Mortify

The word mortify is found in Colossians 3: “Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth.”* (Colossians 3:5) The word mortify means to “put to death.” The Twentieth Century translation reads, “Therefore destroy all that is earthly in you.”TCNT

It has been believed and taught that everything earthly about us is put to death when we are sanctified as a second work of grace, or a cleansing of the heart from carnality. They think that there is nothing to be put to death or to mortify after we are sanctified. These people to whom Paul was writing were dead and their life was hid with Christ in God. They were dead and yet there is something about them that needs to be put to death. This can be because man is a two-fold being. The inner man may be dead to sin and the world—sanctified—yet the outward man has passions, desires, appetites that must be controlled, that must not be allowed to break out beyond their legitimate bounds.

Now we will tell you a secret. What we are now going to tell you is the secret principle of holy living. It is the thread that runs through the entire life. It is “sacrifice.” Listen, no man can keep the body in perfect control who does not keep that body on the altar of daily sacrifice. If you cease to sacrifice, you cease to control. To sacrifice is to mortify. Habits of virtue cannot be acquired except at the expense of sacrifice. He who is not constantly making sacrifice is not advancing in the Christian life. Sacrifice in the little things of daily life. The secret of living holy is sacrifice in the little things. It is not in being absent from dance halls, ball games, theatres, political gatherings, and such like worldly things. These things have but little or no temptation to people who are sanctified. It is no sacrifice for them to abstain from such evils. Where the holy need to watch is to not let love of self get in. Holy people have a self, but they must guard against an undue love of self. Keep that self on the altar of sacrifice. Guard against taking too much thought about bodily comforts. It is no sin to give the body some comfort if it is not done at the expense of another’s comfort. Then you need to have a care when you are alone not to provide too greatly for the body’s comforts, lest you become selfish and find it difficult to sacrifice your comforts for another’s comfort.

To indulge the body in late rising, in dainty foods, in luxuries, in ease, in things pleasant to the eye—fine things, in idleness, in the avoidance of hardships, in the shrinking from bearing another’s burden, and a disposition to lay your own on another, is the way to become selfish. Sacrifice is the law of the Christian life. Sacrificing bodily comforts daily in the home for the comforts of others is helpful to the soul in its upward way. Where there is no sacrifice there is no holiness. Where there is no self-denying, there is no love to God. Where the body is not kept under, the soul is enslaved. The beauty of holiness never grows out of bodily indulgence, but out of bodily sacrifice. If you would live holy, destroy that which is earthly, sensual, and lustful in you.