Colossians 3:5 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Colossians 3:5

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Paul now turns to the duty of mortification, of putting sin to death. Those that the apostle Paul lists here are the most serious of sins. It is especially important to deal with them, because today society is changed, today these evils are paraded and applauded everywhere, and the young grow up in an atmosphere in which these things are accepted as normal. Turning back to Romans 8.13, we read this vital verse – ‘For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify [put to death] the deeds of the body, ye shall live.’ It is a most optimistic verse and it tells us that if we put to death the motions, the suggestions, of the old nature, then by the Spirit we can do so, and we shall experience deliverance from those things. Fornication strictly speaking is unlawful sexual intercourse, but the way the apostle uses the term here and elsewhere, it covers sexual impurity in every form, in the mind as well as in action. What are your members? Well, he promptly lists them, ‘fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence.’. Your whole being, your mind, heart, and will, are involved in the old nature, and affected by sin. These members are an intrinsic part of you, and you are responsible for subduing them and handling them. By members, he means your bodily parts; they are almost like that. Of course, they are not your arms, your legs, or your trunk, but they are so close to you, so much part of you, that he describes them as if they are bodily parts. This echoes the words of Christ in Matthew 18.8-9. It is the language of warning.The Greek term translated ‘uncleanness’ is invariably used in connection with the mind. He is referring to impure thoughts. That is a department of sexual impurity. Fornication comes first, the cover-all term, and then he looks at the departments. ‘Inordinate affection’ translates the Greek word for passion; here is the affection, the heart. Inordinate just means excessive – affection for spiritual wrong, and then ‘evil concupiscence’. They are not words which we use today. Concupiscence is ardent sexual desire, but the Greek simply means evil desires or longings - an inclination of your volition to do wrong. So, we see a structure here which reminds us very much of mind, heart, and will. Then on the end of the verse, ‘… and covetousness, which is idolatry.’ ‘Paul, do you put that with fornication? Do you put the person who is covetous and gloats over his unnecessarily big car and big house and flaunts these things; do you put that alongside immorality?’ ‘Yes,’ says Paul. This is precisely one of the things for which God chiefly judges the disobedience of this world.

Application

Now here is the warning and particularly for the young. Any sexual impurity in the thought life, in the viewing of images, in any kind of temptation, affects these fundamental departments of your being. Your mind is affected – it becomes tainted – but your mind is the palace of faith. It is your highest faculty, it is your reasoning faculty, and all your planning and weighing and discerning and thinking is done through the mind. Did you know that if you entertain in the least degree sexual impurity you have tainted the palace of faith, and the impurity comes in and it is powerful and it takes it over and ruins it? You are sat in front of the television and there is something which musically may charm you, but the imagery is all half-nakedness and undress and flaunting of sex. You tap your foot to it, and you like it, and you are teaching your affections to like and to excuse things that are disgusting and offensive to God. You are virtually training and conditioning your affections.

God hates covetousness; he seems to hate covetousness as much, or almost as much as he hates fornication. Now that jolts, doesn’t it? That is amazing and we have to take that extremely seriously. Why is it put in the same list? Because it is a form of worship. You are not saying that those things are divine, but you are treating them as though they were. You are worshipping them, and dreaming about them, and trusting in them; they fill your horizons and your mind. In London, after the war, the larger churches had pretty well all emptied and shut down, even though there were far more Christians in society in those days. Why was it that the central London churches, where the population was most dense, were in such dire trouble? Well, it was the migration of people – the great rush to the suburbs. Of course, there were practical problems, there was all the bombing from the war and the rehousing. But then there was at the same time this tremendous tendency for people to move to the suburbs and the outer fringes of London for a more comfortable lifestyle. Sadly, you therefore had famous churches that had had large congregations which were just closed and demolished and everything went down. There is always this tendency for people to want to do better and move to a superior house with a bigger garden and a better this and a better that; it comes before the Lord, comes before our calling. It is true that in recent times it is very difficult to get housed economically in the centre of London, and there will naturally be a tendency to be pushing out all the time for that extra bedroom as the family grows. So, there is a wholly legitimate and necessary reason why there is a gravitation outwards, but we have to be so careful that history does not repeat itself.

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Colossians 3:5 Commentary and Bible Study