“…and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.”
We spent the last several minutes of the last sermon in this series, talking about having our minds renewed as to the difference between our old corrupt nature, and the creation of the new man, which each believer is.
You may remember my illustration of my friend Sheri, who had lost over 50 unwanted pounds, yet still saw herself as fat for months afterward, until one day she came past a mirror unexpectedly, and, being caught by surprise, saw for the first time what she really looked like.
Having discussed these things in the previous sermon, I don’t want to belabor the point. But I felt it necessary to come back to it as our primary focus today, because our understanding of this is vital to a full and accurate comprehension of the verses to come next, even to the end of this chapter.
PUTTING OFF AND PUTTING ON
There are some things that we have to be clear on before we can proceed, concerning the putting off of the old self, and the putting on of the new.
First, we note that Paul is calling for us to do something here. (and I’m backing up to verse 22 to bring this in) “…that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit.”
Then in verse 24 he says to put on the new. Now there is a sense in which the change within us comes completely from God. I’m going to discuss that in detail in a few minutes, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. It must be made clear to those who think that it is the Christian’s duty to pray, “God, please take away my tendencies toward my old habits and my old lifestyle, and I’ll just wait here while you do that”, that Paul is clearly telling the Christian that it’s his or her job to put off the old man, from which those things spring.
This, I think, is where most of us get hung up. We’re focusing on the actions and behaviors that mark the old nature, and trying to deal with them as they come up, or, as I said a minute ago, we plead with the Lord in our weakness, to remove those things from us.
But that’s not the way Jesus deals with the problem, you see. We want to keep tossing chlorine into the stream as it rushes by, in an attempt to purify the water. But Jesus goes all the way back to the source and purifies that, so that what flows from it is clean.
In II Peter 1 the Apostle tells us that God has granted to us all that we need in order to become partakers of the divine nature. So it is not that something was removed from man, not that something was changed in the man, but that something was imparted to the man; the divine nature.
Paul says that since we’ve been created brand new in Christ and are indwelt by His Spirit, and have the divine nature imparted to us, we are now empowered to lay aside the old corrupt nature with all its evil practices, and put on the new, and walk accordingly.
So we have entered into a partnership with God in this sense; He purges and empowers, and we put on and practice.
Paul demonstrated this partnership again very effectively in Philippians 2:12,13
“So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.”
Work, for God works in you toward the same end.
Ignorance of this doctrine leads to error in one of two ways. The first, I’ve already mentioned. It is where the Christian thinks he is to sit back and let God make the changes in him that will make him a better person, so he won’t be so inclined to do those things he did as a pagan. The monster is fed by pithy sayings that really leave too much unsaid to be of any real value; “Let go and let God” for example.
And as I said earlier, to some degree that does happen, especially to the new believer. He will suddenly realize one day that there is some thing he used to do or some thought process that used to possess him, or some reactive behavior to certain incidents in his life, that have not expressed themselves in his person in a long time; and he will realize that God has changed him in that regard.
But he cannot go on thinking, and he should not be taught, that he should just go his merry way, giving no thought to scriptural admonitions to put God’s word into practice in his life, and just assume that God will change him in time, and meanwhile, what he does is ok because God hasn’t changed him yet.
“Please be patient, God isn’t finished with me yet” is a clever little sentiment I’ve seen on cards and t-shirts. But hearing it from some folks might make us want to say, “Well, if you know there’s more work to be done, why don’t you help God out and speed the process a little?”
On the other side of that coin is the error of thinking that Christianity consists of living a moral and ethical existence, and that is what makes you a good Christian.
Thomas Arnold was headmaster of Rugby school in England from 1827 to 1842, where he brought about many changes. Mathematics, modern languages, and modern history were added to the traditional classical curriculum. He was seen as very innovative and enlightened. Independent thought was encouraged. Through the medium of his weekly sermons to his students in Rugby Chapel, Arnold expounded the Christian principles and ideals that formed the core of his own religious convictions.
His approach, and one that was widely applauded, was that to be a good ‘Christian’ was to read the teaching and life of Jesus and put the principles He taught into action. It was exclusively based upon behavior and conduct, and there was no spiritual element in it.
What you must understand today, is that to do that simply lumps Christianity in with all of the moral and ethical teachings of the pagan philosophies and religions.
The Greeks were expounding these same principles for living long before Jesus walked the earth. And if we go around with the idea that real Christianity is asking, “What Would Jesus Do?” and then trying to act like Him, then we put Him in line with Mohammed, Buddha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Moses, and relegate Him to the role of ‘good moral teacher’, and nothing more. We’ve removed the uniqueness of Christianity and made it a purely social religion, if we approach it as a cold moral code of ethics and deny the spiritual.
Nicodemus was probably a very upright and moral man. He was a Pharisee, and as we see later in the gospels, he was a help to the disciples in burying the body of Jesus, and at one point made an attempt to defend Jesus to the other Pharisees. Yet Jesus told him that he must be ‘born again’.
It doesn’t matter how good and moral you are. It doesn’t matter that you are kind and sacrificial of yourself and your resources to help others. No matter what good you can say of yourself or others can say about you, none of it is worth anything to your eternal soul. All of that, even the good, has to die. You have to be a new man; you must be born again!
And then, having been made brand new…
“…if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away, behold, new things have come.” II Cor 5:17
…and having had the divine nature imparted to us and the Holy Spirit come to live in us, then, with God’s empowering and working within us, we lay aside the old man daily, and put on the new, and walk according to light.
CREATED IN GOD’S LIKENESS
Genesis 1:26,27 “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth’. And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
Man was created in God’s likeness. Now that didn’t mean that he physically looked like God. Common sense tells us that, or which one of us would look most like Him?
But we were created with the attributes of God that make Him personal. Self-awareness. Morality. Intelligence, and so on.
Here is where the teachers of Christianity as a code of moral ethics fall short. If the spiritual side of the equation is rejected, then it could be argued that Adam’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden had no lasting consequences. In fact, it would have affected no one but Adam and Eve, because the only consequence would have been the immediate one; being evicted from the garden. No one after them would have known the difference.
There are good, moral, ethical people all around us that haven’t the vaguest interest in Christianity; and in many cases, no interest in any religion whatsoever. And if it was only a matter of morals and behavior, then it would be on the shoulders of each individual to live accordingly, or choose a different path.
If you follow that line of thought to it’s natural conclusion, then down the line we would be forced to concede that your idea of morality and proper ethics and conduct, though possibly very different from mine, would be just as valid as mine.
But God makes it a spiritual issue that supercedes the moral dilemma, in that it makes us accountable to Him and not just ourselves and our rejection or acceptance of a code.
In the things that are not spiritual, they still bear the image of God. We still retained some of the marks of God even in the Fall. We didn’t stop being men. We still have reason and intellect and self-awareness and all the things that separate us from the animals. But sin defaced that image of God. And sin is a spiritual problem.
It took spiritual rebirth to restore that image. Not the improvement of the old nature, but something entirely new. A new nature, recreated in God’s image. Something had to be replaced that was lost in the Fall, and since we know that even fallen men retained the ability to practice morality, and retained his intelligence and his self-awareness and all those other things that place him above the animal, then we have to see that what was lost, what had to be restored, was that spiritual side of God’s nature, the image of which we were originally created in.
So what part of God’s image was restored when we were born again? Paul gives us the answer right here in the text. His righteousness, holiness and truth.
RIGHTEOUSNESS, HOLINESS AND TRUTH
Notice that God relates our being created in His image, to being qualified to rule over His creation as His entrusted stewards. Even over the things that creep along the ground. After the Fall that was perverted, and man, instead of ruling over creation, began to bow down to worship it and serve it.
“Professing to be wise they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.”
Everything concerning our relationship to God, or our relating to one another in a Godly way and according to Godly thinking, was turned backwards in the Fall.
We were created to rule creation, and ended up worshiping it.
I have caused my children some problems in the past, I know, at school. And I’ve felt badly about that, and I hope that as I’ve explained to them, on some level they’ve understood me.
But with each one, as they’ve come up through the elementary grades, when the time of year came for them to study ecology and they’ve celebrated “Earth Day”, I’ve sent notes to school with them asking the teacher not to include them in the activities, and to please give them something else to do that they could be graded on.
I’ve explained to those teachers that if my children must be processed through a school system that rejects God the Creator of all things, then I will not allow them to be involved in worshiping His creation in His place.
Once more, let me bring you back to the infinite difference between a philosophy of high moral excellence and so-called “Christian behavior”, and true Christianity, which is being born from above and re-created in God’s image.
The unregenerate mind can understand the codes. They can act morally and behave in a socially acceptable manner; but they cannot possibly comprehend Godly righteousness, or holiness.
When Paul was addressing the issue of marriage between believers and non-believers to the Corinthian church, he made this point abundantly clear with a comparison.
II Cor 6:14-16, “…what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? Or what harmony has Christ with Belial, or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols?”
And then his admonition to them;
7:1 “Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.”
Having been created in the likeness of God, Christian, means having been made righteous and holy.
I repeat; those are the marks of God lost in the Fall, and those are the marks of God created in the new man that separate him from those still in the flesh only.
The old self, he said in verse 22, is “…corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit”. Their entire existence is built upon deceit. What they believe to be true, is all lies. Turned backward by sin and diametrically opposed to all that God is.
They do not have righteousness, nor holiness or the ability to pursue either.
The new self, created in God’s likeness, is created in righteousness and holiness of the truth. It is only the regenerate mind that can comprehend those things, because it has been awakened to truth, and indeed, was created according to truth.
Now righteousness and holiness are both something that we have been created as; that is, the born again believer in Christ is righteous and holy according to God’s own declaration. We saw that in chapter one.
In addition, and because that is what he has been created to be, the believer is now called to put into practice, what he is.
Righteousness means to be justified, and to pursue righteousness in our relationship with both God and man, is to act justly.
Holiness means to be pure, and to pursue holiness…purity before God, means to walk according to holiness, by laying aside the old man with all its corruption and deceit, and put on the new man, which is created in righteousness and holiness according to truth.
I’ve been feeding you a lot of peas today, so I want to keep it short. Let me draw this to a close by taking you back to the illustration I used of my friend Sheri, and connect the dots.
Many Christians go about with the understanding that the purpose Jesus came was to save them from Hell; save them to Heaven; and that is all. So they are grateful, and they say “I was a guilty sinner, but Jesus paid for my sins and now I am forgiven”.
But they don’t recognize what it means that He made them brand new. They still see their old weak, failing self in the ‘mirror’, and all of the admonitions that come later to live according to righteousness and holiness are only a drudgery to them. Because to them this is Christianity. Believe the gospel message, then learn these principles for living, and then do them, and try not to mess up.
Not long ago I was talking with a loved and respected brother in the Lord, who differed with me on the necessity to go ‘deeper’ in the Word and not stay constantly with the simple, practical daily application of the scriptures. What I mean by that is, answering questions like, ‘how do I deal with anger?’ ‘what does the Bible say about fear, or lust, or depression, or addiction, etc?’
A loose quote, since I didn’t record his words, is that as long as he can see those things in himself, and as long as there is tendency in himself for those things to rear their ugly heads, what is the point in moving on and studying deeper?
I didn’t say much at the time, because I had to go away and think about what he was saying. I had to agree, of course, that there is certainly a place for addressing those things from a biblical perspective. People do struggle with all of those things, and the best answers for them are in the bible. No doubt about that.
But as I mulled it over, it occurred to me that as long as we’re in the flesh those things will be around. We’re not going to completely outgrow them, or expunge them from our human nature.
The man who has loved his wife faithfully and been loyal to her for many years, and never entertained a thought of another woman, may have built a strong relationship with her because of that loyalty and attentiveness to her. But he’d better not let himself be deceived into thinking that the enemy wouldn’t like to catch him by surprise and tempt him away in a moment of weakness, because the old man didn’t die. He needs to be put off daily.
“Let him who thinks he stands, take heed lest he fall.” I Cor. 10:12
So if I stay with the basics of the faith and refuse to go on until I no longer struggle with any of these baser things, then scriptural admonitions to go on to maturity are useless. Indeed, His word is truth; Jesus said so; and it is God’s truth that empowers us to comprehend and apply righteousness and holiness.
So Christians, you must come to see clearly that what was restored in you when you first believed, was truth and the ability to comprehend it, and righteousness before God, and the ability to practice it, and holiness in His presence, and the power by His indwelling Spirit to live it.
Look in the ‘mirror’ of His word and see the change.
“If you abide in My word, you are truly disciples of Mine; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:31,32
Free to go on to the practical application of this epistle, and not be burdened down by it, but empowered to obey it. Renewed in the spirit of your mind, turning away from the mirror with a clear revelation of what your new man looks like, and walking with head up, clothes that fit, pursuing righteousness and holiness in Christ your Head.
