We're going to come to the passage that we read from Ephesians chapter 4 and the very core and heart of that passage lies in verse 20 and following and we will come back to that but we will need to come back to it by a different route. I want to just draw your attention to three other passages that are very closely related as you'll see. Firstly, a passage we've referred to in the last few weeks because it runs so much parallel to this one from Ephesians and that's from Colossians chapter 3 and verse 9 and 10 Colossians 3 verse 9 and 10, do not lie to one another since you laid aside, now my translation as in common with many says the old self, some translations will have the old nature and both of those are not particularly helpful translations. Literally we should have, do not lie to one another since you laid aside the old man. with its evil practices and have put on the new man who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the one who created him. You have laid aside, past tense, the old man and you have put on, past tense, the new man. Go to Romans chapter 6, This is the last part of the passage that was read for us earlier, Romans 6 verse 1 to 14 was read for us, but the last few verses. Therefore do not let sin reign, verse 12, do not let sin reign in your mortal body so as you will obey its lusts. Do not go on presenting the members of your body as instruments of unrighteousness but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness to God, verse 14, for sin shall not be master over you because or for or since or in view of the fact that you are not under law but under grace. And then one other verse from Ephesians chapter 2, verse 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, so that we should walk in them." For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God has prepared beforehand, so that we should walk in them." What we find when we come to Ephesians chapter 4 and particularly those verses I referred to, verse 20 and following, is the outcrop of a huge substratum of rock that runs all the way through the apostolic teaching of the New Testament. That you come to these places in the scriptures where Paul or Peter or James and John make a statement about something And that statement in the context of the letter to their hearers or to their readers is something with which the people would have been very closely familiar because it formed such a basic foundational substratum of their teaching. And what we have here is an outcrop of something which appears all the way through Paul's letters in particular but not just there also, Peter and John, James in different ways. And that has to do with what is the foundation for our life in Christ. To put the thing in a slightly different way, we could say this. When a man or a woman becomes a Christian, do they adopt a new moral code? Do they submit themselves to a new law which they did not submit themselves to before? Do they adopt a new ethical standard? And if we're tempted to say yes to those things, we're actually missing the substratum. When a man or a woman becomes a Christian, they have been recreated anew as part of a new humanity which did not exist in that way before. We could say that yes, as an outflow of that there is a change in relationship to the law or to the way in which you live morally or ethically, but you do not become a Christian by adopting a new moral or ethical outlook. You are actually born as a Christian because of a man and your life as a Christian is because of the life of that man Jesus Christ. To put the thing in another way, we know from Ephesians chapter 2 that Paul has been speaking about a new temple which is being built as a dwelling place of God in the spirit And we know that that temple is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, but we're told also there that Christ Jesus is himself the cornerstone. In other words, the whole edifice rests on and is aligned to and is connected to Christ. insofar as the apostles and the prophets, the evangelists and the pastors and teachers we heard about last week, insofar as they preach the word of Christ, to that degree the church is built on them. But we get into all sorts of strife, don't we, when we try and build something on a man, like happened in Corinth. I'm of Paul, I'm of Apollos, I'm of Peter and the spiritual one said well I'm of Christ actually. And we saw the problems that came or we have seen the problems that have come in church history where the building has moved in its own conception of itself, the building has moved from being built on the foundation of Jesus Christ to being built on even teaching about Jesus Christ. The church is not even built on doctrines about Christ, it is actually built on Christ. And when the church is built on Christ, it's built on him in a particular way. The stone which the builders rejected, he has become, what? The chief cornerstone. The church is not just built upon Jesus Christ, in some metaphysical, philosophical sense, the church is built on Jesus Christ as he was as the rejected cornerstone. Like the chief cornerstone was rejected, in that rejection he was crucified, to us the rejected stone is choice and precious in the sight of God. So the one we love, is not some cosmic Jesus. The one we love is Jesus who is crucified for us. The one we love is Jesus the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The one we love is the one who is rejected as the cornerstone and the foundation that Jesus lays for the church is in his being rejected as the cornerstone And that foundation which he lays in that act of rejection actually is where the life of the church comes from. To say it slightly differently, when Jesus was crucified, when he was rejected, he was actually doing something on the cross. He was working for us and he was raising up a new temple through that rejection. He said, you tear this temple down and in three days I will raise it up again and he was speaking of the temple of his body. I will build my church, he said. This is my work, I am doing it and there's no way that that work will be frustrated. I will build my church, the gates of hell will not prevail against it. So when he was in that place of being the rejected cornerstone, he was actually founding a whole new humanity through that act of being rejected. In other words, we do not join the church as an institution, we are joined to Christ. We do believe certain doctrines about Jesus Christ, but it's actually the work of Christ that saves us, not the doctrines. The doctrines give expression to what he's done. And so everything that Paul's saying in this passage and in related passages like Romans chapter 6 and Colossians chapter 3 flows from the fact that in Jesus Christ a new humanity has been forged and minted as he was rejected on that day, as he was crucified and he was buried, as he was raised up Through all of that he was at work to establish his new humanity, to bring about the church which had never existed in that way before and in bringing that about he has actually created this entity which we see before us, ourselves, the church. That entity which we see stretched out through all time and space called the church. And that is the place in which Jesus Christ is bringing his fullness to bear and it's through that building which he's created that he's bringing his fullness to the emptiness which we heard about last week. Now all of that forms a sort of background for us to come to this passage in Ephesians chapter 4. He says in verse 17 that there are certain things that do not belong to us anymore. And you'll notice in verse 17 that he talks about the Gentiles and what that means is Paul sees the church as this new covenant community of God, the community of the new covenant of God's grace. And in that sense they are the new Israel of God and those who don't belong to that church yet may come in, but at the moment they do not belong to that church, they may be called Gentiles, in other words, by comparison to the Israel of God. And he says there are certain things that characterised us before we belonged to Jesus Christ by faith. He said we were futile in our minds and you could probably have in the back of your mind here a lot of stuff from Romans chapter 1. where Paul talks about our foolish heart being darkened and professing to be wise we became fools and so forth. We had a darkened understanding he says in 4 verse 18. We're excluded from the life of God. This echoes the sorts of things he said to us in Ephesians chapter 2. You were dead in your trespasses and your sins in which you formerly walked. according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, and so forth. In that place, he says, we were callous. We were actually given over to all sorts of immorality and sensuality and impurity and greed. But, he says, verse 20, that's not how you learned Christ. Now, that passage from 20 onwards, down to 21, 22, 23, it's got some quite Unusual and in some ways complex grammatical tenses and moods in it. We're going to come back to that in a minute. But in order to come back to it, we're going to go to a couple of these other passages. What we've been told throughout Ephesians as we've been going through it is this. Something final, definitive, irreversible and eternal has happened in Jesus Christ. That work which has been accomplished in Jesus Christ is a work which is entirely done by God's own initiative. He's the one who has set forth Jesus Christ to be the redemption of our sins through his blood, He's the one in Jesus Christ who has caused us to be adopted as his sons, through Jesus Christ to be blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, through Jesus Christ to have an inheritance which is set for us, through him to receive the Holy Spirit as a deposit and a pledge. Everything that we have received in Jesus Christ, we have received sheerly, surely and only by the grace of God. None of us could stand there on the last day and look at the church in all its glorified splendour and look at ourselves in our new splendour on the last day and say, I really did a good job of that. I know God helped me along the way when I couldn't do some things, but for the most part, God's got a lot to be proud of in me. No, there's nothing in us that has accomplished any of that work which is attributed to Christ. Is that true? So you are in Christ by grace through faith, dead in your transgressions and sins, says Paul in Ephesians chapter 2 verse 1, but God, because of his great love with which he loved us, He has made us alive together with him. He's taken that certificate of death it says in Colossians chapter 2. He's taken it out of the way having nailed it to the cross. All of that we know from Ephesians but that actually relates to this huge substratum that runs all the way through the way in which Christ is the cornerstone of his people. In Colossians chapter 3 Paul says, do not seek the things that are on the earth, for you have died. Your life is hidden with Christ in God. You have died. Go to Romans chapter 6. You'll notice the context of this statement. is an accusation that if belonging to Christ and being part of the new covenant community is all by grace not by any of our efforts or by works of the law then surely that will give us a license to sin and Paul has to address that in a number of places in Romans chapter 3 for example he speaks about being slanderously reported, verse 8, by some who say let us do evil that good may come. Romans chapter 3 verse 31, there seems to be behind that a question, if you believe Paul's gospel he nullifies the law, you won't keep the law if you believe Paul's gospel. Chapter 6, if you believe Paul's gospel, verse 1, that will just leave that you'll continue in sin. If you believe that it's all of grace and has nothing to do with your own merits or works, if everything is done by the sheer mercy of God, then surely you'll just continue on in sin. Now Paul has to address that in a number of places in his letters and in Romans chapter 6 is one of them. But I tell you this, Unless that question can be asked, you're not preaching the gospel. Unless that question can be asked, you're not preaching the gospel. You've still got a works orientation somewhere. But the question is asked, and what does Paul say? No, may it never be, verse 2, how shall we who died to sin still live in it? And what I want you to notice as you run your eye down through chapter 6, verse 2, how shall we who died to sin pass tense. Verse 3 is in the past tense. Verse 4 is in the past tense. Verse 5, verse 6, verse 7, all the way through, everything that Paul speaks of is in the past tense. Verse 6, knowing this, that our old, not self, not nature, but our old humanity, our old man, was crucified with Him. in order that the body of sin might be done away with, that we would no longer be slaves to sin. Verse 7, he who has died, past tense, is, some translations say freed, better would be to say justified from sin, acquitted from sin. Verse 8, if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. So we could go into Romans 7 and we would find Paul saying the same thing. Verse 4, you are made to die to the law through the body of Christ, past tense, that you might be joined to another. And if you go to Galatians and Colossians and many other places, you find this same emphasis. It's also here in Ephesians, the passage that we've read. What Paul bases the life of the church on is not our ability to keep the law because we've aligned ourselves to a new moral or ethical code. What Paul bases his teaching about the life of the church on is this, that the church has a history which involves a crucifixion. to quote the title of a book which some people have found enormously helpful by a fellow called Maxwell, The Church is Born Crucified. That every man and woman who is joined to Jesus Christ by faith has already died. That everyone who is part of this new humanity which has been raised up in Christ and seated at the right hand of God, has already died. So the life that we live, we live by faith. In what? In Him who loved me and gave himself up for me. As we have to keep saying, beloved, Jesus Christ on the cross was not just doing something at a distance from us. He was there as the anointed Messiah of the Holy Spirit and that Holy Spirit which took Him to the cross also swept through us so that as He was there that Spirit united us with Him in that action on the cross so that what Jesus became and suffered on the cross was actually our sin. so that Paul can say when he was crucified, then I, Paul, was crucified. All that I am, all of my stubbornness of heart, everything that has ever been belonging to me in my sinfulness, that whole reality of the old Adam was put out of action. It was crucified. It was put to death. Now the problem is that you and I have no physical or emotional, or if I could even put it this way, a psychological experience of having been crucified. For a very negative sort of person, we might think that everyone's crucifying me all the time, you know, but even that would be deficient. What? We don't have any more experience of having been crucified with Christ than we do of having sinned in Adam. But we did, didn't we? And we do, don't we? So if Christ was crucified and what it says about him is true, then by faith we hold that what is said of him is true also of us. that the death he died, he died to sin once for all and the life he lives, he lives to God. Even so, exactly in that same manner, you died to sin once for all and the life that you live, you live to God. Because you are one with Christ in his action You're one with Christ in his death and you're one with Christ in his resurrection life. You say, but I don't have an experience of that. Do you have an experience right now of God being present among us? And you might say, no, I'm trying too hard to concentrate on this complicated sermon. But is there not by faith a reality that Christ is present among us right now? Though I am with you always, even to the end of the age. You might not have in your experience a knowledge, in your experience you may be, like it says in Romans chapter 8, God works all things together for the good of those who love him or are called according to his purpose. And you might have come through something this week and you think, how in the world could that be ever worked for good? It seems so terrible. But by faith you see that verse and by faith you just cling on to it even though you don't have any particular experience of it at this point. By faith, beloved, we have been crucified with Christ. and by faith we've been buried with him." So when it comes to this idea of putting off and putting on, putting off the old things and putting on the new things, he's not saying to us, now you've sort of started at the starting gate and there's this whole life that you have now to get to the finishing gate, and it's all going to depend consciously all the way about how well you do the putting off and the putting on thing and you can be knocked out of the race at any point. Did you get the tense from Colossians chapter 3 verse 9 and 10? Since we have laid aside the old man and since we have put on the new man, That tense is the same that comes through in Ephesians chapter 4. So let's just turn back to it. We've taken a long time to try and come into the heart of it, to come from the substratum up to where it meets the surface. I want you to look at the past tenses, verse 20. You did not learn Christ this way. Now the best translation is, you did not learn Christ, not about Christ. If any man, as we said, hears the gospel, he hears it not from the lips of another human being, he hears it directly from Christ. Since you have heard him, best translation, not even heard about him, verse 21, and you have been taught in him, past tense, as the truth is in Jesus, this is all what they were taught, that in reference to the fauna mannericide, you lay aside the old man and be renewed in your spirit of your mind and put on the new man. Now, it doesn't come through easily in English, but these constructions in Greek are, and we won't go into the technical name for them, they're sort of aorist infinitives. What that means is these are once for all actions. These are actions that have happened and don't need, from one point of view, to happen again because they've happened. If anything, you're only living in the reality of what has already happened. A rather deficient illustration, but everyone here who has been born, put your hands up. Now you might think that life's hard and you think, I wish I could have a fresh start every day. What you do in Christ, you've got a fresh start every moment. But having been born, you don't have to do the born thing every day, which is very good for the midwives among us, isn't it? Having been born of the Spirit, you don't have to be born again every day. Having laid aside the old man, something has happened. Now, what happened? You were, without exception, every one of us, Every single one of us were united to Adam. In him, the inheritance that we had was condemnation, death and judgment. And we were under the power of sin to obey its lusts because we were under the guilt of the law. That humanity could not be reformed He had to be put out of the way. He was corrupted from the tip to the toe. And so Jesus Christ does not pick out the good bits, polish them up and just pick out the bits of clay from the statue. He actually has to do a demolition work on the old Adam and raise up a new one who has not been corrupted. And in Christ what has happened is this You, that whole old humanity, not the old self, not the old nature, the whole humanity has been crucified in Christ. Legally, penally, in that action of the cross, the whole of the judgment of the whole of that old Adam fell upon Christ and as he emerged from the tomb, He emerged not with that old Adam, but as the creator, the foundation stone of a new humanity. He's made the two into one new man, Jesus Christ. Your life is now hid with Christ in God. In that act of the cross, the old humanity was taken off In the act of the cross, the new humanity was raised up. And you think, well, what has this got to do with me? Because somewhere, somehow, someone came to you and told you about the forgiveness of sins. And they told you about the Father's love in the face of Jesus Christ, and you heard it, and you believed it, and at the point that you believed it, all that action that was there on the cross for you for all time suddenly comes tumbling into your heart by the Holy Spirit and you in believing the gospel have walked from darkness to light, you've walked from death to life, from judgment to freedom, you've left behind the old Adam who is dead and corrupt and crucified and put out of action and you've walked into the new humanity of Jesus Christ. You haven't done a thing. Christ has done it all and he's even given you the gift of grace or gift of faith through grace so you can believe it. But what you now live in is not the old man but the new. Now if we had time this morning we could unpack this in great detail in Romans chapter 5. You can read it when you go home. Romans 5 verse 12 to 21 where he says that old Adam with all of its inheritance of condemnation has been put out of the way and a new humanity has been raised up and we are part of the new humanity. So you were taught in Jesus this, put off the old man by believing the gospel. and put on the new man by believing the gospel. Because the old man was crucified and the new man was raised up. Just believe it! Just receive it! Now if you're sitting here this morning and you think, oh this is just preacher speak, it's gobbledygook, it hasn't got nothing to do with me when I go to work tomorrow. Oh yes it does. In the preaching of the gospel you heard something like this. There's a life in which you've lived which is actually death. That death is the death of the old man Adam and he has to be put out of action. In Christ, God has judged him and put him out of action. and the death that he needs to die has taken place. In Jesus Christ the old man was judged, the new man was raised up and he brought forgiveness of sins to birth because he bore all of the old Adam's sins in his body on a tree. So do you want to know the forgiveness of sins? Then believe the gospel. And when you know that forgiveness of sins, you're born again. And when you're born again, you're born into a new Adam and you're never back in the old one. He's being put to death. And you're never out of the new one because the life he lives, he lives forever to God. So your life now in the new Christ, your life in the new Adam is, if we could put it this way, just realise where you are. Just realise what's happened. Just live in accordance with the reality that has already taken place. Just walk in the life which has already been given in Christ. You say, well, that sounds hard. No. How did you receive the new life? You believed the gospel. So, how do you put on the new life? You go on believing the gospel. So, how does that work? Well, are there things that belong to your old nature, the old man? Yeah? Hardness of heart, anger, rage, immorality, impurity, greed, deceitfulness. What's happened to all those things? Well, they've been crucified, haven't they? So, where are they now? They're in the grave with Christ, like with what he left behind, if I could put it that way. The old Adam was dead and buried in Christ. The things that trouble you, the things that cause you fear and anxiety, the sins that come out of the darkness to threaten and terrify you, they're actually ghosts. They have no strength or power because they've been put out of the way. And what have you had in Christ instead? Well, have you received the truth in Christ? Yes. Have you received love in Christ? Yes. Have you received the Holy Spirit in Christ? Yes. Have you received things like tenderness and gentleness and patience and forgiveness and love? Yes. So walk in them. Why? Because that's what your life is. The old Adam, has no legal claim on you. Don't listen to the voice that comes around nagging to say, you have to be angry, you don't have to be angry. Don't listen to the voice that says, you have to be fearful, you don't have to be fearful. You're trapped in your sin, you can never get out of your, whatever it is, your greed or whatever. No, you don't have to listen to that because the old man has been put out of the way. How does that work? Come back to Romans chapter 6. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace. How does that work? If you, under the law, try to please God and do what is good, you will fail and you'll be brought back into guilt in an instant and as soon as you've got guilt, more sin comes. Guilt promotes sin, sin promotes guilt. It's a never-ending cycle and you can never get out of that except you hear the gospel that says that guilt and that sin has been taken away. And if you hear that, what happens? I'm no longer under the law, that is the condemnation of the law, the condemnation of guilt, the condemnation of my sins not being forgiven. I'm no longer there. Where am I? I'm in grace. And what happens when I'm in grace if there's no guilt? Just imagine this. If there were no guilt in your life for anything, would you find that that would be a powerful motivation to love the Lord your God? And if you didn't feel guilt at all about your past failures, would that be a powerful motivation to go on in love instead of trying to atone for them? And if you didn't have guilt, would that be a powerful motivation for you to forgive one another as you have been forgiven? But have you ever noticed it at home if on those rare occasions you and your dear wife or husband have a bit of a tiff If you've got guilt in your heart towards your wife and husband, what happens? You get angry and critical in an instant, don't you? You take the guilt out of the way and suddenly there's a new relationship between the wife and the husband. Beloved, you're no longer under the law that you should obey its lusts, but you're under grace Why? So that you can walk in the newness of life that's yours. Now Paul has taken us in this passage in Ephesians chapter 4 to this great substratum, this great rock on which the church rests, Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Don't hold it in your mind simply as an article of doctrine. but embrace it by faith for the reality that it really is that your old humanity has been put out of the way and judged and that your new humanity is in Christ and that the liberty you have in the new humanity in Christ is as you walk by grace through faith. Works of the law will always bring the spiral of guilt and failure. Grace through faith will tell you of the liberty that's taken place in Christ and it will liberate love in your heart so that you'll actually love the Lord, your God. Can you see how that works? And Paul's going to tell us how that happens in the rest of Ephesians, particularly in relationship to things like anger. and not letting the sun go down on your wrath, and not giving the devil an opportunity, and forgiving one another as Christ has forgiven you, and loving your wife, and loving your husband. But if there is no Christ and him crucified, then all of it is meaningless. It'll be an ethic that you can never live up to, you'll bring yourself under guilt and you'll never escape the cycle. But you're there because of who you are in Christ. We're going to pray and then sing. Father, these things are beyond us trying to just work them out in our own logical reasoning. But Father, there is a reality that actually has taken place in Christ, which has founded a whole new life. And the only gospel that we have for us is the gospel of the forgiveness of our sins through the one who is the rejected cornerstone. And the only gospel we have for the world is the gospel of the forgiveness of sins for the one who is the rejected cornerstone. And it's out of that release, Father, where the guilt is taken away, where the judgement is passed, it's out of that, Father, that a whole new humanity is created. Father, if we can't understand it all today, if it seems just so complicated and too many words and too much preachers speak, Father, just detonate it in our hearts by your Holy Spirit, that by faith we may see that we have died and that the life that we live in Christ, we live to God, never to die again. Father, come to us by your Spirit, let us see it and live in the liberty of it, and from it love you with all our heart. In Jesus' name, Amen.