repent.
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I don't like that you said that.
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Okay.
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I don't want you to misunderstand what I'm saying.
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So I'm trying to say it clearly.
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How about this? How about Jesus' words? When Jesus is preaching the greatest sermon that's ever been preached in the history of mankind, the Sermon on the Mount, we have it written for us in Matthew 5 through chapter 7.
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We have the greatest sermon in history.
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And in the beginning of that sermon, He's talking about the law, and He's talking about how we ought to live, and He says, you have heard it said this, but I say this.
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And one of the things He said was, you have heard it said, do not commit adultery.
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Because why would He say that? Because that's the sixth commandment.
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Seventh commandment.
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It's in the Decalogue.
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It's there.
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Do not commit adultery.
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He says, but I tell you this.
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If a man looks at a woman to lust after her, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
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And every man swallows hard when he reads those words.
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Because that's a struggle with men.
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Visual creatures, and we look.
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And by the way, if you want to know what lust is, I think Ray Comfort gives the best answer to what defines lust.
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Lust is mental pornography.
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Lust is mental pornography.
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That's what it is.
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So looking at a woman saying she's beautiful, that's not necessarily lust.
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But you know what it is.
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And you know how to define it now.
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So again, there's five things here.
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But it starts, He starts with a very difficult one.
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And then He moves to the second one.
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He says, put to death that which is earthly in you, sexual immorality.
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That's one.
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The second is impurity.
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What is impurity? A catharsion is the word.
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Catharsis, katha.
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It's referring to that which is filthy, that which is rubbish, that which is dirty.
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In the moral sense, it is the impurity of lustful, luxurious, and profligate living.
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It is a filthy life.
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So how do you define that? It's a life that doesn't seek to glorify God.
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Everything that we do is supposed to be to the glory of God.
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We read this later in Colossians when he actually says, everything that you do, do to the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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Everything that you do.
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But do we think about what we do as we're doing it and say, is this something that brings glory to God? Or is this something that actually diminishes the glory of God? The next word in the list is sexual immorality, impurity, passion.
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Now, the King James Version says inordinate affection.
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And the NET says shameful passion.
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I do think this is one of the times where the ESV is being faithful to the Greek, but is not being faithful to the meaning.
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Because when I just say passion, right away you might think, well, what's wrong with passion? Because passion for certain things is not really sinful.
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If you have a passion for doing good with your family, you have a passion for those things.
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We talk about passion simply means an expression of the emotion in English.
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But the word pathos in Greek is more than just that.
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And this is why I think the King James translators tried to explain it by saying inordinate affection.
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And then the NET shameful passion.
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The best, absolute best translation I think is neither of those actually though.
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I think the best translation is lust.
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Because that's the type of passion.
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And you say, but didn't he just say that like two sentences, didn't he say that, sexual immorality? Remember what I said, this is all stuff from the inside.
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Sexual immorality doesn't start with the prostitute, it starts looking for the prostitute.
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It starts on the inside.
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Impurity doesn't start with what you're doing on the outside, it starts with a heart that's looking for the filthy and the dirty and it wants that and wants to fill that hole.
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The same thing is true with passion.
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Lust, it's an inside problem.
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Paul is dealing with the inner man in this list.
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The next thing, epithumion cocaine, evil desire.
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Where do your desires come from? James tells us, from within, right? The evil man who has evil desires from within, that's where the evil desire comes from.
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The King James says, evil concupiscence.
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I can't even say it.
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Mike's corrected me.
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He just worded it out for me like a father.
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He's like, it's okay, son, you can do it.
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But it means to long for something that's evil.
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And the last one of this list is covetousness.
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And you say, well, what is covetousness? I'm glad you asked.
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He tells us, covetousness is idolatry.
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He literally says, covetousness, which is idolatry.
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Some people have a really hard time trying to figure out what that 10th commandment means.
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You go through all 10 commandments.
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Have no other gods before the Lord.
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Do not make any idols.
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Do not use the Lord's name in vain.
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Remember the Sabbath.
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Honor your father and mother.
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Do not commit murder.
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Do not commit adultery.
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Do not steal.
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Do not lie.
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Do not covet.
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We get to number 10, do not covet.
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And we say, what is covet? What does it mean to covet? It means to have a desire for something that is not yours, that God has not given to you.
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You look at another man's wife, that's coveting because she ain't for you.
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You look at another man's property that he doesn't have for sale.
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What I'm saying is just wanting something isn't necessarily covetousness.
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Working hard to accomplish something.
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You want a family.
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You work hard for your family.
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You want to have a house.
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You work hard for that.
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That's not necessarily coveting.
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But if every time you drive down the street, you see the guy's house who's not for sale and say, man, that should be my house.
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That's coveting.
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You know why? Because that's idolatry.
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Because what that man has has become the most important thing in your life and you're worshipping that rather than the God that you should be worshipping.
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And again, it comes from the inside.
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All of these are things on the inside.
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Paul's addressing this.
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The next list of five, I'll go through these real quick because I've got to close.
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But I did want to get through them.
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Anger.
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Orgain.
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Where do we get the word? Orgy.
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Orgy means anger, indignation.
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Wrath.
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Thumon.
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It comes from the word, where we get the word thermometer.
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It means the temperature.
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It means something that gets hot.
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Are you easily angered? Do people only know you as the wrathful person? I can't talk to that person.
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He's always angry.
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I can't have a conversation with that lady.
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She's always biting somebody's head off.
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That's this.
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Malice.
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Malice is ill will.
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A desire to injure.
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Wickedness.
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That is not a shame to break the law.
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That's one definition of malice.
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Slander.
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Slander actually comes from the word blasphemy here.
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Blasphemyon in the Greek.
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And it means to rile against or rail against or detract or to speak injurious things toward another.
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And this one here, I wish I had time.
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You guys got time? I got time.
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Now all the visitors got nervous.
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Aeschrylogion.
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Aeschrylogion literally means dirty talk.
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Dirty talk.
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ESV translates it as obscene talk.
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Laonida, which is one of the best Greek lexicons that is available, says this is the way aeschrylogion ought to be translated.
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Obscene, shameful speech involving culturally disapproved themes.
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You say, does the Bible actually address culture? Yeah, it does.
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Right here.
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There are words that are culturally wrong.
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And you say, what does that mean? They are absolutely wrong.
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No, but they are words that we ought not be using.
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Now I admit right away this one's difficult because in some people's house you can't, you got your no-no words, right? And then you got your Christian curse words, like the ones that you can say because Mama made a list.
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I can't say this, but I can say this.
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And I'm not going to say any of them because somebody will go home offended that I got on a no-no word.
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But in general, we know what it's talking about because this is what we do right before we say it.
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We know what it is.
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I remember years ago, I had a foul mouth, foul mouth.
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When I was in high school, I went to a Christian event.
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I wasn't a believer until I was 19.
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I went to a Christian event.
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It was right over there.
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They had the big field.
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They had this big Christian concert.
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I'm standing around with a bunch of Christians.
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I'm just letting it go.
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And one dude looks at me, and he says, Guy, we're Christians.
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I said, I'm not.
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I didn't care.
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Even after I became a believer, I struggled with it some.
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And I don't have a perfect mouth now, so I can't say everything I say is as pure as the driven snow.
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But I remember one day I was sitting in Pizza Hut on Dunn Avenue.
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And I was sitting next to a group of guys who looked like they were on the job.
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They had come there for, you know, their lunch hour.
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My wife is with me.
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And we'd probably been married for two years at that point, back when Pizza Hut was actually good.
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And these men were saying some of the most foul and obscene words.
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Now, they're not believers, and I'm not calling them worse sinners than anyone else because of this.
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But I was upset for my wife having to sit and listen to that.
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And it dawned on me.
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You do the same thing.
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Why are you offended that some unbelieving truck driver or, you know, construction worker is sitting having his pizza and throwing those words out, but you're not offended by yourself? And that cut me to the core.
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Do our words matter? Yes, our words actually do matter.
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And one of the things, and this is where I have to close.
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But the thing that he lists, and here's something you don't think of as obscene talk because we've been talking about, like, filthy language.
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But he does list one thing that's filthy, and it's lying.
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It's the very next verse.
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But in the Greek, remember, there ain't no numbers.
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There ain't no verse demarcations.
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He says, Avoid these things, anger, wrath, malice, slander, obscene talk, and do not lie to one another.
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Why? Because lying to one another is the most obscene thing you can do.
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Lying is actually a form of obscene talk.
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See, it's not just about no-no words.
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It's also about how we use our words.
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And how do we use our words? Do we use our words to hurt, or do we use our words to build up? Do we use our words to cut, or do we use our words to heal? The Bible says the power of life and death is in the tongue.
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And don't let the Pentecostals tell you that what that means is you can speak things into existence because you ain't God, and you can't do that.
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But what you can do is you can use your words to build people up or tear them down.
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And if you don't believe that, let me introduce you to some children who grew up with abusive parents who never swung a hand, but only swung their words, and their words made their children not who they could have been had they not been raised in that abusive environment.
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I remember a young boy who told me.
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This was when I was 20 years ago.
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And his father was a Christian man.
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So he said.
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And he said, when I'm at home, my father cusses me, screams at me, yells at me, calls me stupid, calls me ignorant, calls me effeminate, calls me all kinds of things.
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And he calls himself a Christian.
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If that's what a Christian is, I don't want to be one.
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I feel like I haven't solved the problem, but at least we've identified it, haven't we? So I guess you're going to have to come back next time.
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Let me at least say this.
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Paul is going to tell us, as we study further, that the solution to these things is mortifying the sin in us.
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But it's not something that we do independently.
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But it's something that we can only do by the power of the Spirit who lives within us.
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It has to be done by the Spirit.
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In fact, I will read one quote from John Owen.
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Talking about the Spirit actually being within us.
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And the Spirit being the motivation.
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The Spirit being the empowering.
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He says this.
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All other ways of mortifying sin are useless.
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He says, unless you do it by the power of the Spirit, it's useless.
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Yes, you can go to 12 steps and maybe get off of alcohol.
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Yes, you can go to celebrate recovery and maybe get off of drugs.
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But if you're doing it outside of the power of the Spirit, it's not sanctification, it's behavior modification.
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And it's not the same thing.
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He says, all other ways of mortifying sin are useless.
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All other helps leave us helpless.
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It must be done by the Spirit.
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Men may attempt to do this based on other principles, by other means.
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Just as they have always done and still do.
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But he says, this is the work of the Spirit is to be done by Him alone.
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And it cannot be accomplished by any other power.
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Mortification using our own strength or carried on by ways that we invent to make ourselves righteous in our own eyes.
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Is the core of every false religion in the world.
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Hear that again, that last part.
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Mortification using our own strength carried on by ways that we invent to make ourselves righteous in our own eyes.
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Is the core of every false religion in the world.
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Every false religion has a clean up program.