Putting Off The Old Man

Putting Off The Old Man

Thank you to John Campbell for the Outline.

In today’s Gospel Lesson from Matthew 9, Jesus tells a paralytic that his sins are forgiven. This, of course, shocks everyone. And it really should shock us. The interesting thing is how the paralytic’s friends are shocked more because they expected and wanted a temporary physical healing rather than a spiritual healing. That’s its own sermon.

We also have the skeptics, who see in Jesus declaring the forgiveness of sins a claim that He is God. And it’s true, Jesus agrees only God can forgive sins and He still does.

Addressing His skeptics, to prove that Jesus has authority to forgive the man’s sins, Jesus tells the man to walk. If Jesus can heal a man by His own authority, He must be God, and must also have the power to forgive sins.

Because Jesus intervened in His life, he has become radically different. It is important to note that Jesus did not say to this man, “If you can get up and walk, your sins are forgiven.”

We do not walk to get right with God, but if we have been made right with God we will walk properly, which sets us up nicely to look at our epistle lesson from Ephesians.

Ephesians is interesting, in that it seems to have been put together with a balanced approach to following the greatest commandment, and the second greatest commandment we’ve been seeing come up.

The first 3 chapters of Ephesians open with God’s plan of salvation, being right with God, and why we should love him for what he did. The second half addresses how we live today, with our family in Christ. That’s the model for the lesson choices throughout the year as well.

In a sense, the Epistle reflects the Gospel. First, Jesus takes care of what is most important, the man’s right standing with God. When he can stand right with God, he can walk again with his neighbors. But you can’t walk right in the world if you aren’t right with God who made it.

It's interesting how our fallen world has sought to destroy Christianity, by stressing works, and how we

But Christ teaches us time and time again, how we treat one another matters. Love your neighbor as yourself. He places us in a body, not just leaving us as a bunch of individuals with their Bibles but binds us.

The beginning of Chapter 4 describes that unity. There is one Lord, one faith, and one baptism, and a body to maintain that unity. So, with this in mind, I want to look again at our epistle lesson, especially focusing on verses 17-20. There is something very interesting there.

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. 18 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. 19 They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. 20 But that is not the way you learned Christ

To begin, Paul sounds rather serious, adamant, doesn’t he: Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer…

And you know that whatever comes next, you know Paul means it.

Do not walk like the Gentiles in their futility of their minds.

That’s our theme, so what does Paul mean by futile Gentile minds. We know there is no separation between Jew and Gentile in the Gospel. Gentile minds are not futile just because the people don’t have Jewish blood. And not only is he teaching Christians here, but Gentile converts, who came to believe in Christ out of the worship of Pagan gods. In Ephesus, the biggest was Artemis a.k.a. Diana, a goddess of childbirth and fertility. Ephesus was the hub of a fertility cult.

Pin that. In describing what to watch out for, Paul points to the hardness of Gentile hearts, because Gentile hearts have become craven to sensuality and every kind of impurity. Up until the Roman times, Gentile temple worship almost always involved a cult of prostitutes. Priestesses served as temple prostitutes, meant to fulfill the disgusting desires of the depraved.

This is one way in which the belief in the God of the Bible has always been different. Many often critique Christianity saying that it is anti-Women because it didn’t allow women in the temple to run it with the men. Well yes, that’s true, but it is also true that in the temples that women served as priestesses, they served to service the craven sensualities and every kind of impurity that Paul says has no place among God’s people, the cultural sins that the Gentile men lusted after.