“I Am New”
(Ephesians 4:17-24)
How many of you have a hard time throwing old things, especially clothes, away? Maybe you hold on to them thinking some day I’ll lose some weight and be able to fit into that again. Or maybe its gone out of style but you know that like most things, it will eventually come back into style. If we do this enough we don’t have room for anything new after a while do we?
What about old ways of thinking? Maybe you hold on to old ways of thinking that were engrained in you for so long that you think there is no way you could think any other way about it. I’ve probably told this story before, but I counselled a guy who was a recovering addict and ex biker. This guy wore nothing but jeans, leather jacket or vest, and those big leather Dayton boots. Didn’t matter what kind of weather.
After he started to turn his life around, his wife and children came back into his life after a long separation. He would go to the beach with his kids wearing jeans, a leather jacket, and big heavy leather boots. He felt silly but of course no one would tell him he did. He thought that’s what he had to look like to get by and be safe in the world coming out of a family where the kids were severely and regularly beaten by their dad.
I remember the day he came into my office one summer wearing shorts (Ok they were jeans that had been cut off), and runners with a t shirt. He was just beaming with a big smile and couldn’t believe how much more comfortable and free he felt. But he had one more struggle. In his house ketchup was not allowed. His father forbid it for no apparent reason, so for his whole life he thought you shouldn’t have ketchup. This silly thought had been with him since he was a kid, and his poor kids and wife could never have ketchup because of his father’s silly rule.
Well after this he went and bought some ketchup, and went home that night and the whole family had ketchup, with a big celebration, and he said it was so good, why had he held onto that silly rule for so long?
This is really in essence what Paul is talking about today. The ignorance and futility of some of our ways of living and thinking. Of course here we are specifically talking about spiritual thinking about God. Note that this ignorance is not a lack of intelligence, some of these people were brilliant. But the ignorance about the truth of God as Creator, redeemer and so on, and it’s due to the hardness of heart, Paul says. That word hardness is also used to indicate blindness, and stubbornness.
That is the state of all humanity when we are born into this world. We are all darkened and in the dark until the illumination of Christ shines on us. And at that point we either scurry away from the light hardening ourselves against the light, or we allow it to completely expose us, and this will lead to the realization that we need to repent and accept the work of Jesus. That is the life of God that Paul speaks of here, new life in a different spiritually enlightened way in Christ.
So what is the old life? Well it’s one that is characterized by callous sensual living. Remember Paul started this chapter with saying he was a prisoner for God. Well now he says that the opposite is giving ourselves over to be the slave of our passions. This former life is corrupt or spoiled through deceitful desires.
What does that mean, deceitful desires? Aren’t these desires and passions natural? Exactly, the natural man will have a tendency toward self gratification of all his desires and passions regardless of their source or outcome. We are born to satisfy our carnal desires. They are deceitful because they don’t offer what they promise even when we think they do. But Paul says the spiritual person has a new operating system so to speak.
That’s kind of what Lent is all about. This Wednesday marked the beginning of the 40 days before Easter that has been called Lent. During this time Christians have traditionally spent time fasting and repenting. The main purpose is to tame our fleshly desires and passions, making them obedient to us and to Christ. So I would encourage all of you to think about fasting from a desire that you have become maybe too attached to, for at least a day each week, and look at yourself, and allow God to look inside you, showing you what you are putting above Him who died and was raised from the dead so that you could have life. A life devoted to Him.
The next part of our passage gives us more indication of this old self. It is a thief always trying to get something for nothing. Corrupting talk, literally rotten or putrifying talk that does nothing but ruin and tear down. Bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor (we would probably use the word whining to represent this) and slander, are also characteristics of the old nature.
Can any of us relate to any of these characteristics? Maybe they were in our past, maybe we still struggle to keep them at bay, but I think we can all own at least one of them.
But back up to verse 20. “But 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. No you learned that you are to put off that old life, and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness”.
Now you may have heard me say before that originally we humans were created in the likeness or image of God. Since the fall of original sin, that is no longer true, until we are born again into Christ, which is the only way we can be righteous again. In essence salvation in Jesus is being recreated or reborn in the image of God.
But it appears this is not a completely passive thing, because Paul uses several verbs here to describe this process. He says put on, put off, do not, and several times in this passage he says let. So how do we process that in practical terms? If it was all God we would just be instantly changed into perfection the moment we were saved. Yes God has put this new life in us, but we must choose to walk in it.
I said earlier it’s like getting a new operating system. When we call on Jesus for salvation its like he loads a second operating system into our computer, and we can choose to run on the old system or the new system. In verse 23 he says to be renewed in the Spirit of your minds. It’s like rebooting your computer and when you do, the new operating system becomes the primary one. The way it calculates and handles information, and produces output is completely different from the old one.
So what does the new life look like? What does the new operating system project onto the screen? Well obviously the opposite of the old, so it’s less driven by sensual desires and the need to gratify self, and more driven by the desire to satisfy God and put others ahead of yourself. It speaks the truth, it gets angry but doesn’t act negatively with that anger, but rather seeks reconciliation before the sun goes down.
It’s willing to work and share from the fruit of its labour. It speaks words that encourage and build up rather than tear down, giving grace to everyone who hears you. And finally in the last verse, it is kind, tenderhearted or compassionate, and forgiving.
Are you seeing evidence of those characteristics in your life on an ever increasing basis, overshadowing some of your old characteristics? Are you becoming more forgiving, do you find yourself acting differently when you feel angry, are you more compassionate and less centered on yourself and more on others. Do you find that the desire to please God is gradually overcoming your need to gratify yourself?
I want to just address two interesting phrases in this passage. One is in verse 27 where it says give no opportunity to the devil. And the other is in verse 30 where it says do not grieve the Holy Spirit. What do these mean?
Let’s start with the first one, not giving opportunity to the devil. Let’s go to James chapter 4 for a biblical interpretation here. The Bible interprets itself folks. These are kind of harsh but true words shared in love by James. Read James 4:1-10…
Do you see how that parallels with what Paul is saying here. James talks about the passions that we tend to follow and what submitting to those passions accomplishes. He says resist the devil and submit yourselves instead to God. Feel the weight and wretchedness of your sin and draw near to God. That is an active pursuit on our part.
So Paul is specifically talking about anger here and that festering anger will only allow the devil to get in there and work on you. But the bigger picture is that when we are submitted to God and resist the temptations thrown at us, Satan will flee and God will draw near. But we also know that the devil will be back, he was with Jesus when he was being tempted, he didn’t give up right away.
I think that James passage even gives us a clue as to what grieving the Holy Spirit means. James says God yearns jealously over the Spirit that he has made to dwell in us. Isn’t that interesting? Many of you have seen or read the Lord of the Rings. In that story there is a ring that represents the power of evil. And the ring is constantly longing to be reunited with its evil master, and all the forces of evil are longing to get the ring back from this little Hobbit. They are constantly calling to each other desiring to be reunited.
I think we have a similar concept here. Once the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in us, he desires to be with the Father, and so he is grieved when we are walking away from Him, when He has to dwell in a dirty temple that is listening to its carnal desires over the voice of God. In the same way James says the Father is jealously yearning for the Spirit. All the Trinitarian aspects of God are yearning for each other in and through us. God calls us to himself through the Spirit, and the Spirit longs to be with the Father and in His will. That is why sin is strictly against God. Yes it has consequences in the world and for other people, but sin is ultimately against God and it grieves Him deeply, not because we are bad, He can forgive that, but because he wants so much more for us, to be in union with us.
So here’s a question for you. This message is titled “I am New”, is that true for you? Not just that you now have eternal life where before you didn’t, that might even be debatable if you have not experienced any change in your mind and will.
But do you feel new, do you feel that you are increasingly becoming newer, in other words do you see and feel yourself changing for the better in the ways we heard about today? Do you sense this change just happening in you because of the presence of God in you? You’re supposed to according to Paul, that’s part of God’s plan, and it also appears from much of his writing to the church, that this newness should give you the power to choose Christ over sin, to be victorious as he is victorious.
What if you honestly look at yourself and say, “You know I don’t really notice much of a difference since I was saved”. You might say I’ve always been pretty good compared to most peolpe, maybe I didn’t need to change as much as some. But what about compared to Jesus who we are created in and being conformed to the likeness of? We should really be using him as our standard, not other people, even the holiest Christians.
What if you hear yourself say, “When I honestly look at myself, I don’t see much difference between me and many of the non Christians I know”. What then? What am I supposed to do, try harder? No.
You probably need to surrender, to allow yourself to be taken captive by Christ. The very first thing is to be renewed in the spirit of your minds. Attitude and a change of desires comes before anything else. Have you ever honestly and from the heart asked Jesus to completely take over your life? And if not, why? Don’t you trust Him?
It’s probably because you do not have the relationship with him that you could have. And that is probably because you haven’t invested much of yourself in the relationship. What that looks like may differ somewhat from person to person, but what we know for sure is that reading and meditating on His word and praying, are central to this relationship. Why not use this Lenten season to work on this relationship, to invest as much in this most important relationship, as you do in other relationships in your life, so that you can feel like the new you is rising with Him at Easter.
