We are continuing a series that we started last week on the book of the letter to the Ephesians. You may have heard last week, we are looking at the second half of that letter, chapters 4 through to 6. The title for the series is Living as Light and we'll see more clearly in chapter five the explicit command to live as the children of light. And these chapters really are looking at what it means to be a Christian, what our Christian lives look like in light of the gospel, in light of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. And so, like I said, I hope that this is a very easy to adopt teaching series because it aims to touch on the way that we behave as Christians.
This week, on Friday actually, I flew down to Sydney for some denominational work that I'm involved with, and it was a strange experience flying into Sydney because Sydney, I think, today is having the Mardi Gras. Is that right? The gay pride parade. And I was absolutely blown away by the amount of communication, from all parts of the airport, even the plane itself that was highlighting and advertising this event. I was flying with Qantas and we know that Qantas is a massive advocate for the LGBTQI community.
One of the interesting things though that I picked up was the subtle change from making this a gay pride issue to what was called a celebration of love. And I haven't watched The Mardi Gras for many years now, but it made me think about the thing that was promoted and celebrated when I watched it many years ago now. And I couldn't help but think what I saw there was very far from a celebration of wholesome love. The costumes, the garishness of what I saw there was still just about lust and sex and fetishes. I don't know if it's been toned down.
I don't imagine I'll be watching it, but, I was struck by that. Now, know that in my heart as a Christian, that presses against my core values. And for many of us listening to this, I can say this and I see a lot of shaking heads and a lot of clicking of tongues. But it made me also think about the reality of things that are closer to home and perhaps core values that we have given up and assimilated from the world that we don't even think about. When we talk about the celebration of love, we've given up.
We've lost the fight as Christians, not so much against the LGBT movement, but we've lost the fight against de facto relationships. We've lost the fight against sex outside of married relationships. As a pastor, I've counselled people in this church and in other churches where that bond of celibacy is just something that we assume is lost. It's something of a bygone era. We, as Christians, are okay with living together before we get married, sleeping together before we get married because that is the done thing. Some of our Christians may even celebrate that as love.
That is the awkward position of the tension in our hearts as Christians and that is what we're going to hear about today. The blending, the overlapping of areas of the new self that we uphold as Christians, and we may talk about some of those things that we see this week in Sydney and think, well, like, I'm very different to that. I can't relate to that. I resist that, but there are other things in our life. Paul will say, part of our old self that has blended with the new self.
And we may not realise it, but we are actually falling into the old ways of thinking to our detriment and against the will of God. Let's turn to Ephesians 4 and some of these things will become a bit clearer for us. Ephesians 4:17-32. The new life, as the ESV entitles it. Now this I say, Paul says, and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.
They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard about Him and were taught in Him as the truth is in Jesus. To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbour, for we are members of one another.
Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather, let him labour doing honest work with his own hands so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.
That all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. This is our reading and this is the word of the Lord. Now, you'll remember last week, we heard that Paul in chapter four transitions from the theological framework or foundation of the gospel. In chapters one through to three, this is what Paul has done.
He's explained how the message of Jesus Christ, what He's done for us, how that applies and how that is the truth. But now, in the second half of this letter, he focuses on the experiential implications of this gospel. In these chapters, Paul will be explaining how Christians are to live in light of the salvation we have in Jesus Christ. We saw last week how Paul begins that transition by reminding the Christians to walk in a manner worthy of the calling which you have already received. Last week, we saw how that walk concerns the unity and the love of Christians for one another in the church.
And where Paul, in those verses 1 through to 16, urge us to walk in a worthy manner, he now begins in this section, verses 17 to 32, with another reference to this metaphor of walking. But this time, he frames it in the negative, how we are not to walk. He writes to the Ephesian Christians, verse 17, now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do. First he said, walk in a manner worthy of God's calling. Now, don't walk in a manner similar to the Gentiles.
Now, very good question is to ask, who are the Gentiles? Well, the most basic definition is that they are non Jews. So on the one hand, it's got to do with some sort of ethnic lineage. But more significantly, and the thing that Paul has in mind here, is that a gentile was someone who didn't know and worship the God of the Bible. Gentiles believed and followed the gods of their own cultures.
Therefore, a gentile could, on the one hand, refer to an ethnic background, but at the same time, as is the case here, it refers to certain religious and moral practices that are at odds with the God of the Bible. So when Paul tells the Ephesian Christians not to walk as the Gentiles do, this is not some sort of reference to harbouring some racial distinction or racial hatred towards non Jews. He's talking about the terrible threat that there is for people who don't believe in Jesus Christ. In other words, when we read, don't walk as Gentiles, we can interpret that simply to mean, don't live as non believers do. Don't live like the non Christians, Paul says.
And he explains that by saying, in the futility of their minds. Now, that word futile was used in the Greek version of the Old Testament to describe the lifeless, dumb idols that God's people had started to worship in their rebellion. In Jeremiah 2, God talks about the worthlessness of these idols who in turn make you, like his people, worthless. That worthlessness is the same word, futile. Paul says there is a worthless, futile emptiness in non Christian minds.
Now that is those are fighting words. And you might be a non Christian listening to this online. Give me a chance to explain why Paul can dare to say such a thing. Well, the truth is, because we were created by God to know God, And because, as Paul explains here, a non Christian lacks a right relationship to God, the result is that the way they think about and interpret the basic realities of life suffers a fatal flaw. An unbelieving mind has lost its grasp of reality.
Paul says that these individuals are darkened in their understanding. They are like blind men stumbling around. But the harsher reality is, Paul continues, that they are alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them. Not only are they blind and stupid, they don't have life. And this is what I mean by the title of our first point this morning, the hopeless state of the hardened heart and the darkened mind.
If you are a non Christian and you don't know God, then there's a spiritual darkness and an intellectual futility that blinds you and distorts your perceptions of the world. And it does it so powerfully that you, in turn, have no idea of the things that really matter. The light has gone out of your eyes. You are no longer capable of apprehending the ultimate truths of God and the truth of human existence. And that is said with no pride in the heart of Paul and therefore, pride in my heart because if you are a Christian, you will have come to understand that we are all in that same boat.
Earlier in the letter, Paul writes of the former life of these Christians in chapter 2:1. He says, once you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once walked. Just as the Gentiles walk now, you once walked. Verse 12 of chapter 2 reads, you were without God and without hope in the world. That is who you are if you don't know God.
If you are a pagan. And that's not necessarily just witchcraft. It is if you are a non believer in the living God. You are cut off. You are alienated.
You are separated from God, and you are separated, therefore, from the right understanding of everything. No wonder people can think that the Mardi Gras is a celebration of love. Verse 19 tells us that because of this alienation to God and His holiness, the inevitable result is that we can give ourselves over, rather we will give ourselves over to sensuality and all sorts of impurity. A non Christian sins, in other words, not because they choose to, they sin because they can't stop sinning. They desire sinning with the deepest longings of their soul.
And even when they experience the destructive consequences of sin, and there are destructive consequences of every sin, Every solution that they attempt in stopping that pain, stopping the pain of their sin is ultimately futile. It is a dead end because the thinking of their minds are futile and it never turns back to God. Paul gives the reason for the non believing mind being futile at the end of verse 18. He says, the non believing mind is futile due to the hardness of their hearts. In other words, unbelief is not simply characterised as an intellectual problem.
Unbelief is much, much worse. If you don't know Jesus, it's not that you don't have all the facts about Him. If you don't know Jesus, it is that you are spiritually dead and cut off from God. That is why the flip side of coming to faith is sometimes referred to in the Bible as being born again. Theologically, it's called regeneration.
That's the moment when the deepest parts of us, our hearts, our souls, the spiritual centres of ourselves, are awakened to the reality of God. And in order to be saved, you first need this tiny glimmer of spiritual life in your soul. You need to sense a moment of dread before God. You need to sense a fear of God, an awareness of God, an awe of God. You need to understand something of His holiness, something of His goodness, something of His moral superiority.
It may be the case that you know nothing about the content of the gospel, and yet you are only inches away from salvation because you have a sense that there is a God, and I need Him. Perhaps that's you this morning. Perhaps that's you listening to this online. You realise that you are a sinner, even if you don't know all the areas that you've sinned in. You have always known that God is there, even though you've been trying very hard your whole life to run away from Him.
You know God is very great and that you are very small, and you know that you want to do something in order to get to God, but as of yet, you don't know how. All of this may indicate that your heart has been awakened to God, but you have not been saved through conversion and faith. This morning, if you find yourself there, the good news is that something in you is alive towards God, but the story of your salvation is not yet finished. There is a need for you to repent of unbelief and to put faith in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sin. Now, having explained that sad reality of the non Christian life, Paul warns Christians, don't walk like the Gentiles do.
Don't live like the non believers do, which leads to the second point. Because after coming out of the hopeless state of a hardened heart, a darkened mind, a faith in Jesus Christ should give you this, the power to choose God and His righteousness. There's sometimes an allergy in reformed people like us for the word choose. As you may know, one of the defining emphases of reformed theology is that we prioritise God's sovereignty, that God is in complete control over every aspect of life, even our own willingness to choose Him. Reformed theology confidently asserts that God chooses us.
We don't choose Him. We can't because we're dead. This means, however, that we, as reformed people, sometimes make the mistake of saying that we never choose God. But that is not biblical either, as this passage shows us. We certainly can and do choose God, but only after He's chosen us.
Paul tells the Christians in Ephesus not to walk like the Gentiles walk, in allowing their hearts and their minds to remain in the ignorance and futility towards God. Now having once again used the metaphor of walking, Paul uses another metaphor. So he used walking, now he uses the metaphor of wearing, of putting on clothes. He tells the Christians that we are to put off and put on different versions of ourselves. Firstly, we are to put off our old selves, verse 22, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires.
This old self belongs to a former manner of life, an earlier version of your living, Something that has been tainted, sullied, tarnished, corrupted by deceitful desires. Now, for some of us, perhaps we've grown up in the church, we've always known God, and we can't remember a time of not believing in Jesus Christ. There is something of an old nature, however, that still exists in us. It may not be a light and dark difference. We may not be able to remember a time before Him, but we know that there are elements of this tarnished, corrupted nature that still infiltrates our thinking and our actions.
In other places of the New Testament, like 1 Peter 2, we are urged to resist sinful desires which wage war against our souls. But here, Paul stresses that the desires of the old self are inherently deceptive ones. Deceptive desires. When we sin, we are simply accepting lies that yearn to keep us imprisoned in the ignorance of God. That's what happens when we sin.
We are accepting lies that yearn to keep us imprisoned in the ignorance of God. Think about it when you have chosen to sin. Are you thinking of God in that moment? Are you thinking of the life that He has given you? Are you thankful for the salvation you have in Jesus Christ?
No, you're not. You are remaining ignorant of Him. You are choosing ignorance. And like a robe, remember, this is Paul in the first century, like a robe, a single bit of clothing that covers you completely, we are to cast off all of that, that old nature that's drowning in its resistance to God. Paul says, verse 23, be renewed in the spirit of your minds.
Those words remind us of Romans 12:1-2. Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but to be transformed in the renewing of our minds. The renewed spirit of our minds comes with this decision of putting on the new self, which is the new version of us. Verse 24, it's a version created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. That is a significant thought.
We are to put on the new self which resembles God. In another letter, Paul gives Christians a very similar command. He says, put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. The language of both of these passages, the image of its creator and the likeness of God, casts our minds back to the start of the human story in Genesis 1, where man and woman were created, what? In the image of God.
What is happening here in the putting on of the new self is that God's ultimate plan for your redemption is taking place. He is recreating lost and fallen humanity when you choose to put on new clothes. The result of the fall through Adam and Eve meant that the image of God was disfigured in us. The corruption of sin clouds and degrades the reflection of God in us, but now, in light of Christ's salvation, God's image is gradually being restored in us. And the specific aspect of God that's being reflected here is His moral character.
Paul says we are being created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Some people try and figure out what is righteousness, what is holiness, as one referred to this, you know, the human aspect of our relationships and holiness towards God. Probably not. It's a summary statement of all that is morally good and pure in our relations to God and with one another. In other words, when we choose to listen to God's word, we decide to put on the new self more and more, and in some way, we are participating in the transformative power of God in our sanctification.
Sanctification simply means becoming holy. We are involved in that process. Now, the language here suggests this astounding interplay of God's supreme initiative in saving and transforming us, but that element of human responsibility of deciding to put on the new creation. As believers in Christ, we are therefore already, in principle, part of God's new creation, but now we are being told to be part of God's creation in practice. Walking away worthy of what you've already received.
And so as born again Christians, we have the power to choose God. And we have the power not to choose Him. We have the power, the ability, the right to choose His holiness and righteousness daily. And now God is inviting us to do just that. This new self will resemble what Paul then lists in the final verses of our passage, our final thought for today.
He gives us the behaviours of the new self. And so in keeping with his explanation of the practical outworking of the gospel truth, Paul starts listing how the Christian life with the new self will look. He says this new self will, verse 25, stop lying. This new self will not become bitter with anger, verses 26-27. The new self will stop stealing.
The new self will stop breaking church members down and thereby grieving the Holy Spirit. And finally, the new self will, as a final catch or summary, put away all unedifying, destructive decisions and pursue all upbuilding postures towards fellow believers, ultimately seen in the new self being eager to forgive others as they realise how much in Christ God has forgiven them. So there are the behaviours that you and I need to think about going back home today. In order to stop living like unbelievers, you know, the people that I don't get when I flew in that Sydney flight, in order to stop being like them, I need to stop doing the things that I kind of like doing. The things that I am happy to overlook in my life, like lying, like being bitter.
In order for me to stop being like the people marching in this parade, I need to stop doing the things that I struggle with doing. We are to stop lying. No more white lies. No more half truths. How about this?
No more misleading exaggerations for dramatic effect. We are not to become consumed with anger. Notice that Paul doesn't say we can never be angry, but we shouldn't let anger burn in our hearts so that it sticks around till the next day, which is bitterness. Stop gossiping about church members. Stop self righteously looking down your noses at them and talking badly of these fellow Christians with your family members, thinking that that is fine.
The Bible tells you that you are personally grieving the Holy Spirit when you do that. You are grieving God the Spirit who loves those same members with an infinite love. Stop stealing. Now this one seems pretty straightforward for most of us, perhaps, But stop taking stuff that you haven't paid for. It's probably a better way to think about it.
Pirated videos, anyone? Music? Netflix accounts? Whatever you know in your heart is not technically right, where you have gotten something without paying for it, that is stealing, and you need to stop doing that. Stop all unedifying postures towards other Christians, and I dare say people in general.
Look for ways to be edifying. Look for ways to be positive and helpful and kind. Be quick to forgive each other as God has forgiven you in Christ. How are you going with all these things? Are you still walking in the old shoes?
The old shoes of the previous life, the former manner of doing things? The more important question this morning is how can we possibly maintain this new self version consistently? Well, you probably saw it in our passage. The turning point is found in verse 20. How can we be sure not to fall back into the old self ways?
Verse 20, you have to learn Christ. You have to learn Christ. That is not how you learned Christ, Paul warns the Ephesians. The ministry of the gospel is the means by which God has appointed you to learn to stay on the tracks that He has laid down for you. The ministry of the word of God preached centrally in the gospel, prayed and sung every Sunday.
The habits of attending or organising a Bible study, every morning when you listen to a podcast on the way to work, these are the means that God will use to equip you to put off the old self, put on the new, so that you begin to reflect the likeness of God's righteousness and holiness. In other words, those who look most like Christ are those whose lives are most saturated with the truths of the gospel contained in the Bible. Those who look most like Christ are those whose lives are most saturated with the truths of the gospel contained in the Bible. That's Paul's point. We must learn Christ.
Notice that Paul doesn't say that the Ephesians merely learn about Christ. They learned Christ. Now, what that means is that by consistently pursuing a life built around hearing gospel and its implications over and over and over again, you aren't just merely learning facts about the gospel story. Learning and hearing about the gospel is a connection with Christ. You come to know Him through those truths.
And so coming to scripture, bringing, coming to scripture brings you face to face with Christ Himself. And the truth is no one who truly meets Him there is able to ever be the same again. On the flip side, neglect the gospel, and you neglect the way in which your saviour renews you. Friends, the wonderful news is that this saviour, Jesus, wants you to succeed in these things. We only have the possibility to learn Christ because He wants us to learn who He is.
Don't miss that opportunity because it is ultimately for our good. You don't want futile thinking. That is a life of frustration and pain. We don't want darkened thoughts. We don't want slavery to impure passions.
Set yourself free by daily choosing to put on the new self, setting up those habits that will learn Christ. And so choose to stop walking in your old shoes of your former life and start wearing the better clothes of the new self. And if and when we fail, and we will, and when we fall back into old self patterns, be quick and ready to forgive yourself even as you forgive others who have also fallen into their patterns and hurt you. Be quick to forgive because you remember that because of Jesus, God has forgiven you so much. And because you are forgiven, you are free to forgive lots as well.
Let's pray. Lord Jesus, thank You for these penetrating truths that, O Lord, peel back the thin veil of perceived righteousness, perceived improvement, self declared maturity, and causes us with humility to realise again that we are very far from finished products. Lord, where there is deceptive tendencies in our hearts, a desire to portray something that we're not, an insecurity in us that wants to project things that aren't true. Help us to find the comfort of being fully known by You and fully loved despite of that. Lord, help us in our use of our finances and using the wealth that we have earned by our own hands and not having a desire to take the things that we have not worked for, we have not paid for.
Help us, Lord, to resist all anger and bitterness. Help us to desire not only to speak a kind word about our brothers and sisters, but Lord, in our hearts, in the deepest longings of our hearts to wish the best with tender hearts, with gentleness and kindness in our hearts, to think fondly of our fellow believers in this church. And, Lord, help us to remember that we can only do these things because we have been forgiven so much that we are already walking a life that is new. And that now, for the first time ever, we can choose to follow You. Help us to choose You, to choose Your holiness and Your righteousness, and therefore, be blessed by the life and the joy that those things will give us.
Give us a heart this morning to believe that and a mind that disciplines itself to pursue it. In Jesus' name, pray. Amen.