Kill ‘em off

Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry…But now you yourselves are to put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth. – Colossians 3v5-8


I think as the Lord directs, I may camp on this passage for a couple of days. Today I want to look at the overall picture of putting to death our members.

Sometime along the way in my life I saw the film “Night of the Living Dead.” (The 50's version) I don’t know if I was still lost, backslidden, or just being fleshly. I don’t recommend it by any means. It was the epitome of a “B” movie waste of celluloid and certainly not edifying for believers.

However, I think I can take a picture from it to illustrate a truth. Please forgive me if I miss any specifics, and I doubt anyone would correct me anyway J . The story was that on a certain night the dead would come out of their graves to attack the living. Putrid, rotting, stinking corpses, with flesh falling off, would climb out of their graves and I think, try to eat the living. The living were constantly trying to fight off these zombies - these living dead.

As believers we learned that the old ‘us’ is dead, gone, and vanquished. Yet, we still have to battle the stinking old rotten flesh. It is kind of like those zombies trying to destroy our new lives. Fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desires, covetousness (which is nothing more than idolatry), anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language, and so on are crawling around, zombie-like, trying to get to us.

Too often we don’t even have the sense to cut them off. At least the people in the film knew enough to fight. We, however, far too regularly, welcome these stinking rotten members with rotted filthy flesh falling off with open arms. “Come back to me Uncleanness, I miss you!” “I can’t live without you Covetousness, it is so good to see you again!” “Here, let me make you a cuppa tea Passion, and we can sit and have a chat!”

You say, “Roger that is absurd!” Well maybe so, but I suspect that most of us know exactly what I am talking about.

What’s God’s answer? “Kill them all! Cut them off! Throw them off!”

I remember one scene where one of the living people had a rotten arm crawling up his back and onto his shoulder. He didn’t take it, caress it, and pamper it! He threw it off and ran.

Why is it that we don’t treat our ‘living dead” members the same way?