September 20, 2026 | The Way We Learned Christ

Do people really change?

You may be thinking I'm not so sure.

Do people really change?

And I believe by God's grace the answer would be yes, they do.

And a passage like this would speak to that, but often when you come to a passage like this, you may hear preachers like me bash you over the head and say things to you like, just change already.

I'm not gonna do that this morning.

I believe there's a lot of grace here, and I like to pray in line with that grace for this passage.

Let's pray.

Lord, I just want to be able to preach this morning and just say what you want me to say, and just trust that what you want to say to your people is from your word.

Speaking of me first, changing me, changing us, changing the people sitting next to us.

Lord, change us to be more and more like Jesus, no matter what it takes.

In your name we pray, amen.

My desire for me is my desire for you, and that is to think God's thoughts after Him, to have our minds so enraptured with God's thoughts that it is impacting our lifestyle.

Because your lifestyle is not controlled first by your lifestyle, it's controlled by what's going on in your brain and in your heart.

And I'm asking God to change the way I think so I think more like Him.

And I'm asking the same for you.

I've learned a new phrase recently from my children.

I learned lots of stuff when you still have kids at home.

And the newest phrase that I've heard is the term rage bait.

I love that terminology, rage bait.

Like you say something to get someone else mad.

And this is what happens online: lots of rage bait.

People say something, post something, it makes you mad, and you engage with it, and then the rage just starts to spread, and then we have a whole nation of people who enjoy recreational bitterness.

Anybody?

You just enjoy it.

And and the reason why you enjoy recreational bitterness is because the algorithms and the companies know that, and they've created this rage bait in such a way where you will engage with it and your blood pressure will rise.

Can you believe that?

Someone who knows technology better than all of us, someone has an algorithm out there that somehow is farming your mind.

That's crazy.

They're just trying to get to you and craft the way that you think they're farming your mind.

That's crazy to think.

The apostle Paul is gonna say this morning that that kind of way of living and thinking is futile.

It's empty, and it goes absolutely nowhere.

And his truth speaks to all of us because that is supposed to be the way we used to live and used to think, but no more.

Let's see what he has to say in Ephesians chapter four, starting in verse 17.

So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk in the futility of their mind.

Most of the people in this congregation uh at the time were Gentile converts.

They were not raised Jewish, they were Gentile converts.

And this is the life they've come out of.

And in this one sentence, he says, don't go back.

I guess one of the ways I've heard it phrased is that you must no longer walk as the Americans do.

Don't do like everybody else and what they do in America.

And I think that works because Gentiles, Americans, all of us are corrupt sinners in need of salvation.

And the reality is the gospel doesn't just save you from hell and the wrath of God, the gospel also saves you from you and the futility of your mind.

Look again at verse 17.

It says, specifically, no longer as the Gentiles walk in the futility of their mind.

When God is rejected and you're not a believer, what Paul is saying specifically here is that your thoughts are not thinking in line with the way of the truth.

Romans chapter 1, verse 21 says, For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their reasonings and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Romans 1:21

To push even further, we would say a life lived outside of God is a life of insanity, not an insanity that's going to put you in an insane asylum, but an insanity that is going to help you blend in with the rest of the Americans.

Because when you're living in this insanity where you know that God exists and yet you're not following him, then you're thinking along the ways of this world, and that's called futility, futility, a futile mind.

And now I I wrote a whole book on this.

It's a book called A Trivial Life.

And the tagline under the title, Trivial Life, is the tagline Escaping the Default Mode of the Human Heart.

No one has to tell any human ever to engage in trivial in trivial things, right?

No one has to teach my kids to sin.

They got it.

No one has to teach you to sin.

You got it.

It's the default.

When we're born, we were raised, our default is toward sin.

It's a default toward a futile mind.

And that's of course why rage bait works, is because the algorithms and the people know that that's what's inside of you.

That's your default.

And so you participate in it, and they got you because that's a feudal mind.

So basically, what we're doing so far, Paul is describing the way that the world works.

Look at verse 18.

Being darkened and their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart.

Underline some words here.

Darkened, excluded, ignorant.

So they're making moral decisions in the dark.

And I would say, and I just want I'm just gonna tell you what the Bible says, that that unbelief is not intellectual.

Unbelief is moral.

I was listening to a podcast recently about an expert on Blaise Pascal, who makes this uh whole argument from the 17th century.

He was a mathematician, and he is saying that those who don't believe it's not an intellectual issue, no matter how much they want to make it an intellectual issue, it is a moral issue.

And he says this if anybody wants God, God gives them enough light to have them.

And if anybody does not want God, then there's going to be enough darkness for them not to have them as well.

And the argument is made is the evidence is not the problem.

It's the wanting.

The wanting is the problem.

Men are afraid to want God, and so they pull away from that because they realize that if they have God, guess what?

They are no longer in charge.

And so the lock is not on the head, it's on the heart.

It's not like I can't intellectually fathom it and figure it out.

It's like the argument is no, it's it's on the heart.

So what we're arguing is that it's not an innocent ignorance.

Romans chapter one says that they knew God, but they did not honor God.

And it's been famously said that a young atheist has to be very careful what he reads so he can protect his ignorance.

Now, I don't know, we don't call it protecting your ignorance anymore.

We call it, I don't know, curating your feed or setting your life up in such a way where you're only seeing things, living things that affirm what you're doing.

So it's almost like a can a construction project of your life where you are the contractor, or you or you are the one who is engineering your life to be just the way you want it to be, so that it's in that we're talking the ways of the world right now.

So if I'm looking online, I have everything fed to me that I want to affirm, or if I go out and I live the life I want to live, I'm gonna make sure that I construct it where I am at the center.

And so if I have to follow the Lord, then that is a different master than me.

I want none of it.

And so I may chalk it up to it's an intellectual problem when all along it's just a moral problem.

Let's continue on.

Verse 19.

And they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.

So he's once again, he's describing the world.

He's describing the Gentiles, he's describing the Americans.

It says they're they're callous.

No pain, no grief in disobeying God.

They've handed themselves over to sensuality, a variety of sexual sins.

And that we could say the callousness in our culture is that people no longer blush.

We used to be there, but no one has to look you in the face anymore.

They can just do whatever they want.

And I would say that we we are a culture that is not ashamed of our sin.

In fact, we love our sins so much, we we we throw parades for them.

You know?

There's just no shame.

That's kind of the culture we're living in, the Americans, the Gentiles.

That's that's that's where we're at.

There is no shame but callousness.

And look up again at verse 19.

It says they're greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

They want more and more of not just stuff, but they want more and more of their perversion, more and more of their sin, more and more of their life without God.

They want themselves front and center.

Now, let me give you a prominent example.

And I'm not just trying to harp on this, but just think of you, our culture, our culture, for whatever reason, in the demonic state of our culture, likes to kill babies, just as a reality.

That's what happens.

And so if that baby's gonna mess up my life, then my life takes priority of that baby.

I'm gonna cut that baby off.

That baby's gonna die, and so I'm going to abort it, right?

So that's part of the culture.

And it permeates all areas.

It permeates all areas.

So if my my mom and dad are too old and they're they're gonna bother me in my life and the way I want to scale my life, then I'm just gonna stick them in a home and I'll I'll see them once or twice our year.

You you see how this goes.

You see how this goes.

And so if my marriage is not going so well, well, I can just cut that off.

I can just abort it, I can be out of that.

If I don't want to think about death, I can just I can just set that aside.

I mean, do you realize that?

Like if you don't want to think about death, you can just keep yourself busy all the time.

But guess what?

Death's still gonna come for you.

Oh well, but you keep yourself busy.

Did you see the culture we live in?

It's a culture of do what I want to do.

If I don't like it, I can abort it.

Do what I want to do, if I don't like it, I can distract myself.

That's the world we live in, that's the reality of sin.

You know this, you know this, right?

It's the way the Americans live.

We're really good at it, and that's the way that you used to live.

But then you got saved.

Not all of you, but hopefully most of you.

You got saved, and then something started to happen.

Someone said that conversion is like a mental breakdown.

You used to think one way, and the Holy Spirit convicted you.

You started believing, you trust Christ, and now you think an entirely different way.

Anybody?

Anybody?

Yeah, yeah.

Like this is radical change.

I used to think this way, not anymore.

Now I think like this.

And so this mental breakdown, something God's grace, happens the rest of our lives, or we pull away from this way of living and thinking and start following the ways of the Lord.

And that's what Paul says in verse 20.

He says, But you did not learn Christ in this way, if indeed you have heard of him and have been taught in him, just as you, just as truth is in Jesus.

He didn't say you learned about Christ.

He said, Look, you learn Christ.

You learned Christ.

I mean, you can learn about Abraham Lincoln, you just cannot learn Abraham Lincoln.

He's dead, you never met him.

But I am learning a living person in my relationship with Jesus who shapes every area of my life.

So, what we're getting at is that Christianity is not a syllabus that we kind of engage in.

It's it's an apprenticeship to a person.

I'm not downloading data about Jesus.

I've been rescued by Jesus, I'm in a relationship with Jesus, and he's crafting me, and he's crafting my mind and my heart to follow him.

And he says in verse 20, look at verse 20 again.

He says specifically, but you're not learned Christ in this week.

If indeed you have heard him and have been taught in Jesus, just as truth is in Jesus.

So he piles these words up.

You learned, you hurt, you're taught, classes in session, nobody graduates.

And the reality is we are following this truth in Jesus.

All right, here we go.

Three things that it teaches you.

All right.

So we're learning Jesus, we're following Jesus, three things.

These are the three things I want you to kind of keep with today, and not because I'm trying to give you three points.

It's actually in the text.

Look at verse 22.

That in reference to your former manner of life as an American, as a Gentile, you lay aside the old self which is being corrupted in accordance with the lust of deceit, and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.

Alright, so there's your three points right there.

Take off, be renewed, put on.

We're going to cover the two outside ones first, that the takeo and put on, then we're going to hit the middle one because that's where you live all during the week, right?

So at conversion, when you got saved, there was a decisive break.

And the Christian life is the daily outworking of that break.

So specifically, it starts off by saying, lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lust of deceit.

So it's kind of like the put-off, put-on language.

And it's more than just like in the 80s taking off your Madonna shirt and put on your Amy Grant shirt because you got saved.

It's it's more than that, okay?

That's not what we're talking about here.

We're kind of going beyond that, to something that happens at the core of your being.

My wife and I were watching the news a few weeks ago, and we saw these dudes going down into New York uh manholes in the New York sewers and then popping up that they cut caught on a camera.

They're like these, I don't know, sewer explorers.

Anybody down for that?

Like, who are these guys?

They may be sitting next to you right now.

I mean, they go they go to lunch with people, they go to work, maybe they go to school.

They certainly clean up quite well.

These sewer explorers, and if you think about it, Paul's saying, you know what?

Don't be exploring the sewer all week and then coming here all cleaned up.

That's not the life you're supposed to live.

You're to put that stuff off.

It's not like you just go in the sewer, take a shower, put your sewer clothes back on, which essentially cancels your shower.

It's not the way we're supposed to live.

We are to put this life off.

In the outworking of the grace that comes to us every day, we're to put off sin, put off the old ways, take those clothes off.

We've been crucified with Christ.

There is a new way to live.

And he says specifically, verse 24, so you put that off.

Put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.

So you have these new clothes, they're created in the likeness of a God.

Remember the verse in uh 2 Corinthians 5 17.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature, the old things have passed away.

Behold, new things have come.

So you know this, right?

So you you put off, you put on, we're new creatures, we're a new creation.

Now we are to live in line with that new creation every day of the week, including boring Tuesdays, right?

Every day, every moment that put off, put on language carries on with us.

Now, I I'm about to tell you where I feel like many of us get this wrong, including me, and it's this.

We put off sin.

We go, you know, I should really stop looking at porn.

I'm gonna stop looking at porn.

I should really stop being disrespectful to my spouse, I'm gonna stop being disrespectful to my spouse, I should really stop drinking or whatever.

I'm watching it, I'm gonna stop that.

And you put it off.

You say, I'm gonna take all these clothes out of the closet and I'm gonna throw them away, I'm gonna repent, put off.

And then it comes to put on.

What do you put on?

You put nothing in its place.

I mean, if you throw away all your clothes, I know what you're gonna do.

You can go get some new ones.

But if you clear out the closet, you put it all off, and you don't put anything on, my brothers and sisters, there's no such thing as neutral.

There's no such thing as an empty closet.

If you're not putting off and putting something on its place, this is what you're gonna do.

You're gonna fall back to the same old ways.

Every single time.

You're like, well, I don't know.

I can't just I can't kick this habit.

I I keep doing the same dumb things over and over again.

I put it I repent, I ask, and I keep you put nothing on in its place.

This morning I was listening to a Harvard business graduate.

He graduated this morning.

I was listening to he he graduated Harvard Business School in 1979, and he's currently a professor at Harvard Business School.

Now, this is what he said, this is very interesting.

He said, I graduated in 1979, and we would have class reunions every five years.

Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five.

All right.

He said the first five years, everybody showed up and they got amazing spouses.

You know, they married above for sure.

Um, they got good money, their businesses are doing great, and everybody's happy.

He said, 10 years, there's some trouble.

Marriage isn't going so great.

15 years, divorce.

Kids are going kind of psycho, living with the other spouse, never see them across the country.

20 years, really depressed.

25 years, they just stop showing up.

Things are too miserable.

And the argument he is making of why this deterioration happens and why it happens over and over again is this.

It's because when these business guys and businesswomen have 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, a full day, spending time with the wife and the kids is super boring.

There's nothing eventful happen.

But if I can get ahead just a little bit, if I can use this gap of time to just crank a little bit more, I mean, who's gonna blame me, right?

They're gonna get more money.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna elevate myself.

And then when you take these gaps of time and you put them all together, and you're investing in yourself and your business and not your wife and not your kids over time, what's that gonna look like?

And some of you right now are saying that has been my reality.

I did just that.

But you don't have to keep living that way.

And I believe, even as we're tired folks in here, you have gaps of time that you're trying to fill each week.

And if you're just filling them all, all of them with just you, yourself, and you, don't be surprised if you keep falling back to the same stupid stuff because you're not putting anything on in its place.

You're not putting serving others, you know, you're not putting anything on in its place.

We put off the old ways, we put on the new ways, and a lot of the new ways include people.

Loving people, serving people, discipling people, being patient with people.

That's often what the put on looks like.

And all the stuff over here, well, that's a lot easier, right?

But you know, this is how we grow.

So we put off the sin and we put on, and you may say, Um, well, how do we do that?

Like, if I really want to move from one to the other, how do I do that?

Well, here it is.

Paul's gonna say, it it's right here.

It's right here, and it's right here.

Look at verse 23 again.

That's the most important one.

And that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind.

There it is.

It's about your thinking, the spirit of your mind.

It's about your heart.

Romans chapter 12, verse 2 says, and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Romans 12:2

I I bet I bet about 10 of you that's your favorite verse.

Yeah.

I want to be renewed in the way I'm thinking.

If I'm gonna put this stuff off, I gotta have a reason to put this on, and it's gonna come down to my thinking.

So the renewal happens in my mind, it happens in my heart, and it often is what you put in front of you.

If you put your medical diagnosis and your medical portal in front of you and you're searching Google all week for all of your issues, my guess is you're gonna have a lot of fear, right?

That's what you're thinking about.

That's what you put in front of you.

And if you're always thinking about sports, it's probably because you're putting sports in front of you.

It's like your mind is a bank.

You whatever you put in your mind, you you can withdraw from that.

So if you put news in all week or worry in all week, don't be surprised that what comes out is worry, fear, anxiety, lust, greed.

It's what you put in.

That's what comes out.

And you may think, oh, Pastor, I know what you're gonna do.

You're gonna talk about your other book, Hidden Within, and you're gonna talk about scripture memory, and you're gonna talk about just start throwing a verse at it.

And here's what I want to say.

I don't, I'm just gonna be totally honest with you.

This is a plug, don't buy my book.

All right, here we go.

If you spend 14 hours a day drinking in the word, or let's say this you spend 14 hours a day drinking in the world, your five-minute devotion and one scripture memory is not gonna cut it.

And just think about it.

You're being consumed with the world all day, and you go, okay, God, I'm gonna do my little five-minute devote devo, let's do it.

And then you wonder, why am I not changing?

It's because you're drinking the world all day, and you're like, Yeah, but I I want both.

I want the sewer closed, but I also want this part that I know it's good, it's what I really want, but I want both.

It doesn't work that way.

It's not like, well, you can have both.

You can you can put off and then you can put on, and no, it doesn't work that way.

Is our mind and our hearts being shaped by the word?

And I want to tell you, this is so important to me, and you may wonder, why are you bringing this up?

Well, besides it being in the text, let me tell you why.

This is this will be very instructive for some of you.

Last year, the American Bible Society found 11 million more Americans reading their Bibles.

11 million more Americans.

Bible sales last year hit a 21-year high.

People were talking about revival and change, and then they measured it again this year, and it was all gone.

People picked up their Bible and they put it back down inside of a year.

And I want to say it right now a renewed mind is not a spike.

It's not a spike.

A changed mind is not a spike, it's supposed to be present tense.

And some of you would say, years ago I had a spike, but I've been coasting ever since.

And you may think, well, why does the, why, why, why I don't know, why does it fade?

I mean, I was really into the word at one time, but now I'm not so much.

Well, why does it fade?

And I think that a part of the reason is you just don't find the word useful as much.

Why did it spike in the first place?

Well, maybe people were just trying to use the word because it was a tool.

People were anxious, I'm gonna read the word, and the Bible is a tool for me, or I just kind of put it down when the job's done.

I had a rough year, so I started reading the Psalms and it and it helped, but now I'm doing better.

So you would put it down, right?

So we use the Bible like a tool.

It's not supposed to be a tool.

It's we could say it's a love letter.

It's supposed to impact your emotions and you can go right to your heart.

This is God speaking to you, but too many times we treat it like a tool.

This is what we treat it like, right?

I have an old home I live in built in the 70s.

I've told you about it before.

Built in 70s.

There are two things in the home that we do not use.

And of course, it's the two things that never get broken.

Everything else we use, like ACs and things, those things get broken.

But these two things, they've never broken, I don't know if they've even broken the history.

And let me tell you what they are.

Number one, we have a dumb waiter.

I have no idea why they included that in the house.

We never use it.

We use it as storage, but we don't make it go up and down.

Second thing, this is the thing we never ever use, and it works perfect.

We have a whole house vacuum cleaner.

Ooh, yeah, we got one of those.

There's no, we don't even we don't even have carpet anymore.

You take that tube?

I mean, who who who used to do those?

You bring that big tube around your whole house and shove it in the wall and that thing still works.

We never use it.

And you think, well, you know, they used it at one time, it was just a tool for the 70s.

And the Bible was just a tool for a season, and I and I've moved on.

And maybe that's why the spike happened, but then it went away.

But the Bible's not a tool, it's a relationship that you have with someone that you're learning.

It's Jesus.

So, what can I do to get you in the word more?

Well, I could talk about lots of things, but you know, I'm gonna just scrap that and say, I think it's beauty that draws you.

And when you get in in it, it's beauty that keeps you.

And it's all gonna come down to this week as you get in the word or stay away from the word.

It's like, do you do you really want the Lord?

Do you really want the one who saved you out of all of your futility and foolish lifestyle?

Is there a desire in there, in you, to get in the word?

And at the same time, the word feeds that desire, so it's a both, and I want to get in it, and then the word's gonna feed the desire more and more.

And so I the way I look at this week for you is like this.

This is the way it is.

You can either choose the manhole or the master.

You can choose the sewer or the savior.

You can choose the filth or the father.

We've been changed.

We are new creations.

Let's walk in it today.

Let's pray.

Through Jesus.

There is no one in here who who's too far, they rejected you for too.

There's no one in here that can't have you if they want you.

And if there is a desire in you this morning for the Lord, God is not blocking you, He's welcoming you to put your faith in Jesus today, and you can do that right now.

You can just say, Jesus, I trust you.

Forgive me for living my life away from you.

I trust you.

And if there's anyone in here who's been trying to go down the manhole and trying to hang out in the sewers and then pop right back into church, Lord, just convict us.

And for those of us who keep saying the same sin, pop back in, Lord, show us what it means to put it off and put something on in its place that glorifies you.

Because you're the one that changed us, you're the one that saved us.

So, Lord, this week we choose the master, we choose the savior, we choose you.

In Jesus' name, amen.