There’s a moment in every believer’s life when the question stops being “what should I stop doing?” and becomes “what actually changed in me?” Mike McFadden preached from Colossians 3:9-11 last Sunday and pressed right into that question. The list of things to put off — sexual immorality, impurity, anger, malice, slander — that’s familiar ground. But Paul doesn’t leave you there. He pivots mid-sentence: “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self.” Three little words. The whole weight of the Christian life hangs on them.
A Change of Position
Mike walked us through the three movements Paul makes in verses 9, 10, and 11. Verse 9 is a change of position. The old self is dead, crucified with Christ — that’s Romans 6:6, not metaphor, not aspiration. You didn’t negotiate the death; you died in him. So when the temptation comes to act like the old self still runs the show, you are being asked to live beneath your reality. As Mike put it, the old self is “dead, corrupt, and deceitful above all else.” It has nothing left to offer. Putting it off isn’t self-improvement. It’s recognition of a fact.
“We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.”
— Romans 6:6
Renewed in Knowledge
But position isn’t the whole story. Verse 10 adds the process. The new self is “being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.” Mike noted how easy it would have been for Paul to write “being renewed in works” — and he didn’t. The fruit will come, but the engine is knowledge. He compared it to a newborn baby: fully human, fully formed in essence, yet with all the capacity to grow. You don’t become a person by growing; you grow because you already are one. The new self has the same shape — identity first, transformation unfolding from it.
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
— Romans 12:2
Christ Is All and Is in All
Verse 11 is the change in partnership. “There is no Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free — but Christ is all and is in all.” Mike drove home how radical that sentence was in the first-century church. Jews and Gentiles didn’t eat together, didn’t share space, didn’t even let the dust of one another’s sandals into their homes. Paul isn’t tweaking social customs. He’s announcing a new identity that supersedes every other one — and Mike made it land personally: when you don’t have Christ, you only have geographic, political, vocational, or cultural identities to bind yourself to. Christ gives you something greater than all of those put together.
“Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free — but Christ is all and is in all.”
— Colossians 3:11
The Apple Tree Illustration
Mike McFadden closed the body of the sermon with a story from a wedding he officiated in Oregon. A farm owner had planted a row of trees along a creek, and one of them — clearly an apple tree — wasn’t producing fruit. The owner told him, simply: “That tree doesn’t know it’s an apple tree.” Mike used it as a picture of identity and fruit. The tree doesn’t grow apples by striving; it grows them because of what it is. And identity, he warned, has been “hijacked” in our culture. Satan wants you to believe identity is something you claim — based on what you do, where you came from, or how you feel. The Bible says identity is something you are. New creation in Christ. You are a new man. Now live like one.
So What?
If you’ve put your faith in Christ, the old self is already dead. You don’t get to keep negotiating with it. Renew what is new. Put to death what is dead. Put off what you’ve already put away. Mike was direct: this isn’t an exercise of swapping one habit for another. It’s recognition that the essence underneath has changed, and the fruit will follow from there. The same God who saved you from the consequences of sin is committed to saving you from the grip of it. Walk in that today.
Scripture References
- Colossians 3:5-11
- Romans 6:6
- Romans 12:2
- Ephesians 4:22
- 2 Corinthians 5:17