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Kingdom Don'ts That We Always Do
Brian Mashburn
June 24, 2007
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The Life You Use To Live
Remember back when a major theme of your life was anger? Life was so unfair. People were so wrong. Circumstances were just not right. If only they would change, but they wouldn't, so you lived angry.
Remember when your anger burst forth uncontrollably? The Bible calls that rage. Isn't it amazing that our rage was expressed most freely against those who we say we love most dearly?
Little was more poisonous to our spirits than malice: that feeling of ill-will toward another human being. Remember how justified you felt about it? Wow, you were actually sad when they were successful and happy when they failed.
And it came out of your mouth as slander, that is, words that tear down rather than build up. How much laughter did you enjoy at the expense of another? How many degrading looks, sarcastic remarks, and quiet conversations did it take before you woke up to the death you were dealing out?
Remember how the shadowy state of your heart was regularly expressing itself through your filthy language? How childish, thinking that those words made you commanding. "The vocabulary of the powerless," I remember someone saying.
The worst, however, was how you lived lying to others. Sometimes overt, large lies. But usually subtle, clever ones. "The vocabulary of Satan," I remember Jesus saying.
While these are included in Paul's list of "Kingdom Don'ts" in Colossians, they are more like "the sins in good standing" even among Christians. Stop it, he says, "since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator." (Col 3:9-10)
Kingdom citizens just don't do that.