Remaining standing, turning to Ephesians chapter 4 as we come down to get a further explanation of what it means to be new in Christ. As Paul has already called us to unity in the church, power in the presence of God, the Lord equipping us for ministry, growing up into the fullness of Christ. And now he gives us clear instructions as to the Christian life to follow. Ephesians chapter 4, Pew Bible 978, if you're using those, beginning at verse 17 to the end of the chapter, hear God's word. And now this, I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But this 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 corrupted 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 of you speak truth with one another, with his neighbor, for we are members of one 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. May the Lord apply these words to our hearts and lives. Please be seated. As we turn to this passage, we're looking at the first part of the scripture reading, beginning at verse 17. And I've untitled it, The Old Life and the New, on the reverse of the worship page. You'll once again find an outline if you wish to follow along or take some notes. Shall we pray? Deliver us, Lord, from our old lives. We might live for you in Jesus' name. Amen. What do you think of when you think of the term addiction? Addiction. Well, usually you will think of perhaps alcohol or drugs, some kind of substance dependency, as has been said. And yet when you think about it and when you look at this passage in a minute, you'll see that addiction is really any harmful behavior pattern that demands a person's full attention. The problem is that we are addicted to sin, that we don't seem to be able to get rid of it in any aspect of it on our own. And it's true. Anything and everything in the world is a potential addiction. It's also been described as and intense worship of every or any part of the whole creation rather than worshiping God. Our attention, our focus, our consuming passion ought to be worship of God, service of Him, delighting and walking in His holiness. And when we don't have that, we think, how am I going to fill this emptiness? And we seek to fill it with all manner of idols and dependencies and addictions and patterns of life, patterns of life. And yet, because there are so many of these false gods or distracting addictions, everybody picking their favorite one, the whole world is degenerated into chaos in sin. One thing and the other claiming our attention, one thing after the other. The church, however, is different. The church is to be unified, not fragmented, by the singularity and orderly pattern of love. by the worship of the one true God in Jesus Christ. We are to have come into conformity to Jesus Christ as a new creation together that promotes true unity. You might at first wonder how this matter of new life in Christ follows so hard on to the exhortations about unity in the body of Christ, which we've seen in several weeks time now. Having seen the gifts of the Holy Spirit, having realized that we should speak the truth in love, well, there's one hint as to how it works. The whole body joined and held together, it says in verse 16, by every joint with which it is equipped, when every part is doing its work, it grows in love. It grows in love, but notice it also grows in holiness. We are talking here about this very deep and important matter of sanctification. of being separate from the world in one body but also separate from the world in one way of life. Thus he says here in verse 17, I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do. There is a way of walking. It is a mess. It is horrible. It is depraved. And finding here the next few verses one of the most stark and compact descriptions of the depths of human depravity. We will then come out on the other side with a great desire, I trust, to flee from the worldly patterns that we see around us. No longer walking as the Gentiles do. This is the old life. We see it in verses 17 to 19, summarized by the Apostle Paul as he begins by saying, it is in the futility of their minds. Now this is a very common expression in Paul and Romans 8 and other places but it has its background really in the Old Testament as originally Adam was to keep the garden and till it and the earth would cooperate and it wouldn't be filled with toil and frustration and sweat and death. Life is so frustrating these days that as the wisdom literature reminds us in the book of Ecclesiastes, sometimes it seems like we're getting nowhere fast. We spin our wheels. The rivers, as Ecclesiastes 1 says, flow around and around, and what purpose is there in it all? Vanity, vanity, you know the expression. All is vanity. But the New Testament, Paul particularly in Romans 9, also picks up on this word and says, that the whole creation has been subjected by God to a futility that shows what happens when you leave him and when you make any part of the creation or yourself into a different false God. This insight of the new covenant shows us that in Jesus Christ alone are those bonds of futility broken and that cycle of frustration set aside. I used to observe, and I still do, that we can't seem to get rid of fads. And I don't mean just hula hoops or yo-yos. I mean, I suppose those were fads too. I'm sure most of you remember that one. But we also have fad diets. Just pick one. And the strange thing I find is that everybody keeps changing their minds. We thought salt was bad. Well, maybe it's not as bad as we thought. Now it's not so bad. I don't know. I can't keep track of it all. Trying to decide what you should abstain from. And then you find out that, oh, that was a myth. Oh, now the scientists have changed their mind. Now it's not really all that bad. Now there are good carbs. Now there are bad carbs. Now the cholesterol. And now, you know, I just, it's just an endless babble of confusion. People trying to figure out how in the world do we end up saving our lives in some fashion or other. Now it turns out that we probably are pretty much. having to be restricted to, I guess, a balanced diet, something like that, that recognizes that the whole creation groans and nothing's perfect anyway. You know what I'm talking about. We vainly try to find secret keys, things that will solve the problem. And suddenly we come up with a new secret key. Oh, nobody's thought of this. Take a bunch of vitamin D or vitamin C or vitamin A. I can't remember. You see the point? Just pick one and go with it and do it with your whole heart and yet It never seems to get you anywhere. Some of you are dog people and some of you are cat people. I happen to be a dog person if I am any kind of person at all. But have you ever seen a dog, I don't think, I don't know cats do this or not, but have you ever seen a dog get completely twisted up by seeing its tail and deciding it needs to catch it? And you have a dog, what is that? Where did that come from? And he chases his tail, and of course, because he's chasing his own tail, he never catches up to it, I don't think. Maybe some do, I don't know. It spoils the illustration if he does. The point is that you can't get anywhere chasing yourself around. You can't just catch yourself and wrestle yourself into submission. It's like a dog chasing his tail trying to solve the sin problem with one solution after another. Suppose you are on a sinking ship. Suppose the captain says, all right, there's a bunch of water in the bilges. I want you men to go down there and I want you to bail it out. And I'm giving you, each one of you, a thimble about this big. Okay? Get busy, men, let's go. Come on, come on, there's no time to waste. And you go down there, a little tiny thimble, and you start trying to bail out the bilges of the ship and you're thinking, This is not going to work. This ship is sinking, and there is nothing that I can do about it. People say, I'm just so tired of being angry all the time. And it's interesting Christian counselors have observed that the world has two different opposite answers to this problem. How are you going to deal with your anger? I've heard it very recently, both sides of this question. On the one hand, you're told to simply control yourself, just Hold on to it. Don't say it, you know, when you feel like saying something. And then the opposite is, you're going to explode with anger if you don't let it out. So if you're angry, spill it. Go ahead. Dump it out. And in both cases, you will find you're not going to get rid of your anger. You can't do that yourself. You can't chase your own tail. You can't bail out your own sinking life with thimbles. It just doesn't work. You are trapped. You are caught in the futility of their minds. So the real problem is not something in the world that we have to promote to something that will save our lives. The real solution is not something that we can do on our own. The real problem, as you know, is our sin and ourselves. the futility of our minds by nature. He continues on and he says, and this is pitiful, 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. This is pitiful description of helplessness. They fall down, as the prophet says, and there is no one to help. 1 John 2 says that the darkness has blinded our eyes so that we do not know where we are going. Deuteronomy says at midday, as a punishment for sin and the breaking of the covenant, you will grope around like a blind man in the dark. You will be unsuccessful in everything you do. Day after day, you will be oppressed and robbed with no one to rescue you. It is hopeless. And we can't live that way, the world says. We have to have some kind of hope. And God says, you don't have any hope. There is no hope. You are darkened in your understanding and alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them. You must no longer walk, as the Gentiles do, in futility, in darkness, and in alienation. What is alienation? It means to be separated off from God, to be a stranger to God, to be ignorant and in hard-heartedness against God. And this ignorance is willful. It is born out of hatred for God. This is a depressing scenario, but it occurs in the scripture in every book of the Bible describing the horrible conundrum of sin. Have you ever been estranged from a family member, maybe a cousin or an aunt or an uncle or perish the thought a husband or a wife or a child or a brother or a sister that you have had a fight with in some distant time in the past and you never talk to them. You're a stranger to them. Maybe you have something against them that you just cannot let go. This is a kind of an enmity that becomes a barrier between yourself and that person. This is the idea of being alienated from the life of God due to this willful ignorance and it comes from a hardness of heart. Now our hearts begin hard. But the scripture says, the longer our hearts remain hard, the worse it gets. Romans chapter 1 says it this way, though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but became futile. There it is again in their thinking. And their foolish hearts were darkened later on in the chapter. Therefore, God gave them up to the lusts of their heart, to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies amongst themselves. And we read Isaiah, keep on hearing, do not understand, keep on seeing. but do not perceive. John 12, he has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, lest they see with their eyes and understand with their heart and turn and I would heal them, quoting Isaiah. Of those in Jesus' day who did not believe in him, the hardness of heart that is in each of us, we cannot change. The hardness of heart results then in this kind of impurity that Paul is going to describe in very vivid terms. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. These little fad diets seem a little bit humorous in a way. but they illustrate something deeper about the human psyche that is deadly. What we might see as kind of an amusing observation of the foibles of humanity now begins to unveil the obsessive depths of our depraved hearts. And that's what he's talking about here, having become callous, having not cared any longer about sin. What used to be so horrible to conceive, now becomes something not only that we tolerate, but we actually celebrate it. Origen in his day said that Rome had become so corrupt that adultery and harlotry did not violate good manners. Isn't that us? It's now bad manners to condemn any sin, no matter how horrible it is. Homosexuality, abortion, any other kind of immorality, all driven by some kind of a greed, and everybody wants approval of what they do. Pornography, preying on the desire to soak in desire and to simply indulge ourselves in pleasure without any boundaries, and then it floods over into our lives. We seek to control people by the law of the land, and sometimes those laws are still in the books, It doesn't work, so people say, forget about it. Just drop all the laws because these laws are not helping. They're not controlling human actions. What, after all, can unchain the human soul? We have become prisoners, it says, in effect, given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. Evil desires of all sorts. I researched the idea of addiction and found that there are not only drug addiction programs or sexual addiction programs, but there is such a thing as gambling anonymous, overeating anonymous, narcotics anonymous, emotions anonymous, yes, alcohol anonymous, others. Well, I suppose we could say we are addicted to sex and recreation and health and work and pleasure and so forth. It doesn't help to explain it all as a disease. Where's the antibiotic? Where's the drug? Where's the flu shot? Many things might in themselves be good if we receive them with thanksgiving, as Paul says to Timothy. Use the good gifts you're given, but don't worship them. And at the same time, we feel the tug of all those things around us that the devil seems to be using to get our attention and to make us slaves to those things. Advertising. always observed how it's not there to sell you things that you need, but to make you feel like you need anything that they're selling, right? You hear the advertisement, I never knew I had to have that. Now I have to have it. Let me go out now. Hey, punch it. It's on Amazon. Free shipping. Just like that. Just get whatever you want and anything that comes and we get it and we think it's great for the moment and then it doesn't really satisfy us for long. We're addicted to cheating in school, to bad-mouthing our friends, to worry about our jobs and our clothes and our future. And we are overcome with greed, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. And this is a description of the old life. This is the way you would be were it not for the grace of God. In fact, this is what you were. Is this the way you want to continue to be? Is this the way you want to be? This is what some people will say yes to. This is exactly what I want to be. And the Christian is to say, no, it is not what I want to be. And therefore in verse 17, I testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility, this emptiness, this vanity of their minds that leads to such destruction. I love the fact that this passage greatly achieves a climax in verse 20, where it says, this is what you were, now this is not the way you learned Christ. Notice that it doesn't say this is not the way you learned about holiness, which of course is true. But how you learn holiness is to learn Christ. To learn Christ himself, to have a union with Christ through faith that says, I no longer am what I used to be. I have been crucified with Christ. This is not the way you learned Christ. If you learn Christ, you are not stuck in that endless cycle of futility. It's been said that people who try to reform their own lives are just rearranging the garbage. It's true. You're just taking one piece of garbage and putting it over here and you never get rid of it. You just substitute something else for it. Garbage in, garbage out. I think it's an old programming saying, as a matter of fact, but you might argue it's the same thing with life. You put garbage in and that's all you've got. What are you going to get out of yourself? Garbage in, garbage out. Assuming in verse 21 that you have heard about him and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus. Now this assuming is the word since, sometimes translated if, but it's a stronger word than that. It means since you have heard about him. Since, as Colossians says in the parallel, you have laid aside your old self with its evil practices. Since, as Romans 6 says, your old self was crucified with him. And since, as Galatians says, I have been crucified with Christ, have nothing to do with the old man. He is going into decay. Can you imagine? A dead corpse, a rotting corpse is out there in the graveyard. How'd you like to visit that graveyard and dig up those old bones and say, haha, life. Ridiculous, right? Once you have put off the old man, because it says you have heard about him and were taught on him as the truth is in Jesus, you have been taught to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires. This is an expression that means to take off clothing. to take off your clothes and put on a new set of clothes. I had a bathrobe for about 10 years. I loved that bathrobe. But it got, as my wife would say, filthy. You know, spilled cereal milk, grease from I don't know what. Maybe I fixed the car in it one day, I don't know. But it was a filthy old bathrobe, but I loved that bathrobe. It was just the right weight, it was comfortable, it was heavy, it was warm. Oh, I didn't want to let go of that bathrobe. One day my wife buys me a new bathrobe. I wasn't sure I liked it. I like my old bathrobe. She finally convinced me to throw it away into the trash. And there it sat on top of the coffee grounds and eggshells other garbage. And I have to admit, I got that new bathrobe and wasn't quite used to it yet. And I thought about going out into the garbage and taking that bathrobe out. Now, I have to admit, I looked into that garbage and I thought, no, I didn't take it out. I mean, I could have. It would have been gross, right? It would have been gross. Our old life is kind of like that. We get used to it. It's comfortable. It's what we're accustomed to, but it's got all kinds of trash and garbage. It becomes tattered and torn. It's ratty and ready to be destroyed. That's our old man. That's the man who's lying in the graveyard, rotting away. You have been taught. This is an interesting construction of the Greek. You have been taught, you have learned, you have been taught to put off your old self. This is what you have been taught to do. But you could go back and try on the old self for size. How horrible that would be. It says you've also been taught 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. If any man is in Christ, new creation. That's what it says in the Greek, literally. Or there is, or you are, or he is a new creation, renewed in mind and motive. Or 2 Corinthians 7, since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness, out of reverence for God. And then I thought, wait a minute. It is exactly like a garment. It is exactly like clothes. In fact, the Bible in the Old Testament speaks about old, rotting clothes and old, filthy clothes. I remembered a sermon, that of Leviticus 13, some years ago, in which you could be leprous in your skin, but your own clothing could be leprous. Weird, huh? It's in your skin. It's in your garment. Leviticus says, if you find a garment like this, polluted with this kind of filth, you're to burn it. That'll take care of that, right? You're to burn it. Or the warp or the woof, the wool or the linen, or any article made of skin that is diseased, if it's persistent, if you can't get rid of it. A persistent leprous disease that shall be burned in the fire. And then if it appears again in the garment, in the warp or the woof, if you can't get rid of it, or in any article of skin that is spreading, you shall burn with fire whatever has the disease. The book of Jude says we are to save others by snatching them out of the fire, to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh. You might say it's our way of life. If we are what we are, our way of life is what it is and we are different now and our way of life is to be different. We are to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh as Jude says, hating even the garment stained by the flesh. I think it's referring to Leviticus. Do not return to sin. Do not soil your garments. Do not put on the garment soiled by the flesh. God clothes himself in light. Jesus Christ himself is clothed with majesty and you are clothed with Christ himself. Do you get the dramatic reality of that union with our Savior? So, Romans says in chapter 13, the night is far gone, the day is at hand. Let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. And put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. I try to think of more illustrations of what the Bible does here. It basically says, and I often put it this way, we are to be what we are in Christ. God has declared us to be such. He has united us with our Savior. We have put on the Lord Jesus Christ. We have come to know Christ. We have learned Christ. And what does that mean we should be? Okay, it's voting season. Many of you may have voted. If you are a citizen, you might act like a citizen and decide to vote like a citizen. Hopefully, it's just citizens that vote. You know, I'm talking about you have the privilege to vote. And so you may have voted because you're a citizen. You decide to be what you are, to act like a citizen. You can do that in many other ways. Of course, you are a citizen of the kingdom of God act like a citizen of that kingdom. How do we do that? Where is this new man? Where do we find him? We who have been baptized into Christ, according to Galatians 3, have been clothed with Christ himself, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, Romans 13, 14, and make no provision for the flesh. The idea is that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead. We have been raised with Christ. That is, we have been given new hearts and new lives. We have been given the power to fight against sin. We learn Christ now as a person living and reigning by faith in the Savior who died on the cross such that we were crucified with him there. That is, we have entered into a new age. We have entered into a new phase of life. Now that does not make it easy, because as we'll see in the weeks to come, Because that is true, we are to put away falsehood. We are to be angry, but not sin. We are not give opportunity to the devil. We're no longer to steal, to let no corrupting talk come out of our mouths, not to grieve the Holy Spirit, to let all bitterness and wrath and clamor and slander be put away from you because we are no longer that way in Christ. But it is hard. It is a battle and it is a struggle. But we have the weapons of our warfare found in the whole armor of God in Christ. There are patterns in your life and mine that you have to break. Whatever it is, your temper, your laziness, your lust, your carelessness, pick your sin. Pick your struggle. Your besetting sin, as it's sometimes called. Now as we are sanctified, we will find ourselves sanctified together because what if we decide as a church not to bother? What kind of a congregation is this going to be? Gossip and slander and hatred and immorality and on and on and on. It's going to look horrible. It's going to look like the world. But it says you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of your minds. If you walk, in Christ, having put on Christ, having learned Christ, then the church will grow in love for one another. And people will say, what happened to them? How did that get to be that way? How is that so different? How? How? See how they love one another. See how they forgive one another. See how they're so patient with one another. Oh, the church will stand out. It will be different, and the world will not be pleased. But we will do it by the grace of God. Turn to God, having put on the Lord Jesus Christ. I had a translation of that particular verb. It's kind of a tricky word. Continue to be in the state of having put on Jesus Christ. That's what it means. You have put on Christ. Continue to act like that. Continue to be in the state of having been clothed with Jesus Christ. And you will be like God through Christ, shall we pray. Father, deliver us from our own pet sins. our own cherished iniquities. Deliver us from selfishness and pride and greed, anger of all sorts, frustration. Lord, we can't change on our own, but you have changed us. So now we fight the good fight. We seek to finish the race. We seek to gain the crown. You have given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God. In his name we pray. Amen.