Church Bulletin Week 49

Clean Your Mind

“But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth. Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds.” Colossians 3:8-9

Once the intense drives of the fleshly appetites have been “executed,” we who have been created after God “in righteousness and true holiness” (Ephesians 4:24) must cleanse the passions of the intellect as well.

The action required is that we must “place away from” or “throw away” these ideas that are begun in the mind. These notions are sinful and harmful to everyone.

Anger (orge) is an agitation of the soul that generates an impulse, a desire, that produces a violent emotion.

Wrath (thumos), as the word suggests, is intellectual heat, a boiling up that produces a fierce indignation.

Malice (kakia) is the ill will that creates a desire to injure, even eliminating shame at breaking laws.

Blasphemy (blasphemia), one of the few words directly transliterated from the Greek, means any slander or speech that is injurious to another’s good name.

Filthy communication (aischrologia) is any kind of foul speaking or low and obscene speech.

Lying (pseudomai) is any deliberate false information.

We are to put off the old man, that nature and behavior that was bound up in the flesh (Ephesians 4:22), and put on the new man “which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him” (Colossians 3:10).

Our salvation brings with it both a new heart and a new mind. With the one we are able to “mortify” the deeds of the flesh. With the other we are to put on “the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof” (Romans 13:14). Dr. Henry Morris III