Only Jesus: Kill Sin | Colossians 3:5-11
How many of you struggle throwing stuff away? Any hoarders in the house? You don’t know how much junk you have in your house until you move. A lot of us have filing cabinets, drawers, closets, and storage space that we use to hold on to things that we haven’t used or looked at in years because we don’t want to let go. The self-storage industry made over $49.1 billion in revenue last year with people using over 44 million square feet of space. We all hold on to things with the rationalization that “we might need it one day.” It’s easy to hide the things we don’t use or need in the closet or in a junk drawer, but we don’t realize how much space it takes up. June Saruwatari in her book, Behind the Clutter, talks about not just the physical stuff that takes up room in our lives, but the mental and emotional clutter that keeps us from being productive and happy. She writes, “we hang onto far more objects than we need, and, instead of motivating us, they become objects of guilt and shame… If you put it into a closet and shut the door, you are still carrying that with you. It’s important to get to the root cause of that one item and not just shove it under the rug.” This is true not just in the physical and emotional world but also in the spiritual world. As believers, many of us are holding on to certain sinful attitudes and actions that are taking up space in our lives and often become objects of guilt and shame that we need to let go of in our lives. We are new creations in Christ, but we willingly dabble in the sins of our old life.
Paul is writing to a young church that was challenged by the culture around them to abandon or add to Christ. He has warned against “chasing after the shadows of empty religion.” He has reinforced to them that we don’t go to heaven based on what we do, feel, or don’t do, but based on what Jesus has done for us. Now, Paul instructs us on how we should live in light of who we are in Christ: there must be “an out with the old and in with the new” mentality. Paul is teaching that because of our new identity in Christ, we must kill the sin that is killing us by loving the God who first loved us.