1. "Saying yes to Jesus will mean saying no to other things."

2. "Sin only appears to us as a servant in order to become our master."

3. "Impurity is the kind of food that makes you hungrier by eating it. It's the kind of drink that makes you thirstier by drinking it. It's like the quicksand that will appear like it will hold you up, but really it will hold you down under until it covers you and smothers you."

4. "Universities are well set up to question and even mock the truth, but not to teach it. In that, the contemporary university just reflects the confusion of the fallen human mind."

5. "Friend, satisfaction in sin is always a mirage, a receding horizon, vanishing just beyond our reach."

6. "The struggle that we have if we're Christians in continuing to need to put off this old life does not show that we're losing. In fact, it's evidence that we're winning. Because when you are really the old person, you're not struggling. You're surrendered."

7. "You are coming here for deprogramming from the world and everything it's telling you in its music, its movies, its entertainment. The local church stands here in part to help us resist the call of the crowds."

8. "The only reason any of us are Christians is because somebody used their words to talk to us about Christ."

9. "We're so confident of desire and our interior desires that we will change our physical bodies to accord to what our desires are right now, even though we can't know our desires will be the same five or ten years from now."

10. "To become a Christian is no slight thing. It's comprehensive and it's constant."

Observation Questions

1. In Ephesians 4:17, what does Paul "say and testify in the Lord" that believers must no longer do, and how does he describe the condition of the Gentiles' minds?

2. According to Ephesians 4:18, what three things characterize the Gentiles' spiritual state, and what does Paul identify as the root cause of their ignorance?

3. In Ephesians 4:19, how does Paul describe the progression of the Gentiles' moral decline—what have they become, what have they given themselves up to, and what is their attitude toward impurity?

4. What contrast does Paul draw in Ephesians 4:20-21 between the Gentiles' way of life and what the Ephesian believers had experienced regarding Christ?

5. According to Ephesians 4:22-23, what two actions does Paul say believers were taught to take regarding their "old self" and their minds?

6. In Ephesians 4:24, how does Paul describe the "new self" that believers are to put on—after whose likeness is it created, and what two qualities characterize it?

Interpretation Questions

1. Why does Paul emphasize that the Gentiles' futile thinking, darkened understanding, and hardness of heart are all connected? What does this teach us about the relationship between our minds, our hearts, and our behavior?

2. Paul describes the Gentiles as "alienated from the life of God" (v. 18). How does this phrase help us understand the seriousness of the spiritual condition Paul is warning against, and why is this more than just a moral problem?

3. In verse 22, Paul says the old self is "corrupt through deceitful desires." What does it mean for desires to be "deceitful," and why is this an important concept for understanding the nature of sin?

4. How does the phrase "that is not the way you learned Christ" (v. 20) connect the believers' conversion experience to their ongoing ethical transformation? What role does teaching and learning play in the Christian life according to this passage?

5. Paul says the new self is "created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness" (v. 24). How does this connect to the original creation of humanity in Genesis, and what does it reveal about God's purpose in salvation?

Application Questions

1. Paul warns against walking "in the futility of their minds" (v. 17). What specific sources of teaching or influence in your daily life—media, entertainment, education, or cultural voices—might be shaping your thinking in ways that contradict God's truth, and what practical step could you take this week to address this?

2. The sermon emphasized that "sin only appears to us as a servant in order to become our master." Is there a habit, indulgence, or pattern in your life that started small but has begun to control you more than you control it? How might you bring this into the light with a trusted Christian friend?

3. Paul calls believers to "be renewed in the spirit of your minds" (v. 23). What is one concrete way you could prioritize learning and being taught in Christ this week—whether through Scripture reading, a Bible study, or conversation with another believer—to actively pursue this renewal?

4. The sermon noted that the struggle to put off the old self is evidence of spiritual life, not defeat. How does this truth change the way you view your ongoing battles with sin? How might this perspective encourage you or someone you know who feels discouraged by their struggles?

5. Paul describes the new self as created in "true righteousness and holiness" (v. 24). In what specific relationship or situation this week could you consciously "put on" this new self by acting with integrity, honesty, or set-apartness, even when it would be easier to blend in with those around you?

Additional Bible Reading

1. Romans 1:18-32 — This passage provides a fuller description of how suppressing the truth about God leads to darkened minds and moral degradation, reinforcing Paul's warning in Ephesians 4:17-19.

2. Colossians 3:1-17 — Paul uses similar "put off" and "put on" language to describe the transformation of believers, offering a parallel and expanded application of the same truths.

3. 1 Peter 4:1-5 — Peter addresses the same challenge of believers no longer living as the Gentiles do, emphasizing the surprise and hostility this change may provoke from former companions.

4. Romans 12:1-2 — This passage calls believers to be transformed by the renewing of their minds, connecting directly to Paul's exhortation in Ephesians 4:23.

5. Genesis 1:26-28 — The creation account establishes humanity's original creation in God's image, providing the foundation for Paul's teaching that the new self is being recreated after God's likeness in righteousness and holiness.

Sermon Main Topics

I. The Challenge of Resisting Instruction and Learning from Mistakes

II. The Dead End: The Former Life of the Gentiles (Ephesians 4:17-19, 22)

III. The Way of Life: The New Self in Christ (Ephesians 4:20-24)

IV. The Church's Role in Renewal and Our Covenant Commitment

---

Detailed Sermon Outline

I don't know about you, but as for myself, one of my most characteristic failings is impatience with instruction.

As a dispenser of hour-long sermons, I'm aware that this is a bit ironic.

It doesn't matter if we're talking about playing the piano or board games. Tennis or weightlifting. The tendency to try to figure something out myself without taking time to have anyone explain it to me or show me proper form or fingering or read the directions has been around for a long time. Clues of such struggles in the lives of many of us abound. Hastily assembled and therefore wobbly furniture.

Suggests a preference for learning on one's own and by trial and error rather than by instruction. And sometimes in furniture assembly or games, I mean the downside might seem slight enough, like it doesn't really matter that much. Time and effort saved seem to outweigh the benefits sacrificed. But learning by mistakes rather than by studying can make some costly tuition bills. The most expensive of colleges or training courses can seem cheap when compared to the cost of learning some lessons in the University of Life.

The local church is to give out the most important instruction of all. We come to learn and to be reminded of how we can be delivered from death to life, from a failure so catastrophic that this life, this world, cannot contain its results, to the kind of spiritual success which brings with it a goodness to our experience that continues throughout this life and then compounds eternally. The difference that we are called to make is amazing. Here's one puzzling, even surprising, aspect of this. Once we've experienced the basic change from death to life, spiritually speaking, we can still find ourselves tempted and torn, looking down a kind of alternative path of experience and neglecting the clear guidance from God's Word and God's people that He used to first bring us to new life in Christ.

We can find ourselves having been served a tasty meal, looking over the moral and spiritual equivalent of a plate of dirt and wanting to sample a little bit of it, maybe even occasionally replace our good food with the self-destructive fare of our pre-Christ days. We can find such a temptation at every level in us, in our actions, in our thoughts, even in our loves.

We've been studying the book of Ephesians this year and in it we've seen Paul painting the picture of this most amazing change that God had worked in the lives of these mainly previously pagan church members. Some of them were likely members of the Jewish synagogue in Ephesus, but most of them would have been worshipers of the god Artemis or Diana.

Whose giant statue was at the heart of the enormous temple there in Ephesus. Well, once these Ephesians were converted, I'm sure they sometimes looked around them as a small minority in their city and were reminded of their old ways of acting and thinking and even living and were tempted to fall back into them. Paul has exhorted these young believers throughout this letter to to understand the change that they've experienced. Back in chapter 1, Paul had reminded them that according to God's ancient plan, He had adopted them and that in Christ He had redeemed them and forgiven them and saved them and enlightened them. And then in chapter 2, Paul had described the change vividly as being brought from death to life.

Saved from being children of wrath. He reminds them of how they were once separated from God and each other, but now had been brought near, that's His language, and how one new man had been made out of them in place of the two, Jew and Gentile. They had been reconciled to God and each other and now had peace. Of course, all of this change had come at a cost. This all meant that they had become strange to those around them.

And so Paul reminds them here in chapter 4 of the calling that they had now. They were, as we were thinking about last week in chapter 4 verses 14 and 15, they were to grow up now. They were no longer to be adolescents spiritually. And that's the vein that we see Paul continuing here in our passage today. Now, ethically, morally, daily, they were, as he writes, in Ephesians chapter 4 verse 17, to no longer walk as the Gentiles do, no longer walk in the sense of no longer live.

They were, as he says in chapter 4 verses 22 and 24, to put off your old self and put on the new self. He's beginning to break down his general exhortation that we thought of last week in verses 14 and 15 to grow up. And he's beginning to talk about what that looks like more specifically. And he'll do that for the rest of the book. And we'll be following Paul here in this in these weeks to come, Lord willing, on through December.

We'll follow Paul as he teaches his spiritual growth plan and where he gets very specific and says, don't do it like this, do it like this. Now if you haven't found our passage already, go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 4. We're on verses 17 to 24 today. If you're using the Bibles provided, that's page 978, 978. If you don't have a Bible at home that you can read, please take the Red Pew Bible there as a gift from us to you.

Take it home, keep reading it, learn more about it, understand it. Ephesians 4:17-24. Listen as I read.

Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, 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 so put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

Friends, this passage is straightforward.

It's clear that there is in the first half, verses 17 to 19, a kind of dead end presented. The former days of these Gentiles, believers, the road that they may even now be tempted to travel, even though it leads nowhere. And then the second half of our passage, verses 20 to 24, there is the way of life that they've taken in Christ. If you're looking for an outline, that's the outline. The dead end, verses 17 to 19, and the way of life, verses 20 to 24.

And with each of these two ways, we'll consider what they mean for life, as Paul describes implications that we can see in our bodies and also in our thoughts and even in our loves. I pray that as we consider these together, we may learn to continue in this way of life, putting off the old self, putting on the new with every day and week He gives us. Basically what we're seeing here is that even as their old birth made them part of a certain people who lived a certain way, the Gentiles, that's the non-Jews, the Ephesians, so their new birth in Christ had made them a part of a new people who live another way. A new way. But once they were in that new way, they could still be tempted by the old.

That is to blend in with everybody else. Look like all the non-Christians around them. Look like they used to look like in the way they lived. And so Paul here lays out these two ways. Warning them and us against the old way and encouraging us in the new.

First here, Paul warns them about, number one, the dead end. And we see this, as I say very clearly, in verses 17 to 19. And he returns to it again in verse 22. The way the Gentiles walked, as he puts it in verse 17, the way they lived would lead to nowhere good. You know, many of these Ephesians' friends and neighbors would have been typified by such living.

What he's describing wouldn't be the exceptional person, it would be the normal person in Ephesus. For us today, the passage reminds us how too many of us were living, how we shouldn't be living anymore. Some of you will know the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament. Chapter 7 is a particularly good example of the kind of thing Paul is doing right here. Chapter 7 The writer of the Proverbs presents a young man lacking sense who goes where he shouldn't go and so ends up doing what he shouldn't do, and so is persuaded to do that which will finally lead to his own death.

So Proverbs 7 stands as a warning to a young man who reads that, Don't do this. Well, this is how this part of Ephesians 4 is functioning. It's a warning. The world around us is a picture of our past. It is not the way forward spiritually.

Paul has been talking to them about the great change that God has made in them. Now here in verse 17, he kind of leans forward and begins to meddle in the way the Christians live. Now this I say and testify in the Lord, so he's saying all this truth that I've been telling you In chapter 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, all of this truth should make a difference in the way you live, in the way you live. He says, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do. So friends, saying yes to Jesus will mean saying no to other things.

Saying yes to Jesus will mean saying no to other things. Paul is filling out his exhortation that he gave up in chapter 4 verse 1, Walk in a manner worthy. That means walk not like everyone around you is walking. You've got to be willing to stick out from other Gentiles around you, he's saying. And what is true then is true now.

Congregations like ours are full of young people. Who've only recently come to Christ and who still have a lot of pressure from their families and friends to join in their old ways. Perhaps you could spend some time reading over 1 Peter chapter 4 with a Christian friend and praying about what it means in your own life. Look over at 1 Peter chapter 4 just for a moment where Peter gives very similar counsel. 1 Peter 4, beginning verse 1, Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking.

For whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh, no longer for human passions, but for the will of God. For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join with them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you, but they will give an account to Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. Well, back to Ephesians chapter 4. This is what Paul is saying to the believers in Ephesus.

He is warning them not to give in to the peer pressure around them. He's saying, look, your actions have to change. Here in chapter 4 verse 19, Paul characterized the Gentiles as having given themselves up to sensuality. You see there in that second phrase in verse 19, and having given themselves up to sensuality. Given up, given yourself up.

Do you remember in John 8 how Jesus describes that everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin? That's quite an image, isn't it? Sin only appears to us as a servant in order to become our master.

Paul talks about this a little further on in the letter when he warns the Ephesian Christians that there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality or any kind of impurity. They weren't to get drunk on wine, not even a hint of Sexual immorality, down in chapter 5 verse 18 he says, drunkenness leads to debauchery, the two go together. In fact, the last phrase in verse 19 describes him as being greedy to practice every kind of impurity. Did you notice that? Greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

There's a desperate greediness which accompanies sin and its failure to satisfy us. Impurity indulged grows the appetite for it. This impurity is the kind of food that makes you hungrier by eating it. It's the kind of drink that makes you thirstier by drinking it. It's like the quicksand that will appear like it will hold you up, but really it will hold you down under.

Until it covers you and smothers you. Friends, beware of respectable addictions.

What can you not get through the day without?

That's a good thing for you to evaluate and to consider as a Christian. Paul is describing the experience of total depravity. That is where every part of our lives are touched and stained by sin. This afternoon, go back and read the first half of chapter 2 where Paul gives the spiritual description of sinfulness. Even as the Gentiles around them would no doubt be offended if they read this letter.

So people today are offended by the Bible's contradiction of how we naturally want to live. But friends, in this, the Bible tells us something that nobody else will today. To suspect our own desires. It warns us that just because something seems natural to us, we shouldn't assume it's good for us. Who else will tell you that today?

But this dead end goes even deeper than what we do. It has to do with what we think. You notice that in verse 17, In the futility of their minds futile, means empty, means worthless. This describes their whole mindset. The mind which is made to learn doesn't, at least not the truth about God.

The great philosophical sophistication for which ancient Greece was so well known, still known today, didn't help them to know God. And, friend, it's true today too. Universities are well set up to question and even mock the truth, but not to teach it. In that, the contemporary university just reflects the confusion of the fallen human mind.

As a man who seems to have spent the first half of his life collecting degrees, I can just tell you that some of the most educated people I've known have been some of the most foolish, some of the most clueless.

Paul says here that these pagan Gentiles are darkened in their understanding. See that, verse 18. They are darkened in their understanding. Paul will mention again down in chapter 5 verse 8. One result of the fall of our first parents is blindness to the things of God.

We've certainly had our minds darkened in their understanding of God. Of sin, of Christ. And so men and women naturally rebel against God and His truth about our spiritual state. This is the Bible's explanation for all the brokenness all around us and naturally inside of us as well. Friends, our world is full of people hawking other answers to the problems.

They'll say it's all about your health. Take care of your health. They'll say it's all about who's in office. Make sure the right people are elected. They'll say it's all about having enough money.

They'll say it's about getting the right education. Again and again and again, people will talk about things that may be okay, pretty good, it's good enough for us to spend our lives trying to be good stewards of, if we're a good farmer, a good salesman, a good lawyer. But friends, the answer for these great deep things in life is God and Christ. This is the answer that Paul has preached to these Ephesians, and this is what they have accepted, and it's accepting that that makes them stick out from those around them. Paul speaks even more radically in that second phrase in verse 18, They are alienated from the life of God.

This is what he was describing up in chapter 2 at the beginning, as being dead in sins and transgressions, without God in the world. Friends, the very core of our depravity, of our sinful state by nature, is our separation from God, to have our wills separated from His, our thoughts from His, our ways from His, all these separations and alienations, which can only end by faith in Christ. It's only by faith in Jesus Christ that you will come to know God and His way for you.

Paul describes it still further in verse 18, They were alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them. Friends, don't misunderstand this phrase. Paul doesn't say this to excuse them. No, this ignorance of God is a culpable ignorance. This ignorance is no excuse.

Well, I didn't know. No, John Gill well observed that such ignorance is natural to men. It comes by sin and is itself sinful. And is sometimes the punishment of sin and also the cause of it. As here the alienation from the life of God.

For where is ignorance of God, there can be no desire after Him, no communion with Him, no faith in Him, no dependence on Him, no true worship of Him, or living according to His will and to His glory. And this ignorance is because of the blindness of their hearts, the hardness of it. So this is not the ignorance of simple facts, like you don't happen to know what the size of France is, viS-A-Vis the size of Texas, or the number of atoms in a proton, or what you can best get your uncle or aunt for a birthday present. No, it's not that kind of ignorance. This is ignorance of God, our Creator.

Ignorance of the one in whose image we're made, ignorance of the one who gave us a conscience and who will one day judge us for how we've heeded it or trying to hide from it. Paul described the suppressing work that people do trying to rid themselves of knowledge that seems intuitively right to them but they don't like. Friends, sin It keeps us from this true knowledge. It keeps us in ignorance. It's part of the spiritual death that Paul is describing here in Ephesians, back up in chapter two at the beginning, for instance.

Well, how do we fight such ignorance? Well, we fight that ignorance by learning, don't we? We cultivate getting in places where the truth is taught and we cultivate our own attitude to be teachable. We want to be people who don't act like we know everything. But people who realize we still have much to learn, even as we learn about our own natural spiritual blindness.

I wonder when was the first time someone put that idea across to you. I remember reading one person who said, you, know, I lived and everybody around me told me all was great and all was fine and everything seemed hollow. And then somebody told me the truth, that I was sinful and it made sense. He said it was like the birds finally singing in the spring. Finally I could see the truth of the world around me.

Friends, that can be the missing key to many people's understanding of this world and this life. If you'll tell them the truth about sin, about what it means to be out of joint with God. There's still another dimension to this way we must avoid more than merely what we do or even what we think. It has to do with what we love. Did you see that in verse 18, how Paul ties this all to the heart?

He says that we're naturally ignorant about God and Godliness because, well, he says, due to their hardness of heart. This hardness of heart is ultimately a lack of love. We have no love naturally for God and His truth. That's why by nature we oppose it. Those of you who know their Bibles may think of Romans chapter 1.

Verse 18, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. We by nature suppress the truth we know. We by nature are hard-hearted toward God. So vanity and frustration marked the unbelieving Gentiles' thinking.

They seemed to live for nothing, certainly not for God. The emptiness of their lives was perfectly displayed in their worship of idols, which of course are really not God. They are separated from the life of God, and yet this is what Paul says, the people around are unable to understand because they are darkened, separated, ignorant and hardened in their heart. He'd said up at the beginning of chapter 2 that they had been dead in their sins and transgressions. They're ignorant because of their hard, dead hearts.

They were willfully and stubbornly opposed to God and His ways. Friends, this is not a pretty picture. I understand if you're reluctant to tell a non-Christian friend about this. But trust me, this is a loving thing for you to explain what the Bible says about human nature. Because this nature that's described here is this bad and worse.

I mean, it just keeps degenerating. When you look at this description, you meditate on it, the ears of their conscience have become deaf, its voice muffled. They're entirely surrendered to self-indulgence. And that gnawing hunger they feel when fed only gnaws more insistently and voraciously and insatiably. You can't satisfy such lusts.

You can only endanger yourself when you grow close enough to try to control them. Paul writes here, When you give in to them, you're really giving up to them.

Now they have an ironic addiction that will destroy them, agreed for that which will consume them. Friend, satisfaction in sin is always a mirage, a receding horizon, vanishing just beyond our reach.

And such an empty wandering lostness is typical of everyone outside of Christ. Now friend, if you're here and you're not a believer, you may think, really? I mean, you don't know me. You don't understand how good my life is. With all due respect, I think all of these words are accurate about everyone's life.

And I would encourage you to go back this afternoon and just try to line up your life against these words and see if you see any truth in that. Talk to a Christian friend about it, try to help them understand, help you understand how we would think through life today. You look at verse 19, They have become callous, which means they're past feeling. They've been corrupted through deceitful desires. That's why Paul is charging these Ephesian believers down in verse 22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life.

So friends, this is basic instruction. After all of this description, the basic instruction Paul is giving about this old self is to put it off. Friends, the struggle that we have if we're Christians in continuing to need to put off this old life does not show that we're losing. In fact, it's evidence that we're winning. Because, you see, when you are really the old person, when you're like the Gentiles were before they were saved, you're not struggling.

You're surrendered. You're under the dominion of the evil one in rebellion against God. The struggle happens when all of a sudden there is a new government in your land, when now there is an insurgency and a new king is claimed. That's when you have the struggle. So don't be discouraged by merely the fact that you have to continue to work in putting off.

Paul began this whole section up in verse 17, remember, telling these young Gentile Christians what they must no longer do. They're following God now and telling them, rejecting the patterns that they were raised with and that they saw all around them. So Paul writes here very clearly in verse 22, you, were taught with regard to your former way of life to put off your old self. Which is corrupted through deceitful desires. And he does this by reminding them what they had been taught.

Paul is reinforcing the teaching and reminding them that the life, the self that they used to know, which desired wrong and harmful things, must be stripped off and laid aside. This is a necessary implication of the Christian gospel. Repent and believe, Jesus said. If they were truly believers, they had done this and they would continue to do it, living their life differently from their former way of life. And now that wasn't just changing their behaviors, but Paul has here the radical image of putting off your old self.

It's like your self is a suit of clothes and they were to live out this change to continual turning from their old deceitful desires to the truth in Jesus.

Certain actions must be avoided, certain patterns of thought, even certain loves and desires.

That's why Paul finishes verse 22 as he does about their former manner of life. He says, It's corrupt through deceitful desires. Friend, even that phrase, deceitful desires, That's an oxymoron today. Psychological health is founded on that being false.

The idea that your desire could deceive you. Friends, we're so confident of desire and our interior desires that we will change our physical bodies to accord to what our desires are right now. Even though we can't know our desires will be the same five or 10 years from now.

That's the world that we live in today. But here we see Paul putting these words together, deceitful desires. The idea that what comes from in us is sacrosanct and that what comes from outside of us corrupts us. That's what Jesus was debunking in Mark chapter 7. You can go read that later when he talks about clean and unclean food.

He taught us that defilement comes not from outside, like the ceremonially unclean food, but from inside. Within is the home of evil according to Jesus.

Through sin, our natural innocence has been destroyed, our righteousness and holiness taken away, our hearts have been corrupted and our minds darkened, our wills have been inclined to evil so much so that we give our body and all its members to serve unrighteousness. And this is why we pray for God's help. This is why we join a local church so that God's Word helps to un-deceive us. You are coming here for deprogramming from the world and everything it's telling you in its music, its movies, its entertainment. So many of the classes you've been taught The local church stands here in part to help us resist the call of the crowds.

Do not live in the former way of life as the Gentiles. Prince, how are you doing in that?

Are you self-consciously, critically looking at your former way of life? Is your life looking different in a good way from those around you? We are here to change our lives by educating our minds and praying for our loves.

To be continually remolded and shaped toward God. And that really leads us right into the second half of our passage. Number two, the way to life. This is verses 20 and 21 and 23 and 24 there in Ephesians, chapter 4. You see, the church they were part of really was a preview of what was coming.

The world ordered with God and His love for His people at the center. And Paul is reminding Christians that in the past, We weren't living like we do now. And furthermore, we shouldn't live like that anymore, but we should live a new life. Of course, this is true morally in how we act. You see that last phrase in verse 24, in true righteousness and holiness, this is what God remakes us to be, righteous and holy.

And this renewal includes loving God and one another. Paul's about to call us in Ephesians 5:2 to to walk in love as Christ loved us. Friends, you know, one role a church family can play for each other is to let us get to know each other, to let others get to know you well enough to be able to question us honestly and to encourage us. I mean, I don't know all of you who are members of this church because there are so many of you, but I know literally hundreds of you. And I can tell you some of you are way too confident.

And others of you don't have enough confidence. And how we help each other is by helping sort through those issues in our lives. Actually, stop being so confident there. I think you're wrong about that. And don't do that again.

And on the other hand, oh, sister, I don't know why you're discouraged about this. This is wonderful. No, this is really good. Oh, no, I think you're misunderstanding that. This is actually what I think brings honor to the Lord.

I think you dealt with that situation very honestly and it brought him glory. It was like him the way you did that. So the world around us won't tell us the truth about those things and you're kind of stopping up your own ears to the help the Lord means to give you. If you don't, join a church. So join a church.

And let other Christians get to know you, especially other Christians who aren't exactly like you. Find other Christians who have some differences with you, maybe in age, maybe ethnically, maybe politically. Find some who love the Lord Jesus and the gospel, but who still would be in a different place than you are and listen to what they see in the Lord's work in your own life. Now part of the change that we try to see as a church morally has to do with then changing mentally. You see that at the end of verse 19, Paul rejects their being greedy to practice every kind of impurity and giving themselves up to sensuality and becoming spiritually callous.

He opposes all that by saying in verse 20, But that is not the way you learned Christ. You see the way of life, the spiritual dead end that had typified them. Had ended with their coming to Christ. That way of life had not brought them to Christ. That old life was not the way to truth.

In fact, it was leading them to hell. Until Christ interrupted them, until He raised them from their spiritual death. So in coming to know Christ, they had come to know different appetites and different desires. Those of you who come early to Wednesday Night Bible Study we'll hear Bobby reading to us from John Bunyan's most well-known allegory, the Pilgrim's Progress. It's an excellent book.

If you've never read it, come listen to Bobby read it or read it yourself. But John Bunyan had another well-known allegory, maybe his second most well-known allegory, called the Holy War, in which he depicted the town of Mansoul with five gates, five ways in and out. Eye gate, ear gate, nose gate, mouth gate, the field gate. I think I got them right. The five senses.

And which one of those do you think was the absolute crucial gate for controlling the town? Ear gate. It's what you hear. That's how the change will come.

Friends, the way that city is won or lost is through what is heard in Mansoul. This is how you and I have been released from the painful and perilous path we were on. That's why Paul says here in verse 21, Assuming that you have heard about Him and were taught in Him, the truth is in Jesus. The only reason any of us are Christians is because somebody used their words to talk to us about Christ. It was the truth about Christ, about His life and work, about His teaching that God used so radically to change these Ephesians' lives, and it's what he's used to change ours if we're here as Christians.

It's not simply that these Ephesians had picked themselves up by their own bootstraps, sort of started a sinner's support group and turned themselves around. No, Paul hadn't come bringing some false message, peddling some notions of self-help or other false gods. No, Paul had spoken the truth to them, the truth about Jesus. And it's the same way today. This is why as a church we put teaching in the absolute middle of our life together.

I trust this has not escaped your notice. We do it for the children. We do it for the young people. We're doing it right now, and I say we because this is something that we do together each week as a church, even as the preacher must work, so too those of you who are sitting there to listen. Must work to listen.

We'll teach again tonight and in more ways than you may even realize. So we hope to learn through Trevor's address, but we also hope to learn through the songs that we sing and through the people that are interviewed and the requests that are shared and even how they're prayed over. You realize that part of the way we do our praying in the morning service and in the evening service is meant to teach you how and what to pray. We're that deliberate in it. We mean to instruct you in all these ways.

And then there's the Wednesday evening Bible study at 7:00 p.m. where we can reason together around God's Word for an hour. There are small group Bible studies for members. And then, of course, there are all the books that we're always giving away tonight and on Wednesday nights. And those books can help you to teach each other through discipling relationships. You can meet up with somebody else.

You don't have to even come to church to complete this. You can continue to help each other through the week as you meet up and pray together and talk together about God's Word. That's how we keep pointing each other to Jesus.

Now, brothers and sisters, if you're struggling with sin this morning, in particular some sin that's hard for you, that you feel deep in the struggle, maybe like drinking too much, or maybe struggling with covetousness over what someone else has.

Or maybe even thoughts of doing harm to yourself, sinful thoughts. The answer we find here in God's Word is not just stop it. It's not just say no. It's not even just read the Bible more and come to church. Those are all good things.

We have to pray to God for God to do this work to continue to change us. This is ultimately supernatural work that is going on in our souls. It's ultimately the Spirit of God that we are absolutely dependent upon. We cannot finally control everything that happens to us. That's not given to us.

But we can pray for God to be at work in us, in our thinking and spiritually. Look here at verse 23. What does Paul say? To be renewed in the spirit of your minds. So the Holy Spirit renews our spirit.

That belief then does lead to behavior, and behavior reveals what we believe. And yet the change that we need is so comprehensive that Paul uses this image here in verse 22 of put off the old self and verse 24 put on the new self. New self. Does that make any sense to you? I mean surely if there's anything that's given in the world since Descartes it's the self, right?

Self. But not according to the Bible. According to the Bible, You have so sinned that God should punish you eternally. There's much you can study about that in Scripture to understand that more. But what that means in shorthand is what you've done that you felt is wrong really is wrong.

It's not just made up thrust on you by your society. It really is wrong. And God will say that finally. But that's not the whole story. In mercy, God sent his only Son to live a life of perfect trust.

The Son of God took on flesh, was incarnate, made a man. Jesus of Nazareth lived a life of perfect love to his heavenly Father and love for others. He lived the life that each one of us should have lived, and then he died on the cross as a sacrifice in the place of all of us who would turn and trust in him. God raised him from the dead. He ascended to heaven and he accepted that sacrifice.

And he calls each one now to repent from our sins and to trust in him, to believe that this sacrifice is sufficient for our own sins and to give ourselves up to him. Friends, this is good news for you today. You can have a new self, a new life. If you want to know more about what this means, we do a study through Mark's gospel. We'd happily do with you.

Find any one of us at the doors on the way out afterwards and ask us about that. We would love to talk to you more about that. All of this, of course, is a follow on from Paul's exhortation, the beginning of chapter four, to walk in a manner worthy. So this exhortation is not just negative, but it's a positive exhortation. Be renewed in the spirit of your mind.

And so put on the new self. Our minds attitudes, our whole self is to be made new, he says. Verse 23 here, this putting on the new cell or renewing the spirit of your minds is a continuous kind of thing. Paul is talking here about the way a Christian's mind continues to be renewed after becoming a Christian. So the beginning of our transformation is definite.

That happens when we're converted. But it continues afterwards until it's complete when we're in His presence. Now the thinking of the Christian is 180 degrees different than what it had been before. And then what so many around us are still thinking today. And this link of thinking and living makes sense.

Paul says that the Gentiles thinking had become futile so their lives had become degraded. Well, friend, if the Holy Spirit has renewed our spirits, the spirits of your minds, then it only makes sense that we'll see the implication of that in our daily lives. He refers to it then as putting on the new self. This is a big deal. I mean, to become a Christian is no slight thing.

It's comprehensive and it's constant. Friends, this is a great change that's symbolized in baptism. The Lord willing, a couple of Sundays we're going to see some baptisms. So if you're a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and you have not been baptized, you should be. We would love to talk to you about that.

Again, talk to any of us at the doors on the way out. But that sign symbolizes going under, burying the old self, and rising to newness of life. It's a symbol, a preview of the bodily resurrection that we trust is coming. This lifelong struggle for the Christian of putting off and putting on is part of what sanctification is. This is part of the growing up process that is the growing up into every way that Paul just exhorts him to up in verse 15 we thought about last week.

This is a battle between the old and the new, the indwelling sin and the new life that God has placed in believers, what Paul talks about at more length in Romans chapter 7. So there is a givenness and a continuingness. Good example of this is Galatians 5:24. We read, We have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. But then Paul says in Colossians 3:5, To put to death what is earthly.

So there is a death that is one time that's happened where our new life, our old life dies, our new life begins. But then there's also a continuous aspect where we are continuing to put on the new, to put on the the new life that God has given us, even as we continue to put to death what is earthly. We see here in verse 24 that Christians are created after the likeness of God. All of this morality is rooted in how God has made us like Himself. So we see at the end of verse 24 that our new self was created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

That's an important phrase. Friends, we've not created ourselves. Again, this is not a meeting of people who are trying to think ourselves into some different space. No, we're a meeting of people whom we realize God has intervened in our lives, and He has given us a new birth. He has recreated us.

We haven't made ourselves in some spiritual version of a public relations makeover. No, God has remade us, and He's remade us for a purpose: to be like Him in true righteousness and holiness. God again and again is said to be upright and just, holy and righteous. And so He's making us to be like that. His people will be like that.

We are to become what we have been created in Christ. And what we are is nothing fake or false, but truly righteous and truly holy in Him, and such righteousness and holiness and truth are fundamental to the ways we Christians are called to live in this very passage of Ephesians. Brothers and sisters, consider the privilege of our calling this. We have been created after the likeness of God. What an amazing truth.

He's not referring to what we look like physically. He's referring to our moral and spiritual selves. Knowing God and reflecting His righteousness and holiness. This is rooted in creation, as we see in Genesis 1. This image was damaged by the fall, but it's being restored in Christ.

He is the one who we're now being re-patterned after. He replaces Adam's ignorance with His knowledge. Adam's sin with Christ's own righteousness. And holiness. You know, unlike a stone, every person is rational.

Every person has a capacity to have relationships and it's spiritual, has a capacity even to know God. But in Christ, we've learned the truth and we've begun to serve God even as Adam and Eve did before the fall. As Christians, we know God. We live as He's made us to live. In fellowship with Him, and in rule over other creatures as his stewards.

We're being remade more and more in his image. So distortions fade. Virtues begin afresh. The Creator's image begins to appear more and more clearly in his creation as you and I walk around as kind of billboards of God. What the one who made this place is like.

It's because this change is a spiritual one that we must give ourselves to prayer as we do. That's why we're given to give time to praying together in our services. We hope to do this again tonight and ask you to come back. I hope that you're setting aside time each day to pray privately and with others. This putting off and putting on is serious spiritual work and we need God's help in it.

It's not the work we can do in our own power. Well, friend, in just a moment we come to the Lord's table. There we will again join together in covenanting with God and each other. We've included an insert in your bulletin that you can take out and keep in your own Bible, an insert of our church covenant. You'll find it there between those last two hymns.

Notice how this covenant concludes.

We will seek by divine aid to live carefully in the world, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, and remembering that as we have been voluntarily buried by baptism and raised again from the symbolic grave, so there is on us a special obligation now to lead a new and holy life. We will work together for the continuance of a faithful evangelical ministry in this Church as we sustain its worship, ordinances, discipline, and doctrines. We will contribute cheerfully and regularly to the support of the ministry, the expenses of the Church, the relief of the poor, and the spread of the gospel through all nations. We will, when we move from this place, as soon as possible, unite with some other church, where we can carry out the spirit of this covenant and the principles of God's kingdom. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all.

Amen. That's what we're about here.

That's what we've always been about here.

Will you join us?

Let's pray.

Lord God, we thank youk for the hope youe give us in Christ. Thank youk for interrupting us in the dead end of sin. Thank youk for helping us to hear the gospel. Thank youk for the gift of repentance and faith. Thank youk for calling us to give ourselves up entirely to youo.

Help us to do that even now by youy Spirit. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.