Consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry.
–Colossians 3:5
Galatians 6:7 says, “Whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.” In other words, whatever you plant is what you’re going to harvest. You don’t plant an apple seed and harvest a kumquat. What you plant is what you get, and that’s true for every area of life. As one person put it, “Plant a thought and reap a word; plant a word and reap an action; plant an action and reap a habit; plant a habit and reap a character; plant a character and reap a destiny.” Our destiny begins with our thoughts. That’s the message of this week’s passage in Colossians 3.
In this chapter, Paul called on us to be heavenly minded–to conform our everyday attitudes, affections, and actions to those of Jesus Christ. Verse 3 says, “You have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Just as Jesus died on the cross, your old sin nature has been crucified, and you have been raised to a new way of living.
In verse 5, Paul talked about our responsibility in the process of becoming like Jesus. He wrote, “Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry.” In other words, act in a way that is consistent with who you are in Christ, and who you are in Christ is someone over whom sin has no hold.
My friend Bobb Biehl once worked at a circus for a day. He was amazed to see a ten-ton elephant tied to the same size stake as a “little” three-hundred-pound elephant. Wouldn’t the larger animal be able to pull up that stake? A trainer explained, “When they’re babies, we stake them down. They try to tug away from the stake maybe 10,000 times before they realize they can’t possibly get away. At that point, their ‘elephant memory’ takes over, and they remember for the rest of their lives that they can’t get away from the stake.”
Before we became Christians, we had no power to break free from addictions and wrong relationships. Now we have the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives. But sometimes our memory takes over and we think we’re the same as before, so we don’t even try to break free from sin. Paul was saying we need to remember who we are in Christ and act accordingly. That means dealing decisively with sinful actions and attitudes in our lives.
