Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Have Congregation turn to Colossians 3:1-12

Recap - Christ is Supreme

Christ is our Life - Sometimes we say of people: ‘Music is her life—Sport is his life—They live for their work.’

Such people find life and all that it means in music, in sport, in work, as the case may be.

They define themselves by their loves.

For Christians, Christ is their life.

Why?

Because we died with him and were raised to life with him, and our life is hidden with him.

Christ is our Life - Sometimes we say of people: ‘Music is her life—Sport is his life—They live for their work.’

Such people find life and all that it means in music, in sport, in work, as the case may be.

They define themselves by their loves.

For Christians, Christ is their life.

Why?

Because we died with him and were raised to life with him, and our life is “hidden” with him.

Context Recap - The Supremacy of Christ in all things over and against false teachings creeping into the church that focus on “secret knowledge” and “Mysticism” and obsessions with “angelic visitations” and “spiritual visions” as being the way to true Godliness.

For the Gnostics spiritual growth and godliness was to be found in these various “experiences”

Question: What do you think of when someone is described as “Spiritual?”

Perhaps you think someone with extra ordinary gifting, Someone with extensive Bible Knowledge?

Knowledge of hidden things?

Someone who sees angles or regularly has visions?

interprets dreams?

Secret Knowledge

Secret Knowledge

True spirituality and Spiritual growth, Paul has made clear, comes only from knowing Christ himself, True spiritual knowledge is Knowledge of Christ that leads to an obedient transformed life!

You can have all the ecstatic experiences in the universe, but it doesn't make you spiritually mature if it is not centred around knowing Christ and comprehending his supremacy above all things.

Mystical visions

Mystical visions

Consequences of Christ’s Supremacy for our Christian living.

(1-4)

For Christians our Focus is to be on Christ.

He is all we need for life and Godliness and true spirituality, we dont need ecstatic visions, secret knowledge and angelic visits.(The

context of false teaching).

Indeed, our christian thoughts must be set on the things which are above, but only because that is where Christ is and our lives are hidden with him there.

We can no longer be concerned with the trivial passing of things of earth; we must be totally concerned with the eternal truths of heaven.

Christians will view everything against the background of eternity and no longer live as if this world was all that mattered.

we have Died with Christ.

we Have been raised with him!

This is not an mere “idea or a “concept” it is an otological reality, even though this “reality” is hidden from the world we will appear with him in Glory.

You will appear with him in Glory (4)

Question: Implications - What does this mean for Christian living then, and in particular Our Christian conduct at Rosskeen?

What does this mean for Christian living then, Christian behaviour?

Consequences

Answer: We seek deeper fellowship with Christ and with one another in actively killing our sin or “putting our Sins to death.”

(5-9)

Put to Death (Mortify) 5-7 (In Contrast to Stoic Philosophy which was to transcend) What Paul is saying is: ‘Put to death every part of yourself which is against God and keeps you from fullfilling his will.’

He uses the same line of thought in : ‘If you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.’

It is exactly the same line of thought as that of Jesus when he demanded that people should cut off a hand or a foot, or tear out an eye when it was leading them into sin ().

Its extreme language commanding an attitude of engaging in Mortal Combat when it comes to our sin.

Christians must kill self-centredness and regard as dead all private desires and ambitions.

In their lives, there must be a radical transformation of the will and a radical shift of the centre.

Everything which would keep them from fully obeying God and fully surrendering to Christ must be aggressively and surgically removed.

Taking off Clothes (8-9) Paul says that there are certain things of which the Colossians must “strip” themselves of.

The word he uses is the word for taking off clothes.

There is here a picture from the life of the early Christians.

When Christians were baptised, they took off their old clothes when they went down into the water, and when they emerged they put on new, pure white robes.

They got rid of one kind of life and actively put on another.

In this passage, Paul speaks of the things of which Christians must rid themselves:

The counter cultural revolution of Christianity - Every one of the “Vices” that Paul lists were embraced as virtue by Greco Roman Society at large,

Sexual Immorality (πορνείαν) (High on the agenda)

Definition (Any expression of sexual activity that is outside of Gods intended plan for human sexual fulfilment and flourishing” All sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage).

In the ancient world, sexual relationships before marriage and outside marriage were the normal and accepted practice.

Chastity - chastity was the one completely new virtue which Christianity brought into the world at that time.

The sexual appetite and desire was regarded as a thing to be gratified, not to be controlled (it was also an act of worship).

The driving force behind Roman Greco culture was the so called liberty (freedom) of ordinary white male Roman citizens to cast of restraint and to have sex with whoever and whatever they wanted, often brutally without care, mercy or consequence, there were no rights or laws on the part of the week, the vulnerable, the oppressed, the sexually victimised or the abused.

Power was celebrated, mercy was for the week.

Victimhood was not to be empathised or sympathised with but seen as pathetic.

Power and lust of it was highly esteemed.

Tom Holland - The sexual appetite was regarded as a thing to be gratified, not to be controlled.

The driving force behind Roman Greco culture was the so called liberty of ordinary white male Roman citizens to cast of restraint and to have sex with whoever they wanted, and whatever they wanted, often brutally without constraint or consequence.

Today Even though we live in a sexually promiscuous society that is regressing back to becoming more and more Roman in its expression everyday, We dont actually appreciate how our traditional values on sexual ethics and moral assumptions about liberty, equality, human rights, international law are a consequence of the influence of Christian thinking of a 2000 year old Revolution and the influence Apostole Paul in particular.

Christianity truly did turn the worlds values upside down transform the a brutal western world for the better.

That is an attitude which is not unfamiliar today,

Objection Why?

If it doesn't harm anyone?

Thats the assumption What happens in the privacy of my own life doesn't affect room

Tom Holland (Famous Historian) who now describes himself as a “Christian” (in the non believing sense) He now does so because he recognises the christian roots of all his moral ethical assumptions including restraint on sexual liberty.

In (2016), he penned an article for The NewStatesman.

Titled “Why I was Wrong about Christianity” Holland seemingly fell for the myth that Christianity was harmful:

In (2016), he penned an article for The NewStatesman.

Titled “Why I was Wrong about Christianity” Holland seemingly feel for the myth that Christianity was harmful:

(2016), and penned an article for The NewStatesman.

Titled “Why I was Wrong about Christianity” Holland seemingly feel for the myth that Christianity was harmful:

“By the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and the other great writers of the Enlightenment, I was more than ready to accept their interpretation of history: that the triumph of Christianity had ushered in an “age of superstition and credulity”, and that modernity was founded on the dusting down of long-forgotten classical values.

My childhood instinct to think of the biblical God as the po-faced enemy of liberty and fun was rationalised.

Why

Delving into ancient history helped Holland understand that he had been misled by the various writers of the Enlightenment.

The longer I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, the more alien and unsettling I came to find it.

The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics, and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more.

It was not just the extremes of callousness that I came to find shocking, but the lack of a sense that the poor or the weak might have any intrinsic value.

As such, the founding conviction of the Enlightenment – that it owed nothing to the faith into which most of its greatest figures had been born – increasingly came to seem to me unsustainable.

The moral contribution that Christianity has made is still felt today “even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents.”

Holland concludes his ‘aha’ moment:

 It is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering.

It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value.

In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.

Our attitude to Sexual Liberty is “so long as it doesn't harm anyone else whats the problem” But thats the assumption, that it doesn't harm anyone else” The Brutality of Roman Society shows what happens when we cast off restraint and embrace what is contrary to Gods design for sexual fulfilment, because human sexuality will never find fulfilment outside of Gods plan, it always lusts after more, it always goes to greater extremes and will always lead to degradation and suffering of the individual and society at large.

Our attitude to Sexual Liberty is that so long as it doesn't harm anyone else, But

Our attitude to Sexual Liberty is that so long as it doesn't harm anyone else?

But thats the assumption.

Sexual Immorality:

Whats wrong if it doesn't harm anyone else?