00:00
00:00
00:01
Transcription
1/0
Well, of course, you know, we're two days out from a brand new year, and new years are often an exciting time, a fresh start, and many people take some time and do a little inventory, do a little bit of looking back, do a little bit of looking forward. perhaps make a few New Year's resolutions, gonna tweak my life in this area, gonna make a change in that area, I'm gonna get more healthy in this New Year, I'm gonna eat better, I'm gonna exercise more, I'm gonna be more disciplined, I'll read more books, I'll watch less TV, or I'm gonna get a handle on my anger this year, or get my finances under control, or be a little bit more diligent in my spiritual disciplines. And of course, absolutely nothing wrong with any of that, but it's hard when we think about self-improvement in those kind of terms and in those areas of our lives to not let that same kind of mentality slip over into how we think about and how we approach our spiritual life. But I want to talk to you this morning about the fact that living in Christ and living for Christ is so radically different from making and all too often, sadly, breaking human resolutions. Living in Christ and living for Christ calls for something far different than making a little tweak here or a resolution over there. When we receive the gift of saving faith in Jesus Christ, and when we offer ourselves to serve the Lord with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind, and all of our strength, we do not embark on a program of self-improvement. The Christian life is not a means for personal improvement. Embracing the saving faith that Christ gives us sets us on a lifelong path of total transformation. What we were is no longer what we are. It's as radically different as the caterpillar in the chrysalis to the butterfly that emerges from it. The New Testament speaks of the newness we have in Christ in so many different ways. If you are in Christ, you have a new mind, you have a new will, you have a new heart, you have a new inheritance, you have a new relationship, a new relationships, you have a new power, you have new knowledge, new wisdom, new perception, new understanding, a new righteousness, a new love, a new desire, a new citizenship, and many, many other new things. Becoming God's child through faith in Jesus Christ does not result in us simply receiving something new. but in actually becoming something new. 2 Corinthians 5.17 tells us, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. The new nature does not get piled up on top of the old nature. We're not some kind of hybrid. We're not old plus new. The old self dies. The new self lives. Galatians 2.20, Paul says, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. If you are in Christ, the new you, the deepest, truest part of who you are, now loves the law of God. You long to fulfill all of God's righteous demands. You love righteousness. You hate sin. You long to be delivered from your unredeemed flesh. You long to be clothed with your new, perfect, glorified body. Yes, yes, sin still resides in our corrupt flesh, and you are not able yet to give a full and a perfect expression of your new nature, but you are a new person, a totally new creation. As we prepare ourselves today to move forward into this new year. I want to call you this morning to consider with me the contrast that Paul paints between life before Christ and life after Christ. What looks different in our life when we surrender ourselves to Jesus Christ? Paul wants us to know that a changed identity demands a changed behavior. So I want you to open your Bibles, please, to Ephesians 4. We're going to be looking at verses 17 through 32. If you want to use one of the ones in the seat rack in front of you, it's page 978. If you're sitting in the front row, it's right behind you. There's Bibles right behind you if you need one. Just want to be sure you have these wonderful words in front of you this morning, because here Paul gives us an inventory with which to measure ourselves and to address how faithfully, how accurately you are living up to the new identity you have in Christ. So let's read God's word and pay attention to what the Holy Spirit is speaking to you this morning through this word. Ephesians 4 verse 17. 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 the hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus. to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbour, for we are members 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 mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 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, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. This is God's holy, living word for us today. Now, this section of Paul's letter begins with a reminder of what our lives looked like before we welcomed Jesus in to take charge of our lives. The call is made there to no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. And I want you to think through that very carefully with me this morning because it's easy to read that and to quickly develop an us, versus them kind of a mindset. And if you think like that, and you read these verses with that mindset, Ephesians 4, 17 through 32, you're going to hear Paul saying something like, don't be like all those nasty, nameless faces out there somewhere, or maybe even worse yet, don't think like, I sure hope the so-and-so is listening to this, or the person sitting next to me really gets that this morning, because no, that is not why these verses are here in the Bible. That is not the way the Holy Spirit applies Scripture to our lives. These verses are up close, and they are very personal. These verses are about you. They're about me. The Holy Spirit is saying, listen up, I'm talking to you. What Paul serves up for us here can broadly be summarized with a phrase that I often remind you of from time to time, never forget what it was like to be lost. Never forget what it was like to be lost. Remember what your life was like before Christ. You were no different then than anyone you know today who still lives apart from Christ. At heart, people today are no different than the people of Paul's day, the Greeks, to which Paul was initially addressing this letter, the Greeks of Paul's day, they prided themselves on their great philosophy, on their politics, on their literature, their art, their science. For the ancient Greeks, the whole notion of salvation consisted mainly in being delivered from the powers of the sinful flesh by human reason. Philosophy was seen as the savior for the Greeks of Paul's time. And I really don't think that's too different than the constant drumbeat that we hear today, the pride of human achievement. It's going on all around us. Pride and human achievement. Remember what it was like to have your mind tied up and occupied with all those kinds of things. Paul calls it futile thinking, foolish speculation. He notes man-made philosophy, pursuing goals that are purely selfish, accumulating things that are strictly temporary, looking for satisfaction in ways that only lead to disappointment. Remember what it was like when your mind was darkened in its understanding? Remember what it was like when ignorance and immorality reigned in your life? When you were separated, when you were alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance in you that resulted from your own hardness of heart? Remember that? Having a stony, a petrified, a callous heart. How eager you were to rush into sin. How willfully determined you were to remain in your sin. How determined you were to reject God and exclude him from your presence. You were spiritually and morally calloused. You were apathetic and insensitive about moral and spiritual things. You were caught in a web of unbridled self-indulgence and undisciplined obscenity. Your conscience was so covered with scar tissue that you were completely insensitive to wrong. There's a story that actually comes from the Greek time in which Paul was writing that really illustrates so fantastically this picture of what our lives were like before we met Christ. The story is told about a boy who stole a fox from a man. Now, I don't know why anyone keeps foxes, but it might have been a pet back then, I don't know. But in any event, the boy that stole the fox inadvertently comes in contact with a man whom he stole the fox from, and to keep his theft from being discovered, the boy sticks the fox inside of his clothing, and he stands there without moving a muscle while the frightened fox tears out all of his vital organs, even at the cost of his own painful death. This boy will not own up to his wrongdoing. And that is such a powerful and a potent picture of our lives before Christ. So as we stand on the brink of this new year, it's very helpful for us to stop, look, take time, inventory, but also to remember how it is that we measure time. in our society. In the Western world, we measure time in quite a different way than they measure it in many of the countries in the Eastern world. In the Western world, we don't count years from a given fixed point and keep moving forward all the time and keep adding a new number to the year as we go farther and farther along. The Jewish calendar does that. The Chinese calendar does that. But in the West, we measure time from a fixed point in the middle. There's a year that we consider an approximation of the year Jesus was born, and we count backwards from that year in a receding series of year. We call that those years before Christ. And then on the other side of that, as we move forward and in increasing accumulation of years, AD, in the year of our Lord, we count Christ's birth as the centerpiece of human history. Jesus' birth is the dividing line of history. But, Jesus and the way Jesus comes to us is more than a dividing point in the way we outline or chronologize history. Jesus is a personal dividing point in the life of everyone who is saved by him. before Christ. We were greedy to practice every kind of impurity, the text says. We were thinking our own way, we were doing our own thing, we were pursuing our own destiny, cut off from God. That is B.C. But thank God. Thank God there is an after picture as well, starting in verse 20. Verse 20 is the turning point in our text. But you did not learn Christ in this way. You did not learn Christ in this way. Welcome to the school of Christ. Welcome to those who have, quote-unquote, learned Christ, according to the text. Those who have heard Him, and I just want to point out, as much as I appreciate the literal word-for-word translation that we use, the English Standard Version, they don't get it quite right here in this verse, and God bless the NASB, Brian. This verse says those who have learned Christ, those who have heard Him, not heard about Him. There's such a dramatic difference between hearing Christ and hearing about Christ. So in the school of Christ, they've learned Christ, they've heard Him, and they've been taught in Him. They're called to put off their old self and to put on the new self. The old self is the exact opposite of the new self. The old self is self-centered and futile. The new self is Christ-centered and purposeful. Now, when the text speaks of to learn Christ or learning Christ, it's talking about salvation. It's talking about a one-time, unrepeatable act in our life in which God moves in on us. We receive the gift of saving faith in Christ. We commit ourselves to love the Lord, to follow Him, heart, soul, mind, and strength. I need to ask you that this morning. Is that you? Have you heard Christ's call? Have you responded to Christ's call? Have you been taught by Him to come and know and to love and to hold on to Him and His truth? If so, Then there are things our text tells us that you will do. You will put off your old self. You're going to lay aside all those lists there of your former manner of life, like stripping off old dirty clothes. The old self is worn out. It's useless. It doesn't fit anymore. The old self is corrupt. through its deceitful desires. Don't steal. Don't let corrupting talk come out of your mouths. Put away bitterness, wrath, slander, clamor, angry, malice. In short, don't grieve the Holy Spirit. And then we're told in verse 23 to be renewed in the spirit of your minds. Be renewed in the spirit of your minds. Now, unlike that single, unrepeatable moment of salvation in our life, this is not a one-time action. This is an ongoing, daily, continual work of the Holy Spirit in the child of God. Through God's Word and through prayer, we gain the mind of Christ. And through the mind of Christ, we live the life of Christ. So be renewed in the spirit of your minds and put on the new self instead of the dirty clothes of the old self. Wear the clothes of the lifestyle that matches who you are on the inside. You know, let me just challenge your thinking a little bit. The only reliable evidence that you have that you are a saved person is not your memory of some past experience of receiving Christ, but it is a present life that reflects Christ. If you don't see any evidence that Christ is working in your life, it's time to stop and take stock. and look inside and say, do I really belong to Christ? Have I really given myself to Him? Because the new self is meant to be put on and to take charge of our life. A new self that's created after the likeness of God. A new self that's marked out by true righteousness and holiness. Put away falsehood, the text tells us. Speak the truth. Speak the truth with your neighbor. We're told elsewhere in Scripture that liars will not inherit the kingdom of God. Now that does not mean those who occasionally lapse into telling a lie, but this is speaking rather of a person who lives a continual lifestyle of lying. A person who is a regular daily part of his or her life shows themselves to be a child of Satan. and not a child of God. So speak the truth." And it says, be angry, but do not sin. Yes, have a righteous indignation and anger against evil. Be angry at whatever is done against the Lord, whatever is done against His will, whatever is done against His purposes. Hate evil. Abhor injustice. Abhor immorality and ungodliness of every sort. But anger that is self-serving, anger that is self-defensive, anger that is resentful of what has been done against you, is sin. Anger that is selfish and undisciplined and vindictive is sinful. It has no place, even for a moment, in the life of the Christian. But beware here, because there's a danger. Even righteous anger can turn into bitterness and resentment and self-righteousness. So Paul says, don't let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil. Don't carry this anger with you all the time. Yes, be angry over sin, but put that away and move forward in a freshness as you welcome the coming of a new day. So speak the truth, be angry but do not sin, and then stop stealing and start sharing. Instead of stealing, work hard so that you have something that you can give to someone else who's in need and bless them. Be a blessing to them. Talk in a way that builds other people up, a way that gives grace to those who hear you. The words corrupting talk in verse 29, they have a very vivid word picture underneath of them. The word for corrupting really refers to rotting vegetables and rotting fruit or other spoiled food. Now when I was in college, just a couple years ago, I of course like many was working hard to pay a lot of it myself and I moved out of the dormitory after my first year. I found a home in the college town in which I was going to college in which I could rent a room for $17 a week. Wow. What a deal. I mean, it was filthy and it was a pig pen. It was the home of a widower and his adult son who the deceased wife slash mother must not have really gotten the message across about cleanliness and standard. I mean, the kitchen, there was like piles and piles of dirty dishes, but I didn't care. It was $17 a week and I knew it wasn't for the rest of my life. And the son, Max, Max was his name, like the dog in the Grinch. And Max had a van and he delivered produce. And occasionally I would have something and I would ask Max if it would be possible for me to use his van to do something, to go somewhere. And he was very kind and agreeable about that. But you get in that van. and the smell of the rotten vegetables. I mean, he didn't clean it out. There was stuff that had probably been in there for months. That's... You got the picture now, right? That's what Paul is saying about our words. Don't let that rotten stuff come out of your mouth. Get rid of that. Rotten words, foul talk should never proceed from the mouth of a Christian. It is totally out of character with the new self that we are given to put on. Be kind to one another, Paul says. Be compassionate. Be tenderhearted. Forgive one another as God has forgiven you in Jesus Christ. What does that mean? It means clear the accounts. Clear the books. There's an empty ledger column between us and God. There needs to be an empty ledger column between us too. We don't carry past hurts around. Don't carry any unforgiveness from 2018 into 2020. 19. Get that taken care of. Deal with it. Put on the new self, Paul says. Don't walk around looking like and smelling like death. It's interesting that in the Roman Empire, so at the time when Paul was writing, there was a custom in some cases that if you murdered someone, your punishment was to strap the dead body of the victim onto your back. you would be forced to carry the dead body of your victim. There'd be no way to get that off you. And obviously it wouldn't take too long for that to have an effect on you, would it? I mean, think of the dramatic effect of not only the decaying flesh, but all the infestation of insects. carrying around that death, smelling like death. But you know what? All too many of us carry around death with us. We carry the old man, that rotting old man. We've got to get rid of him. So if you've learned Christ, if you've heard Christ, if you've been taught in Christ, if you love the truth of Christ, what's the sense of carrying that dead man of your old self around on your back or in your heart? That's the thought I want you to leave with this morning. And I want to take some time to just pause in the Lord's presence, you and God, one-on-one, quietly, asking what in this section of scripture, what is here this morning that you want to impress on me this morning, Lord? I'm just going to take a few moments. I know silence is sometimes uncomfortable for people. We're not used to it, but we need some quiet time. And Jesus tells this wonderful parable in scripture about how but the seed of the word is sown and some of it falls on a hard ground. Some of it falls on a ground where Satan just comes in and snatches it right away. I don't want Satan to come in and snatch this word of God away from you this morning. So just pause in the Lord's presence and you take some time with him and this text in front of you on your lap and ask, what is it, Lord, you want me to know and do today about putting on the new self? So let's pray. Lord God, we thank you that you've made the new life possible in Christ. We pray that as a people, we would experience and express all the blessings and all the benefits that come to us because of what Christ has done, because of what Christ has given us. Forgive us for those ways of which we still cling to the tattered rags of that decaying old man. Lord, help us to put that away. Lord, help us to be done with that, to be able to put on the new self, to be renewed in our mind, and to not grieve the Holy Spirit. Lord, help us to help one another in that. We need each other to encourage us. And we pray, God, that you would just continue, Lord, to move among us with power so that we would know the reality and the joy of that. It's not a punishment, it's a freedom. It's a joy, it's a gift. Lord, help us to take advantage of every last bit of that that you make available to us. In Jesus' name, amen.
Putting On the New Self
Those who have "learned Christ", "heard Christ" and been "taught Christ" are called to put off their old self and put on the new self.
Identifiant du sermon | 1231181412450 |
Durée | 29:17 |
Date | |
Catégorie | Service du dimanche |
Texte biblique | Éphésiens 4:17-32 |
Langue | anglais |
Ajouter un commentaire
commentaires
Sans commentaires
© Droits d'auteur
2025 SermonAudio.