A technical difficulty caused us to lose the opening of the sermon, so it has been included below:

Christ Jesus is Lord. Let me say it again. There is no other king except King Jesus. Amen.

My thesis for today, the center of my sermon is “The Lordship and Salvation of Christ Jesus is life changing.” Without Christ, my worldly passions will consume me, mislead me, deceive me and lead me to death. It will be a horrible death which will suffer endless punishment under the wrath of God, and rightly so since the deeds that I have done in the body are contrary to God’s law and love. I will have brought upon myself the right and judicial condemnation of the judge of all there is.

But if Jesus is my savior and my Lord, then I have the blessing and forgiveness of God. Jesus is my life. His righteousness has been imputed to me and he carried the burden and punishment of my sins on the cross. The wicked have no such substitute, but certainly those who abide in Christ do. Amen?

As we discussed last time, Paul instructs us to put away evil. Anything that would tarnish us, soil our testimony or make us separate from Christ Jesus must be done away with. He is not talking with the wicked, those who identify with the world and live in the flesh. Instead, he is talking with confessing Christians. Those who confess to be alive in Christ, abiding in his light and saved by His sacrifice are the ones Paul has in view.

That is one of the distortions people have made with this text. Paul uses the language of “put on” and “put off” to convey the central idea of attitudes, behavior, emotion and love. I would not put on a bathing suit to go outside in January in Michigan. Neither would I take off my polar fleece jacket in a raging snowstorm. We put on and take off what is appropriate for our condition. It is no different with our Christian life. We “take off” what is evil and repulsive to God and we “put on” that which glorifies God. We do so because that is who we really are in Christ. We are no longer children of the devil, descendants regarding Adam’s sin, instead we have become children of God and heirs with Jesus. We live in a different and new kingdom, one of light and not darkness, one of grace and not law (though we abide by the law and honor it), one of eternal life and not death.

But the distortion comes in when they go to the unbeliever and try to get them to “put on” Christ. They cannot. As Jesus told Nicodemus:

Jesus answered him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." (Joh 3:3)