Colossians 3:1-17; Matthew 15:1-20
Amen. Turn to Colossians chapter three, and then also Matthew chapter 15. Tonight, we’ll be talking about genuine repentance or conversion, particularly what is the dying away of the old self or the old man, and what is the rising to new life of the new self or the new man. And then we’ll think a minute or two about good works. While you’re flipping to Colossians three, which should be easier to find than Joel chapter two, Let me point out two things.
We pass these wise words for moms around the church. It’s a little calendar booklet. You look up whatever your kid’s doing, disobeying, and it gives a Bible verse, like why you shouldn’t be doing it and what you should be doing instead. It’s a really handy thing for moms.
And then there’s one for big people. It’s called transformed into his likeness. And it’s the same thing, but it’s got more big people’s sins. I think it has like, I don’t know, it’s got 120. But it’s really helpful. I’ll talk a little bit more about it, but I figured I’d better say something before I forget, because it’ll be tucked under my notes, no doubt, or I’ll just get cooking and forget to tell you. But those are really helpful. If you want to look at them afterwards, they are both wonderful resources and will help you live out what we’ll talk about tonight. Okay, Colossians chapter three, and we’ll be reading verses one through 17. And it begins this way.
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above and not on things that are on earth. For you have died in your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
Put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these, the wrath of God is coming. In these, you too once walked when you were living in them, but now you must put them all away. Anger, wrath, malice, slander, obscene talk from your mouth.
Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and you have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is all and in all. Put on then as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you. So you also must forgive and above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony and let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts to which indeed you were called in one body and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom singing songs and hymns and spiritual songs. With thankfulness in your hearts to God and whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. And then back to Matthew chapter 15. Beginning at verses one, verse one, it says, then the Pharisees and the scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem.
And they said, why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat. He answered them. And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, honor your father and your mother and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. But you say, if anyone tells his father or mother, what you would have gained from me is given to God, he need not honor his father. So for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God.
You hypocrites. Well, did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. And he called the people to him and said to them, hear and understand. It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person. But what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a person.
Then the disciples came and said to him, do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying? He answered, every plant that my heavenly father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them alone, they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit. But Peter said to him, explain the parable to us. And he said, Are you also still without understanding?
Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart. And this defiles a person for out of the heart comes evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone. Amen. The word of the living God, may he add his blessing to it. A couple of weeks ago before the general Senate meeting, there was a Monday night gathering of pastors and their wives and elders and their wives. It was for our church planting arm. And we had a known theologian speak to us about 10 things that a church ought to be and do in order to succeed.
And there was nothing about smoke machines. There was nothing about, you know, pastors with cool hairdos or skinny jeans. There was nothing about, you know, climbing walls for the young people. It was just simple, basic biblical ideas like worship, Christian education, catechism, evangelism, and on and on it went.
But one of the things that I remember hearing that always strikes me, it’s nothing new, but it’s a good reminder that we got the recipe right. We want to preach and we want to evangelize with genuine conversion in mind. Now we are coming out of an era, a very long era in the United States that goes back to camp meetings, it goes back to you know, the revivals and revivalism, it includes the modern day anxious bench or altar call, where we have been rather Arminian in our theology and our practice, meaning that we believe that man is not so bad that we can use words and arguments and reason to persuade people to leave their sin behind and to come to Jesus. And it has gotten so basic that I’m sure you can fill in the blanks because you’ve been around cynical me. Remember what evangelism is?
It’s the simple question. You don’t want to go to hell, do you? And of course, the answer is no. Well, some people do want to go there and get there as quick as they can. I think that is their heart’s desire. We also think from time to time about how the free offer of the gospel is not filling out a change of address form from hell to heaven. The gospel is not a bus ticket to glory. You stick it in your pocket, you sign your pledge, and when the chariot swings low, you jump on board and say, Mr. Conductor, I’ve got my ticket. I’m going to heaven. It’s not that either.
I was looking at a book this week by the Puritans. I think it was by Thomas Watson, and it was on the subject of regeneration and the table of contents in this Puritans book. had more biblical and theological content than most modern day Christian books, I fear. But this work on repentance talked about the necessity of repentance. You cannot come to God without repenting, unless you repent, you will perish. And so it talked about the necessity of repentance and it talked about the, the nuts and the bolts, uh, and the details of a life of repentance.
And it reminded me of what Martin Luther said on his 95 theses. Remember, uh, October, 31st of 1517, he wanted to debate the others in the little town of Wittenberg. So he nailed on the chapel door there his 95 theses or his 95 points of debate. And he was hoping some other, let’s just say smart people would get together with him, probably over some German beer and discuss his 95 points.
And the first one, because of the indulgences and the view of the Catholic church of Hail Marys and all the rest. His first point was the Christian life is meant to be a life of repentance, a life of ongoing till you die, repenting and repenting again of your sins, not in some self flagellation way, but your life is going to be full of full of sin and full of struggle. And you need to repent and repent often. And so Martin Luther was good to remind us of the Christian life and a life of repentance. But we also think of the great Jonathan Edwards in America, his famous sermon, sinners in the hands of an angry God, their foot shall slip in due time.
I always think about the order of salvation. I think about it often when I’m thinking of evangelism. I think about it often or first when I’m thinking about uh, witnessing to someone or counseling them through a hardship or a problem. I think through the order of salvation, uh, often because it’s, it’s the Christian life.
Okay. We have made salvation. You don’t want to go to hell, do you? So pray this prayer, say this prayer, walk this aisle, fill out this card, stick it in your pocket and you’re good to go until God calls. But I think what we’ll see tonight and what you already understand is the Christian life is an inside out change that begins at conversion and it ends at glorification. When you get to heaven, God will be finished with you. You will not be finished with him for you will spend eternity worshiping him for what he has done for you in Jesus.
But we think of predestination, God’s eternal decree. We think of effectual calling, the preaching of the gospel. We think of effectual calling, the inward work of the spirit to convince us of our sin and misery. We think of effectual calling as sending out missionaries, sending children into the covenant homes of parents, all that.
But then we get to regeneration. We get to being born again. And, you know, if you’re a real nitpicker theologically, you say, well, where does conversion fit in? And, you know, in my mind, it’s, it’s just, it’s just happening. And yes, it’s probably got some order to it, but regeneration and conversion or repentance are the work of God, the spirit, the work of God’s grace in our lives. And I can’t convince and convert centers as a preacher. No great orator can say the right words to wake a dead person into life. It takes God, the Holy Spirit.
And so the question is asked, what is involved in genuine repentance, genuine conversion, the order of salvation? How does someone go from being faithless to having faith in Jesus Christ as the sole savior of their soul. So we wanna think about that for just a few moments. So what is involved in genuine repentance, genuine conversion?
Two things, the dying away of the old self, which we’ll explain in a minute, and the rising to new life of the new self. If you read through the New Testament, particularly Paul’s letters, There is something old about us and there is something new about us. We know well the Bible verse, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone, the new has come. We know from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. We no longer, are to live by the flesh, but we are to live by the Holy Spirit. I’m not disappearing here, I’m getting some water.
So what is involved in genuine repentance or conversion? There should be a real spirit-wrought change. There should be a conversion, but there should be a life of repentance. We repent and believe the gospel for the first time, but we continue to repent and believe the gospel, not for salvation, but for sanctification the rest of our lives.
So first, let’s think about the dying away of the old self. Question 89, what is the dying away of the old self? It is to be genuinely sorry for sin and to more and more hate and run away from it. You all know the drill, there’s godly, Grief, godly sorrow, godly repentance, and there’s worldly grief. And the latter is, I’m sorry I got caught.
And you know this with your children. I love the family circus. Did y’all read that in the papers? We thought of the funny papers growing up, the family circus. And we had the books. I think Mandy had them growing up. And then our kids read the yellowed pages.
And my favorite is when Dolly says, Mommy, PJ hit me back. Y’all are slow, but you hear what happened there. But you know when one of your kids slugs the other and you grab them by the arm and you bring them to each other, say you’re sorry. And what is one kid? I’m not going to do it. Say you’re sorry. We try to cajole them. And then we start threatening them. Say you’re sorry, or else, or whatever. And they stomp their foot and they say, sorry.
And you can tell. Maybe you’re watching a court case on TV or, you know, you’ve been in law enforcement, you’ve been in the room where a judge issues a sentence because the jury has found the person guilty. And you can tell who is sorry and who is happy they did it.
You can see grief and hatred of sin in a person’s life and a body. And so dying away of the old self is to be genuinely sorry for sin. Now this is probably breaking protocol, but I’m going to use the Westminster Shorter Catechism to explain the Heidelberg Catechism. Repentance unto life. somewhere in the question 80s range. Repentance unto life is a saving grace, whereby we, with a sight and sense of our sin and our misery, do with grief and hatred of our sin, turn from it to God.
There has to be an understanding in the mind, what I am is a sinner. What I do is sinful. The God who is hates it. And unless I forsake it, I will perish. But even further than that, it has to have sunk down in our hearts. We have to mourn our sin, grieve our sin, hate our sin. We need to understand that it is a stench in the nostrils of God.
And if sin is not a stench in our nostrils, something is wrong. There’s a proverb that says the wayward woman does her wayward woman things and she wipes her mouth and says, I have done no wrong. What is Jesus or what is the scripture say about Israel from time to time? You are like a horse without bit and you are an animal without bridle. You cannot be tamed.
There is something wonderful about the Holy Spirit opening our eyes to see the glory and majesty of God. There’s something about the Holy Spirit and the word opening our eyes to see sin and its sinfulness. And there’s something wonderful about our heart opening, our chains falling off, our eyes enlightened to sin and misery and gospel and grace. And there is something about a physical gulp, a physical pit in the stomach where we realize that what we have done and what we have been deserves death and everlastingly so.
Sinclair Ferguson, if you’ve been listening over the last couple of years to the daily podcast, Things Unseen, from time to time they’ll do a rinse and repeat. And it’s really worth listening to the one I couldn’t tell you what it’s about, what it’s named or which episode it is. But he talks about naming your sins, giving them the biblical name and then naming the opposite virtue. And so when you name your sin, you understand what it is. And when you name the virtue, you see the opposite.
And that’s where I remember this comes in handy. That’s where. This comes in handy with the kids. It gives the biblical answers to a lot of common things we deal with. And so we want to, by the word and by the spirit, be troubled in our hearts. We want to think of the nature and the consequences of sin and be genuinely sorry for it.
Do you remember what happened to King David after Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite? He probably thought, well, I’m getting away with this. I’m King David after all. And remember Nathan the prophet comes to him and tells him the exact story of his own life, except maybe under the guise of a shepherd and a sheep. And David gets so angry when Nathan tells that story and he says, Before God, that man ought to pay for his sin. That man ought to die. And what is Nathan’s response? You are that man. And so David was cut to the heart. He was pricked to the heart. He was grieved over his sin. It took the word of God and it took the spirit of God.
And that’s why we need faithful people in our lives. That’s why we need to be in church. We need to be in the word. And that’s why in this digital age, when we have TikTok brain, And some of you may say, oh, that’s for the older people, but no, we all have digitally affected brains where our attention span is that of a sparrow or something. We need to take time in the word without digital distractions, and we need time for the word and for the spirit to do their mighty work. So we wanna be genuinely sorry for sin, but more and more hate it and run away from it. Sin ought to be a stench in our nostrils because we have named it.
Now, it’s summer denominational meeting times and some of the denominations of churches in America have already embraced the whole sexual revolution, including homosexuality and same sex unions. But one of our closely related denominations recently accepted the language of same sex attraction. And they have opened the door for the ordination of people who are same sex attracted.
But if you think about it, what is the language of the Bible? I’m just using this for example. What is the language of the Bible regarding homosexuality? It certainly doesn’t say love is love. And if love is love, then love is love and love is love. So leave it alone. It doesn’t say that it talks about unnatural desires. It talks about things contrary to God’s creation design. And see, when you have those definitions and those terms in mind, it’s a stench in your nostrils. And you say, of course not. We do not want to embrace that in the church of Jesus Christ. We want to call people to repent of it. We want to call on them to receive the Holy Spirit and strive to more and more hate and run away from it.
Remember when Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers, ends up in the Potiphar’s house. And do you remember his wife was relentless? Come, come lay with me, she said. And finally she catches him alone in the house and he runs leaving his cloak behind. And she of course shows the guards and the husband, here’s his cloak of the Hebrew that you’ve put here to make sport of me and Joseph flees, he runs for his life. How can I do this thing to my master who’s been nothing but good to me? How can I do this thing to the God that I love and I serve?
If that’s not your mindset towards sin, you will coddle it and you will nurture it and you’ll be okay with it and you will justify it. It is our nature, but we need to be genuinely sorry for sin more and more, hating it, and running away from it. What did Colossians tell us? Put to death, therefore, what is earthly. We call that the mortification of sin. One of the Puritans was known for saying, be killing sin or it will be killing you. Question 90, what is the rising to life? What is the rising of life to the new self?
It’s wholehearted joy in God. You think of the, people that Jesus encountered. They were blind, but now could see. And it wasn’t just that they could see physically. It wasn’t the 2020 vision that was so wonderful to them. They could see Jesus. They could see he was the problem to the sin filled, cursed world. They could see salvation in him.
And so what did they do? They went running and leaping telling everyone they could what God had done for them in Christ. And so the believer who rises from death to life has wholehearted joy in God. That’s why saved people, what do they do? They sing. Saved people sing. We’ve got joy down in our hearts.
But we also have a love and delight to live according to God’s word or the will of God by doing every kind of good work. If you are a believer, you’ll want to dig into the Bible. If you’re a believer, you want to find out what pleases God. If you’re a believer, you want to show your gratitude for the grace of God in Christ and you’ll want to serve him and obey him by doing every good work.
You read Psalm 119. A to Z, at least in the Hebrew alphabet, it’s the A to Z acrostic of loving the law of God. And you read a thousand times in there. I delight in your word. I delight to know your will. I delight to live according to your ways. We have Psalm one, blessed is the man who doesn’t sit, walk or stand with unbelievers, but he delights in the law of God on it. He meditates day and night. He’s like a tree planted by streams of living water. And all that he does, he prospers.
So we want to live the new life. We want to live the new obedience. We want to put off our old man. We want to put off our old nature. We want to put off our dirty clothes and we want to put on the new man. And it’s a daily struggle to live for God and to not live for self. That is the, the, That’s the hardship of the Christian life, to live by the spirit and not the flesh. We struggle with the flesh, we struggle with the world, and we struggle with Satan.
But what are good works? That’s our last question. What are good works? And I love the answer. Only those which are done out of a true faith. Did the Pharisees pass that test? Not according to Jesus. And I love how the disciples, they came to Jesus and said, you offended them. Really, I’m sure Jesus was concerned about PR at that particular moment.
What are good works? It’s those things done out of a true faith. So can an unbeliever do good works? Not if it’s that they don’t have true faith. They’re not good works. Can they help a little old lady across the road? Of course they can. But are they doing it to please God and out of gratitude for what’s been done for them and Jesus? Oh, they’re not. So it’s those things done out of a true faith. And here’s the important thing. They conform to God’s law. And what this catechism is going to tell us that we want we want to have true faith. We want to do biblical things and we want to do it for God’s glory.
We don’t want to make stuff up. We don’t want the traditions of man. And it’s not just the Pharisees that have it or the Roman Catholics. You know, we live in the cultural Bible Belt South where we don’t drink and we don’t cuss and we don’t smoke and we don’t chew and we don’t play cards, dip snuff. You know, we don’t wear short pants. You know, our skirts have to go down to the ankles. Our hair has to touch our backbone. You know, on and on, we’ve got fundamentalism and traditions down pretty well, right?
And we understand where people do that culturally, or maybe they have good reasons for it. But if you’ve lived in the South long enough, that stuff is imposed on us as if it is canon law, as if the Pope has spoken on it, those sorts of things. And it’s very often in the church, particularly in the South, where people are more concerned about the length of your skirt than they are about the condition of your heart.
And that’s a burden that many have rejected. And so we want to present the gospel. We want to present true repentance and conversion. And we want to present conforming to God’s law for his glory out of a life of true faith and not to make so-and-so happy or the preacher happy. We don’t want to impose our opinions on people. We don’t want human traditions.
And so what is a true or genuine repentance and conversion? It’s someone who by the word and spirit is convinced of their sin and misery, convinced of their need for rescue and redemption and salvation. And they see Jesus offered in the gospels and they freely because of a changed heart, because of regeneration, embrace him and receive him by faith aligned. And they desire to live a life of new obedience.
And I hope that is the case for each of us this night. And perhaps if it’s been the case and it’s grown a little stale, perhaps you will renew your zeal for living for the Lord. Let’s pause and ask for his help and blessing. Pray with me. Lord, as we sit here and hear the rain on the roof and we know that our parched land is receiving refreshment, we pray that the rain from heaven through the Holy Scriptures, particularly about things of our salvation and daily Christian living, would rain down now in our souls so that we have a strong desire to reflect the realities of the new life that we have in Christ Jesus. Hear us and help us and bless us, we pray in the name of Jesus. Amen. Let’s respond by worshiping the Lord together in song.