Ephesians: The Renewed Life (4:17-32)

Hello, friends.

This is Pastor Creighton.

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The second lesson is taken from the letter of Paul to the Ephesians chapter 4, starting in the 17th verse.

Ephesians 4 · chapter mention

Now this I say 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 neighbor, for we are members one of 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 labor, 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 mouth, 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.

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.

Be kind to one another, be tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

The word of the Lord.

Incline our hearts to the renewed life that you desire for us.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, together we've been journeying through the Apostle Paul's letter to the first century church in Ephesus.

And we've been journeying through this letter with a question in our minds: why bother with the church?

This perhaps is Paul's great letter to the church about the church.

And it's Paul's prayer that he prays in chapter 1, that this church that they may know what is the hope to which he has called you.

God is a hope to which he has called the church.

Perhaps we can think of this letter as Paul's means of making known the heavenly hope and divine calling at the center of the Christian life, and therefore at the center of the life of the church.

It's through faith that we have a share in the never-ending life of the risen Lord Jesus as members of his body, who are chosen by God, redeemed in Christ, and sealed by the Holy Spirit.

And all this being the case, Paul's explored this in the first half of his letter.

He begins the second half of this letter with an exhortation, chapter 4, verse 1.

Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.

Walk in a manner of life that is consistent with being chosen by God and redeemed in Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit.

Live consistency consistently with your heavenly hope in Christ.

So the question becomes: what does that look like?

Last Sunday we explored the first half of chapter four.

We saw that a Christian is eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Christian unity takes place in our common confession, the truths we hold together.

It takes place in the use of our diverse gifts towards that singular ministry of making Christ known.

And that Christian unity takes place in sacrificial love towards one another.

And today, as we explore the second half of this passage, we see another thing that walking in a manner worthy of the call to which we've been called looks like.

A walk consistent with our calling looks like a renewed life.

You, Paul says to the church, must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds.

See, the Christian manner of living will look noticeably unlike our unbelieving neighbors.

Paul uses this word Gentiles.

Why does he do that?

He's not referring to the non-Jewish members of the church community, but those who are understood to be outside of God's covenant people.

Pagans, non-believers, neighbors of this church.

What did a pagan's manner of living look like in first century Ephesus?

Well, Ephesus was a bustling ancient metropolis.

Its scholars often talk about its citizens as being industrious and lavish based on some of the uh excavations of homes and places of work.

They were entertainment consumers.

They were pleasure seekers, and often promiscuously so, and they were fiercely spiritual and pluralistic.

And if we take all those things in consideration, we see that the ancient world is so unlike ours, isn't it?

See, the pagan life is a life with the self enthroned at its center, self-seeking, lived out through worldly pursuits and pleasures.

And Paul describes this mindset as futile, empty, aimless, confused, foolish, like being infinitely curved in on one's self, unable to find peace or satisfaction.

See, Port Perry is thousands of miles and years away from the Ephesus that Paul writes to, but could our self-interested thinking be still considered just as futile?

In all that time, has self-centered self-seeking ever delivered on its promise of the good life?

So Paul understands that the Christian life is a renewed one, one in which the self is dethroned, with Christ at its center.

It's a life made regenerate by the Holy Spirit, out with the old and in with the new kind of life.

That's why Paul writes to the Romans do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds.

See, the Christian is a renewed person, and the church is a community of renewed members sharing in the life of the Spirit.

No longer futile in our self-centered thinking, we are transformed, and we are being transformed by grace to love God and to love our neighbor.

So to grasp all this, I want us to spend our time asking three questions of this passage.

What belongs to our old self?

What belongs to our renewed self?

And what does it take to put on the new self?

What belongs to our old self?

First off, I think we see that our old self is totally lost.

Let's pick it up at verse 17.

If you've got your order of service or your Bible, I encourage you to follow along.

Paul writes to the Ephesian church that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do.

How did the Gentiles walk?

Verse 18.

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, greed, or pardon, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

Paul uses a few words here to describe pagan neighbors of this church.

They're darkened, they're ignorant, they're blind, they're mistaken.

They may have brilliant neighbors who've got the ancient equivalent of a PhD, but their spiritual eyes have been shut.

Those who are darkened in their understanding deny the light of God's revelation of Himself in Christ.

They're alienated.

Paul has used a similar word in chapter two to describe Gentiles as alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenant of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

See, estranged from God, pagans are without hope.

And finally, he says they're hard-hearted, they're callous.

And the great biblical image of hard-heartedness is Pharaoh from the book of Exodus, whose power-hungry heart was so calcified against the Lord and his people that he refused to set them free from their slavery.

He illustrates Paul's point in Romans chapter 1, that at a certain point, when we deny God's will be done, God eventually says, Well, thy will be done.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

And for a hard-hearted sinner, that's perhaps the worst judgment that God can issue.

So is it any wonder that Paul goes on to say that they have lost themselves, or pardon me, lost themselves, given themselves up to pleasure and promiscuity, which is what we see in verse 19.

See, apart from God, pleasure and gratification is the best kind of life we can hope for, isn't it?

But it's this kind of sensuous living that never seems to deliver on its promise of satisfaction, and it hardens our hearts.

And we just have to talk to any pleasure seeker or pornography addict for that instance to tell you that seeking after pleasure hardens our heart and it drains us, and it never delivers on satisfaction.

See, on its own, our old life is totally lost.

It's blind to God, it's estranged from God, and it's hard-hearted towards God.

The old self, with self at its center, cannot find its own way to God.

And we see, too, that our old self is totally corrupt.

Verse 22, Paul goes on to describe your former manner of life.

He says is corrupt.

It's ruined, wasted, spoiled through deceitful desires.

See, it's not that our old self is a little misguided and it needs a little coaching.

It's thoroughly and completely compromised on its own.

When I was in college, I was getting ready to hand in my last paper before I graduated, and somewhere between the dorm room where I typed it out and the library where I went to print it out, my hard drive got corrupted.

And suddenly every single file on my hard drive got corrupted with it, including that paper that I had just written.

Some files were more corrupted than others.

Some files, like this paper, were completely lost.

But nothing was left untouched by this corruption.

So too has sin corrupted our humanity.

Theologians refer to this biblical truth as the doctrine of total depravity, or we could call it the bondage of the will.

Total depravity does not mean that human beings are as sinful as they could possibly be, but that there is no part of the human self that is left untouched by sin.

Sin isn't something that's compartmentalized within our human constitution.

We are comprehensively corrupted by our sin, such that there is no way we can save ourselves from our sin and from God's judgment of sin.

Left to ourselves, our wills are shackled to sin, so that even our attempts to do good works are still corrupted.

And at the center of it all is a heart that's inclined towards deceitful desires.

Did you catch that?

Verse 22.

I've shared this story before, but I think it's pertinent to this text.

This is a story from a pastor friend of mine who said he spent several months uh counseling uh maybe a middle-aged woman, several years into marriage, but was finding marriage just lifeless and dry, and finding more and more that uh she was, well, taking an interest in a possible suitor at her workplace.

She was confused about what to do next and what God wanted for her, and so she was meeting with this pastor to seek some guidance.

And the pastor was trying to draw her into uh the renewed life of living out fidelity and love and sacrificial love.

But she comes into the office one day and says, I have God spoke to me so clearly.

I know exactly what I have to do.

And the pastor was quite excited.

He goes, Oh, well, what is it that you have to do?

He's expecting to hear the answer.

And she goes, Well, he wants me to uh abandon my husband and run off with this new guy.

And the pastor kind of took a beat and thought, that doesn't sound like the kind of thing that God usually says.

He says, How do you know that?

And she goes, Well, I was praying, and I was praying and I was praying, and eventually I decided to open up my Bible, and I've talked about the drop and flop before.

She did the drop and flop, and she found the first verse that caught her eye, and it was this verse right here in Ephesians.

But she was reading an older translation.

So the verse read like this Put on the new man.

And she thought, what could be more clear than that?

The remarkable thing is we zoom out even just a little bit, we start to see that that's the exact opposite of Paul's point here, isn't it?

Our hearts are deceitful above all things and desperately sick.

Who can understand them?

No one is immune from having their deceitful heart call what's evil good and what's good evil.

Which means that follow your heart might be dangerous advice to give, if we're willing to acknowledge that our corrupted hearts so often deceive us.

See, a life with self at its center may not result in the same kind of devastation as this story describes, but will it will inevitably lead us further and further away from God as we become more and more convinced, self-deceived really, that we're closer and closer to the good life.

Paul understands that our old self, the self apart from grace, centered upon the self, is totally lost and corrupt.

It is unable and unwilling to curve outside of itself and towards God.

So what would Paul have us do?

He says, put off this manner of living.

See, it takes the illumination of the Holy Spirit to see our sin and corruption for what it is.

A dirty, ratty, old garment that we used to wear, but that's no longer worth keeping.

Lay it aside, discard it, leave it behind.

And this is just as true for those who have had a profound conversion experience, who remember what life was like before they met Christ, as those who, kind of like myself, always grew up in the church and grew up in a Christian home.

I used to get testimony envy.

Maybe some folks who have a story similar to mine get that.

Uh, at the church I grew up in, we'd we'd have folks come forward and give their testimony, what their life was before Christ, and when they met Christ, and what life has been like since.

And there was one fellow who'd get up and give his testimony from time to time.

And like this guy was a drug dealer, and like he went to jail for stabbing a guy, and he met Jesus in jail, and he's now a pastor.

And I used to hear this story and think that is unbelievable and powerful, and praise the Lord for that, seriously.

But I'd go, like, I've never been to jail.

Like, I've I've had a pretty good life.

Like, I guess I skipped class once.

Should I like stab a guy so I have something to like say?

No, I didn't think that.

But the point is this this is just as true for those who had a profound conversion experience as those who have lived their whole life with Christ.

We all of us have an old self to put off.

And we all of us wrestle with the inclinations of our old self.

None of us are immune from a self-deceiving heart.

Paul reminds us, the old self is not the way you learned Christ.

So what belongs to our renewed self becomes the question.

Put off your old self, Paul writes, verse 24, and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

See, putting on the new self means we begin to image God rightly.

This phrase likeness of God that Paul uses us brings us right back to the beginning of the biblical story and the purpose for humanity.

Genesis chapter 1, God said, Let us make man, that is male and female, together in our image, after our likeness.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

See, to bear God's image is humanity's unique privilege.

We are created to share in perfect, loving, and never-ending unity with God and with one another, as vice regents of God's kingdom and creation, and to show forth our creator's character.

This likeness wasn't obliterated when our first parents fell into sin, but it was corrupted and distorted.

So putting on the new self means God renews his image-bearers such that they can rightly image his character again, his righteousness, his holiness.

See, true righteousness relates to our justification.

Paul writes in Romans chapter 3 that we are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

Romans 3 · chapter mention

Justification is God's gracious, once-for-all time declaration that repentant sinners are in right relationship with himself, not on the basis of our good works, but on the basis of Jesus Christ's sinless life and obedience on our behalf, his substitutionary death, and resurrection for us.

Only those in right standing with God can rightly image his righteousness.

And holiness, this word that Paul uses, relates to our sanctification.

Justification is a once-for-all-time declaration that we're in right standing with God.

Sanctification is the ongoing action of God by which a follower of Jesus is changed over time to be more like him in godly character and living.

Bishop J.C.

Rile writes that holiness is the habit of being of one mind with God, according as we find his mind described in Scripture.

It's the habit of agreeing in God's judgment, hating what he hates, loving what he loves, and measuring everything in this world by the standard of his word.

So putting on the new self really means living out the humanity that God has always intended for us, renewing his righteousness and his holy image within us.

And when we image God rightly, our self-centered ways get flipped upside down.

Suddenly our love for God and our love for neighbor become front and center.

It means that those of us who are inclined towards falsehood become more inclined towards truth.

God is a God of truth, and now his people show forth truth in verse 25.

Verse 26, those of us who are inclined towards anger are now inclined towards peace because God is a God of peace.

Notice it doesn't say you'll never get angry, but Paul rather says you'll handle your anger rightly.

You won't let the sun go down on your anger.

It'll be appropriately measured, and you won't chew on resentment.

You'll strive for peace.

Those who are inclined towards theft and stealing are going to be inclined now in Christ towards generation.

Thou shalt not steal is the eighth commandment.

Not only is it concerned with personal integrity and public stability, but it's also a matter of trust.

Do you trust God to provide what it is that you need when you need it, or will you steal it for yourself?

Here Paul tells the thief to do honest work so that they not only provide for themselves, but that they themselves can be a means of generous provision to others when they're in need.

See, it's a reminder that all we have comes from a generous God, and the renewed life is a generous life.

Verse 29, those of us who are inclined towards corrupted talk, gossip, and slander and backbiting are inclined towards encouragement.

Because God is a God of who speaks blessing and builds us up.

And finally, whereas our old self is inclined towards hostility, verse 31 and 32 will be inclined towards forgiveness.

The renewed life doesn't just rehearse the words, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

It looks for opportunities to put that into practice.

See, the renewed life restores us to the humanity that God intended for us at the beginning of the story, sharing in his likeness, living out our calling to righteousness and holiness that looks quite unlike our old self-centered manner of living.

The renewed life is not a superhuman life, it's a truly human life.

And so we begin to see that the life of the church is not that of a club of holy rollers who get together each Sunday to look down on their pagan neighbors and feel smug about themselves and their holy living.

Rather, it's more like a recovery group for those who, by grace, are trying to kick the habit of the old self and practice the renewed life.

There shouldn't be a drop of superiority or smugness in any church, including ours.

Rather, there should be gratitude that our holy and righteous God should endeavor to rescue us sinners from our lost and corrupted state.

Corruption belongs to our old self.

It belongs to our renewed self to image God rightly.

What does it take to put on the new self?

Here's where I want us to land.

I want us to zoom in on these four words in verse 32, because I think they open to us a pretty wild door.

These four words are this As God in Christ.

See, Paul is saying rather than practice hostility and malice, he writes, be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another.

In other words, instead of practicing the old life, practice the new self.

But notice what Paul doesn't say.

He doesn't say, put off the old life, so that God in Christ will forgive you.

Put off the old life, and then God in Christ will forgive you.

What does he say?

Forgive one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

In other words, don't think putting on the new self and its habits will earn you God's grace.

It's rather through God's grace, first extended to you, while you are deep in your old self that renews you from the inside out.

God shows us his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

So what does it take to put on the new self?

It doesn't take a fresh resolution to do better.

It's not a pledge to try harder this week than we did last week.

It takes a transforming encounter with God's wild grace towards sinners.

Only a heart that has seen how generous and forgiving and loving God is towards sinners will first repent of its own sin, dethrone the self, and put Christ at the center, and live out a generous, forgiving, and loving life.

Only God's grace can crack the shell of a hardened heart.

This is just as true when we first put off the old self at our conversion as it is every day.

We renewed people in Christ still struggle with sin, don't we?

Paul writes elsewhere that I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.

Though our old self has been put off, it has a way of clinging to us, doesn't it?

Sometimes we pick up the old garment, we even admire it.

We wonder if it still fits like it used to.

And we find maybe that it never delivers on its promises.

When we fall back into old habits of sin, we fall back into the old self, it can be discouraging because we can feel like hypocrites and we can hear the accusations of the enemy.

But we shouldn't conclude that we aren't Christians, that we're disqualified from the new life.

Rather, we should conclude that we still need a Savior to rescue us from ourselves.

And we have a Savior who has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

He has put to death the corruption of the old self through his cross, so that he can raise us to a renewed life by his resurrection.

And it's the work of the Holy Spirit who seals this in our hearts.

The Spirit has sealed us for the day of redemption.

Until the day Jesus returns, living the renewed life will not happen by accident.

It takes ongoing reliance upon the Spirit and practice.

Bible scholar D.A.

Carson writes that people do not drift towards holiness.

Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate towards godliness, prayer, obedience to scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord.

But the flip side of that is true.

When our heart is rooted in grace and we strive to live out the renewed life in the power of the Spirit, we discover more and more that we grow in godliness and prayer and obedience and faith and delight.

The renewed person takes every opportunity she can to put holy living into practice.

So put off your old self, put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

This means that Christian living will look noticeably unlike our unbelieving neighbors.

It will be a life with Christ at the center, not ourselves or worldly pursuits or pleasures.

A renewed life will have tasted the sweetness of God's grace and be unwilling to settle for less and walk accordingly.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old is passed away.

Behold, the new is come.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

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