Are You an Alien?

Colossians  •  Sermon  •  Submitted
0 ratings
· 11 views

A look at the default condition of man

Notes
Transcript
Handout
Sermon Tone Analysis
A
D
F
J
S
Emotion
A
C
T
Language
O
C
E
A
E
Social
View more →
Introduction:
Tonight, I know that I’m talking to a group of people who will understand this reference, but when I was growing up, I remember watching a movie called E.T. Some of you are very fond of that movie. The most memorable line was.... you got it! “E.T. phone home.”
E.T. was an Extra-Terrestrial that “ain’t from around here!” He was dressed up like a little kid with them long Charles Stanley fingers and had a little red hoodie on him. The little boy in the movie would put him in his basket and he had a Santa Clause like moment when the bike lifted up off the ground and he rode through the moon one night.
In the movie many people were fooled by E.T. disguise and didn’t know he was really from another planet. There are a lot of movies about aliens in disguise, like Superman, and others. Maybe you have wondered about some people you’ve seen walking around and thought, You know they might be an alien. That would explain so much!
Well, the truth is all of us were once a type of alien and some may still be. Tonight we are going to find out if you are an alien or not as we jump back into our study we started several months ago through the Book of Colossians.
I know that your memories are probably like mine, so you may not even remember starting Colossians together, but I want to give you a quick recap of the first chapter and then we will get to our passage tonight.
Chapter Review:
How the Gospel Came to Colossae (vv.1-8)
Paul’s Prayer for the Church (vv.9-14)
A Portrait of Who Christ Is (vv.15-20)
Who We Are in Christ (vv. 21-23)
Paul’s Ministry to the Church (vv. 24-29)
Tonight we are going to look at Who We Are in Christ. First, in order to see who we are in Christ, we have to first see who we were; and if you are not a believer, you are not in Christ and this is not a description of who you were, it is a picture of who you are!

1. Everyone Starts Out Alienated from God (v.21a)

After taking time to discuss how wonderful Christ is and how He is the one that holds this whole world together and is the one Who reconciles us to God, Paul takes a minute to explain why we need to be reconciled to God in the first place.
You see, we were not indifferent to God. We were not laissez faire about God. We were actually alienated from God and hostile to Him! We will come back to the hostility in a moment, but let’s look at what it means to be “alienated” from God.
We are not aliens in the since of UFOs, but we are aliens in the sense of foreigners. Now, this a very politically loaded term today, but to be an alien means to be a foreigner with no claim in the land you now are in. You have no rights in this new land you are in. That is why God actually commanded the Israelites in the Old Testament to care for the rights of the alien.
What Paul means here is not just that we don’t have an inheritance in God because we were aliens, but also that we were not His people. We belonged to someone else. We belonged to the world.
However, once we accepted Christ, things changed. Peter described it this way.
1 Peter 2:9–11 ESV
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.
Did you catch all of that. There is more to it than just what flag you pledge to. Being a part of God’s family means we inherit salvation. We get mercy. We have a stake in the kingdom of God. It is not earned, but is given to us as a gift.
Paul wants to point out to a church of Gentiles who would have understood very clearly the concept of Jew vs. Gentile that they once had no claim in God, but now through Jesus, they have been made joint heirs with Christ. They now are a people that belong to God and have an identity in Christ.
How does it make you feel to know that even if you don’t matter to anyone else, you matter enough to God to be invited into His family?

2. Everyone is Hostile in Mind Towards God (v.21b)

I mentioned earlier that we are not lassez faire towards God. That means we are never neutral towards God. A lot of people may think they are. They may think that they don’t really have a problem with God, but really what they are saying is this. “If God will play by my rules and do what I want Him to do, then I can be okay with God.” That is really making yourself more important to God. It is blasphemy! It is saying, “God I matter more than you do so you need to do what I want.”
The natural mindset of the world is not neutral towards God, but is AGAINST God. They don’t want God raining on their parade. I believe this is why so many college students walk away from the faith. They want to party and have a good time during college and if God exists and has expectations for their lives, then they can’t go live however they want to live.
The world doesn’t care who your God is, as long as that God is only your personal God and doesn’t require anyone else to behave a certain way.
Notice that it is the mindset of the world first that is against God. Sin starts in the head....in the mind. That mindset is hostile to God. The word for “hostile” here is the word that means enemies or foes. It means our mindset is set against God’s ways. We naturally rebel against God.
Think about for a moment many of the ways that our culture rebels against God.
Personhood - Abortion
Sexuality
Morality
Marriage and Family
These are just a few of the ways we have a hostile mindset towards God. But these are not just the way that some other people feel, we also feel this way by default. These were our thoughts towards God.
Paul describes it this way in
Romans 1:18–21 ESV
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
Paul says that we know the truth internally and we willfully suppress it.
2. Do you find yourself struggling with accepting God’s standards of living over what you want to do?
3. Do you ever find yourself trying to play with the Scriptures to make them say something that allows you more permission than what God has given you for a particular matter?

3. Everyone Practices Evil Deeds (v.21c)

Not only were we separated from God and hostile towards Him in our thinking, but we also acted out on those thoughts. Now it’s bad to think evil things, but it is even worse to act out on those thoughts.
Paul told Titus in speaking of unbelievers
Titus 1:16 ESV
They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.
Many people claim to be Christians. They will check that box on the survey form or casually claim that they are Christians, but it is only lip service. Their hearts are far from God and it is evident by their actions. You want to see if a person is a Christian? Look at their lifestyle!
Our actions are a mirror of our thoughts. We act out what we think. When we have a mind that is hostile to God, we are going to have lives that are lived in hostility to God.
Think about for just a moment some of the movies that are coming out these days, particularly horror movies. These movies are ideas conceived in someone’s mind to try to illicit shock and awe from the audience. How gruesome can we make this scene. How can we rattle this person watching the movie. In order to do that, you have to push the envelope of what they are comfortable with. Is it any wonder that as people have gotten more and more comfortable with sin, the envelope of what scared us has been pushed?
I mean think back to how Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds used to be considered horror shows. Today, Hitchcock is tame compared to what we see even on prime time television! And all of these ideas are dreamed up by the human mind. Our minds are far more evil than we think.
The internet and social media reveal this. People will bully someone from behind a keyboard without a second thought. I was reading a news article about an update on the 5 year old boy that a man picked up and threw over the balcony of a mall several months back just because he decided he wanted to kill someone that day.
We look at these actions and think they are in a separate category of behavior. These are pure evil! They are far more evil than the things we might do. But the truth is, all of us are capable of any level of evil if we are not in Christ.
Listen to
1 Corinthians 6:9–11 ESV
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
Notice first the list of evil things that unbelievers do. Maybe you are one of these people. Maybe you are a Christian in name only and your lifestyle matches these behaviors, even though you say you are a follower of Christ. Somebody isn’t telling the truth!
But notice that Paul also says in verse 11, “and such were some of you.” In other words, there were people in the church that used to live this way but had changed their lifestyles. That should be the way it is for all of us!
Conclusion:
We can’t change our lifestyle to come to Christ. We can’t fix our mess. Christ has to do that for us. He did that on the cross. We will cover that next week, but I don’t want to leave tonight without giving us hope. If I have described your life, you are an alien to Christ. You are not His child and not a part of His kingdom. You have no rights in His heaven. You are an outcast.
But the good news is Jesus wants to let you in. You can’t just climb over the fence and get in. You have to enter in through the door. That door is Jesus. Jesus died for your sins and my sins to make peace between us and God. We can have forgiveness for even the most awful things we’ve done, because Jesus took our punishment for us on the cross.
If you have accepted Christ, then live for Christ. Change your thinking through reading the Bible. Join God’s people in a local church and worship Him. Serve him and turn your works of unrighteousness into righteous deeds that will no longer store up wrath for you, but instead store up treasures in heaven.
Related Media
See more
Related Sermons
See more