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. 18 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. 19 They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. 20 But that is not the way you learned Christ!— 21 assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus,22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
A couple months ago, I preached on “Attaining the Unity of Faith” from Ephesians 4:8-16. As members of the Body of Christ we are to aspire for maturity, and a true knowledge of God’s Son, Jesus Christ, and to be knitted together with other believers. The goal is to build each other in love. A key verse is v.15,”But speaking the truth in love we are to grow up in all things into Him who is the head, even Christ.”
Today, I want to look at the Apostle Paul’s explanation as to how to grow up in Christ and avoid the pitfalls that will hinder or stop our growth. In the rest of the chapter, vv.25-32, Paul gives practical wisdom as to how to live the Christian life. In this section he contrasts two selves that we have to deal with – the “old man” or self that developed in our sinful state of unbelief, and the “new man” who belongs to Christ. Every day we have a choice as to which self will be preeminent, and that choice in turn will shape who will be in the future, even in eternity.
Paul declares “I… testify in the Lord”. That word “testify” means a solemn declaration. We get our word martyr from the noun of this verb – this is serious business! What he says next is vitally important because it will determine whether all the noble aspirations Paul discussed that come with being in Christ will actually be realized in us. To testify in the Lord is to say that this is apostolic truth that has the imprint of divine authority – that God Almighty backs up every word he is saying.
(v.17b) “You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do”. “Walk” refers to your way of life; and it reminds us that life is a journey that moves gradually at the pace of a walk, not a run. The Gentiles were unbelieving peoples, which meant the non-Jewish world, except for the small Christian Church which was slowly spreading throughout the Roman Empire. Paul tells us to “Live no longer as the ungodly do, for they are hopelessly confused.”
Paul describes four characteristics of the Gentiles that believers should avoid.
First, their thinking is futile from God’s point of view. They can reason intelligently enough about things of this world, but when it comes to grasping spiritual truth they inevitably stray from God’s path. The first of the Psalms states this principle clearly: “How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers.” Unbelievers may be able to give you practical knowledge about particular things; but when it comes to guiding you in the important decisions of life, they inevitably miss the mark, because they don’t take God’s will into, or purposes for humanity into, consideration. Their counsel, therefore, leads to futility. They are confused about the meaning and purpose of life.
They are “darkened in their understanding” – they can’t see clearly the right response to challenging situations, because they don’t see things from God’s perspective. As believers, we may not see what God is up to, but we do know God’s ways are always right and always directed for our ultimate good. Therefore, we can trust God in any and every situation to look out for our true needs, and that’s God’s way of love.
But unbelievers’ “closed minds are full of darkness” – they refuse to consider God in their decisions, and so spiritual light is withdrawn from them. To them, God is a non-factor. This is an insult to our Creator; but in their mind, because they don’t perceive God, this is reality.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus is called the Word who is with God and is God. John then says, “In Him was life and the life was the light of men.” When men refuse to receive Christ, his life and light are withdrawn from them and their minds and hearts become darkened.
Second, unbelievers are alienated from the life of God, because of their ignorance of Jesus Christ and His salvation. While all people bear the image of God and have an immortal spirit, only the redeemed have God’s Holy Spirit imparting Christ’s nature within them. It is the Spirit of God who imparts the life of God to us, and only those who have faith in Christ have the Holy Spirit within them. Without God’s life within them, it is impossible for them to have a heart for God or His ways. They are alien to them.
Third, the result of having darkened minds and lacking God’s life working within them is to have a hardened heart and to become callous to spiritual realities. To have a hardened heart means to be indifferent to things God counts as precious – God Himself, virtue, righteousness, and a holy love. Invariably, people become less important and self-gratification becomes more important. The New Living Translation says, “They don’t care anymore about right and wrong and they have given themselves over to immoral ways.”
Titus 1:15 says, “To the pure all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled.” Sin hardens the heart, defiles our thinking and our conscience, so it becomes in Paul’s words “seared with an iron” – it is calloused and insensitive to things that offend God and are impure.
The result of having a hardened heart and dull conscience is that unbelievers give themselves over to “sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.” This is the final stage of wickedness that begins with having a mind that is unenlightened to the truth of God.
In an earlier letter to the Romans, Paul expanded on this process of unbelief turning to a hardened heart that leads to a depraved mind and all manner of evil.
20 “For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.
21 Yes, they knew God, but they wouldn’t worship him as God or even give him thanks. And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. As a result, their minds became dark and confused. 22 Claiming to be wise, they instead became utter fools. 23 And instead of worshiping the glorious, ever-living God, they worshiped idols made to look like mere people and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 So God abandoned them to do whatever shameful things their hearts desired. As a result, they did vile and degrading things with each other’s bodies. 25 They traded the truth about God for a lie. So they worshiped and served the things God created instead of the Creator himself, who is worthy of eternal praise! Amen. 26 That is why God abandoned them to their shameful desires. Even the women turned against the natural way to have sex and instead indulged in sex with each other. 27 And the men, instead of having normal sexual relations with women, burned with lust for each other. Men did shameful things with other men, and as a result of this sin, they suffered within themselves the penalty they deserved.
28 Since they thought it foolish to acknowledge God, he abandoned them to their foolish thinking and let them do things that should never be done. 29 Their lives became full of every kind of wickedness, sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, quarreling, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip. 30 They are backstabbers, haters of God, insolent, proud, and boastful. They invent new ways of sinning, and they disobey their parents. 31 They refuse to understand, break their promises, are heartless, and have no mercy. 32 They know God’s justice requires that those who do these things deserve to die, yet they do them anyway. Worse yet, they encourage others to do them, too.”
The Bible tells of men who allowed darkness to enter their thinking and brought Israel’s kingdom’s downfall. Years after he became established as king, David stayed home when his army was out in battle and gazed on a neighbor’s wife as she was taking a bath on the roof. Instead of turning his eyes away, he kept gazing upon her until lust was stirred up in his heart.
At this point, he could have turned away and sought one of his wives or concubines to have sex. But David’s lust turned to greed and he sought to know who this beautiful woman was next door. It turned out to be the wife of one of his most loyal warriors, Uriah the Hittite, named Bathsheba. Perhaps because Uriah was a foreigner and not an Israelite, David felt he could get away with it. But when Bathsheba became pregnant, David felt he had to cover up his betrayal of his servant; so he instructed his commanding general to put Uriah up front during a siege where he would likely be killed. And Uriah was indeed killed in battle.
God sent a prophet and friend named Nathan to confront David and expose his sin. Nathan told the king a story about a wealthy man robbing and killing the lamb of a poor man that made David furious. David said, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die, and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.”
Even though David confessed his sin and was forgiven, trouble came to his kingdom from then on. The baby boy that David fathered with Bathsheba died soon after childbirth by God’s command; and David married Bathsheba. No doubt the gossip mill started running in the king’s household about the king’s adultery and murder of his valiant warrior. There began a downward slide in moral tone in the kingdom that infected society at the highest level. David became a despondent and indifferent king and corruption spread throughout his family.
First, his firstborn son, Amnon, burned in lust for his step-sister Tamar and raped her. King David, now compromised by his own wickedness, became angry when he learned about this but did nothing. This caused Tamar’s brother and David’s third son, Absalom, to plot his brother Amnon’s death in revenge, which he carried out about two years after the rape of Tamar.
Absalom, one of David’s favorites, was forced into exile, which hardened his heart against his father. After Absalom was restored to Jerusalem he conspired to overthrow his father, and succeeded in driving David away into temporary exile. David cunningly used a friend named Hushai to give false counsel to Absalom that bought David time to regroup his forces when he could have been wiped out early. Hushai also advised Absalom to lead his army in battle, exposing him to danger that resulted in his death on the first day of battle.
After another rebellion in the northern half of his kingdom, David ruled unchallenged until he became an old man. Apparently, David did not announce that Bathsheba’s second son, Solomon, was the crown prince, because an older brother, Adonijah, tried to make himself king. David then acted to crown his chosen son, Solomon, and Adonijah backed down. But after David died, and Solomon became king, Adonijah acted presumptuously, resulting in his death and also that of David’s commanding general, Joab, the one who had carried out his conspiracy to kill Uriah.
So David lost four sons as a consequence of Uriah’s murder, an ironic fulfillment of his judgment after murdering Uriah that the wealthy man would have to repay the poor man fourfold.
Furthermore, because David imitated the ways of pagan kings around him by accumulating wives and concubines for himself, his heir King Solomon took this practice to greedy excess. Solomon set in motion the downfall of David’s dynasty by introducing idolatry and sexual covetousness at the highest level. This led God to divide the kingdom in half, by supporting Jeroboam’s rebellion and the divided kingdom was thereafter unable to resist attacks and finally conquest from stronger neighboring kingdoms like Egypt, Assyria and finally Babylon.
The fall of David’s kingdom can be viewed as a grand type of how we can fail in life by hardening our heart to God and turning away from him to sin.
But Paul then says, “That is not the way you learned Christ! assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus” If you have asked Christ to come into your heart and have been taught anything about him, you know that God wants you to turn away from greedy and immoral practices and to live a faithful and morally pure life. Jesus lived without sin, and set the example for all of us to try to live a holy life. We will never be sinless as He is, but we can definitely live a more holy life when we seek to follow and obey Him. Jesus put it this way in John 12:26, “If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.”
A genuine faith will always result in a life of genuine repentance – that is, turning away from sin, the things God disapproves, and living a righteous life that honors God.
Paul now instructs us to do two things “to put off your old self… and to put on the new self.” In the Greek, the word for self is literally “man”. Put off the “old man” and put on the “new man.” You get a mental picture in his words of shucking off an old, decrepit man whose soul is scarred by hard-living, lust and other vices. And this old man is replaced by a vital, handsome, fair young man.
The old self “belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires”. Another version says our old man “is being corrupted in accordance with the deceitful lusts”. Our old self never gets better; it is corrupt and will continue being corrupted whenever we allow it to rear its ugly head in our thinking. Our old sinful nature will deceive us through lust into caving into behaviors that corrupt our character and sear our conscience. It brings a portent of death and rottenness to us, for “the wages of sin is death.”
By contrast, Paul tells us in v.23 “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.” By contrast to the futility of mind that is the unbeliever’s lot, God gives us the ability to be renewed in our minds, by the power of His Spirit. Our mind is intimately connected to our immortal spirit – our heart. So when Christ dwells in our heart, our mind begins to feel the effects of His presence. He gives us a new spirit that can renew our minds.
In Romans 12:2, Paul puts it this way. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may prove what the will of God is – that which is good, and acceptable and perfect.”
How do we renew our minds? By focusing our thinking on things pleasing to God. Philippians 4:8 says, “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.” Memorizing and then meditating on Scripture is an excellent way to renew your mind. Listening to the Bible on an MP3 player is also an excellent way. Reading good Christian books will reinforce renewed thinking. Singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs is another way.
The new self, Paul says, bears God’s likeness, which is true righteousness and holiness. Righteousness, which is roughly synonymous to justice, relates to just and upright dealings with others. John MacArthur says this is the lower part of the Ten Commandments, which is the moral law of God – honoring your parents and prohibitions against murder, adultery, stealing, lying under oath and covetousness. True holiness, he says, refers to the upper part of the Decalogue – those commands that relate to our relationship with God – having no other God but God, rejecting idolatry, not misusing God’s name and setting time aside for worship and rest, which is the intent of the Sabbath.
A spiritually renewed mind and life will reflect true righteousness and holiness in greater measure as we allow God to conform our character to that of His Son, Jesus. That is God’s perfect will for you and me, and His will is always for our ultimate and eternal good. Elsewhere, Paul calls this renewed life, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” It is the one and only life that can lead to divine and everlasting glory in heaven, which will bring us everlasting joy, peace and love.