Audio Download

Book of Colossians 3:5-7 Mortify Therefore Your Members

[Study Aired October 20, 2026]

“Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry: For which things’ sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience: In the which ye also walked some time, when ye lived in them” (Colossians 3:5–7).

Dead, and Told to Make Dead

The last study ended on a hope: a life hid with Christ in God, to be shown with Him in glory. The next word is “therefore,” and what follows it is a command: “Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth” (Colossians 3:5). The command stands on what came before it. A life hid in heaven still has members here on the earth, and Paul tells those members what to do.

Three verses, and they move in four steps: a command given, a list named, a warning stated, and a past recalled.

Start with the plain sense. “Mortify” is an old English word. In 1611 it meant to make dead, and that is what Paul says: put to death.

The word Paul uses is nekroō (G3499). It appears only three times in the New Testament, and the other two are both about Abraham. Paul says that Abraham “considered not his own body now dead (G3499), when he was about an hundred years old” (Romans 4:19). Hebrews says that from “one, and him as good as dead (G3499),” came “so many as the stars of the sky in multitude” (Hebrews 11:12). In both verses the body is not killed. Its strength is gone. So the word is about taking the strength out of something, and that fits Paul’s command here: take the strength out of these sins.

Here is the difficulty. Paul has just said, “ye are dead” (Colossians 3:3). Now he tells them to make dead. If they are dead, what is left to do?

Paul answers this same difficulty in Romans. He puts the death first and the command after it.

“Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God” (Romans 6:11–13).

The death comes first, and the commands rest on it. Yet sin still reaches for the mortal body, and that is why commands are needed at all. Galatians puts it the same way, to a different church: “And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit” (Galatians 5:24–25). The crucifying is stated as done. The walk is told what to do next.

So the command does not undo the death. They are dead with Christ, and for that reason they are told what to do with the members that remain.

Your Members Which are Upon the Earth

A question comes up here. Paul says to put your members to death, but the five things he lists next are not parts of the body. They are sins. So what does he want put to death, the members or the sins?

There is a second question. Earlier in this letter Paul spoke against “neglecting of the body” (Colossians 2:23). Part Eleven found that he condemned those rules because they were laid on other men as wisdom, and because they did nothing against the gorging of the flesh. Does this command bring those rules back?

The answer starts with the word “members.” It is melos (G3196), the word for the parts of a body, and Romans 6 shows what Paul does with them. They are yielded, either to sin as instruments of unrighteousness or to God as instruments of righteousness (Romans 6:13, quoted above). Six verses later the same word stands beside uncleanness, one of the names in our list: “as ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness (G167) and to iniquity unto iniquity; even so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness” (Romans 6:19). So Paul does not tell them to get rid of their members. He tells them to give the members to a different master. They once served uncleanness, and now they are to serve righteousness.

Not every verse speaks well of the members. Paul says that when we were in the flesh, “the motions of sins… did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death” (Romans 7:5), and James asks, “come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?” (James 4:1). So the members are where sin works. The Lord’s own word is the hardest case: “it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell” (Matthew 5:29). There the member is named as what causes the stumbling, and its loss is set against the loss of the whole. We read the member as the occasion and not the source, because the Lord puts the source elsewhere. The verse before has the adultery done “already in his heart” (Matthew 5:28), and He says again, “out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries” (Matthew 15:19).

So two things are true of the members. Sin works in them, and they belong to Christ. First Corinthians says which one stands, and it says it about fornication, the first name in our list. “Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid” (1 Corinthians 6:15). A few verses on: “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). Here, too, the members are not put to death. They are Christ’s, and they are to be given to Him.

Romans and First Corinthians both say the members belong to Christ and are to be given to Him. Romans and James both say sin works in them. That leaves the question of what Paul does mean to put to death.

Paul explains this himself. He does not leave “members” standing alone. The words right after it say what he means: “fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness.” What is put to death is the list, not the members.

Paul has already spoken of sins in bodily terms in this letter: “putting off the body of the sins of the flesh” (Colossians 2:11). Romans gives the object in the same terms: “if ye through the Spirit do mortify (G2289) the deeds of the body” (Romans 8:13). The KJV’s “mortify” there is a different word from the one in Colossians, so the English echo is false. What is put to death there are the deeds of the body, not the body itself.

This is not the same as the rules Paul condemned earlier in this letter: “Touch not; taste not; handle not” (Colossians 2:21). Those rules went after the body, through what a man eats and touches. Paul goes after the sins. The body is Christ’s. We have already heard Paul say that your bodies are members of Christ, that you were bought with a price, and that you are to glorify God in your body. So he does not tell them to break the body down or to punish it. In Romans he tells them to give it to God as an instrument of righteousness (Romans 6:13, quoted above), and here he tells them to put to death the sins that work in it.

The strength for the command is not theirs. “Through the Spirit” is Romans’ word for it. Philippians says the same: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12–13). The command is real, and the One who gives it also supplies the working.

One phrase is left: “upon the earth.” The last study said it would come up here. Paul uses it of the members to say where they are. They are here, on the earth, and that is where they are at work.

That does not make them evil. Paul has said that by Christ “were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth” (Colossians 1:16), and that the Father was pleased “by him to reconcile all things unto himself… whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven” (Colossians 1:20). So the earth is not the fault. The fault is in where a man sets his mind, as the last study found at verse 2.

Paul sets the two places side by side. The life is “hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The members are still here. He calls both yours: “your life” and “your members.” Two addresses, heaven and earth.

What Paul lists is what a mind set on the earth does with its members. This letter has said something like it already. These people were once “enemies in your mind by wicked works” (Colossians 1:21), and Part Four found that the works were the evidence of the mind, not the disease. Return to a verse the last study heard: “whose God is their belly… who mind earthly things” (Philippians 3:19). It fits both the man ruled by appetite and the man who rules it. “Mind” there is the same verb (G5426) as “set your affection” at Colossians 3:2.

Five Names

Five names stand in a row, and they belong together. Fornication and uncleanness are done in the body. Passion and evil desire stir them up, as James says: “when lust (G1939) hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin” (James 1:15). Covetousness grasps after more. The body is where they show, but the Lord says where they come from: “from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications… covetousness (G4124)” (Mark 7:21–22). The members are Christ’s, as we have heard, and of sexual sin Paul says, “He therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man, but God” (1 Thessalonians 4:8). So these are sins of the heart, and they are done against God and against Christ.

Two of the names are plain: sexual immorality, and impurity. The other three need a closer look, because the English leads a reader astray. Take them in order.

Start with “inordinate affection.” It is one Greek word, pathos (G3806), and it means a passion. Two things in the English hide that.

The first is “inordinate.” That is the KJV’s own word. The Greek has only the one noun, with nothing in front of it, and modern translations say “passion” or “lust.”

The second is “affection.” Today it means warmth. In 1611 it meant a strong feeling that moves a man. It also sounds like verse 2, where the KJV has “Set your affection on things above.” The English is the same, but the Greek is not. There the word is phroneō (G5426), to set the mind on something. Here the word is pathos, a passion. The two verses are not talking about the same thing.

The New Testament uses pathos only three times, and two of them are outside our verse. Both are about sexual sin. Paul writes of men given up “unto vile affections (G3806)” (Romans 1:26). After telling the Thessalonians to abstain from fornication, he says, “Not in the lust (G3806) of concupiscence (G1939), even as the Gentiles which know not God” (1 Thessalonians 4:5). There passion and desire stand side by side, as they do in our verse. The third use is our verse, where passion follows fornication and uncleanness. In all three, the sense is passion, not warmth.

Next is “evil concupiscence.” Concupiscence is an old word for desire. The Greek is epithymia (G1939), and on its own it can mean good or bad. The Lord used it of Himself: “With desire (G1939) I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15). Paul used it of his wish to be with Christ: “having a desire (G1939) to depart, and to be with Christ” (Philippians 1:23). But it is also the word in Galatians: “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust (G1939) of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16). So Paul does not leave it bare here. He puts evil with it. The fault is not in desire but in what it is set on, as it was with the earth.

Last is covetousness, pleonexia (G4124): a grasping after more. Paul does more than name it. He gives it a verdict: “which is idolatry.” He says that of covetousness. He does not say it of the other four. Nor does he say why he gives the verdict to this name. That covetousness is idolatry is a large claim, and three witnesses carry it.

The first is the Lord’s own use of the word: “Take heed, and beware of covetousness (G4124): for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth” (Luke 12:15). The parable that follows ends on a man who lays up treasure for himself and “is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:21).

The second does not use the word, but it points the same way: “Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). Mammon is wealth, and the Lord sets it up as a rival master.

The third is Job. He says that if he has made gold his hope, and said to fine gold “Thou art my confidence,” it would be iniquity (Job 31:24–28). Job speaks of trust, not of grasping, and he does not use the word idolatry. His own sentence puts trust in gold next to the worship of the sun and moon, and of the second he says it would deny “the God that is above.” The “also” in the verse sets the first in the same company.

“If I have made gold my hope, or have said to the fine gold, Thou art my confidence; If I rejoiced because my wealth was great, and because mine hand had gotten much; If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness; And my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand: This also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge: for I should have denied the God that is above” (Job 31:24–28).

Set side by side, the three say one thing: what a man grasps after and trusts can take the place of God. That fits where the last study ended: the test is where the mind rests.

So idolatry is not first a matter of statues. God said of men who still came to enquire of Him, “these men have set up their idols in their heart” (Ezekiel 14:3). Isaiah says of a man who bows to wood, “a deceived heart hath turned him aside” (Isaiah 44:20). Paul says of the nations that they “became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened” (Romans 1:21), and only then “changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image” (Romans 1:23). In each, the heart turns first. The image is where it ends up. An image is one type of thing the heart can make a god. Gold is another, the belly is another, and covetousness is another.

Scripture ties idolatry to the other four names too. Paul sets desire, idolatry, and fornication side by side as Israel’s examples: “to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted. Neither be ye idolaters… Neither let us commit fornication” (1 Corinthians 10:6–8). Romans 1 sets them together too, with idolatry first, and the next section quotes what follows it.

The Wrath of God Cometh

The next verse gives the reason for the command: “For which things’ sake the wrath of God cometh” (Colossians 3:6). Some early copies of the Greek leave out the closing words in the KJV, “on the children of disobedience.” Because of these things, the wrath of God is coming.

That is a plain statement, and Romans stands behind it. Paul opens his account of the world’s sin with “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (Romans 1:18). The sins that follow the idolatry are ours, in the same words. Men are given up “to uncleanness (G167) through the lusts (G1939) of their own hearts” (Romans 1:24), and “unto vile affections (G3806)” (Romans 1:26). They are “filled with all unrighteousness,” and the list that follows includes “covetousness (G4124)” (Romans 1:29). These sins stand under the wrath, and Paul says so to two churches.

Notice the tense. “Cometh” is present: the wrath is coming, or comes. Scripture speaks of it in both tenses. Romans 1:18, quoted above, has it “revealed” now, and Paul speaks of “the wrath to come” (1 Thessalonians 1:10). The verse does not choose. It also does not say how long the wrath lasts or what it is for. What this letter says wrongdoing receives waits at Colossians 3:25, as the last study said.

What the verse does is give the reason for verse 5. These are the things wrath comes for, and Paul tells people who are dead with Christ to put them to death. It also brings the next verse, since these are the very things the Colossians once lived in.

Ye Also Walked Some Time

Verse 6 looks ahead, and verse 7 looks back: “In the which ye also walked some time, when ye lived in them.” In the KJV the nearest words before “the which” are “the children of disobedience,” and some copies lack them. Whether it points to those men or to these things, the sense is the same: the Colossians once lived the life that wrath comes for. “Lived in them” reads most naturally of things, as “living in the world” does at Colossians 2:20.

Two verbs carry it. “Walked” is peripateō (G4043), and “lived” is zaō (G2198). Each has been heard in this letter. At Colossians 2:6 Paul wrote, “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk (G4043) ye in him.” The same verb, and the same small word in. They walked in these things, and they are to walk in Him. At Colossians 2:20 Paul asked, “why, as though living (G2198) in the world, are ye subject to ordinances?” The same verb for living, and the same in. There they were asked why they would live as though the death had not happened. Here Paul says they did once live so, and that it is past. The objects differ, the world there and these sins here. The shape is the same.

The letter has looked back this way once already: “And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled” (Colossians 1:21). Once, and now. Peter says it of himself and his readers: “For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries” (1 Peter 4:3). Different letters, different men, and each says the same: a life once lived in such things, now behind.

Notice what the verse does not say. It does not say they are living in these things now. Paul says they walked in them “some time,” and that means once, in the past. So the command at verse 5 is not an accusation, and he is not saying they are still doing these things. He is talking to people who have left that life, and telling them what to do about the sins that still try to reach their members. Verse 8 begins with “But now,” and it turns to what they do now. That belongs to the next study.

What These Verses Establish

Read whole, the three verses give a command, a list, a warning, and a past. Those who are dead with Christ, and whose life is hid in God, are told what to do with the members that remain on the earth. The members are where sin works, and they are Christ’s; they are to be yielded to Him. What dies is a short list: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and the grasping Paul calls idolatry. Wrath comes for these things, and the Colossians once lived in them.

The order this series has found through twelve studies holds a thirteenth time. Here the command stands on a death already stated: “ye are dead,” and therefore “mortify.” The walk answers to the standing. And the working in the walk is God’s: “through the Spirit” (Romans 8:13).

That also gives us a test for any discipline: what is it aimed at, and does it bind others? The rules at Colosse reached for the flesh through food and touch. They claimed wisdom, and they were laid on other men. Part Eleven found them of no value against the flesh. Paul names what has to die, the sins that work in the members, and he treats the body as Christ’s. None of this forbids a man a discipline of his own before the Lord. That study allowed it, and Paul himself wrote, “I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection” (1 Corinthians 9:27). He disciplines the body. He does not put it to death.

Next study: (Colossians 3:8–11)

“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; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.”