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To See Clearly, Look Up

Sermon by Rev. Doug Pratt — June 29, 2008
 

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Introduction
In continuing our series of messages on Paul’s letter to the Colossians, today we charge into the third chapter of four. Halftime is over and, like a basketball team rushing out of the locker room after their break, we’re moving into the second half—which I believe is the most crucial and important part of the book (just as the final half of a game determines the winner). We’re going to be learning how to make what Jesus did for us on the cross intensely practical and applicable to every area of our lives. Our text will be Colossians 3:1-10, and we’ll read from the New Living Translation:

Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits at God’s right hand in the place of honor and power. ²Let heaven fill your thoughts. Do not think only about things down here on earth. ³For you died when Christ died, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴And when Christ, who is your real life, is revealed to the whole world, you will share in all His glory.
      ⁵So put to death the sinful, earthly things lurking within you. Have nothing to do with sexual sin, impurity, lust, and shameful desires. Don’t be greedy for the good things of this life, for that is idolatry. ⁶God’s terrible anger will come upon those who do such things. ⁷You used to do them when your life was still part of this world. ⁸But now is the time to get rid of anger, rage, malicious behavior, slander and dirty language. ⁹Don’t lie to each other, for you have stripped off your old evil nature with all its wicked deeds. ¹⁰In its place you have clothed yourselves with a brand new nature that is continually being renewed as you learn more and more about Christ, who created this new nature in you.

So Heavenly Minded to be No Earthly Good?
Some people are cautious about too much of a good thing—especially faith. Have you heard the cliché warning us about people who are “so heavenly minded that they’re no earthly good”? It’s supposed to be a profound observation. It’s supposed to caution us against unwanted fanaticism. A little bit of religion is okay, the cliché implies, but we don’t want to take it too seriously.

And yet I must say that, from my Christian life experience of nearly 40 years, I am honestly hard-pressed to think of anyone who actually was “so heavenly minded that they were no earthly good.” Most of the American Christians I know are in absolutely no danger whatsoever of going to that extreme. We’re far more likely to make the opposite mistake: becoming so caught up in and consumed by the ultimately petty and trivial affairs and pursuits of our day-to-day earthly lives that we forget about God and act as if He doesn’t exist.

That’s what our secular society presses us to do: to focus only on earthly things. The temptations and enticements, the preoccupations and distractions, are more than we can count or even be consciously aware of. Like fish swimming in a polluted stream, we are surrounded by values that can corrupt and pollute our minds and souls without realizing it. Colossians 3 shows us a very different approach to life. These words point the way for us to learn how to be heavenly minded and earthly good.

Author Calvin Miller, in his intriguing novel The Valiant Papers, records the journal entries of a guardian angel sent down to earth. His mission is to try to guide a young businessman named J.B., who lives in Cleveland and is a typical, secular, unthinkingly non-spiritual American, into discovering his Creator and placing his faith in Him. At one point the angel Valiant comments:

They have a cliché down here about people who are “so heavenly minded that they’re no earthly good.” I fear that idea. It is absolutely false. My hope is that J.B. may someday become heavenly minded enough that he can at last be of some earthly good. The heavenly minded man is the only one that matters. The earthly minded man is like a bird with a broken wing who cannot fly and has lost its purpose.

And that is our theme for today: that each of us who have placed our faith in Jesus need to learn how to be heavenly minded so that we can be of earthly use to our Lord, and live effective and victorious Christian lives in the midst of a nation of people who are earthly minded. The people I know who are the most heavenly minded—in the proper, biblical sense—and who spend the most time in prayer and scripture are, in fact, the ones who are capable of doing the most earthly good. My hope is that you will take another step on the journey this day to seeing life as God sees it.

Let Heaven Fill Your Thoughts
Our text begins with commands in verses 1 and 2 to “set your sights on the realities of heaven” and “let heaven fill your thoughts.” Let’s make sure we understand what this does and does not mean. Paul is not saying here that we should have a wistful death wish—an escapist fantasy or daydream about dying and going to heaven. He is not telling us that we should spend hours trying to envision what the “Pearly Gates” will look like (for it’s impossible for us to know). Neither is Paul’s exhortation to “let heaven fill your thoughts” telling us to pursue a Buddhist-like trance, in which we try to remove ourselves by transcendental meditation from the physical realities of the world. Buddha was supposedly a man who, while still living, reached a perfect hypnotic state of Nirvana; Buddhism teaches that the greatest virtue is to attempt to escape the world.

In contrast, the greatest Christ-like virtue is to take the mind and the values of the eternal God and bring them down to our earthly lives. Jesus, after all, was not like Buddha—a mortal man who tried to rise to heaven. He was just the opposite: God Himself, who purposely came down to earth to live among us and demonstrate real holiness in the midst of the gritty details of everyday existence. “Setting our hearts and minds on heaven” does not mean, then, that we devote our waking hours to daydreaming about eternity. It means that we learn how to look at this world in which we are now living through the eyes of God. It means that we take heavenly or spiritual or holy values and apply them to our daily decision-making and relationships. It means that, just as Jesus did literally during His days on earth, we bring holiness into our little corner of the world by our words and actions.

You Died When Christ Died
Verses 3 and 4 assure us that becoming heavenly minded is not something we can do through our own effort alone. Christ has already done the most important part: He has “saved” us, “redeemed” us, forgiven our sins and entered into our hearts by faith. Paul uses a vivid image: “…you died when Christ died, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God.” Something powerful and irreversible has happened, if you are a Christian. You are not, and never can be, the same as you were before you believed. You are now able to look at life through God’s eyes precisely because you are now a part of God, and He is a part of you.

Getting Painfully Practical
Now we move on to verses 5-10. And here we find the Apostle getting very personal—almost meddlesome. He’s not content with vague and pious generalities about holiness; no, he goes on to spell out precisely what that holiness will look like. If the misconception about verses 1-4 were true—that it’s telling us to just escape from the world in a nirvana-like coma—then Paul would not have gone on to these verses. But he does. And this might get a bit painful … for the Apostle puts his finger on some of the ways in which we most struggle with temptation.

Specifically, he identifies three of the biggest areas of our weaknesses: our sexuality, our money and our mouths. Verse 5 covers every aspect of sexual sin: not just immoral actions but also immoral thoughts and fantasies, lust and wandering eyes. The second half of that verse fingers the powerful grip money and the desires for material things have on us—so powerful they are called “idolatry” (the worship of anything other than the true God, a violation of the First Commandment). Then we get a little parenthesis in verses 6 and 7 about the consequences of surrendering ourselves to sin, and a reminder that all of us in the past have been tripped up and entangled by one gripping temptation or another (and though you might not be weak in the same areas I am, none of us can self-righteously pretend we’re immune to moral weakness). Verses 8 and 9 then return to this sad litany of the things that tempt us: sins of speech that destroy our relationships and that dishonor God (anger, rage, malice, slander, dirty language and lying).

Ouch! Don’t you wish Paul had stuck to the abstract and ethereal stuff? I do, too. Because each one of us—probably in the past day, at least in the past week—has stumbled in one of those areas, whether in thought, word or action. Go back to the beginning of verse 5: “So put to death the sinful, earthly things lurking within you.” Those are not pacifist words. You don’t win the battle for your own heart and mind and daily holiness by being weak or passive. If something has you in its grip, kill it! Just as an oncologist’s goal is to kill the cancer cells multiplying in his patient’s body, so we are to kill—get rid of—those earthly things lurking within us. Don’t coddle them, or hold onto them. Radical surgery is what “Dr. Paul” is recommending here, to cut out these dangerous tumors of sin.

It takes courage and discipline and God’s help to “put to death” the immoral and unethical and shameful things in our lives that are inconsistent with having a heavenly mind and heart. It’s not easy to live consistently as a Christian. It takes commitment and sacrifice. But we’ll never make a difference in this world, never be an effective witness and servant for Jesus, unless we break the grip of the “earthly nature” and those seductive sins. As the angel Valiant would say, may we become heavenly minded enough that we can at last be of some earthly good for the Lord.

The Transformation Process
I know we’ve been focusing, of necessity, on the negative aspects of resisting sin. But Paul doesn’t stop there, for God’s work in us is not only to remove the negatives, but to build the positives. That’s what the final words of our text today, verses 9 and 10, focus on. Paul speaks about this two-step, combined process of Christian maturity (learning what we are not to do) and Christ-likeness (learning how we are to live): “stripping off” the old and “clothing ourselves” in the new.

The process reminds me of the experience my graduate school advisor had. I did my seminary training outside Boston—where many houses are, by American standards, really old. My professor, Dr. Doug Stuart, purchased at auction an old, dilapidated house in the Massachusetts town of Beverly. The house was over 200 years old. Plumbing and wiring had been added in the previous century, but they were in bad shape. Dr. Stuart’s first step was removing the old stuff: the collapsing front porch, the corroded copper pipes, the dangerous wires and the decaying wallboard. But that wasn’t the end. For his goal was not just to remove the bad materials from the house and leave it gutted and empty. His ultimate purpose was to rebuild, renew and renovate it. And so, room-by-room, section-by-section, he rebuilt the frame and the interior, brought all the systems up to code, installed new HVAC, new plumbing, a new roof, etc. And after more than a year of work, that old house was transformed.

Think about that experience as a parallel to what God is doing in you and me. He wants to remove the old stuff that isn’t working well in our inner life and our relationships, but He intends to do so not to leave us empty and gutted. He wants to renew us, to put the right things in place of those things He is removing.

Don’t Miss the Dolphins
As we close, I want to return to the beginning of this passage: Paul’s exhortation to us to stop focusing solely on the details of our daily lives and start “looking up” to see things in a new, spiritual perspective. I’ve entitled this message To See Clearly, Look Up. This portion of scripture took on a new meaning for me through what my wife Jeanne discovered several months ago. She was studying this passage of Colossians, where we are told to “look up,” and she remembered a lesson she had learned not long before while walking on Bonita Beach.

Jeanne’s custom is to get up at sunrise on Sunday morning, drive the three miles to the beach, and do a brisk hour walk along the shore for her morning exercise—all this while I get dressed and get to the church early to prepare for the worship service. These morning trips have resulted in our having a huge collection of seashells at our home—free souvenirs of her weekly walks. But one morning as she was walking along—head-down as usual, scanning for interesting shells—she heard a slight splash. Looking over she just caught sight of a dolphin’s dorsal fin diving below the water. For the rest of that walk she kept her eyes up, on the gulf, watching the dolphin as it slowly cruised along at her pace, keeping her company. That day she didn’t find many shells. But seeing the dolphin was the much greater treat. And from that Sunday on, Jeanne has tried to discipline herself to keep her eyes up, scanning the water, rather than looking down on the beach. Because it’s a simple fact that you can’t see the dolphins if you don’t look up.

And as she read Colossians 3, it occurred to her that the same principle is taught in God’s Word. There are so many blessings in this life, blessings from the Lord, that we will never be able to see if we don’t look up. Rather than keeping our heads down, focusing only on our problems and our challenges and our worries, the Bible tells us to look up, to see things from a different perspective. That’s my challenge to you today: lift your heads, your eyes and your hearts. See things from God’s view. Remember your blessings and look at the challenges you’re facing through the eyes of faith. It will make all the difference!