Good morning. It's just great to be with you this morning. Let's pray together now as we look at God's word. Let's all pray. Our gracious heavenly father, it is good to be together. We thank you for the reminder that we are gathered around the table of the king in a few moments time as we share in the Lord's supper. We thank you, Lord, for your word. It is the bread of life. and we pray that you would feed us now by your Holy Spirit. Please would you help me as I speak, help all of us to sit under the authority and the sound of your voice. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Well, this week I read an article entitled, quote, How Self-Deception Allows People to Lie. In it, the author talks about Elizabeth Holmes, the biotech entrepreneur who in 2015 was declared the youngest and richest self-made female billionaire. She now faces 20 years in prison for fraud. Then there's Anna Sorokin who pretended to be a German heiress and conned members of New York's high society out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now a perverse part of me quite thinks to myself I'm glad members of New York's high society were conned out of that money because I don't have it but that just exposes my jealous streak. What that story exposes, and both of those examples expose, is how people tell lies. And how these individuals not only told lies to other people, but actually told lies to themselves to convince other people about who they were. And it's that self-deluding part that kind of caught my interest. It raises the question that many of us ask on a daily basis. Are we being authentic? Are we truly living the way that we ought to be living? Because especially if you're a Christian here, and I know the majority of us are here this morning, and we know that Christianity is all about living for the truth and living with integrity and following Jesus, who actually says, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. So truth is a big deal for Jesus. If we say we're a follower of Jesus, what does it mean to actually live truly? Because deep down, honestly, there are times, aren't there, when we feel like a spiritual fraud. We're asking ourselves the question, am I just trying to fool all of these people all of the time? When deep down inside of our hearts and in our minds, we know we're kind of trying to kid ourselves. Are we trying to fake it till we make it? The good news of Christianity is that God sees the truth of our hearts all the time. We're gonna see that this morning as we look at his word together. So if you could turn with me please to Ephesians chapter four, page 1,244 of the church Bibles. I'd really appreciate you do that because we believe here that this word, God's word is true. And we're reading his words and thinking his thoughts after him. So let's look at Ephesians chapter four. I'm going to read verse 17 through to 24. We could go on, but we'll talk about that next week. So let's look at verses 17 to 24 of Ephesians chapter four. The apostle Paul is writing. 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 learned about him and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Now, in the context back in chapter four, verse one, Paul has told the Ephesians to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called. Now, the call in question is the moment when we hear and believe the good news about Jesus Christ. And it's important that we get that framework correct because Paul here is talking about behavior. But he's talking about behavior from a place of grace. Now that you have believed in Jesus, now that you are in Christ, now that you know his forgiveness, so walk this way. And we saw last time that the word walk has to do with the word live. You could translate it that kind of, live this kind of a way. But we like this idea of walking, don't we? Because it conveys all of our lives, all of who we are, including not only our feet, but when our feet go in one direction, what happens with us? The rest of our body goes there, including our minds, including our personalities, including all of who we are. So there are three headings to help us as we think about these verses. They're actually on the penultimate page of the bulletin if you want to follow along with me. There's first of all, a solemn charge against empty living. Then two headings off the back of that, put off the old self and put on the new self. So then first of all, a solemn charge against empty living. If you look at verse 17 there, when Paul says, now this I say and testify in the Lord. It's one of those kinds of moments where basically you've got to poke your neighbor and say, you got to listen to this. This is really important. What Paul is saying here shows us that this is not some sort of informal advice or optional guidelines. Paul is speaking in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. The one who is king over this church, we can't ignore this. I remember when I was in London, I would go to a church working in the city of London. And the pastor there was a man called Dick Lucas who talked like that. He was very, very, very posh. And he would talk to all of these guys in the city who were all equally British and posh. They couldn't help it. But the thing was that they were from a public school background. He would begin a sermon like this. This is on a Tuesday lunchtime with all of these men in the city. Well, you may have been earning millions this morning. Now I'm going to tell you something of infinite value. So you better shut up and listen. No, that was his introduction. I would never do that. But that's the implication of what Paul is saying here. We need to shut up and listen. because he is speaking in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the head of the church. This folks is not optional extra guidelines. We need to take these words seriously. And look what he says, you must take these words seriously. You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. Now notice, Paul is addressing their minds as well as their actions. Why? Because behavior begins with the brain. How we think shapes how we live. And now many of these Gentiles or these people who received this letter are from a Gentile background. So when he talks to these people, he's not being racist, however, because yes, they come from a non-Jewish background, but what he's getting at is not their ethnicity as such. He's getting at what influenced their worldview, their patterns of thinking before they knew Jesus. And he's describing those people who do not have the Jewish scriptures or any knowledge of God and saying that those patterns of living are empty. Futile is how he talks about it. Their behavior system or their belief system and their behavior therefore were influenced by a mindset that there were many gods, small g. There were plenty of gods and there were plenty of different ways that they could be appeased. It's a kind of a DIY religion, a pick and choose what I believe, how I believe, when I believe and where I believe. And they may be appeased through good behavior, bad behavior, any kind of behavior, live and let live. That kind of empty thinking says Paul will get you nowhere. And remember Paul speaking into a context of Ephesus, which has dominating the city skyline, a huge temple to a cult dedicated to Diana, to Artemis. It's a sex cult. And the language that Paul paints here is of an existence that is useless because it is ignorant of the truth. and is kept in that condition by powerful spiritual forces. Forces opposed to the truth about who God is and the truth of what the Bible is all about. And those patterns of living, those patterns of thinking, says Paul, are futile. They are empty. They lead nowhere. And ultimately when we see that today, God has taken out of the equation that leads to darkness. You hear it in the last 150 years in philosophers like Nietzsche, who said that not just the idea of the Christian God, but the idea of God altogether is dead. And he was found towards the end of his life in a spiral of madness, catatonic, hugging a horse in the street. We hear that sense of pointlessness that many people have today conveyed in the music. Think of the music of the last 50s. I'm going to age some of you now. Rolling Stones, I Can't Get No Satisfaction. Talking Heads of the 1980s, We're on a Road to Nowhere. Amy Winehouse, 2009, Back to Black. and I tread a troubled track, my odds are stacked, I'll go back to black. Hear the darkness there? Now we might not express the extreme of someone like Nietzsche or the bleakness of someone like Amy Winehouse, but Paul here is emphatically charging these Christians, you mustn't think that kind of a way. Your behavior begins in your brain. and how you think shapes how you live. Don't live shaped by a worldview that dismisses the truth about God, that dismisses the existence of God as he's spoken about in the Bible, either in the bleakness of the atheist or the drifting ambiguity of the agnostic that believes that there might be some sort of divine power up there, not quite sure who he, she, or it is, Well, happy to live and let live. That, says Paul, is futile. It's empty. It's quite literally a road to nowhere. Which raises a very obvious question, how can Paul say that? What gives him the right to say these sorts of things? which will lead us into the next heading. Before we introduce it, let me just say something very obvious. When you get up in the morning, one of the first things that we do is to get dressed. I know it sounded obvious even as I said it. It's true though, isn't it? And what we wear is with us through the course of a day. Again, that's fairly obvious. But do you notice the language that Paul uses here? He uses a figure of speech that is gonna be dominating the next few verses. He's essentially saying the spiritual characteristics that we wear shape how we live. And he says that we're to take off and put on different characteristics as it were. As we go through our day, we're to put off the old self and we're to put on the new. Which brings us to the next heading there. Put off the old self, verse 22. You see it very clearly. We're told if you're a follower of Jesus Christ and you've been taught in this kind of a way to put off the old self. What Paul is talking about is who they were before they came to fit in Jesus Christ. Take off the old values, the old assumptions, the assumptions and the presumptions of how you once thought and acted. They're to be removed, taken away. And he highlights three characteristics. I'm sure there are many more, but let me just pick out to you three characteristics of this old self. Before you knew, Jesus says, Paul, you had darkened understanding. We've seen some of that already from our passage. But look at verse 18. Remember, behavior begins in the brain. And if you look at those who are Gentiles, says Paul, who do not know the scriptures, who do not know the truth about Jesus Christ, they are darkened in their understanding because of the ignorance that's in them. Now that does not mean that they are stupid. What it does mean, however, is that they're ignorant of the truth of the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. They haven't heard or believed in it. And nature deplores a vacuum. So in the absence of truth about God, we naturally fill it with something else. And that's why in the world today, when Christianity is rejected, it's not filled with nothing. It's filled with anything and everything. We hear it in our friends. You know, I don't believe the Bible. I like to think of God as X, Y, and Z. And ignoring the truth of what God says in the Bible. Paul says, don't think like that anymore if you're a follower of Christ. Put that old self off. And secondly, in terms of those characteristics, the old self is characterized by a desensitized heart. Look at verse 18 again. People have been alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart. People are callous, indifferent, hard-hearted to God. And when that happens, the irony is that the more people pursue their feelings apart from God, actually, the more desensitized they become. Look at verse 19. They've become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. And we see that all over the place in our society today, don't we? We see that in the fads, the different kinds of diets, or lifestyle, health programs, fitness regimes that people go after. As though that's going to be the next thing that's going to save them, whether that's the F-Plan diet, or the Atkins diet, or whatever kind of diet it might well be. Or we actually see this as well, and specifically in the context, this seems to be where Paul's getting at, in those who are hopelessly chasing after the next physical or spiritual or sensual high. Those who are caught in the trap of pornography. immunized against true feelings, caught up in a downward spiral, or caught in a downward spiral of looking at more, which becomes increasingly graphic, and increasingly harmful, increasingly destructive, and increasingly dark. And Paul says at its very heart is greed, selfishness, and it will never be satisfied. I can't get no satisfaction because it's a lie. Do you see that's the third characteristic of this old self. Darkened, desensitized, deluded. Verse 22, do you see it there? Paul talks about your former nature of life which is corrupt through deceitful desires. You see the picture here is of a people so unhappy that they've delivered themselves up to the destructive forces of their own unrestrained appetites. The lie is that this will fix you. or bring lasting joy or happiness. And even if we know that it won't, we still chase after it, and it's a delusion. Those desires, if only I had X, Y, or Z, then I'd be happy. Or, says Paul, deceitful. And so oftentimes we find ourselves caught up into that downward spiral, even as followers of Jesus Christ. Paul says, take off that darkened, desensitized and deluded pattern of thinking. because that's not the message about Jesus Christ. That's not how you learned about Jesus Christ. That's not the way we as followers of Christ are to live and walk and think and move and behave. Instead, says Paul, we're to take off that old self and put on the new. Put on the new self, and there are three characteristics of that. You see that throughout these verses as well. First of all, they receive the truth. You see that in verse 20 and 21. Paul says, but this is not the way you learned Christ. Now, when he talks about learning Christ there, he's not like talking about how we learn our ABCs or your times tables in math. He's talking about how we heard the message about Jesus and met Him, how we believed in Him, how we came into a deepening relationship with Him. He's talking about how you heard and believed and met and experienced and you deep in the depths of your soul, the truth of who Jesus Christ is in your heart, life, mind, conscience, will, personality. You name it, he's there. And so that Jesus, therefore, is the one, verse 21, who, by contrast with the delusion of those who are darkened in their thinking, holds the truth. Do you see it at the end of verse 21? Assuming that you have heard these things about him and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus. And of course no one can come to God except through Jesus. And Jesus proves that he's true, that he really is the way, the truth, and the life through what he does the day after he says those words in John chapter 14, verse six, when he dies on a cross and when he rises from the dead. And that, of course, is Orthodox Christianity. Jesus shows us the truth about who God is. And Jesus also shows us the truth about who we are. He exposes the truth of our hearts. He exposes the truth of our motives. We're laid bare before him in every way, and we can't hide from him. Before a holy God, the Bible says very clearly, you and I are sinners. We are failures, and we ought never to think otherwise. I've told some of you this story before. When I was a teenager, I went on a boys' brigade camp in Ireland. And during the week of that camp, the results for our A-level exams came out for some of my friends. Now, the A-levels are kind of like the SATs here. They're a big deal because they determine which university you get to go to or not. And a group of the guys, I remember this very specifically, on the Thursday morning got their A-level results. and they bombed spectacularly. We're not just talking D's and E's, we were talking F's and O's and U's for unmarkable. I mean, like it was seriously bad, bad failure. And I remember that afternoon, a group of these guys were in a big bell tent. and they were just hanging out together, kind of feeling sorry for themselves, grieving, laughing at one another. And the reason I knew they were laughing at each other was because of a sign they'd put across the top of the door of the tent. It read, and I quote, Failure ease only. They'd misspelled the word failure and put extra ease at the end and they pinned it to the front door of the tent. That sign should be above the door of every church. Failure ease only. Intrinsic to being a Christian is a recognition that we are failures before a holy God. Sinners. None of us gets it right. It's actually part of the liberating truth of Christianity because God sees us in all of our failure, our moral, our spiritual, our relational, our emotional failure, everything, and yet he still loves us. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. That's not to act as an excuse for our sin or to explain it away. It's to demonstrate the truth of God's redeeming love for you and me in Jesus Christ. And if you're not a follower of Jesus Christ here this morning, can I say two things? First of all, you are very welcome. Keep coming back, keep listening. Come and ask me questions or pass your hand or the people who came with you this morning. But can I say very specifically to you, isn't it time you stopped kidding yourself? Isn't it time you stopped pretending you're better than you are or worse than you are? Isn't it time you came clean before a holy God? He sees you and he sees the truth about you because he is the truth. And the implications of this as followers of Jesus Christ is that we live and walk in light of that. We receive the truth. We have renewed minds. That's the second characteristic that we're to put on. We're to put on the gospel truth every day. We need to remind ourselves of that. We need to remind ourselves as well that our minds are being renewed. We see that in verse 23 there. how we are to be renewed in the spirit of our minds. Now what does that mean? Chapter 1 verse 13, we're told the Holy Spirit lives in us. And so as we come before God's word each day and the Holy Spirit lives and works in and through us, he not only shapes our behavior, he starts to work in our brains. Not in a spiritual robot kind of a way or anything like that, quite the opposite, which leads to the next characteristic. were recreated in God's likeness. Do you see verse 24? Paul says that those who put their trust in Christ are to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Now, some of us will get the echo here. This is from Genesis 1, verse 27. We're told we're made in the likeness of God, in the image of God. God created them male and female. And Paul's using that language. But we know that we're not like Genesis 127 because of the way we all rebel against God. We're all sinners. We deserve God's wrath, but God in his mercy and his goodness has given us Jesus Christ. He's rescued us. He sees the truth about who we are. He still shows us the truth about who he is and redeems us. He renews us. He restores us. And what Paul says here is, is that he is still recreating us. That revitalizing, recreative work of God begins as His Spirit lives in us and makes us more like the Lord Jesus Christ. What Paul is talking about is how God is truly making us into the people that He has designed us to be. Now folks, if that's not a reason to get out of bed in the morning, I don't know what is. And look what he talks about here. He talks about righteousness and holiness. These are meant to be characteristics of this recreating work in our lives. Righteousness is God's justice and how we need that justice in our society, his fairness, his goodness, and how we need as well, holiness. in comparison to the unholiness of the mess and the impurity that's there at the end of verse 19. Paul is not saying that we're to be holier than thou. We're not to be those who are sanctimonious, self-righteous, superior, pious wee creeps. What he's talking about is how in this context we are to be pure. transparently pure, good for people, trustworthy in a sleazy culture. And how we need to hear that in a world that is dominated by me too. And Paul says, put this on every day. Put on this wardrobe every day. Something that also caught my eye this week was the fact that it's the platinum jubilee of the Queen of England. She's been on the throne in the UK for 70 years, Queen Elizabeth II. And a couple of you have actually said to me how much you enjoy looking at the Queen and her wardrobe. Because it's always bright colours. It's usually the matching hat and the outfit. Now, obviously, I wouldn't look so good in it. But the reason she does that, apparently, is actually very sweet. According to her daughter-in-law, it's because she wants to make sure that members of the public can catch sight of her through the crowds. So they can say, I saw the queen. She's not being pig-headed when she does that. It's just part of who she is. When people look at members of Lansdale Presbyterian Church, who or what do they see? The encouragement here is that we start living this way in Jesus Christ. That's not always easy. But the demand here, the somber charge here is that the Lord Jesus Christ puts to his followers, we are to put off the old self and put on the new. Take away the dark, desensitized, deluded old self. Put on the true. the transparent, the revitalized, grace-filled, loving, kind, good, righteous, holy you in Jesus Christ. Let's pray together. Just take a moment to quiet. What is God saying to me this morning from his word? What will it mean for me as a follower of Jesus Christ to take off the old self, put on the new? Our gracious heavenly father, thank you that you are so kind and patient with us. Please would you help us Please may your Holy Spirit work deep within the depths of our souls so that we are renewed and revitalized in Jesus Christ. Amen.