Opening illustration: A young boy knocked at the studio door of an Italian artist who had died. When it was opened, he explained, “Please, madam, will you give me the master’s brush?”
The boy, who had a passionate longing to be an artist, wished for the great master’s touch. The woman placed the brush in the boy’s hand and invited him to try.
He made a supreme effort but soon found he could paint no better with that brush than with his own. The woman then said, “Remember, you cannot paint like the great master unless you have his spirit.”
So too, people who have never been born again are doomed to disappointment and failure when they attempt to live in a way that pleases God. Without the indwelling Holy Spirit, they cannot do it.
Perhaps you have experienced the new birth and you have Christ’s Spirit living within you, yet you feel so powerless. The reason may be that though you have all of His Spirit, His Spirit does not have all of you. All your ambitions and desires must be submitted to His control.
The greatness of the power and effectiveness of your service for Christ is in exact proportion to the measure of your surrender to Christ.
Let us turn to Ephesians 4 in God’s Word and see how we could pursue to be in the likeness of our master.
Introduction: The Bible was written to be obeyed, and not simply studied, and that is why in this second half of Ephesians the Apostle Paul takes what he told us in the first three chapters and tells us - what to do about it. Follow his flow with me. First he says "Here is what Christ has done for you.” Then he says: “In the light of this, here is what we ought to do for Christ."
The bible says, we are to be doers of the word, and not hearers only. So in our text today the Apostle Paul tells the Ephesians: “Because of what Jesus has done, you need to live differently than the world.” “You need to walk in purity / you need to live in purity.”
Believers are alive in Christ not dead in sins; so here in the scriptures say, that we are to "Put aside the old man – who is ruled by the flesh, and by sin. Then we are to put on the new man who is ruled by God. Or as one commentator says, “take off the grave-clothes and put on the grace-clothes!”
How can we be like our master?
1. Unlike the World (vs. 17-19)
(a) Faith in Christ demands a radical change in the lifestyle of the believer from the way he once behaved. The words “no longer” and “also” indicate that Paul’s readers once lived the way they are now to renounce and reject. Paul’s command is to cease living the way they used to live and to live in a way that glorifies God.
(b) This command deals with the Christian’s new relationship to the world. Once, as a part of the world system, we were alienated from God and strangers to His kingdom. Now, as those in Christ, we are citizens of God’s kingdom and members of His body, but we have become strangers and pilgrims to this world (see Hebrews 11:13-16; 1 Peter 1:1; 2:11).
(c) This command deals with the Christian’s relationship to the culture in which they live. While the Ephesians saints once lived like Gentile heathen, their fellow-Ephesians still do live this way. This may very well result in the persecution of the Gentile saints, since their godliness poses a threat to the sinful ways of their peers (see 1 Peter 4:1-6). But in addition there will be considerable pressure on the Gentile believers to continue to live as they used to.
Paul does more than to simply command his readers to cease living like unbelievers; he commands them not to conduct themselves as their unbelieving Gentile peers. Why didn’t Paul command the Ephesian saints not to live like the unbelieving Jews? Because these Gentile saints were a part of the Gentile culture. It was this culture which threatened to influence them to live as they formerly did. The “world” is, to a great extent, the culture in which we live, which seeks to pressure us to conform to its values, standards, goals, and conduct. The “world” which most influences us is the culture in which we have grown up.
Christianity, Paul implies, often runs across the grain of our culture, and thus we must determine to follow Christ and to cease to march to the drum of the world in which we live. Peer pressure contrary to God’s will and His Word is to be expected and rejected by the Christian, in order that he or she may walk worthy of the calling with which we have been called (4:1).
(d) Fourth, Paul maintains that the moral conduct of men is the outgrowth of his mental processes. The dominant thought here, as we find elsewhere in Ephesians, is that doctrine determines conduct. What we believe affects the way we behave.
The lifestyle of unbelieving Gentiles is characterized as a walk which is …
• in the futility of their mind
• being darkened in their understanding
• excluded from the life of God
The Christian lifestyle will not be lived out by those with a pagan mindset. It is the Christian mindset of our text which works itself out in the conduct which befits our calling in Christ. Allow me to point out some of the inferences of Paul’s teaching in our text and its implications in our practical daily living. Our pagan culture believes that the past is the key to the present. What we think and how we act, we are told, is the result of our past. It is only by understanding our past that we can live as we should in the present. In other words, the past controls the present.
Illustration: A new Christian was reading through the Gospels. After she finished, she told a friend she wanted to read a book on church history. When her friend asked why, the woman replied, "I'm curious. I've been wondering when Christians started to become so unlike Christ."
We can understand why this new convert was perplexed. There is a great disparity between the life of Christ and the lives of many who bear His name. In fact, some believers are even imitating the world instead of trying to live like Jesus.
Almost 2,000 years have passed since followers of Jesus were first called Christians (Acts 11:26). Today, we who have placed our trust in the Savior still bear that name and march under the same banner as those early believers. The Bible says that we are God's "workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them" (Eph. 2:10). When we call ourselves Christians, we are saying to the world that Christ is our Savior and that we are following Him.
2. Renewed in the Spirit (vs. 20-23)
“Learning Christ” is not the typical way of referring to one’s coming to Christ in the Bible. It most certainly is not the normal way of referring to conversion today. Biblical terms such as “born again” are sometimes used, but more often unbiblical expressions are the norm. We talk, for example, of “inviting Christ into our lives,” which is both existential and self-oriented. We talk little of “learning” and we think that doctrine and evangelism are not closely related. “Let them first get saved, and then let them learn doctrine,” is the way many Christians seem to think. Paul assumes otherwise, perhaps because some of those to whom Paul was writing came to faith directly or indirectly through his ministry at Ephesus (see Acts 19). Coming to Christ, as Paul believed and practiced, was not just an experience. It was learning. It was learning Christ.
The lifestyle which Paul sets out as God’s standard for Christians should come as a surprise to no convert to Christ, as radically different as it is from our former way of life. Our relationship to the world and to our own flesh is simply the outworking of the gospel which we should already have learned in coming to Christ. If, as may be the case today, some have not learned these general things of which Paul speaks in verses 17-24, then the gospel has not been fully or faithfully proclaimed.
If the renewing of our minds is so vital to our Christian life, how is it done? The Bible is not a book of formulas, but I would like to focus your attention on one key element: the Word of God. When a person wants to learn a foreign language, what is the most effective way to do so? It is to enter into that culture and language and become saturated with it. This is how our children learn to talk and to think as we do. If we would desire to have our minds renewed, then we must find God’s thoughts and immerse ourselves in them. His thoughts have been incarnated in Christ, the Living Word, and recorded in the Bible, His inspired written Word.
I dare say that most Christians spend more time in front of their television sets, radios, magazines, and books than they do in their Bibles. Even many Christian stations and publications contain much that is secular thinking sprinkled with a smattering of spiritual jargon. If we would think God’s thoughts after Him, we will find them only in His Word. Let us become so saturated with His Word that we begin to reflect His ways, His values, His goals, His methods. This is the renewing of the mind which Paul calls for.
Illustration: Let me ask you this question: have you learned Christ? Are you in the process of learning Christ? We learn of persons historically, for example, we learn in books of Julius Caesar. And we can say, “I know about Julius Caesar.” And we can learn by hearsay and by study. In our day, most of us lived during the Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, or if not Eisenhower, John Kennedy. And we can say yes, I know something about John Kennedy and I know something about Dwight Eisenhower. I know by hearsay or by study. But then, you only know about them. But with Jesus Christ, it’s possible for us to know about him through personal contact, so that we don’t have to say, “I know about Christ.” We can say, “I know Christ. I know him.”
By the presence of the Holy Spirit, through the word of God, we may truly come to know him. Dwight Eisenhower’s dead. Julius Caesar’s dead. John F. Kennedy is dead. Jesus Christ is alive, and we can know him. That’s why the Holy Spirit has been given us, so that we would have no handicap over the apostles themselves, who were able to know him personally. In fact, even better, because Peter could only know him as he was in his physical presence. We have the marvelous privilege of having our Lord with us all the time.
3. Put on the New Man: Righteousness + Holiness (vs. 24)
In Christ, our old man has been crucified, put to death. In our daily conduct, we should crucify the flesh daily, and put aside the conduct which springs forth from fleshly desires. In Christ we were made alive, raised from the dead and seated with Him in the heavenlies (see Ephesians 2:5-6). We should therefore walk in newness of life, manifesting the work of the Spirit of God in and through us. It is by His power that we are both motivated and enabled to live in a way that pleases God.
Jesus warned of the danger of attempting to remove evil, rather than replacing it (see Luke 11:26). Paul’s words indicate that our old nature and its deeds are not merely to be rejected, they are to be replaced. We must “put off” the old man and at the same time “put on” the new. While the old nature is continually being corrupted by the lusts of deceit, the new nature is renewing us, in accordance with the nature of God and His righteousness and truth. The old nature is being corrupted, the new is being renewed. The old is deceitful, the new deals in truth. The old is sinful, the new is righteous. The old is driven by lusts, the new by the character and purposes of God.
Illustration: Often when I find something in the garbage, I do not use it for its originally intended use, but I adapt it for some other use. God has done something similar to every Christian. So far as our usefulness to God is concerned, when we are in our natural sinful state, we are fit for nothing else than the trash. But when God saves us through the person and work of His Son, He transforms us into something entirely new. Through His Spirit, which works in us personally and through other members of the body of Christ, He equips us for serving Him. He gives us a new identity and a new function.
Application: Christ is seen most clearly when we remain in the background.
