Rev. Tobias Riggs Archives - Christ the King Presbyterian Church

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Rev. Tobias Riggs – September 20, 2026

Good morning. For those of you who don’t know, I am Tobias, the Associate Pastor here at Christ the King, and it’s my privilege once again to open God’s Word with us this morning. Last week, we were in verses 5 – 11, where Paul tells the Colossians to put off the old life, anger, malice, lying, all of it. But we didn’t end with the list. We ended with what God has already done for us. In Christ, our old self has been taken off, and the new self has been put on, a self that’s being renewed in the image of the one who made us. And this morning, Paul finishes the thought and tells us what we’re to wear now that we’ve put on the new self. But by the end of the passage, he’s talking about far more than clothing. He’s talking about everything we say and do. So what does that life look like, and what makes it possible?

Let’s turn there together. Chapter 3 of Colossians. We’re going to read verses 12 – 17.

“Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” (ESV)

These are the words of the Lord. Let’s pray.

Oh, Father, we bow before you. We are so thankful that you have called us here today, that we can gather freely to sing your praises, to learn from your word. We thank you, Lord, that we have heard the beauty of the gospel, that we have been buried with our Savior, that we have been raised with him, and that we are seated with him now, in union with him, we are hidden with him. Thank you, Lord, for that. We thank you that you have put on the new self, and we pray, Lord, that you will teach us as we listen this morning to put on the things that reflect you. We cannot do this on our own, and so we pray for the Spirit to work within us, even as we ask the Spirit to give us insight, to open our eyes and ears to what you would have us hear this morning. And may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.

Well, after last week, some of you may be nervous that a sermon about getting dressed is going to involve Lycra. Rest assured, I think we can all agree, once was plenty. Still, most of us know something about playing dress-up. Whether we’ve raised small children or simply remember being one, we know how much of childhood is spent that way. A towel becomes a cape, a pot becomes a helmet, and for an afternoon, a five-year-old is a knight or a doctor or whatever his older sibling happens to be. And working through this passage, I was reminded of something C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity. He says that every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we’re doing something like dressing up. We’re calling God our Father, which is language that belongs first to the Son. And so, in a sense, we’re putting on Christ.

And Lewis admits how that looks. “Left to ourselves,” he says, “we’re a bundle of self-centered fears and hopes and jealousies. And so dressing up as Christ is a kind of pretending, even a piece of outrageous cheek.” But he says there are two kinds of pretending. There’s the kind that takes the place of the real thing, like a man who acts generous so that no one will notice he isn’t. And then there’s another kind. And he gets at that second kind with a question. “What is the good of pretending to be what you’re not?” His answer is that Christ uses it. As we put on what we don’t yet fully feel or live out, Christ is at work in us, making it real.

And I think Lewis is on to something here, but I’m not sure most of us would call it pretending. After all, when we try to put on compassion and patience and forgiveness, we aren’t playing a part. We’re honestly trying to obey. And yet we still fail, often the same day. And something in us wants to say, who am I kidding? I’m not those things. And that’s when we can start to feel like a fraud. And in that moment, pretending doesn’t feel far off the mark. But friends, Paul wouldn’t call that pretending either. In Christ, we’re not putting on something that is in ours. Our clothes aren’t a costume we wear in the hope of someday becoming God’s people. They’re the clothes of people who already belong to him. That’s why he calls us chosen, holy, and beloved, before he gives us a single garment. It’s as if he were saying, “Before I hand you something to wear, let me tell you who you are.” And so that’s where we need to begin this morning, with those three words, and with whose they were before they were ours. In verse 12, Paul calls the Colossians “chosen, holy, and beloved.” And we might be tempted to take those as merely warm words from the Apostle, but they’re more than that. They carry a history. They belonged to Israel.

In fact, these are the three words Moses uses to address them as they stood on the edge of the promised land. A people holy to the Lord, he says in Deuteronomy 7, chosen out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, loved simply because the Lord loves them. But now Paul says the same of the Colossians, and it helps to see who they were. Picture the room where Paul’s letter was first read aloud. Colossae is a small market town in the Lycus Valley. It’s overshadowed by larger neighbors. Most of the people in that room are Gentiles. In fact, most of them are the very people Paul named last week, Greeks, uncircumcised, Scythians, and some of them are still slaves. And yet Paul calls them chosen, holy, and beloved. Those words were never theirs. They belonged to somebody else’s nation, somebody else’s history, but now they’re “theirs.” Everyone.

Friends, that is a remarkable thing to say to a gathering like that, and yet Paul’s saying something more than that, because before these words were ever spoken over them or over us, they were spoken over someone else. In the New Testament, we hear them spoken over Jesus. At his baptism, he came up out of the water, and the Father said, “this is my beloved son with whom I’m well pleased.” Peter calls him “the living stone, chosen and precious in the sight of God.” And when many of his disciples turned away in John 6, Peter said, “we have believed and have come to know that you are the holy one of God. You see, before these words belonged to the church, they belonged to the Son.” And so when Paul calls the Colossians chosen, holy, and beloved, he isn’t only telling them they’re God’s people like Israel, he’s telling them that what belongs to Jesus now belongs to them. Not just God’s people, sons in the Son, and he says it of us too.

And what’s true of those three words is also true of the clothing and the rest of verse 12, because nearly every garment Paul hands us here was God’s first. Take compassion, kindness, and patience. The gods the Colossians grew up with were famous for their tempers, for being touchy and fickle and easily offended. Kindness definitely wasn’t their reputation. But when the Lord passed before Moses on the mountain in Exodus 34, he proclaimed himself “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” That’s the compassion, kindness, and patience on Paul’s list. And the Lord said it of himself first. And it’s worth saying something more about compassion, because Paul’s word for it is stronger than our translation suggests. The ESV says “compassionate hearts,” but the word behind it is Paul’s. It’s not Paul’s usual word for the heart. It means the inward parts, the gut. The King James renders it “bowels of mercies,” which is faithful to the Greek, but I’ll leave you to imagine how that would land today. The point though is that this compassion is felt deep inside, so much so that it turns us toward others. In fact, Paul uses that same word for Onesimus. Sending him home, Paul tells Philemon, “I’m sending him back to you, sending my very heart.” A slave had become Paul’s innermost self. And then there’s humility, which would have sounded strange to Colossian ears. In their world, it was hardly a virtue at all. It was closer to an insult, a word for the posture of a slave, someone with no standing to speak of.

And yet there it sits in the wardrobe of God’s chosen ones. And I imagine the slaves in that room heard it a bit differently. But it’s there because Jesus said of himself, “I am gentle and lowly in heart.” That word “lowly” is Paul’s humility word. And the word behind gentle is the same one behind Paul’s meekness. Both belonged first to the Son, who took the form of a servant. And humility and meekness as he showed them, set aside whatever standing would keep us at arm’s length from others and move toward the lowly. Friends, these are our family clothes. And every one of them was Christ’s before it was ours. But what is it like to wear them? I mean, it’s not like a cozy sweater on a cold morning. These clothes are demanding. They cost something.

And so Paul goes on in verse 13 to tell us what wearing them involves. “Bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other.” You see, Paul isn’t naive about the church. He knows perfectly well that someone is going to have a complaint. And he doesn’t mean a misunderstanding or a bruised ego. He means a real wrong. The kind that requires forgiveness. And we acknowledge the same thing every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer together as we did this morning. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” In that one prayer, we confess both that we owe and that we are owed. And that’s what Paul’s getting at. He isn’t describing a church that stopped wounding one another. He’s describing how wounded people are to live together. But bearing with one another and forgiving, it’s hard for us, isn’t it? A complaint rarely feels like something we need or want to let go of. It feels like being right. And when we’re right, we don’t move toward the person. We nurse the complaint.

It shows up as the conversation we keep rehearsing in the car. The one where we finally say exactly what we mean and the other person finally understands. It shows up in how we tell the story to a friend and how the other person comes off a bit worse each time. We convince ourselves we’re just remembering accurately. But really, we’re keeping a record. And a record is exactly what Paul won’t let us keep. His answer instead is to bear one another and forgive. As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And I think this is where we need to come back to Onesimus. You see, he was from Colossae, and so was the man he wronged. Philemon was in that room, a man with a real complaint. And Paul asks him to receive Onesimus as a brother. And he asked the whole church meeting in his house to do the same. That’s what Paul’s command looks like in person. But it’s a hard thing to ask, and Paul knows it. And this is why he gives us one final garment, love. In verse 14, he says, “Above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”

Now, above all sounds like a ranking. But Paul’s still talking about getting dressed. Love goes over the rest, the way a cloak goes over everything else and holds the whole outfit together. In fact, the word he uses for that binding is the one he used in chapter 2, for ligaments that knit a body together. Love is what makes it possible to bear with the brother who’s wronged us, to be patient with him, not just the seventh time, but the seventy-seventh time, and to receive him when he comes back. And friends, the comforting thing is that this isn’t a love we have to manufacture. It’s the love the Father spoke over the Son at His baptism and has now spoken over us. We are beloved, and that’s where our love for one another begins. And yet, knowing we’re loved and living like it with one another are two different things. And so, in verse 15, Paul leaves the clothing behind and tells us what our life together will need.

“And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you are called in one body.” That word rule comes from the world of games. It’s the word for the umpire, the official who decides the contest and awards the prize. And it’s just like Paul to use an athletic image, right? Writing to the Philippians and the Corinthians, it was running for the prize. Here, it’s the man who decides the race. And his point is this. In every heart, someone is making the call. Something is deciding what counts and where we stand. And that, Paul says, must be the peace of Christ. And Paul’s used that word before in this letter, but pointed the other way. In worship of angels, to disqualify is to be ruled out. And there were men in Colossae who’d set themselves up as the officials of the Christian life. And they had a rule book, special days, food laws, a hard discipline of the body, and a kind of humility that could be displayed and admired. It had, Paul says, the appearance of wisdom, and it was working. Some of the Colossians were beginning to wonder whether they’d been disqualified. And some had started keeping the rule book, hoping it would settle the question. And, you know, it’s not hard for us to imagine why men like that found an audience.

After all, when we ourselves keep failing at the same sin, when we’re not sure we’ve grown at all in years of following Jesus, what do we do? We start looking for something that will give us some confidence that we’re really his. A new devotional practice, maybe, or a season of fasting, a conference, or a pastor or a friend whose walk with the Lord seems to be everything ours isn’t. None of these is wrong in itself, and some of them do us real good, but the danger is that we hand them the whistle. We let someone other than Christ tell us where we stand, and that’s exactly what was happening in Colossae. Men who weren’t holding fast to the head, as Paul says, had found their standing somewhere else, and they were telling the Colossians to do the same. But the peace of Christ is a different official altogether. It’s the peace he made by the blood of his cross. That peace doesn’t disqualify us. In Christ, we’ve already been received, but it isn’t only about our own comfort. Paul says we were called to that peace in one body, and when he tells the Ephesians that it broke down the dividing wall of hostility, he means that that peace did something between people, not just inside them.

So the peace that comforts us is also the peace that rules between us, and this means it’s going to have something to say about the complaint we’re still nursing against a brother, and it won’t simply take our side. And if we’re honest, we don’t like that, do we? It means the Lord’s ruling might put something, point something out in us, and none of us enjoys being told we’re wrong, or that we’re the one who needs to change, and so instead of submitting to his rule, we often resist it. But friends, his rule is meant to be a mercy, and it should lead us to gratitude. This is why Paul adds three words almost in passing, “and be thankful.” But they’re not in passing. He’s going to return to them twice more in verses 16 and 17, three times in three verses.

Thankfulness is what he’s building toward, and that’s because of where the passage began. You see, people who are chosen, holy, and beloved, who’ve been rescued from the domain of darkness, forgiven all their trespasses, and raised with Christ, have a great deal to be thankful for. But there’s something else too, and it goes back to the umpire. If the peace of Christ is what makes the call, then we don’t have to, and that’s a weight we were never fit to carry anyway. Instead, we submit to him, and trust him to bring us back to each other, and that’s something to be thankful for. And there’s one more thing worth pointing out here. Paul’s word for forgiving one another, back in verse 13, is built on the word for grace. So his, so is his word for thankfulness. And this makes sense. Thankfulness is grace received. Forgiveness is basically grace passed on. And when we can’t do either, we’ve usually got the same thing wrong. We’re basically keeping accounts. Either we’ve decided that someone owes us, or we’ve decided that what we’ve been given was no more than our due.

But a grateful heart can’t keep those accounts. It doesn’t hold on to grievances, and it isn’t looking for another gospel. It knows its own debt was canceled, and it refuses to hold anyone else’s against them. So how do we come to live like this? Well, Paul answers in verse 16. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly”- Dwell in you richly. He isn’t describing a word that visits us now and then, but one that lives within us, and not just in us individually. The “you” there is plural. And friends, when the word of Christ dwells in us, Paul says we’ll be “teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” Now that teaching and admonishing, it happens among us in all sorts of ways. But look at the one Paul names, singing. And it’s not just the pastors and elders. It’s all of us. You see, when we sing together on a Sunday morning, we’re not warming up for the main event, the sermon. We’re catechizing each other. And so even those of us who aren’t confident singers shouldn’t hold back. When we sing, we’re handing something. We’re handing something to the person beside us. And what we sing stays with us.

I think we all know this. There have been times, I’m sure, when you couldn’t find the words to pray, and what came to mind instead was a hymn you’d sung for years. Or you’ve stood here on a Sunday too tired or too grieved to sing, and yet you’ve been carried by the voices around you. Horatio Spafford wrote, “when peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul.” “Thou hast taught,” he says. The Lord taught him to say, “it is well,” whatever his lot. And what’s beautiful about singing is that the Lord has taught most of us the same thing by putting Spafford’s words in the mouths of the people beside us. And so we sing with thankfulness in our hearts to God. And that’s where Paul ends too, with thankfulness. In verse 17, he gathers everything he said into one sentence. “And whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

Some of you were with us for my first sermon years ago on the third commandment. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” And what we found then was that bearing his name was never mainly a matter of how we speak. It’s a matter of how we carry it. His name is on us, and it goes wherever we go. And that’s what Paul’s after here, only from the other side. Don’t just avoid carrying his name emptily, carry it into everything. And yet it wouldn’t surprise me if most of us, when we hear that we’re to do everything in his name, feel overwhelmed, maybe even confused. We look at our lives and see only the failures and not the path forward. And so this is where we have to start asking, what would it look like for us to post or comment or scroll in the name of the Lord Jesus? To talk about politics and the news that way, including with the relative who sees it all very differently. To sit on the sideline at a soccer game or to coach one as people who bear his name. The path forward isn’t always obvious, and it isn’t easy. It takes his wisdom and his strength, and that’s one more reason we need his word dwelling in us richly.

But it isn’t only that we find it confusing. Often in our embarrassment or our weakness, we find it too costly to carry his name into any of it. And so we let those moments pass. But friends, think about what it cost him. On the day Jesus was crucified, the soldiers divided his garments and cast lots for his tunic, and the son whose name we now bear hung on the cross, stripped of everything. He bore the Father’s name perfectly in every word and every deed, and he was condemned as though he’d borne it in vain. Now this isn’t a call to muster that kind of faithfulness ourselves. We carry his name the same way, Paul says, we put on the clothes as people who already belong to him, chosen, holy, and beloved. That’s where he began this passage, and it’s where we begin to, not with what we can summon, but with what we’ve been given.

And as we close, I’m reminded of a poem George Herbert wrote about being dressed in Christ called Aaron. It opens with the high priest in his vestments, holiness on his head, light and perfection on his breast, bells ringing at his hem. But then Herbert looks at himself and he finds the opposite. He finds profaneness on his head and darkness in his own breast, a poor priest he calls himself. And then he remembers he has another head and another heart, and in him he is well dressed. And this is what he says, “Christ is my only head, my alone only heart and breast, my only music, striking me even dead, that to the old man I may rest and be in him new dressed.” Friends, the old man is the old self we took off last week. New dressed is everything Paul’s given us this morning. And that’s true of every one of us who belongs to Christ. We walk out of here dressed, not in what we manage to put on, but in him. And so we carry his name into everything, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Let’s pray.

Oh Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for what you have done. We thank you that you have given us the gift of the Spirit that not only seals us and protects us, but strengthen us and strengthens us and empowers us to walk in your ways, to put on the family clothes. Help us to rest in these truths as we leave. We pray all this in the name of Jesus. Amen.

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Rev. Tobias Riggs – September 13, 2026

Good morning. It’s so good to see all of you here this morning. If you don’t know, my name is Tobias. I’m the Associate Pastor here at Christ the King, and it’s my privilege to get to open up God’s Word with you this morning. This morning, we’re going to continue in our study of Paul’s letter to the Colossians. And last week, Penny walked us through chapter 3, verses 1-4, and he gave us a picture of who we are, that we’re no longer hidden from Christ in our sinful alienation, but now, through faith, we’re hidden with Christ instead. In fact, He’s our very life, and because we’re hidden with Christ now, one day when He appears in glory, we too will appear in glory with Him.  And it’s in light of that incredible hope that Paul picks up one verse later, and so I invite you to turn to Colossians chapter 3. We’re going to look at verses 5-11. It says this,

“Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. 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. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.” (ESV)

Friends, this is the word of the Lord. Let’s pray.

Oh, Heavenly Father, we bow before you with grateful hearts. You take care of us. You have given us your word to teach us about who you are, what you have done on behalf of sinners, and what you call us to. And we are grateful for that. We thank you for this letter. We thank you for Paul’s faithfulness, and his wisdom. And we ask, Lord, that you will continue to teach us through it, by your Spirit. Open our eyes and our ears to what you would have us learn. Help us, Lord, this morning. May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight. Oh, Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.

Well, so many of you know, I started cycling a couple of years ago. And I was recently introduced to a word I hesitate to admit applies to me now – Mamil. Not the four-legged kind, but M-A-M-I-L. It’s an acronym. It means “Middle-Aged Man In Lycra.” How’s that for a defeating descriptor? Apparently, now that I don the spandex, that’s me. Just one more mamil testing your patience on our beloved Roanoke roads. But here’s the thing about cycling clothing. It’s perfect for a Saturday morning climb, or a quick out and back on the greenway, but it’s useless. And my wife and kids would say downright inappropriate for anything after. Which means it needs to come off fast. The problem is, it doesn’t want to. More than once, I’ve stood in our bedroom, sweaty and out of breath, wrestling my way out of my jersey, wondering why something that went on so easily an hour or two ago won’t come off now.

Of course, it always does, but it definitely involves some grunting. Maybe cycling’s not your thing, but I’d bet most of us have experience with clothing that clings right when it’s time to move on to whatever’s next. Maybe it’s snow boots you have to hop on one foot to get off, or maybe it’s a sweater you get stuck halfway over your head every time. But whatever the specific item is, we can always get it off eventually if we wrestle long enough. But there’s a harder kind of change in clothes, and Paul’s been building toward it since the beginning of this letter. In fact, all the way back in chapter 1, Paul said something remarkable. He said we’ve been “rescued from the domain of darkness and moved into the kingdom of God’s own Son.” We’ve been transferred. We’ve been moved to an entirely new country, one that dresses differently than the old one did. And the problem is we’re still wearing our old clothes. We’re foreign transplants who don’t look the part yet. And I think this is a helpful analogy for understanding where Paul’s picking up this morning.

And so he begins with a command in verse 5, “put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you.” Now after all we’ve heard since the beginning of this letter, the raising, the hiding, the assurance of promised glory just last week, it almost sounds like he’s changing the subject, but he’s not. “Putting to death” is where getting dressed for our new country actually begins. But what actually counts for earthly? Well, Paul names the old wardrobe item by item: “Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.” It’s an uncomfortable list. And our English translation actually undersells it a bit. Behind what is earthly in you is a more specific word, “members”, “limbs.” It’s the same word Paul uses elsewhere for the body of Christ, where we’re described as members of one another. That’s not distant language. It’s the language of our own body. And Paul knew this battle personally. He confesses it himself in Romans 7: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin.” This isn’t a doctrine Paul’s deduced from a distance. It’s a fight he’s lived.

Now, none of this means the body itself is what’s under attack here. Paul isn’t at war with his own members as such. He’s only at war with the vices using them. And four of these move together almost as one thought. You can call it a cluster of sins of desire: An act, then the residue it leaves, then the current underneath, then the wanting before it’s aimed at anything. It’s almost like he’s tracing a current down to its source. And it reminds me of what James said in chapter 1 of his letter: “Desire conceives and gives birth to sin, and sin, once it’s grown up, gives birth to death.” Paul isn’t interested in managing a progression partway through. He wants it stopped before desire even finishes conceiving. And he’s not ashamed about naming that current “sexual” as often as he does. Not because this is the only shape desire’s corruption takes, but because it’s here that using someone and loving someone are easiest to confuse. What we do with our bodies, with someone else’s body, either loves them or uses them. There’s nothing really in between.

It’s no wonder that Paul returns to this list or a list similar to it, writing to the Galatians, the Romans, his young protégé Timothy, city after city, letter after letter. Whatever was pressing on Colossae, this isn’t just a Colossian problem. It’s the shape evil desire takes, everywhere it’s left. But putting it to death is harder than admitting it’s there. Centuries after Paul, Augustine prayed with a kind of honesty most of us reserve for no one, not even ourselves: “Give me chastity, Lord. But not yet.” It’s a strange prayer to say out loud, but the feeling behind it isn’t strange at all. I imagine most of us have prayed some version of that, about something we know we should let go, but aren’t ready to yet. There’s a fifth item in the list we haven’t mentioned yet. It’s the one under all the others, I think: “Covetousness, which is idolatry.” The first four all show up somewhere specific, in a body, an act, a particular hunger. This one covers everything. It’s not another item on the list so much as what’s driving the other four. The desire for more, whatever the more turns out to be, no matter how much of it we get.

And the thing is, covetousness rarely feels dangerous. Instead it feels like practicality. A little more put away, a little more security, or it feels like ambition. The next raise, the bigger house. I don’t know what it looks like in your life, but I guess most of us can recognize it in ourselves if we’re honest. And yet that’s exactly the problem. We’re not honest with ourselves. We give it a nicer name instead. And when it goes too far, we’re more likely to joke about it than confessing it. Being too practical or too ambitious are among those acceptable sins. The kind we laugh off at dinner, not the kind we bring to prayer. We think of them as character flaws. Mildly embarrassing, maybe, but not really sin. But Paul doesn’t diagnose covetousness as a character flaw. He calls it idolatry. Whatever we’re certain would finally be enough, that’s our God, whether we’d use the word.

And idolatry, after all, is just devotion aimed at the wrong thing. You see, devotion is itself a kind of marriage, which makes misdirected devotion a kind of infidelity. Hosea’s life and ministry, all of it prove the point. And Paul, calling this covetousness idolatry, is standing shoulder to shoulder with him. And yet that’s not all idolatry does. It shapes what we become. Reminds me of a scene in C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. A boy named Eustace Scrub falls asleep on a dead dragon’s treasure with his mind devoted entirely to it. What it could buy him, how much it would finally make of him. And he wakes up a dragon, remember? His covetousness didn’t just describe what he did, it remade what he was. We become like whatever we worship, which is exactly why it matters so much what or who that is. Friends, all of this, the wanting that never stays satisfied, the worship aimed at the wrong thing, the being made into whatever we’ve bowed down to, all of this is still just what it looks like to keep wearing clothes that don’t belong on us anymore.

And if we stay dressed like this, Paul tells us in verse 6 what comes next: “On account of these, the wrath of God is coming.” It’s not someday in the abstract, but as a settled verdict of judgment. And that’s hard to hear. But the New Testament scholar Charles Cranfield says something worth holding on to. He says this: “Rightly understood, God’s wrath is an expression of his goodness, not its opposite. A God who felt nothing at injustice or corruption wouldn’t be good, he’d simply be indifferent.” So there are two things that are true here at once. This warning carries real weight. Staying dressed in these desires really does lead where Paul says it leads, and we need to hear this. And yet we also need to hear that this warning comes from a God whose character we can trust, not one prone to cruelty, but one whose opposition to sin flows from the very goodness that has already raised us with Christ and hidden our life with him. And Paul says as much himself in the both times, this isn’t who we are anymore.

But wanting like this rarely stops with what it does to us alone. It shapes how we treat others as well. And so what Paul turns to next isn’t desire anymore, it’s disunity. Look with me at verse 8. He says this, “but now you must put them all away. Anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth.” Five things this time, and every one of them a way disunity shows up between us. But notice too that Paul’s changed the verb. A moment ago it was “put to death,” it was killing language, but here “it’s put away.” The New Testament scholar Scott McKnight offers a picture worth remembering, an old stained shirt worn through at the collar that we finally throw out instead of washing one more time. We don’t kill a shirt like that, we just stop wearing it. And yet we’re often slower to take this list, this second vice list, as seriously as the last one. Our obscenities get excused as a slip of the tongue. Our short tempers, they barely count as sin at all. But Paul doesn’t rank them that way. To him, a bitter, unforgiving heart is no lighter a sin than a lustful one. “Put away” carries the same weight as put to death. Yeah, the verb has changed, but the weight hasn’t.

And here’s what each one actually looks like.  Anger is what we feel. Wrath is what that feeling becomes once we act on it. Malice is wanting someone else to get hurt, and if we’re honest, malice rarely stays with us alone. It recruits, drawing others in. And once malice does this, it starts to talk. And Paul names two kinds of talk, slander and obscene talk. Now, neither of these really are about the words themselves. Slander is blasphemia in the Greek. It’s the same word scripture uses elsewhere for blasphemy against God himself. We never think of ourselves as blasphemers, but tearing down someone made in God’s image over coffee, in a text thread, in a version of a story we tell each other on a drive home, these things are as close to the same act that scripture uses the same word for them. And obscene talk. Obscene talk isn’t just crude language the way we, I think, we tend to hear it. Paul’s point here is that it’s speech that degrades. It cuts someone down to size quick and in the moment. Slander does this with a story built around the truth, usually, but obscene talk, it doesn’t need one.

But there’s one more thing on Paul’s mind, and he gives it a sentence all his own. He says, “do not lie to one another” in verse 9. Unlike everything before it, this command names who gets hurt. It’s not a general just corrosion of the church. He says, “do not lie to one another.” Why does he put it that way? Well, in Ephesians 4:25, he tells us, “Put away falsehood, speak the truth, because we are members of one another.” There’s that word again, “members.” The same one Paul told us to put to death back in verse 5. And it’s doing double duty here. There, it named the vices we had to kill. Here, it names the people we’re called to protect by refusing to lie to the person next to us. Anger and slander wound the people they’re aimed at. A lie does something worse. It poisons the ground everyone else is standing on, too, replacing whatever trust was holding this place together with suspicion instead. A community can absorb a lot, but it cannot survive on that.

Leviticus 19 already said this centuries ago. Centuries before Paul had ever wrote to the Colossians. It said, “You shall not lie to one another.” God’s people have never been permitted to build a community on anything but the truth. Now, we’ve moved slowly through this list, one word at a time, and it would be easy to hear all of it and think the answer is simply to try harder. And when I think about what that kind of effort would actually take, I’m reminded of a movie I love, The Shawshank Redemption. It’s about a man named Andy Dufresne, a banker wrongly convicted of a double murder, sentenced to two life terms for something he didn’t do. Near the film’s climax, we watch him escape, crawling to freedom through a sewage pipe, 500 yards of foulness, the movie says, none of us wants to imagine. He comes up out of a creek in the middle of a thunderstorm, arms lifted, lightning turning the rain white as it pours over him, and what’s easy to miss is what he’s been dragging behind him, a bag sealed in plastic against the filth, so that by the morning he isn’t just free, he’s someone else entirely, right down to a sleek suit, shined shoes, and even a new name already prepared and waiting.

For me, it’s one of the most beautiful portrayals of redemption, of leaving behind the old filth and beginning anew in modern cinema. But here’s the thing, all of it, the tunnel he dug out of his cell, the new identity he spent years building, he did it all. It was Andy, alone, from start to finish. And this raises a question worth asking, is that the kind of effort Paul’s asking of us here? Years of solitary work, digging and building ourselves free, one inch at a time? Friends, the answer is simple, no, not even partly. You see, Andy was innocent and more than capable of digging his own way out, but we’re neither. Paul tells us that apart from Christ, we’re not struggling to escape. We’re dead in our trespasses and sins. We’re still following the prince of the power of the air, bound to a master we can’t leave on our own. And what we need instead is what the English poet John Donne prayed for. We need God to “batter our hearts.” We need him to divorce us from the enemy holding on to us. We need him to enslave us to himself so that we might finally be free from the filth. The gospel isn’t a call to solo bootstrappa salvation. I’ve said it many times, it’s not save yourself one effort at a time. It’s a declaration of what God has done on your behalf. And here’s the good news. Paul tells us it already has.

Take another look at the end of verse 9 along with verse 10, and notice what he says there. “Seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and put on the new self, which is being renewed in the knowledge after the image of its creator.” Did you catch the shift? Up to this point Paul’s only told us what to do. Put to death what is earthly in you. Put away anger and malice and every lie. All of these are commands, things we’re still in the middle of. But here he says you have put off – You have put on. That’s not one more thing being asked of us. It’s Paul telling us something that’s already true, even though sometimes it might not feel like it within the struggle. He isn’t waiting for us to finish changing. He’s telling us we already have. In fact, he says so plainly to the Corinthians, if anyone is in Christ, he’s what? A new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come.

And yet that’s not the whole picture. Paul adds that we’re also being renewed. Unlike putting off and putting on, which happened once and are finished, renewal is still happening. But this isn’t just our own work. Writing to Titus, Paul uses the same word, renewal, and says it’s the Holy Spirit doing it in us. He says the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit. And this is why Paul can say writing to the Philippians, work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his own good pleasure. God works first. That’s the only reason any of this is possible at all. He works first, then we work, not instead of him, but because of him. And this is where everything he’s already told us to do this morning fits in. Putting to death, putting away, none of that is separate from renewal. It’s what the Spirit’s work actually looks like in us. And friends, this is slow work, all of it, I know. And it doesn’t always feel like progress while it’s happening. We’re still growing into what we already are, and some seasons, some seasons, it looks like there’s real change. We catch the anger before acting on it. We hold our tongue before we slander. But other seasons, it feels like nothing’s moved.

And yet Paul doesn’t measure renewal by how it feels. He just tells us it’s happening in us, whether we can see it yet or not. The Spirit’s still at work, even on the days when we can’t feel it. And yet none of this, the putting to death, the putting away, the slow work of renewal, is just about getting free of old clothes for their own sake. Look again at verse 10. Paul tells us that “the new self we’ve put on is being renewed after the image of its creator.” That word image, it comes straight from Genesis. “In the beginning, God made us in his own image, after his likeness.” That’s who we were built to be, but it’s not who we’ve been, not fully. And everything we’ve been told to put to death this morning, everything we’ve been told to put away, is, is proof of that. But it is who Christ already is. Think back to how Paul opened this letter. Christ, he said, is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. Firstborn. Christ was never meant to bear that image alone. Others were always meant to follow him into it. And that’s exactly what’s happening in us right now.

We’re being remade, renewed after his image, a little more each day to look like him. But this renewal, this renewal isn’t just an individual experience. That image, that likeness is a new humanity. One that doesn’t dissolve our individuality, but weaves us together into one people. Which is exactly why Paul brings this whole section to its conclusion in verse 11, with an emphasis on that unity. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all and in all. That’s a loaded list, right down to Scythian. Every one of those categories was a way people used to sort each other in Paul’s day. Who counted? Who didn’t? Who ought to be despised for this or that reason? And you know, if we’re honest, we still draw the same circles today with the tribes we choose, with the people we cancel. But here’s the thing, Paul doesn’t explain those distinctions or rank them. He simply ends them. Not Greek or Jew, not slave or free. None of it has any place among the people of God. Why? Because Christ is all and in all.

And a chapter later in this very letter, we see Paul putting this into action. He tells the Colossians in chapter 4, he’s sending them Onesimus, our faithful and beloved brother, he calls him. One of you, he says. Onesimus’ legal status under Rome as a slave hadn’t changed, but to Paul, he wasn’t a slave anymore. He was a brother. Friends, that’s a remarkable thing for Paul to have done. Could we do the same? I guess most of us already have someone in mind, someone we’ve decided is beneath us, we refuse to talk to, or maybe we talk about. Paul once had someone like that too. What changed wasn’t Paul’s effort. It was that for Paul, Christ really was all and in all, and his grace left no one beneath – anyone. Only then could he put off the old way of seeing Onesimus, a slave, someone beneath him, and put on the new – a brother. And whatever tensions used to keep you apart, maybe from the person next to you, or someone in this room, or someone else you’re thinking of, or maybe they still do. Christ is who holds all of us together now, the same way he held Paul and Onesimus together, and I’m reminded of those words from one of my favorite hymns, “The Church is One Foundation:”

Elect from every nation, yet one over all the earth, her charter of salvation, one Lord, one faith, one birth. One holy name she blesses, partakes one holy food, and to one hope she presses, with every grace endued.

Samuel Stone wrote those words in 1866, and he’s saying the same thing this whole sermon has been trying to say. One Lord we’re all being remade to look like, and one birth for every one of us. And this is why in a few moments we’re gonna share the same bread, and the same cup, the same meal for every one of us, and we’ll leave this table the same way we came to it, still growing into what we already are. Christ is all, and in all. Let’s pray.

Almighty God, we bow before you once again. We thank you for your word. We ask that you use your word in our lives. Give us your grace, by your Spirit, to put away, to put to death the things that are unlike you, the things that bring shame upon your name. Help us to rest in our Savior, knowing that we have been clothed in him. We pray all this in the name of Jesus. Amen.

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