Ephesians 4, 17 through 24, hear the Word of God. This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart, who being past feeling have given themselves over to lewdness to work all uncleanness with greediness. but you have not so learned Christ. If indeed you have heard him and have been taught by him as the truth is in Jesus, that you put off concerning your former conduct the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lust, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness. Let's pray and ask God to bless this word. Our Father, we thank you for this portion of your inspired, infallible, inerrant word. We pray that by your Holy Spirit, you would help us to understand what is taught here and that you would apply it to our hearts and lives for your glory. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. So we continue now in our walking through the book of Ephesians trying to understand it and to understand it in many ways as a book that has a high emphasis and a great balance of our understanding of what is Calvinism. And so the book of Ephesians like most of Paul's letters has and begins with what might be called a doctrinal section. And when he does that, he always follows that with a practical section or an application section. And he does that here as well. And in one sense, you can say that the application section begins at the beginning of chapter four. because he begins to beseech them to do something. At the beginning of chapter four in verse one, I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called. And then as he's doing that, particular we know that he brings up in the doctrine of the church would he he had already introduced in the previous chapter in terms of the covenant but he expands that doctrine but he's doing it in a way of application so that he talks about how they should be, yes, walking worthy of their calling, which he's already referred to in the previous chapters, but the spirit in which they do that with all lowliness and gentleness, with long suffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace. And so what we saw last week is something of that unity which is true of the church, that is supposed to be preserved by the members and the people of the church, but which a special responsibility for is given those who are called to minister the word in the church. but those that minister the word in the church are to equip the rest of the congregation, basically, as we were seeing in verse 12, their job is for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry. The saints do the work of ministry, not the ministers as such, but the saints, and then the whole body is supposed to be built up. And then he begins to talk more about the distinctiveness of individuals and concludes in verse 16 that the whole body, the whole church, is to be joined and knit together by what? Well, by that which every, by the effective working by which every part does it share, that which every joint supplies. So it is the work of the individuals working together to join and keep joined together the church. Now, he's made that a kind of a first part of his practical application. And then in verse 17, he continues with application by really going back to verse one in chapter four, in some ways, talking about the Christian's walk. Now, you know, I mean, you can walk with a limp, or you can walk in various ways, and some people don't use their calves when they walk, and other people walk in other different ways, and people have distinctive walks. You can recognize. I remember being on campus at college and seeing someone a distance away, and you can see who they are, not because you recognize them, but you recognize their walk. Well, this is not that kind of walk. This is how you live as a Christian, how you progress, how you move along as a Christian. And so just as in verse one in chapter four, he had said, I beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called. Here in verse 17, he says, this I say therefore and testify in the Lord that you should no longer walk. So here's a negative about the walk with that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk. Now, there's several things we need to recognize here as we move forward. One, he's building all of this on his doctrinal teaching earlier in the first three chapters. In verse one of chapter four, he says, I therefore beseech you. It's based on something. There's a therefore, it's a response to what has gone before. And when he comes back and says in verse 17, this I say therefore and testify in the Lord, he's going back to that teaching. And it is on the ground of that that he says what he says here. And then what he says here that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, he is making the negative side of things on the one hand, and that's important. And don't we hear so often that we just shouldn't talk about negatives? People don't like that, people aren't encouraged by that. You're gonna step on somebody's toes if you do that. Stepping on toes did not seem to be ever one of Paul's worries. Applying the truth did seem to be one of his concerns all of the time. And so he's going back in a negative way and there's an important reason for it. an important reason in terms of applying the doctrine he has already taught. And it is that some people feel like in terms of the practical application of Christianity, and especially in churches that like ours emphasize the objective finished work of Jesus Christ, some people feel like there's nothing left for me to do. Wow, how glad I am that Christ has already done it all, and so I have no responsibility left. They consider that, yes, they were dead in trespasses and sin, as chapter two speaks about, but in verse four of that chapter, they read, but God, who is rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, and goes on made us alive together. with Christ in the middle of chapter five. And raised us up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. So some Christians look at the definitive work of Jesus Christ and begin to make some bad applications. And so Paul is making correct applications over against incorrect applications. So some of the incorrect applications might be to say, not so much in terms of something Paul has already said in Ephesians, but things he says in Romans and Galatians and elsewhere, they may make incorrect conclusions about the law of God. They recognize they're justified by faith alone, in Christ alone, on the basis of what Christ has done. And they read places that seem to say that I'm no longer under the bondage of the law, and they conclude that they don't have to keep God's law any longer. Now we're not going to be saying in opposition to that that keeping God's law somehow keeps us in our relationship with Christ. It doesn't do that. That's by grace alone through faith alone still. But the idea that the law has nothing to say to us as Christians now is incorrect. or the idea that the law is only useful to us as Christians now in an evangelistic sense to point non-Christians to their danger. and to call them out of that to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. There is more concern about obedience than that. One of the other things comes up that Paul is countering by what he says here is the idea that we should let go and let God. God has regenerated us as Christians. And so instead of making any kind of effort and endeavor and work and laboring, some of those words are words Paul uses in a positive sense, but they would say instead of those kinds of things, let's go, let's let go. let God do it, let God by His Spirit working in us lead us and guide us so that our guidance is by the direct work of the Holy Spirit in their thought. Not so much the scriptures themselves, nor particularly commandments positive and negative in the scriptures, but just that the Holy Spirit who indwells us will guide us. And if we just let God do it and stop making any effort, whatever, that everything would be fine. And so Paul starts off in verse 17 with this negative to say, no, actually there's this change that has been made in you from being dead in trespasses and sins to being made alive in Jesus Christ. And this change that has been made in you, very real, still does leave you with something to do. With regard to what you were and what you would naturally have done, you have to avoid going back and continuing to do those things that you did before. Don't walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk. Well, that's what they had done. Go back to chapter two and look at those first three verses. Just remember the doctrinal teaching there. And you, he made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked. So there was their previous walk, but isn't that over now? And the answer is, Yes, but there's an effort to be made in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience. So according to the course of this world, according to the devil who works in the sons of disobedience among whom We also once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others." That's what we once were. That's a description of what we once were, and it was our nature. It was our nature to be children of wrath. just as they still are children of wrath. And he basically says, so don't walk that way anymore. He says, you once walked that way that was natural for you. And he's basically recognizing and helping us to recognize that the sinful walk is still natural for us in many ways. Now Paul deals with that in Romans chapter seven, the second half of the chapter. And basically, while he says that, while he recognizes that we have a tension, it's a tension that comes from the fact that though we are the new people that Ephesians chapter two talks about, made alive now, we are new people, a new creation, though that is true, that old nature still tries to pull us into sin. And Paul is honest with us about that, and he says, so don't walk that way. You used to walk that way. That was natural for you. Don't walk that way now. Now, it's interesting to look at the way Paul expands the walk of the Gentiles. They walked in the futility of their mind. I wanna just kind of abbreviate that and say part of the problem for the Gentiles was their lack of understanding, so their mind was futile. We see wording like that in the book of Romans in the first chapter, but in describing the non-Christian, so here it is again. They walk in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened. So that's very much a parallel phrase. Their mind's not straight and right with regard to recognition of the truth. Their understanding of those truths is darkened. This is the non-Christian. He's saying it again about them, but he's saying don't walk that way anymore. He goes on and says that with them walking in the futility of their mind and having their understanding darkened, they were alienated from the life of God. There's a big problem. Underlying that in some ways is their lack of understanding, their lack of recognition, their lack of acceptance of truth, but it leaves them alienated from the life of God. They are not reconciled to God. They are not at peace with God. Romans chapter five would put it, they were enemies while they were yet enemies, while we were yet enemies. He talks about that alienation and look at why. Because of the ignorance that is in them. So again, their lack of understanding, their lack of knowledge, their lack of acceptance of the truth. It should be interesting to us to note how much weight Paul puts on the understanding and on knowledge. And then he goes on into that same verse and says the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart. Now the heart is not usually in the Bible primarily seen as an organ of understanding and mental capacity and stuff like that, but more our response, what we love. So there was a blindness to the heart because the heart was intentionally closed off to God. And when the heart closed off to God, their understanding was closed off to the truths of God. Now that's why the Gentiles, the non-Christians, walked the way they did in the sin that they did. Look at verse 19 about these same people, who being past feeling, not only past understanding, but beyond that past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness. And how did they work all uncleanness? with greediness. They were greedy for their sinful pleasures because they had closed their hearts to God and their minds to God. And so Paul changes in verse 20 to reinforce why they shouldn't walk the way that had been natural for them to walk. Verse 20, but you have not so learned Christ. If indeed you have heard him, and again, we're getting back to the mind through the ears in a sense, but you've heard him and have been taught by him as the truth is in Jesus. So that the effect, or at least part of the effect of being raised up and being saved and being made alive together with Christ, part of the effect of that is a reorientation of the mind and of the understanding and underneath that the heart as well. But if your understanding of the truth is turned into faith and belief of the truth as it is in Jesus, then you were called to do something else, that you put off concerning your former conduct, the old man, which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts. If nothing is done, if there is no action of putting off, Then that old man grows more corrupt according to the deceitful lust. And what appeared as a weak Christian early and an immature and baby Christian comes to be without that putting off work and action, which is assigned to us, commanded to us as a responsibility, that Christian becomes an ugly thing. Not just a Christian that is lacking, but a Christian that has grown in the wrong direction, grown in the direction of corruption. according to deceitful lusts. So where's to put that off? You and I are to put off the sinful actions that either once did characterize our actions and our walk, or at least before coming to Christ characterized our natures. We may have grown up with parents who chastened us, who taught us, who were careful with us. We may have never walked in any major way in those sinful paths of sinful desires, but the sinful desires were there. And so we're to put off that old man which is corrupted in its understanding and its heart in the direction of central desire to put that off before it becomes more corrupt. So how do you do that? That's a part of being practical as well. And how we do that is not going to be surprising in terms of the context of what Paul has been saying. He's been saying the problem was the mind in many ways and underneath it, the heart. And he now, and he says, that's not how you learn Christ. Your mind, your understanding has changed. And so we look at verse 23. And he says, be renewed in the spirit of your mind. Don't be that old person, but be renewed. How, where? In the spirit of your mind. Now, there are lots of places that we could go to for parallels to this. I certainly think that Romans 6, 7, and 8 taken together are that kind of thing. But I want you to go with me to where Paul in Romans begins his practical application section in chapter 12. So turn to Romans 12 for a moment. Keep your finger here. Where he begins is in chapter 12 verse 1. There's his practical section beginning. The first part through chapter 11 has been largely doctrinal. And basically almost the only commandments given in those first 11 chapters in the middle of chapter 6 are paralleled by what we see in verse one. And so I want us to look at verses one and two and then focus on some of two. I beseech you therefore, brethren. Do you see something of an echo of what Paul has said in Ephesians four, one and 17? I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that he's been talking to them about, that you take some action, in this case, that you present your bodies, yourselves, a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And then the next thing he says is, and do not be conformed to this world. no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk is the same thing. So he's paralleling that. Then how is it that we're supposed to not be conformed to this world? Well, the idea there is not, we'll be like the hippies. You know, they're not conformed to the rich materialistic people. This is in the 60s and early 70s. Not conformed to those people. So they're going to be non-conformist, right? They all had the same long hair, drove the same Volkswagens with the same flowers on the sides of the Volkswagens. They were conformist. They were just conforming to a different worldliness. But this isn't that. not conform to worldliness, or to the walk of the Gentiles that you wish to walk in, do not be conformed to the world. And then there's the opposite side of it, the flip side, but be transformed. Now that but be transformed is echoed in Ephesians chapter four, in verse 24, the last verse for our text for tonight, which he had said, put off the old man, verse 24, and that you put on the new man, which was created according to God in true righteousness and holiness. The new man is created, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing to do further on your part. You're to put on the new man. or you are to be transformed, or maybe better is be being transformed. How? In Romans 12 too, by the renewing of your mind. It's sad to me when I run into Christians that don't want to learn doctrine, that don't want to learn the teachings of scripture, that don't want to have their minds renewed. But Paul said there, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. He says here in Ephesians 4.23, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind. There is that intellectual component I'm sorry for those of you who are anti-intellectuals. I don't know that any of you are, but yeah, our minds have to be changed. In fact, what faith is is believing not what seems so to us in a worldly sense, but what God says to us. That's what faith is, believing what God says rather than what man says or what we want to think. so that there needs to be some work at the renewing of our minds. And that work is accomplished largely by the Word of God, by studying it, by hearing it taught and preached, by reading the expositions of it by other people. but have your mind renewed by thinking through, by meditating on the word of God, not just reading it, not just memorizing it, but thinking through, what does it say? What does it mean? How am I to understand this? And then of course, how are we to apply this? So both the putting off and the putting on, putting off of the old man and putting on the new man are to be done largely by the renewing of our minds, by studying and coming to an understanding of the scriptures and believing those things. Otherwise, we're going to be sucked back in to what we once were. Not completely, if we're truly converted, we won't be completely sucked back in, but there will be too much corruption. too much conformity to the world, too little of being transformed, too little of living in and out of the new man which was created according to God in true righteousness and holiness. You know, if we're going to have applied to our lives true righteousness and holiness, It's going to be in conformity to the revelation of the word of God and the commandments of God in his word. How do we know? How are we to know? How it is we ought to live? And the answer is not, I have a pilot sitting back here, Jim. It's not what some pilots do or certainly used to, fly by the seat of your pants. You know, just have a feel for it. It's also not flying autopilot, right? But it is flying according, living according, walking according to the teachings of the word of God. And that's what we're called to. And Paul is very explicit about that in making application of the doctrine. He's not divorcing his practical teaching from the doctrine. He is applying the doctrines. What's true of you? Well, what's true is you're a new person. But what's also true is there's a remnant of the old man. And that must be dealt with, not ignored. If we don't deal with it, if we don't think about it, if we try to ignore it, we are giving power to the old man rather than as we're told elsewhere, crucifying it, putting to death the old man, mortifying the old nature. Those are the things we're called to do. And much of that is done through building up our faith, building up our believing of the right things, which is by taking the word of God, hearing it, thinking it through, meditating on it, understanding it, and then living as though those things are true because they are. Because the non-Christian doesn't have those truths as markers for his living and his walk, and so doesn't live by those. but the Christian is called to renew his mind and put on the new man. There's a walking in fellowship with God that only happens through faith, walking in conformity to God and in obedience toward him, but in love for him, all of which happens through faith. Unless we believe in him, unless we believe the truth that scripture says, we don't really know what it is to know and have in our lives and our hearts the life of God. We can be, if we're not careful, alienated from the life of God. Now true Christians never will be completely that, but at times we may be more of that. than we mean to be. In fact, some of us tonight may say, if we're paying attention, you know, I've been walking that way too much. I've let the old man be powerful in my life still. When he's supposed to be crucified and dead and put off, and God's done his part in bringing me to new life and creating me anew in Jesus Christ, but I've let myself slip back too much. Do you say that? Well, the remedy is to come back to Christ, to apply your faith, to renew your mind, to say, the things that count are not the things I've been investing in. The things that count are not the things I've been making priorities lately. I need to renew my priorities. I need to put aside fleshly, worldly things and put on love for God, obedience, true righteousness and holiness, by coming close to God, by hearing what he has to say to me in his word. There's practical application. Put off the old man. You've got a task to do. Be renewed in the spirit of your mind. It's a task to do. It doesn't just happen. You know if you sleep at night with a Bible under your pillow, you don't wake up in the morning knowing more of it. Nor if you sleep during Sunday school in the sermon, do you wake up knowing more of it. There's a task to do. Invest in that. Invest in the renewal of your mind to be transformed, to put on the new man. That's our calling. It's a task to do, put on that new man. Yes, it's alive, it's created, it's there. Don't ignore it. Put it on. Wear that. Walk that way. There's part of the practical nature of the Christian calling. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we confess that too much of the time we fall into worldliness. We fall back into the Gentile walk. Some who may have not walked in that way as they were growing up and have been converted and yet becoming older and more mature seem to be maturing in the corruption of this world. Help us all to be putting off the old man. and putting on the new, being transformed, not conformed, but transformed by the renewing of our minds for your glory eternally. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.