Old Self And New Self

CHILDREN’S SLOT EARLY IN THE SERVICE

Three visual aids

Have you heard the phrase, ‘Out with the old in with the new’? Let me give you some examples.

1. These are some pictures of Meghan Markle. In 2018, she married Prince Harry. She became Duchess of Sussex and a member of the royal family. Before she married Prince Harry, she was an actress, and she wore clothes which fitted with her job as an actress. But after she got married, she changed the way she dressed (two pairs of before and after pictures).

2. Old phone and new phone. Show my old brick phone and the phone I now have. My old phone sits in a box in the attic. When I got a new phone, I stopped using the old one.

3. My son Daniel, wearing an old jacket. I’m holding a much newer jacket. ‘Daniel, can you put the new jacket on?’ Daniel tries to, but can’t, because he hasn’t taken the old jacket off. ‘Daniel, could you take the old jacket off and try again?’ Now, Daniel can put the new jacket on.

Last week, we thought about something God said to his people a long time ago. He said, ‘And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh’ [Ezekiel 36:26].

God wants to make changes. But he doesn’t want to just change our phones or our jackets. He wants to change US! He wants to change our old hearts of stone to new hearts of flesh. In fact, he wants to change us completely. He wants to change old us into new us. That’s what we’re looking at today.

MAIN TALK

INTRODUCTION

In our service last week, I talked about transformation. We looked at a verse in Ezekiel in which God said this:

‘And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh’ [Ezekiel 36:26]

God tells the people of Israel that he’s going to give them new hearts! Wow! That means transformation at the deepest level of their beings.

But it isn’t only the people of Israel in Ezekiel’s time who would get new hearts. Every Christian gets a new heart. The New Testament doesn’t talk about God giving us hearts of flesh in place of hearts of stone, but it says the same in a slightly different way. For example, Paul wrote:

‘But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is A MATTER OF THE HEART, by the Spirit, not by the letter’ [Romans 2:29].

A person isn’t a child of God because of what is done to them. They are a child of God because of an inner transformation of their heart. Notice that Paul says, ‘By the Spirit.’ This is God’s work.

What God wants is a heart changed by His Spirit, not the fact that we follow a set of religious laws.

So, God is going to give us new hearts. God does this by his Spirit. But we may wonder, do WE have to do anything?

Today, we’re returning to Ephesians after a break. The passage Kay read for us answers that question. The answer is, yes, we do have to do something!

WHAT WE HAVE TO DO

Let’s take a look.

Our passage today is Ephesians 4:17-24. It’s just eight verses long. I want to look at them quite closely. Kay read for us from the NIV which is the Bible we have in church. But I’m going to switch to the ESV. It’s a bit different from the NIV but I think it’s closer to the Greek in this passage.

I want to focus on four statements in this passage:

• No longer walk as the Gentiles do

• But that is not the way you learned Christ!

• Put off your old self

• Put on the new self

In 4:22, Paul tells the Ephesians that they have been taught ‘to put off your old self.’ Then, in verse 24, he tells them that they have been taught ‘to put on the new self.’

God is in the business of transforming us. But it’s clear we have to do something too!

No longer walk as the Gentiles do

‘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.’

In Paul’s day, Gentiles meant people who weren’t Jews. By faith, they could become members of God’s family. But the Gentiles who Paul was writing about were alienated from the life of God. These Gentiles weren’t part of God’s family.