Ephesians chapter 4, we're in a new section this morning that runs from chapter 4 verse 17, you probably have a paragraph break there, it goes all the way, the rest of chapter 4, all of chapter 5, and continues all the way through chapter 6 along about verse 9. It's all about the same thing. Which is the new you. 2 Corinthians 5.17 says, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold, new has come. So he says that, and he starts off in this part of chapter 4, he says, put off the old self, put on the new self, and then he proceeds to describe what the new self looks like. So, just as God supernaturally changed nature with the curse, He supernaturally changes you when you're saved. Exactly right. He reverses the effects, starts to reverse the effects of the curse. That's right. This is what we should look like had there been no curse. Here it comes. So, that's kind of the overview and that's what it's about. And so, if you will look at the first paragraph, 17 through 24, look, what does Paul absolutely insist that his Gentile readers take off and put on. So let's read chapter 4, verse 17 through 24. This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, and 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 uncleanliness with greediness. But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you 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 lusts, 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." Alright, what are they supposed to put off and put on? Two-step process. What do you put off? And what do you put on? The new self. That's just that simple to say. It might not be so simple to do. So basically he wants the readers to stop acting like Gentiles. Is this parallel in Romans where he talks and told them what evil was? I think it is. We know that a Gentile, generally speaking, is a non-Jew. The Greek word is ethnos, ethnic. But he's not using the word Gentile here simply to mean non-Jew. He's charging this word. How does he mean here when he says Gentile? Believers versus unbelievers. Even worse than that, because you've got Jewish unbelievers, too. How is a Jewish unbeliever in the first century different from a Gentile unbeliever in the first century, even though they're both unbelievers? Alright, the Jews did have a basic understanding of the true God and an understanding of what God required, even if they didn't follow it, even if they were hypocritical. The Gentiles, on the other hand, were totally, our ancestors, totally pagan, whereas the Jews hid their sins. The Gentile man, let it all hang out. They were like the Canaanites that God told the Jews to destroy in the promised land. They were Greek Canaanites. They were Roman Canaanites. That's the idea. Frolicking in the fountain of unrighteousness. That's right. Right. Head first. Boosh. And to get the big picture, it's a two-step process. You put off the old, you put on the new. If you're going to do cutting, sewing, you have a pair of scissors. You ever tried to cut fabric with one sciss? like an incision, I guess you could take a knife, but if you're trying to cut out a pattern, a pair of scissors, so this is a two-step process. These words are garment words. You take off this old stuff and put on some new stuff, so it's a two-step process. So going back to the world of Gentiles, these are people in the church. They're fresh out of paganism. Did they have problems? I said yes. They had big problems. And they're learning what it is to be in Christ. A Jewish convert was way ahead of the game compared to a Gentile convert because of his knowledge of God and basic righteousness. So he looks like he's writing to the pagan Gentiles here. And this is what he's telling them to do. And he starts off by saying the very first thing, now this I say and testify in the Lord. Why did he have to say that? Why did he start with that? Okay, number one, it's not just my opinion. Why would they be tempted to discount what Paul's saying here? Well, if there was a division between Jews and Gentiles, which he's addressing in this entire thing, and Paul's a Jew, then this could be a Jewish opinion. They see this as a Jewish opinion. Sure. This is what I'm trying to unite you in. Yeah, but what is it about the Gentiles that would make them want to Explain this away is just Paul's Jewish opinion. Clearly, Paul's pulling out the credentials here. Look, I've got a union card he's showing. It seems to be, in my opinion, it's not convenient to do the things Paul's about to talk about. These guys are used to lives of sin. And now Paul's setting the standard before them that is like, yeah, right. This is impossible. Mention impossible here. I think they're so steeped in this sin that when Paul says the way it ought to be, the new you, I think there's a tendency toward incredulity here that either they don't believe it's really possible or they don't want to do it. Well, do you realize what they're going to have to do? What? Imagine if I was in the clutch plan. And I'm the grand poobah. And my father was a grand poobah before me, and his great-grandfather, and so on. This being Christian is going to so profoundly change me that when my dad comes over to my house and makes an off-color racial joke, I say, Dad, I'm sorry, that's not allowed here anymore. That's a pretty profound change in my cultural heritage. All his friends are going to go, wait a minute. What's the matter with you? I think that's the deal. So you've got genuine Christians who still got on the wrong clothes. Peter says, the time that has passed suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. So Peter's telling his readers. Time has passed for that. Obviously, you've got some people in the church who still were doing this. And I guess that would mean some of us are still tempted, can be at points to do this. We've all got things that tempt us. Well, there was a letter about that. That's right. He says three things about pagan Gentile intellect in verse 17 and 18. Nathan, read 17 and 18 again. Let's get the three things he says about their intellect. 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. Three things about their intellect. What's one thing about their intellect? Okay, they have a futile mind. What else? Dark understanding. They're ignorant. Yeah, but I'm looking at their mind right now, but yeah, that's right. There's a lot wrong with them, but that's it. The Greeks prided themselves in their learning. The Romans really liked to capture Greek slaves because they made them the tutors of their children. It had nothing to do with going to college and getting a master's or a doctorate. The Greeks, who prided themselves on their learning, had futile minds, dark understandings, and Paul says they were just ignorant. There's a lot of people, humanists I guess you'd call them, secular humanists, who have the idea that higher education is going to eradicate poverty and social ills. It ain't necessarily so. The Nazis in Germany were some of the most educated people that ever lived. And look how well they turned out. So the problem is an unregenerate heart. That's what it goes down to. Paul in 2 Timothy 3.7 warned of people who are always learning and never able to arrive at the knowledge of the truth. So there you have it. So let's talk about a futile mind. Somebody hadn't said anything today. What is a futile mind? Ed, you've been very quiet. I have Greek words that were mataiotes. I did some studying that way before. And the word related to what they used to do in Greek times is they'd drink dead hens and stuff like that. And they'd go out the same historic window and they'd throw it out and just drink like that. And that's mataiotes. The stuff inside. Wow! It does. Wow! That's good. The Greek definition means empty, purposelessness, transitoryness. Ineffective. Yeah, that's good too. I remember ever since the early seventies, the slogan of the United Negro College Fund is is what? A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Well, a futile mind is a wasted mind. That illustration you gave is pretty good. That's what it says. And then it says they have darkened understanding. Okay, I want somebody on the back row, the comfy corner back there, tell me what it means to have a darkened understanding. Okay, you don't have a lot of Christ. They're separated from God. If you're severed from God, who is your head, you're not going to think right. What is it John Newton said? I once was blind, but now I see. Dark, blind. Yeah, so it's not that the people were stupid. They were highly educated. But spiritually, they're blind. Jews had a background, so when I spoke the gospel, at least they could understand some of the religious jargon that I was using. Whereas the Gentiles, they had no concept of these words coming out, like righteousness and justice and stuff like that, and God. So that when you start speaking to them, their understanding is dark and they have a hard time comprehending what you're saying. I've got to say, as a Roman Catholic, at least I knew some basic Bible stories. So as people spoke to me, I could understand something. Our understanding would be equivalent of, you're in the desert, you're dying of thirst, and you see a mirage, but you think it's real. And so you follow after it, and all it does is take you deeper into the desert and kill you. Oh, yeah. That's well said. Good. I mean, you've even got a more direct parallel that, if you think of, you know, how we can see things in the daylight versus at night. You know, at night you can still see things, but it's often distorted, you don't get the good color perception. And a lot of times the shadows and things like that, you see things that you think something's there, but it's really not. It's hard to really make out what you're seeing. Oh, that's good. We were working on Nathaniel's tractor yesterday, and we're in a dark garage, and it's under a dark shroud of the hood, and the thing is covered in crudded up black oil. And I'm looking at the carburetor. I couldn't see any adjustment screws or nothing on it. I had darkened understanding, just like you said. There you go. Now, Al? I think it's important for us as believers to understand that darkened understanding is not exclusive to unbelievers, not exclusive to any particular group. For instance, if I don't even know the meaning of the word hermeneutics, I can I appreciate you saying that because he's characterized Gentiles in this way, people totally cut off from the scriptures, unlike the Jews, who were just as lost but in a different way. But he's writing here to Christians and what he's saying is, stop that! You will meet far too many Christians who still are futile in their thinking and have a darkened understanding. It's a sign of a self-inflicted wound. He's saying, stop that, take that off. and put on this other thing. So, I think your point is well taken. Well, unfortunately, when you meet Christians, like the church around the corner that says homosexuality is perfectly okay, you know to go the other direction. In fact, there's one in each direction from us. You all know that. There's a Baptist church this way and an Episcopal church that way. That's terrible. Alright, now the next word is ignorant. The Greek word agnoia, we get our word Agnostic. We use agnostic to mean I don't know whether there's a God or not. This just means they're ignorant. They didn't have knowledge of spiritual truth. They were lacking in understanding about their true God. Now, the Jews did have that. Gentiles didn't. So, if you look back at verse 18, go back to verse 18. You know, in science, you've got cause and effect, right? He gives cause and effect there. He says, this ignorance caused something Because is the word I'm looking at. According to verse 18, because of their ignorance, what happened? They're alienated from the life of God. That's right. So in the sphere of the spirit, they're aliens from another planet, a bad, evil planet. Go back to verse 18 again. It says, he tells us how they got this way. How did they get so ignorant? How did they get so dark? 18 and 19. They are darkening 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 given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. How did it happen? He tells you. It's due to what? Hardness of heart. And then the next verse, he says it a different way. What word does he use there instead of hardness? Callous. Yeah. This is the quote when you talk about a gateway drug. In other words, something that's kind of innocuous. But it is considered taboo, and once you get past that taboo, the next one isn't so big, and eventually you've thrown out all the rules. That's what he's talking about here, is eventually they throw out all the rules, and they've completely hardened their heart, and as a result of that, they're completely ignorant of God. Now that's the process. Let's go back in time. When did this happen? How far back do you have to go till you find a situation where everybody in the world knew the truth about God? You don't have to go back that far. You can come forward in time. There's another time everybody in the world, everybody knew the truth. Noah, Noah and his... Three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, they come off the ark. They knew they go different directions. Now that wasn't that long ago. That was probably, I'm guessing, I'm thinking it seems like it was about 2,500, 3,000 B.C. So probably about 2,500 B.C. So a little bit further before Jesus than we are after Jesus, everybody in the world knew the truth about God. In fact, I've read that every ancient peoples has a flood story. There's some common truth there. But as they got away from God, what happened? They began hardening their hearts, becoming callous, suppressing the information and replacing it with idol worship in whatever form that expresses itself. The only group that didn't do that was the Shemites. God worked through them to bring the Messiah, and He gave them the Hebrew Scriptures. So somebody who's anti-Semitic, he's anti-Shemitic. Most of us are, I guess, descended from Jephthah. Our ancestors didn't have the Hebrew Scriptures. God didn't bring the Messiah through our ancestors. So our people got more and more dark and calloused because we suppressed the truth. It's not that our ancestors didn't have it. This is Romans 1. I was going to say, this is Romans 1. Let me just read it. Romans 1 verse 21 they did not honor God as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were Darkened that's like the same guy wrote both of these Claiming to be wise they became fools They exchange the truth of God for a lie. So, you see, it's the same thing. Eric? Because we didn't have that witness, because Jews were the original missionaries, basically, that's why our minds were further darkened. If the Jews had done their job and had been more evangelistic, maybe Paul wouldn't have had so much trouble evangelizing. that he didn't really have to build with the Jews. In one sense, both lost, as you said earlier, were a little bit more ahead. Paul had to almost take, they were like middle school, and where these guys were just born, so he had to come up to speed. Well, the Jews did do a lot of good. That's why Paul always went to the Jewish community first, and there were always Gentile converts there to Judaism that were easy pickings, so to speak. So in that sense, they did help soften up the Gentile world. When you really have a tough time, It goes to some part of the world where the Jews never went. Mongolia, places in Africa where the Jews never went, and you got... That's even worse in this situation, arguably. But anyway, going back to this, it says they have a hard heart in verse 18. What's a hard heart? I want a lady to tell me what a hard heart is. No feelings, I like that, with reference to God. Give me a man in the Bible who's famous for his hard heart. Pharaoh, who refused to obey God's requirement to let the people go, so he had a hard heart with respect to the things of the Spirit. I heard this song on the radio, Hard Hearted Hannah. in old Savannah." I said, Savannah. They got a gal there who's colder than an Arctic storm. She's got a heart just like a stone. Even ice men leave her alone. They called her hard-hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah, the meanest gal in town. Leather is tough, but Hannah's heart is tougher. She's a gal who likes to see men suffer. I saw her at the seashore with a great big pan. There was Hannah pouring water on a drowning man. She's hard-hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah, GA. Point is, sin has a petrifying effect spiritually on your heart, doesn't it? In Christ, you become soft-hearted to the things of God. In fact, in the Old Testament, it was Jeremiah somewhere, he says, I will take away the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. That's what you want. And then another way he says it in verse 19, he says they become callous. You ever had these things when you're working out so you get callous? What does the word callous mean? Thick and therefore insensitive. The Greek word means to cease to feel pain. The King James here said a callus is past feeling. The NIV says you've lost sensitivity. So a callus, you don't have feeling there anymore because it's thick skin. Thick dead skin. Well that's right, no empathy. Now, look at verse 19. According to verse 19, the Gentiles, our ancestors, what had they given themselves up to? Impurity. Sensuality. What else? Greed. Yeah, that's right. 2 Timothy 3.13 says, evil people and impostors will go from bad to worse. Deceiving and being deceived. Very good. So, once a person has given himself up to sensuality, God may in turn give that person over to his own depravity. That also goes back to Romans 1. Romans 1 24, God gave them up to the lusts of their hearts to impurity. Romans 1.26, God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Romans 1.28, since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. So this stuff is like a drug, it's addictive, God gives you over to it. So you're a slave to it. I don't doubt that a lot of mental illness today is quite possibly a direct result of rampant sin. So what's the application here? Stop that. Something different as we look at our society. It's more and more like what Paul's describing here Al said we lost it we did our Ancestors that might not have been Christians, but they were like the Jews They were so close to spiritual things that even among the lost there was a general Outward morality as there was with the Jews of the first century, but now in America We are so and the whole West is so post Christian. We're going back to the days of of the Roman Empire and the Greek Empire with that level of depravity. Archaeologists were excavating Herculaneum, which is one of the cities destroyed along with Pompeii. They were so disgusted by the immoral plasters and stuff on the walls, they said, Herculaneum wasn't destroyed by lava, they were destroyed by lewdness, and that's what we're going back to. So back to the future. The good news is, this is exactly what the early church was in the middle of. And they survived, and so can we. But the application then also for us is, if some of this clothing is still caught around your ankle or something, kick it off. This application, put that off. Don't be shocked when you find out there's other Christians who do these things. If you are struggling with some of this stuff, put it off and help the other guy to do it. So, just don't have your sensibilities so shocked. Well, face it, some of us are going to have a problem taking off the old stuff, just like they did. Or we're going to get new people in that have a hard time doing it. The problem with the people down the street is, they're taking something wrong and saying it's right. They're probably not Christians. Here you're dealing with people who are Christians, they know it's wrong, but they're struggling with it. And that's a big difference. Now, a bunch of hands. Adam, say something. I was just going to point out that with calluses, the whole issue with the calluses is that you've built up a thickening so it doesn't bother you as much. And so the solution, you know, we have, which is like, you know, I like going barefoot, and so I'll fight off, you know, especially when I was younger, you know, I had to run around barefoot on gravel. And early in the spring, your feet are a little tender and you notice it. Once they've gotten calloused, you don't even notice. So you can run right across gravel and not even pay attention to the fact that you had. And so the solution is that you have to train yourself to be hypersensitive to notice when I'm doing it, even if I'm not feeling it, and avoid it. And eventually the calluses will go away. But it takes time to lose that callus. So over the course of a winter, if you've got shoes on and stuff like that, then you'll back but it takes time and so during that time you have to be training yourself to watch for it even if I'm not feeling it. So watch for these sins that so easily can entangle us. Now was there a back row comment? Way back row? So you pay attention to those things that you've been taught are going to deceive you. Like you were saying, just give attention to it. Don't walk in it. Amen. Al? In the last hundred years, the church, in this nation at least, has multiplied its hardness of heart five times in the course of that period. That's a good gauge. Ed? The thing about putting off and putting on, I love music, I really do. I love rock music, I love progressive music, and some of it is pretty heavy stuff. So what I did was, I knew there was a problem with that, I sold a lot of my rock out, most of it. Scissors. Both pieces. It is encouraging, isn't it? Well, here's why this is so encouraging to me. If you look at Romans 7 as this progression, our country's about right in the middle of that right now, halfway through Romans 7. Romans 7? Sorry, Romans 1. We're about halfway through Romans 1, heading toward the bottom. The country is, right? Paul, when he's preaching to these people, they're at the bottom, frolicking in the fountain. That's the culture there. Do you hear him going, oh, woe is me! Oh, the culture! No! This doesn't look that way to me! This looks like, preach the gospel, teach the truth, disciple, get him saved, do the next one. Power of God. Where does he get all bent out of shape about this? So if we're only halfway down that ladder, and he was able to take them out of the, when there was no law at all, and pull them out of that, Christianity could pull them out of that. We got half the battle won here. We still got a little bit of sensitivity left that we can... Now look at verse 20. What contrast did Paul make in verse 20, Sandra? But that is not the way you learned Christ. What's the contrast? But that stuff that you were doing, that you might still be doing, that's not what you learned in Christ. In fact, I think, as I recall, the first word in this in Greek is the word you, is you got a bad That's not what Jesus is about. There had been time. What are you talking about, Adam? That's why you have verse 21 that says, assuming that you have heard about Him in wartime, Him is the truth, isn't Jesus? Now, this is a first-class conditional sentence in the Greek. This assumption is guaranteed. They had been taught this. Now, even if Paul hadn't been there to teach it, because he'd left, he knew they had been taught, in this case, the right thing. So, the assumption is they did know right from wrong. They did know this other stuff was bad. So, you read verse 20 just now, Adam? Is that right? Well, I read 21. I mean, 21. Yeah. So, let's keep going. Here's what they're taught. Look at verse 22. "...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. Now there's three infinitives here in the Greek. He says first, to put off the old, and then he says to be renewed, and then the last one is to put on. So three things. It's all related. Guess what? Application. We need to do the same thing. You, I can't do it for you, I need to do it, I can't do it for you, you need to take off the old, be renewed, put on the new in Christ. It's a process. And he describes what he means by the old self. Based on verse 22, what does he mean by the old self? Your old ways that you did in your former life that was corrupt through deceitful desires, that's right. So, now, ESV says old self, the Greek says your old man. He says the old Jew was corrupt through a deceitful desire. What is a deceitful desire? I know what a desire is. What's a deceitful one? What do you think, Daniel? What's a deceitful one? Okay, it's misleading you. That's right. Apart from Christ, people often deceive themselves into thinking that evil is actually good. Jeremiah 17.9, the heart is deceitful. What's deceitful? The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? What's the answer to that question? No one! Here we go again, Romans 132, "...though they knew God's decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them." If you look at verse 23, what should you do? Be renewed in the spirit of your minds. The Bible talks about something called, it doesn't translate it this way the Greek says it, it calls it saved thinking. This is in contrast to a futile mind and dark understanding and being ignorant of the things of God. We ought to have safe thinking when God gets in there and starts working on you. Romans 12 2, and do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing, there it is again, of your mind. So you've got to hit the reset button. He offers hope in verse 23, that's what he's offering. And tell me what I can learn about the new self in verse 24. Create a likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. So our application is today, even for every Christian, that it looks like there's something you have to do. God has promised this thing. You've got to believe it. Okay, what do you do? You put off the old you. You renew your mind. You put on the new you, the new self. That's what he tells us to do. You go back to the original design that God had for mankind. Go back to the original. That's what he's saying. What he said about Christ earlier and about holiness and unity, You need to learn to discern this old way of doing things and what it looks like to be in Christ. You need to learn to recognize that when you're in your mind so that you can recognize it, throw that away, and head toward what I just told you to do. That's good. That's what he says. But you have to do that. Another kind of imagery that I like thinking about this is if you've ever learned about insects as they mature, They quite often, they start out as worms or larvae or stuff like that. And then as they're growing, a lot of them go through different stages where their shell kind of hardens and they split it and struggle out of it. And they go on to the next phase where they've grown more. And some insects, they even do this multiple times. At each stage, they're more mature and better. But you'll occasionally, if you're actually out there looking at some of these insects, you'll find the ones that they didn't struggle They can't grow, and their shell just keeps hardening and hardening. They're just stuck in that dead shell. So we have to continually renew ourselves, throw off that shell that's drying and limiting our growth. Yeah, you do. Amen. We should all become butterflies. Thank you. Thank you. Eventually, you get to this completely different creature that's not the worm that we started out as. Amen. Well, you know, I was going to say this is very much a Romans 7 and 8 situation. It is a struggle, just like struggling to get out of the old church. It's a struggle and it's a process, I believe. And in the next section next week, we'll answer that. He does. He tells you what to do. And Doug, you look like you wanted to say something. Well, good. So, Jesus gives you the power to come out of the shell, but he does want you to do it. By the way, this section today actually goes all the way back to the very beginning of chapter 4. verse one. It's the same idea. I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called. And he's going on with that now. This is the same idea. He's going along with it. So, that's what we need to do. Easier said than done. We'll talk about it more next time, Lord willing. This message was produced by the New Testament Reformation Fellowship, reforming today's church with New Testament church practice. Permission is hereby granted for you to reproduce this message. To learn more about New Testament church life, you can find us on the web at ntrf.org. God bless you as you seek to follow Him in obedience. May your faith in the Lord Jesus be strengthened and your daily walk with Him deepened. do do Oh.