By Pastor Matthew Ritchey
Christ is seated at the position of honor beside the Father and, if you have trusted in the redemptive work of Christ alone, you have a seat reserved with Him in Heaven. Because our eternal state resides in Heaven, we are to pursue and desire those spiritual blessings. In other words, we are to take our redeemed and perfect position in Christ and live it out in our daily lives. Until the day we receive our new bodies, we are called to allow the Holy Spirit to guide us and not be controlled by our sinful flesh. In the August 2018 issue, we looked at some sinful actions that were not to be present in the life of a believer. Since the believer is secure in Christ with a renewed life, the way we live should be different than that of lost sinners.
We have two groups of actions in our text today, one bad and one good (Colossians 3:8-14). A quick reminder that we talked about many months ago in these articles is that Paul is addressing the Gnostic error that had made its way into the Church at Colossae. Part of that error was the teaching that all matter (physical things) is evil, in spite of the fact that the Bible teaches that it is not the physical nature of man that is evil; it is the moral nature. For example, Paul does not say that sex is evil; He says impure sexual relations are evil. He doesn’t say tangible possessions are evil, he says lusting after worldly things is evil.
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