In Colossians 3:5-7, we read "5 Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. 6 Because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience, 7 in which you yourselves once walked when you lived in them."
The Apostle Paul gives believers another directive in order to help us in our pursuit of the Lord. The directive is to reject our old way of living. He gives examples in the arena of sexuality.
One of the greatest lies of our culture is what we do in private, as long as there is consent, doesn’t affect anyone else. But Paul says walking in Christ means thinking Gd's way regarding our sexuality.
Almost all of Paul’s letters include teaching on how to think about sexuality. He does so because our view on this subject has the greatest affect on the community as a whole.
In the Colossian culture, religion had incorporated sexuality into its practices. This was nothing new for we see this ungodly practice in the Bible as early as Leviticus 18.
God gave man the gift of sex to be experienced in the context of a commitment that instills the kind of trust that creates a creative form of vulnerability and subsequent oneness.
In the context of this trust, creativity was meant to run wild with joy and the greatest of loving expression. And, when experienced according to God's definition, sex adds life to any community, both physically and emotionally.
Well, after giving us five sins to reject, Paul gives two rational reasons for our rejection of such.
The first is the wrath that is incurred in such choices. The second is that it is not congruent with our newly given nature.
The wrath that Paul is speaking of here is simply the absence of the holiness of God. When we give in to these sins, we are demonstrating a lack of completeness that the holiness of God brings to the human soul.
When we are not defined by the completeness that God wants to bring to our souls, we will be defined by our incompleteness and insecurities. As a result, the flesh will render death and destruction.
This incompleteness and these insecurities reject God's definition and the benefits of life that He brings. The lack of God and all that He renders to and in our souls, yields this wrath or the lack of God in our lives.
You will remember in our study of Romans 1 that the wrath of God is expressed in God letting us go our own way to experience a life void of His life. This is the life of the Prodigal the Lord Jesus told us about in Luke 15.
As the Prodigal did when he returned from his life of waste, we discover that we are miserable because there is a presence in our lives who has brought with Him a certain measure of guilt.
This guilt is that gnawing in the back of our souls that reminds us that it is simply dumb for us to reject the life that God wants to offer us. It is incongruent for us to live our old lives of sin, especially due to the fact that we have been introduced to the liberating freedom the Lord Jesus has brought to our souls.
