EPHESIANS 4: 17-24

MAY 3, 2009

Exordium: In the Bible we have a mirror of ourselves.  We see who we are, where we came from, and how we need to change and grow; what we ought to be doing and thinking.

Yet, it is like those clothing stores that give you two or three sides of yourself in the mirrors.  God, in this passage, also sets the heathen, the pagans, before us as a mirror in which we can observe what our nature is like not governed by the Holy Spirit.

Explication: In these few verses of Ephesians 4, our whole story is told- like a biography of every soul-traced out for us so that we can know exactly where we are and what we are to do next in our story.

Paul knew these Ephesian Christians well.  He lived with them for three years, his longest ministry anywhere. There he rented a hall from a man named Tyrannus, a kind of lecture hall, where he could teach them as well as inquirers interested in the Gospel he had received from the Lord. In the evenings, he taught in the homes; there was so much to give them and they loved him for it.

So that when he wrote this letter, he was reminding them of the lessons he had given before.  He also built on his earlier teaching, taking them further into the mysteries of God.

We get the benefit of the review.  It shows us what the journey of the human soul looks like from God’s point of view.  He gives us God’s pattern for our lives and then calls us to live it out.  What a help that is!

He starts out describing where we have been.

1. 1. YOU ONCE WALKED AS THE GENTILES DO

“In the futility of their minds.”  (For the children that means being empty or without any meaning, not making sense.) The mind is the control center of the soul and the person. At the very heart of everything, there was nothing of value.  It was all trifles and entertainment and pleasure, but nothing with lasting or deep meaning.

Because they were alienated from the life of God, that is, cut off from His strength, wisdom, grace, and love. The very way that is put shows us that there was a time when they had been connected to His life. They were made in His image, for Him and His glory. The human family was made by God “a little lower than the angels.”

But they turned their hearts inward, and thus hardened them toward God. Their lives became “curved in on themselves” which cut off all light and life from God and left them locked up to their own resources, and devoid of His.

This came from their willful ignorance.  Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as their God, nor were they thankful. They were instead obstinate and proud. So the mind, out of touch with the knowledge of God, became blind to truth and callous to God’s love.

In this downward movement, they crossed a line in the mind of God in which He left them to their choices of pride and self-centeredness. He removed His restraints from them, and gave them over to lewdness, to impurity and uncleanness. They reveled in this freedom to do their pleasure and satisfy themselves. They even looked greedily for ways to gratify their lusts. They went out of their way to devise new expressions of their evil desires.

This is the biography of the human spirit apart from God. Rejecting the light they had, they descended into the darkness of moral morass and shame. These Ephesian Christians had lived in that culture and in those sins-this is who they were.

The people of God, the Jews, on the other hand had an advantage. The law and the prophets were boundaries around them that restrained their willfulness to a degree. But they too had not lived according to the knowledge of God. That, in a sense, is a biography of the whole human race, Jew and Gentile-in its radical departure from the living God-to living in futility or empty meaninglessness.

For us, living in this culture, we find ourselves in a secular setting. We live among a people alienated from the life of God, darkened in understanding. Some of you have walked in the ways of this world and made its agenda, your agenda, and identified with its values and you were heading toward God’s judgment along with the world.

Others have had the great benefit of a Christian home, and Christian training. Still you also live in this culture of unbelief and are enticed by its allurements. You are attracted to its ways. This passage is for all of us who live in this fallen world.

Here is the mysterious part of the this outline of the human soul’s journey:  in one sense each person’s story is unique, but in another they all follow the same pattern of descent away from God with the possibility of redemption  and restoration.

1. BUT YOU HAVE LEARNED CHRIST

The “But” here is a great word introducing a sentence of contrast: Jesus Christ as over against the mind of the world. When He sets His love on you, He unites you to Himself forever. You are identified with Him not the world.  You have learned Christ.

To learn Christ means to be absorbed in Him, taken up with His words and works. You have focused on Him so that He is in you and you are in Him. He has become the atmosphere of your life. You can’t conceive of life without Jesus Christ with you.

“Learning Christ is to be in the school of Christ.” He is the teacher and the subject at the same time. He is the curriculum and there is no end to what He can teach you and me. He teaches of his life in glory before Bethlehem; His coming to earth and His birth and boyhood; His mighty miracles and His great teaching times; His way with the Twelve; His death and Resurrection and going up into Heaven and sitting even now at the right hand of the Father praying for us.

When Paul taught the Ephesians it was really Christ teaching them about Christ through Paul.  He is the Teacher, the Lesson, the Text book and the Exam. What a school, the school of the Lord Jesus Christ!

Your school sets you apart. It puts its unique stamp on you. In the same way, having Christ sets you apart from the world; you have discovered that He is the Truth.  He acts and speaks truthfully, but the world around you is filled with deceit and pretence.  It promises one thing and does another.

The contrast is also love over against the culture of self-centeredness. Those in the world are interested in mainly their satisfaction, their pleasures, their wealth, but the way of Christ is to deny yourself and to love others as Christ has loved you.  The school of Christ makes a remarkable change in you. You stand out by your truthfulness and your love which you gained while you were learning Christ.

That may convict some around you and prick their consciences and make life hard for them. They may resist and hate you for it. Simply tell them that you went to a different school then they did. What did you study?  We were learning Christ.

Tell them your mind was enlightened there. Your heart was stirred and your will came under control of the Blessed Controller of all things, the Lord Jesus Christ.

There is no excuse for not learning Christ, since you have been enrolled in His school. Some may say, “But, I am such a poor student. And the ideas are too deep for me.”  You have the same Holy Spirit that others do, and He is your teacher within you. If you will ask Him for His help. Let Him be your tutor.

Others may say, “But, I just don’t get it.”  Our Saviour is very patient and He goes over things many times in different ways to help you get it. He even “lisps” as it were to make a thing understandable to us, like a parent putting a thing in his child’s language.

Some of us have been in His school 15 or 20 years, and by now ought to be teaching in that school. Your enrollment in the school of Christ did not happen by chance. It was ordained from before the foundation of the world. Enjoy it!

1. PUT YOUR OLD LIFE OFF, AND PUT THE NEW LIFE ON!

When Christ enrolled you he gave you a new beginning, a new nature, to fit your new curriculum. Your old nature was connected to Adam in his fallen nature, but your new nature has a covenant connection with Jesus Christ. You are united to Him and belong to Him from now on.

The tension between the old and the new life is not the same as the struggle between flesh and spirit. The old relation can be definitely and permanently left behind and the new state definitely entered and continued.  The new man is our permanent possession in Christ. The person who knows that he possesses Christ will resolve “to put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”

In Zechariah, chapter 3, the prophet has a vision of Joshua, the High priest, with filthy clothes standing before the altar. But God took the dirty clothes off of the High Priest Joshua to show a radical change in him. He robed him instead with beautiful new festal robes, clean and bright. That is what God does with us when we come to Him in repentance and faith.

We stand then in a whole new relation to God and we are beautiful in His sight. But sometimes we are tempted  to hold on to those old clothes, hide them in a closet, and have them ready for a season of sin, should we want to revert back to what we were before Christ came into our life. This is called “the dog returning to his vomit.” (Proverbs 26:11) (II Peter 2:22)

That is what the Bible calls “making provision for the flesh”, making the arrangements to sin. Rather, we are to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh.   (Romans 13:14)

We are enabled to persevere in our new connection of grace with Christ by the “continual renewing of the spirit of the mind.” The spirit of the mind is that part of our thinking where God is in touch with us. That spirit of the mind can be made constantly more sensitive to Him and alert to the things that would take us away from Him by the application of the Word of God to the mind in a prayerful and believing way.

Thus Paul writes in Romans that we may be “transformed by the renewing of our mind that we may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” (Romans 12: 2)

Your new nature is created “according to God.”  That means that the image of God is being restored in you.  Like an old painting that has grown faint and is being renewed and touched up in color and beauty, so the image of God becomes bright in you once more. Jesus Christ has been sent to us that we might be restored to His image, His likeness in spirit. And we see it happening in us day by day. God can’t acknowledge us as His children unless He can recognize His image being restored in us.

The features of His image which He looks for in us, according to verse 24, are righteousness and holiness. Righteousness means soundness in us, uprightness of character and conduct.  Holiness is not the normal word hagios, which speaks of being God cut off from all that would be less than He is.  Rather this Greek word means “free from contamination”, from anything that would spoil the integrity of the person. Remembering this helps us to put away the old garments and don the new robes that His love has woven for us to wear.

Application: Look at yourself in the mirror of God’s Word. Do you follow the Christian dress code? What clothes do you have on?  Does your life look more like the world, or like the character of Christ, your Teacher?

Are you being renewed in the spirit of your mind? Have you moved away from the futility, the emptiness of the world and are you being refreshed in your mind by Scripture, fellowship, the sacraments, and the spirit of prayer?

That is what sanctification is.  It is moving our minds along more and more in the direction of truth and love, righteousness and holiness.

Conclusion: Will you heed the imperatives?

• Take off.

• Put on.

• Be renewed.

These are the keys to a happy ending in the biography of your soul.

Rise my soul, and stretch thy wings

Thy better portion trace.

Rise from transitory things

Toward Heaven, thy native place.

Glen C. Knecht