Articles
Don't Play With Dead Things
As a teenager, I knew a family that had a dog named Hey You. I'm not sure of the exact breed, but Hey You was a small terrier of some sort. He was very intelligent and fun to play with - capable of doing all sorts of clever tricks. Sadly, Hey You died and the children buried him in their backyard. One boring afternoon some months later, the children got the bright idea of digging up Hey You in order to see him again. As one might imagine, they found his corpse badly decomposed. It was a gruesome sight. He was not at all the wonderful pet they remembered, and they had no desire to play with him anymore.
As disturbing as that story might be, it illustrates an important truth. Dead things aren't fun to play with.
In Romans 8:13, the apostle Paul encourages us to "put to death the deeds of the body." In Colossians 3:5-9, he specifies what "deeds" should be put to death:
"Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. Because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience, in which you yourselves once walked when you lived in them. But now you yourselves are to put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth. Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old man with his deeds."
This text helps us realize that, in order to live a holy, Christ-like life, we must put to death worldly thinking. We must set our minds "on things above" while eliminating earthly thoughts. When we do that, the things of the world will no longer look appealing to us. Temptations relating to sexual immorality would have little power over us if we put to death unclean thoughts and desires. The prospect of enslaving ourselves to working for material wealth is not going to be very appealing to us if we've killed covetousness. We'll have a much easier time controlling our speech (e.g. filthy language and lying) when we've slain anger, wrath and malice.
The problems that we sometimes have in trying to live Christ-like lives may simply boil down to this: we are tying to play with dead things (or things that should be dead to us). Christianity is an unpleasant experience for some people for precisely this reason; they keep trying to play with dead things. If we are ever going to be what we should be and experience the beauty of holiness in our lives, we are going to have to kill the world within us, bury it, and leave it alone. Maybe then we will be able to joyfully declare with Paul that "the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Galatians 6:14).
