WHAT DOES A LOST PERSON LOOK LIKE?
EPHESIANS 4:17-21
· This morning we are going to continue in Ephesians 4, beginning with verse 17. Last week we looked at how important our role in the body of Christ is.
1) We looked at how God is has given to each of us at least one gift for the purpose of ministry in the church.
We saw #1 We are gifted by the Holy Spirit,
#2 Given a Ministry by Christ’s call upon our lives, and
#3 Empowered in the ministry by the hand of God.
2) Last Sunday night we looked at 4:11-16 and saw how God has given special gifts to the church for a purpose of bringing growth in the church. Growth in 4 specific areas:
UNITY KNOWLEDGE MATURITY STATURE
· This morning we are going to consider the condition of a lost person and Paul’s command to the church that we live lives different from the world.
What’s Your Heart Condition?
In 1998 459,841 people or one in every 5 deaths in America were attributed to Coronary Heart Disease. That is how many die. A vital key to defeating heart disease is to determine how many are LIVING with heart problems. That is also key in defeating sin in the church.
1) Paul is writing to a church when he says, ‘WALK NO LONGER JUST LIKE THE WORLD”!
(17) So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk,
· The first thing you notice is that Paul reminds us that this message does not just come from him but from ‘the Lord’. Every wonder what Jesus would say if He came to an average church this Sunday morning.
STOP LIVING LIKE THE WORLD!
1) This is the GREAT PHYSICIAN diagnosis the church’s condition.
· Bible was written to be obeyed and not just studied, James says that we are to be ‘doers of the Word and not hearers only’(1:22)
· GENTILES is Paul’s way of describing the inhabitants of the lost world we live in. We may have so many things in common with them: same office or school, job similarities, family ties but what we live for should be radically different because of our relationship with Christ.
A father of college girl was riding up in the elevator of her dorm to visit her room. While they were riding up, a few other girls in the elevator began to talk about certain girls living with their boyfriends, abortions that had taken place and other forms of depravities that caused the father to blanche.
What type of place had he delivered his daughter to?
When they stepped off the elevator, the daughter spoke to his distress: "It’s ok, dad, they’re just talking about their favorite soap operas."
Those college girls may not have “lived like Gentiles” but they were thinking like Gentiles.
Notice where these college girls were spending their time: In the company of twisted people acting out tales of perversion & self-centeredness. God tells his people: Don’t spend your time with folks like that.
God told His people: "Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers." Psalms 1:1
Don’t spend time with the WICKED, the SINFUL or the SCORNFUL because you become like the people you spend time with. You learn to think like they do. Or as 1 Corinthians 15:33 says: “Do not be misled: ‘Bad company corrupts good character.’”
Young boy caught a sparrow and decided to teach it to talk like a parrot. He put in a cage already inhabited by 3 other parrots and waited.
After a day or so he checked by and found that the sparrow had learned a thing but the 3 parrots were now chirping like a sparrow.
· What does Paul say is so bad about a lost person? What is so negative?
THE CONDITION OF THEIR MINDS (17) ….walk in the futility of their mind, (18) being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them,
· Interesting that Paul does not start with their actions but with their thinking. The place for a Christian to recognize his similarities with ‘the gentiles’ is by the way he thinks. The thought life.
1) Am I adopting the world’s philosophies for life
2) Am I holding the same system of values
3) Am I working for the same goals, motivated by the same motivations?
Criminals come from all walks of life: rich, poor, black, white, educated, uneducated. Background makes little difference. However the common link between them all is a thinking pattern
1. PAULS SAYS THEIR THINKING IS EMPTY walk in the futility of their minds
a. The word FUTILITY lit means, ‘that which never succeeds’.
In their lostness they are never going to come up with the right answer.
It means vanity, emptiness, without any substantial purpose to it’.
Their thinking will never lead anywhere of eternal value.
Rom 1:22 ‘Professing to be wise they became fools’
Fool has said in his heart there is no God PS 14:1
Solomon went on a "quest for the best" using his wealth and power to pursue every pleasure that came to mind but concluded that such a life is "vanity and grasping for the wind" (Eccl.2:26).
2. THEIR UNDERSTANDING IS UNENLIGHTENED being darkened in their
understanding.
a. The live life in the dark. They have darkened understandings.
I was putting up a ceiling fan this past week when I felt a direct connection to KEYSTONE DAM.
Stopped to take time to count my fingers and check the curl in my hair, and rememorized 911.
Went to the breaker box and shut off anything and everything that might be suspect.
Safe from any further chance of becoming a Rottissery preacher but meant I had to put the fan up in darkness. Only a small bit of light coming in a distant window.
Life is much easier lived out in the light:
A lost person has to come to conclusions, discover answers with their understanding in the dark.
IT is no wonder we hear some of the wild statements we hear from time to time. No wonder people live their lives certain ways, I am amazed that ceiling fan didn’t end up upside down.
If you have every tried to share your faith with a person with a darkened understanding you quickly realize that they treat you as if you just landed
from Mars.
They aren’t stupid or unintelligent and the problem is not one of an inadequate explanation but they need illumination. They need God to turn the lights on.
We need to be ‘always ready to make a defense for the faith that lies within us’ and to pray that God will lift the darkness in their lives.
3. THEIR SPIRITUAL LIFE IS DEAD excluded from the life of God because of the
ignorance that is in them.
a. A third thing Paul mentions is that because of their ignorance they are
missing the life of God in their lives. They do not have God’s power to live
life in victory over sin
THE CONDITION OF THEIR HEARTS …because of the hardness of their heart; (19) and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.
· Paul alerts us to the great cause, why a lost person finds themselves with
Empty thinking, dark understanding, and a dead spiritual life.
IT IS A CHOICE OF THE HEART. Because of the hardness of the heart!
RAY STEDMAN: If men were cut off from God only because of ignorance of him, they might well excuse themselves, for no man can be blamed for not having what he doesn’t know exists, but now we learn the whole truth. It is all "due to their hardness of heart." Man is born ignorant and cut off from the life of God, but he remains in that condition only because of the hardness of his heart.
In 1994, George and Tina Rollason of York, Pa. named their newborn daughter Atheist Evolution Rollason. Mr. Rollason said that his daughter’s name is the couple’s answer to other parents’ use of biblical names. "There’s so many people named Christian, or Christine," he said. "This is just one person named Atheist." Those are two people with pretty hard hearts.
Word for hard is ‘porosis’. Used to describe a stone harder than MARBLE.
It was also used to describe the deposit that formed when a broken bone was reset and the break became harder than the bone itself. It describe the loss of all sensation.
IT IS WHEN MAN SETS HIS WILL HARDER THAN THE CALL OF GOD.
1. SYMPTOMS OF A HARD HEART
a. REJECTION: Rejecting the teaching and preaching of God’s Word
b. UNCOMPASSIONATE: like the Levite/Priest who passed the man on the
road to Jericho.
c. UNCOOPERATIVE SPIRIT: Pharisees attitude towards Jesus because He
didn’t do it their particular way.
2. SIGNS OF A HARD HEART:
a. Having become Callus: they are past feeling. Beyond any shame.
b. Having given themselves over SENSUALITY – IMPURITY - GREED
1) Those three pretty much describe what MADISON AVENUE targets now day to sell things to the American people.
2) They have lost an spiritual conscience and are just carried along in sin. No longer resist or fight the spirit of the age.
QUICK REMINDER: Paul is calling on the church to stop living like the lost world.
What does it take to make you stop and watch an ad, to make sure you watch a program on TV. What kind of movies are you most prone to want to see or rent?
What is the condition of your heart?
HOWARD HENDRICKS: Popular seminary professor for many years. Many young men were taught by him over the years. Keeps a little black book with him wherever he goes.
He writes in there the names of men whom he taught in seminary classes who have fallen out of the ministry through affairs and such. Grown to well over a hundred names
Was looking through the many names written down and was trying to determine any common thread between them.
Finally he realized what each had in common. When he had them in his class and as he knew them in the years after they all had the same thing: A HAUGHTY SPIRIT.
None saw the danger in what others could see. Things in common with a lost world and the ultimate consequences they would bring.
(20) But you did not learn Christ in this way, (21) if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus.
· Paul’s first argument to not live like the world was based on what a lost person is really like in their mind and heart BUT his second argument is based on what is true about Jesus.
IS THIS THE KIND OF STUFF YOU LEARNED IN SUNDAY SCHOOL?
Does living this way have anything to do with Jesus?
· If your life is like that of the world then Paul suggests that you ask yourself two very important questions with which we will close.
1. HAVE YOU REALLY HEARD HIS VOICE - May have ‘heard of Him’ but is lit. ‘Heard Him’.
A reference to a genuine response to the call of salvation. Do have a relationship with
Him or are you just a religious person? Are you really saved?
2. HAVE YOU REALLY BEEN TAUGHT IN HIM? The truth is in Jesus, you may be feeding at
many different tables but where are you learning the lessons of life and eternity.
If you are living like the world then you must be having a steady diet of worldly
thoughts, ideas and philosophies.
Worldly church members come in two ways: This morning
1) Lost people who think they are saved Trust in Jesus
2) Saved people who aren’t growing in Jesus. Turn away from the world
