Colossians: It’s All About Christ 3: Christ, My Life - Col 3 pt. 2
Put Off – Colossians 3:8-11

But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth. Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.

Spiritual Stripping

The picture Paul gives us here is of a person changing clothes and discarding the old ones as rags not worthy of wearing of one whose life is Christ. First, we are do spiritual slaying and now we are do some spiritual stripping. Living the Christian life, the life of a child of God, requires a constant putting off of wrong actions and attitudes that will always crop up in our lives, due to our carnal, physical nature. Paul says, “Put them off..” strip these away from our lives …

Anger: This is the stronger, deeper word for the emotion, most times in the Bible it is translated wrath. God’s wrath is justified by His nature but in the child of God, wrath has no place. It has be replaced by the willingness to forgive.

Wrath: This is the Greek word thumos, Paul is using it here as a bitter, emotion that takes control of us and begins to rule our life and dominate our relationship with others.

Malice: This is when anger and wrath aren’t put off. Soon those emotions take on a life of their own and instead of just emotion, we begin to act, in hurtful, painful, backstabbing, malicious ways toward others.

Blasphemy: is slander, gossip which is false and hurtful.

Filthy Communication: uttering obscenity, using foul, inappropriate language.

Finally, Paul says, “Lie not to one another, seeing you have put off the old man.”

All of these sins are social sins, they are grouped together here because they are sins that can be seen in the way we deal with other people in our lives. These are sins that are on the outside of our life and that can have terrible effects on the lives of others.

Consistent Christian Character

Paul says we can put off the old because we have put on “The new man.”  Vs. 10. It is possible to put down the sensual sins and put off the social sins because we have put on the new man. The new man who is renewed every day in knowledge after the image of Christ, can deal with these sins that try to come back into our life through our old nature.

In vs. 11 Paul says, this man is so new that even his nationality, race or station in life has be changed, in fact it no longer exists. “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free”

All that counts, all that should exist, for us is Christ. Christ, our life!  He is now our ultimate reality, our consuming passion and our overcoming power.

We must maintain a consistent Christian character and that kind of character is not static. Every day as the Holy Spirit reminds and focus us on the task at hand, we need kill the hidden sensual sins on the inside and make sure I put off the visible social sins of the outside.

The key is seeing ourselves as God does through the eyes of the Holy Spirit and then surrendering to the power of God’s Son, our life, who makes all things, at all times, new.

2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
This is in the perfect active indicative and it means to have become new and now will stay that way. – AT Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament.

The stripping away of the old is by the power of knowing Christ.
It means you can take off the old rags daily and be renewed because you know Christ. “Colossians 3:10  And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him:
Putting off the old in the power of the new man renewed in Christ, should be a true action, something that is part of my daily life. It should be real. It should be as real as the story of …

Illustration: From KKK to Bandages

The American Red Cross was gathering supplies, medicine, clothing, food and the like for the suffering people of Biafra. Inside one of the boxes that showed up at the collecting depot one day was a letter. It said, "We have recently been converted and because of our conversion we want to try to help. We won't ever need these again. Can you use them for something?" Inside the box were several Ku Klux Klan sheets. The sheets were cut down to strips and eventually used to bandage the wounds of black persons in Africa.

It could hardly be more dramatic--from symbols of hatred to bandages of love because of the new creation.- Maxie Dunnam, Commentary on Galatians.