“Consider”—that’s the core activity of the Christian mind. We need to consider, to think, to interpret, to change our field of reference. As those with new lives hidden in Christ (vs. 3) we have been enlightened and no longer see the world the way we used to see it.

Though we’d like to see this all happen automatically, it is rather a matter of putting us in a position to live differently. At the heart of it is the capacity to see things differently because we have been redeemed, because we have been raised up with Christ. So the choice is ours in how we interpret life experiences. And that choice is one of faith.

For example, when an enticing temptation confronts us, I can choose to interpret it as being more powerful than I am and since I have fallen to that temptation before, what’s the use, I can’t resist. Or I can choose to consider, as our passage for today teaches us, that my body is dead to temptation, that God is living out His holiness in me and therefore I don’t have to give in to that temptation. Satan may intend it as a temptation for evil, but God intends it for my faith-building. The choice is one of interpretation based on faith.

This applies to whatever temptation or situation confronts me. The apostle Paul lists six vices, powerful ones at that. The draw of immorality is huge, especially in our time with the prevalence of the internet and media in our homes, and the loosening of traditional morals at an accelerating pace. Passion, by its very nature, is all consuming and difficult to resist. It covers a broad spectrum of behavior and thought. But some things can only be described as “evil desires.” Greed, disguised as rampant consumerism, has left many Christians in debt and enslaved by their desires for more and more.

All those things, Paul says, amount to idolatry, for they carry for us a god-like quality—we think that we can’t live our lives without them. When a person holds on to greed, they are setting up an idol that their life depends upon—they can’t live without that for which they lust. All else in their life bows in worship and subservience to that evil desire, passion, impurity or immorality.

Against all this, the Holy Spirit instructs us to “consider the members of your earthly body as dead.” We need to picture in our mind and in our spirit that we are indeed dead to those influences, that they have no control over us. We are free, therefore, to walk in freedom as those alive from the dead.