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.
Does Paul’s description of the Gentiles in his day fit with people who aren’t members of God’s family today? Does it fit with the majority of people living in Boscombe and Pokesdown?
Look at how Paul describes the Gentiles of his day in verses 18 and 19:
‘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. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practise every kind of impurity.’
Are people in Boscombe and Pokesdown like that?
Are they darkened in their understanding? Many people give their minds to sports, movies, and sitcoms. They don’t have the light of understanding things that are actually important.
Are they ignorant? Many people get addicted to alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and gambling. How does that happen? Isn’t it a sign of ignorance? And many people have no idea of who God is or what he has done for them. That’s the height of ignorance.
Are they callous? Many people put their own pleasure or prosperity before other people’s needs. That is callous. Many people see stories of war and suffering on the news but do nothing to help.
Have they given themselves up to sensuality? Many people love to see sex or suggestive images on TV or in the cinema.
Are they greedy to practise every kind of impurity? In 2024, the Home Office tells us that more than 5.3 million non-fraud related crimes were recorded in the UK. There were another 1.3 million cases related to fraud. More than half of crimes are never reported. What does this tell us? People around us are practising every kind of impurity.
Paul’s description of the Gentiles of his day fits EXACTLY with the people who live around us who don’t know Jesus.
PAUL HAS AN INSTRUCTION. It’s a very serious instruction. He writes:
‘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.’
This may be the way of life you have come from. BUT IT HAS TO CHANGE.
God wants to give us a new heart. But first, the old heart has to go.
We have to REJECT THE OLD before PUTTING ON THE NEW!
Paul wrote, ‘YOU MUST NO LONGER WALK AS THE GENTILES DO.’ It means that it’s possible for a person to say that they have turned to Christ but not change. That’s a scary thought! When we turn to Christ we have to turn away from our old way of life.
'But that is not the way you learned Christ!'
Wow! That’s an extraordinary statement. I don’t believe there’s any statement like it in the Bible.
We learn Spanish, we learn Braille, we learn guitar, we learn chess. What else do we learn?
But could Priscilla say, ‘I’m learning Simon’? It wouldn’t make sense.
How can Paul say, ‘But that is not the way you learned Christ’?!
This is difficult and I’m not sure that I’ve got it. But I think Paul’s idea is this. Before we turn to Christ, we look at the world around us and we learn from it. When we’re kids, we look up to the cool kids. As we get older, we listen to the vloggers and influencers; we watch the movie stars. At work, we hear how other people falsify their tax returns. We learn the world.
But now we have turned to Christ. Now he is our model. And now, we learn HIM. We watch what he says and does, and we do the same.
Put off your old self
In these verses, Paul contrasts the old self and the new self.
Look at verse 22. The old self belongs to your former manner of life. It goes with the life you had before you became a Christian. The old self was taught by the world around you and that world was characterised by deceitful desires.
Put on the new self
Now look at verse 24. There is some variation in how different Bible versions translate this. It seems to me that a version called the Disciples’ Literal New Testament is very close to the original. It has:
‘and that you put-on the new person having been created in accordance with God, in righteousness and holiness of truth.’
This new person is created ‘in accordance with God.’ The Greek doesn’t say ‘like God’ or ‘in God’s image.’ If people say ‘in accordance with’ it means that they are complying in every detail with some standard. God is creating us in accordance with him. That’s amazing! The person God is creating complies in every detail with him.
And then Paul writes, ‘in righteousness and holiness of truth.’ The old self is led by deceit. The new self is led by truth. Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the life and the truth.’ Find Jesus and you find truth. Find truth and you find Jesus.
We’ve reached the end of this passage.
FINAL THOUGHTS
1. Don’t live as the Gentiles – as the people around us
Paul started this section by writing:
‘Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles.’
Paul is VERY emphatic. We MUST put off the old self. We must change.
2. Learn Christ
We learn Christ. We go to the School of Christ. We make HIM the model we learn from, not the world around us.
3. Put off the old self
4. Put on the new self
Our new self is being created according to God! But we must put it on! We must put what we’re learning into practice.
5. Paul will come onto the practical application: verse 25 starts with a ‘therefore’.
6. Patience!
This is a process. God created humankind IN HIS IMAGE. Sin has spoiled God’s image, but it’s still there. When someone becomes a Christian the marks, the tarnish of sin begins to fade, and the believer starts to show the image of God more clearly. But it doesn’t happen in an instant. Paul wrote a letter to the Colossians and told them that they had ‘put on the new self, which IS BEING RENEWED in knowledge after the image of its creator’ [Colossians 3:10]. Paul didn’t write, ‘put on the new self, which HAS BEEN RENEWED.’ He wrote, ‘is being renewed’. The renewal doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process. It happens, but we need some patience.
TWO SONGS
'Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus', just the chorus, and ‘Create in Me a Clean Heart’, the Keith Green song, which is based on David’s prayer in Psalm 51.
7. Cost
God created us in his image. That image became tarnished because of sin. But now, when we turn to Christ, God starts to restore his image in us. For Jesus’ image to emerge in us, we need to imitate Jesus. We observe carefully how Jesus spoke and acted and then try to do the same. We aim to think and speak and act like he did.
So how did Jesus think and speak and act? Above all, Jesus loved people. Does Jesus want us to copy him in the way he loved people? Absolutely! He told his disciples, ‘A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another’ [John 13:34-35]. Jesus wants us to love one another just as he loved us. How did Jesus love us? He went to the cross for us.
A Bible scholar called John Frame wrote that ‘…the most profound form of imitation is the imitation of Jesus’ atonement.’ That sounds like a very strange idea. Jesus atoned for our sins – he bore our sins – and he was the only one who could do that. You or I can’t atone for anyone’s sin. But we CAN lay our lives down for each other. John wrote, ‘By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers’ [1 John 3:16].
Clearly, imitating Jesus is going to be costly!
COMMENT ON THE FINAL HYMN
There’s a psalm in which David prayed to God, ‘Create in me a pure heart, O God.’ We’re going to conclude our service with a hymn Charles Wesley wrote in 1742, 'O For a Heart to Praise My God'. I wasn’t familiar with this hymn, but I found that it has been published in over a thousand hymnals! Wesley's hymn echoes David's prayer.
Some years before, Charles Wesley and his brother John had made a mission trip to America. Charles Wesley got malaria, and they faced quite a bit of resistance from people in America. Both men came back with a sense of failure. But later, Charles Wesley experienced a spiritual renewal. He longed for his heart to be transformed by God’s grace. This hymn expresses that, and I hope that it will express our desire too.
Talk given at Rosebery Park Baptist Church, Bournemouth, UK, 17th August 2025
