Be Renewed

Have you ever been in the witness protection program? Obviously, don’t answer that! This was a program created in the 1970s to protect people who would testify against dangerous criminals from harm. It is a very effective program with a 100% success rate (at least according to themselves) for those that follow the rules. The rules are quite strict. One is not allowed to make contact (except through controlled means) with prior friends or even extended family. They are to take on new identities, start new jobs, live in new places, and promise not to ever return to where they lived before. They have to lay aside everything about their previous life so their cover isn’t blown. This requires a definitive break, a cutting of all ties. Some find this easier to do than others. A large portion of the people in this program are criminals themselves (which is why they are able to testify as key witnesses to crimes!), and while they are obviously supposed to stop doing crime while in the program, between 10-20% go back to criminal ways, anyway. 
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Laying aside an old life is hard to do, but in the case of becoming a Christian, this is absolutely essential. No, you don’t have to change cities or jobs, but your conduct sure will. That’s what Paul is beginning to address to us today. To reorient ourselves to the context, we are being told about how to live the Christian life. This passage isn’t detailing how one becomes a Christian, but rather spells out what your life will be like once you have put your faith in Christ. We were told that Christians are made up of one body with the goal of that body to be unification and maturity. While we have many things that unite us, God doesn’t give us all the same gifts and talents. That’s what we saw last week, as God gives us different gifts but we have the same goal to become more mature in Christ. 

We are continuing in that theme of looking at what our individual lives are supposed to look like. We will be examining two points today: Leave behind the futile life and Be renewed into lasting life. 

Leave behind the futile life

Paul exhorts us with an introductory statement about not walking as the Gentiles do. Now, there would have been Gentiles in the congregation at that time, and this whole room is filled with Gentiles, that is, non-Jews. Should we be offended about this? Should Paul have taken a diversity and inclusion course? No, what Paul is getting at by using this term is to say, “Don’t live like people who are out of God’s covenant.” For centuries, Gentiles didn’t have the promises of God like the Jews did. And while that has changed in the New Covenant, there are still people who are outside of God’s covenant, people who are not Christians. We are not supposed to act like them. We are to cut ties with that kind of life. 

So what kind of life are we to cut ourselves off from? We are not to look like and act like the world. Now, if we look around at the world, doesn’t it seem like they actually understand how to really live? Look at Hollywood and all of its citizens of questionable morals. What are their lives like? They drive around in fancy cars; they have tons of money and adoring fans. They are given free stuff just for existing! Or what about those who are sitting in the science labs of the modern age? They are populated with atheists who are doing really exciting things like launching rockets to distant planets, discovering cures for awful diseases, and understand things about the world that we couldn’t even begin to imagine. It seems like from the outside, we can point to the people who don’t believe in God and aren’t Christians yet have everything that we could want. Aspah, who wrote Psalm 73 which we read earlier, asks the same question. It seems like good things happen to bad people! But then he considers their end. That’s what Paul warns us against. It doesn’t matter how rich, smart, or famous you are, the question that matters is your soul. 

So what is the soul like without God? Well, Paul tells us that it is a futile, dark, ignorant, hard-hearted, and sinful place. It’s not a pretty picture, and honestly, one that should inspire feelings of pity towards those people rather than a smug sense of superiority. Futile means empty, or vain. We see this in Romans 1:21. Imagine if you were trying to untangle a financial report, and everything was there except decimal points. You wouldn’t be able to know if there were dollars or cents at play there. You could come up with a lot of theories about what that balance sheet said, and you may even come up with some correct answers, but without something as key as a decimal point, you wouldn’t be able to get the full, real picture. That is what the whole of life is like without the knowledge of God. My old seminary professor put it this way, “The worshipful acknowledgement of the one God is foundational to all useful knowledge” (Thielman, 297). In other words, unless you know and love God as the driving force in your life, you won’t have the foundation you need to understand the world. If you don’t worship God, then marriage, kids, right, wrong, purpose, you, everything has to be made up by you. That’s the world we are seeing today. It is a place where there is no guiding principle, so everything is made up as you go. That’s what futile thinking is. 

But there is more happening than just not being able to navigate life from an intellectual perspective. What we are more worried about is being able to navigate life from a moral perspective. Paul goes on to say that those who aren’t Christians are alienated from the life of God, the essence of life itself. This is due to ignorance and hardness of heart. They are unwilling to learn because their hearts are deadset against God. Then it goes on and says that they have become calloused and are greedy to pursue all kinds of impurity. These words often have sexual overtones (Thielman, 300) This doesn’t mean that every person who isn’t a Christian is as utterly depraved as they otherwise could be, but I think this is getting at the fact that there really isn’t anything in themselves to prevent sliding further and further down whatever sin they fall into. Without God, sin is the next most pleasurable thing (at least at first, there are always consequences to pay later). 

This is what Paul is telling us to leave behind. He is showing us that the life that we are leaving behind is actually one of futility. We actually do need to be reminded of that. Remember what we read earlier in Psalm 73? Looking at the famous sinners in our world, it looks like they have it all. But that is a limited perspective. When we consider their end, then all the money and debauchery we could stand simply won’t help on judgment day. 

Even with all of those warnings and wider perspectives, this is something that we are going to have to be continually reminded of to walk away from. There are a couple of reasons for this, I think. One is because some aspects of our old life are harder to put down than others, and we need to be reminded of what they really are and what they lead to. Another is that God doesn’t reveal to us all at once all of our sin. It would crush us if He did, so He leads us step by step to see what needs to be put off. 

The one thing we never want to do is to be comfortable in our sin, because that is where things are the most dangerous. That is the condition that Paul calls here “callous.” As one commentator put it: “The original force of the word is to have no more pain or sorrow, and so can be applied here to indicate that ‘they have deadened their conscience and do not feel its stings’ (Lock; cf. 1 Tim. 4:2)” (Francis Foulkes).

These are the things that we have to put away. So what should we be doing instead?  

Be renewed into lasting life.

Here Paul makes the turn in verse 20 to say that holding on to the old way of life is not what is taught Christ. You can’t follow two people at the same time when they are walking in opposite directions. You are to put off your old self. Now there is the sense in which one has already done that to follow after Jesus, Paul is talking to Christians after all, but there is a sense in which we are doing this for the rest of our lives (Merkle, 81). Pastor Reeder uses the illustration of living with someone who is oppressing you, that being sin, the Old Man. When Jesus comes into your life, He breaks the power of that sin. He breaks the back of that Old Master so he can’t control you anymore. But the old man is still in the house. He can’t force you to do anything, but he can sure yell at you. Old habits die hard, and there will be times you will jump to his call. The longer you submit to Jesus, though, the quieter that old sin master gets (Reeder, Private Group Teaching). 

Instead, we follow after our new master, Jesus. He is going to be the one to renew our minds from darkness to light. Our old sinful desires lie to us. Jesus doesn’t lie to us. He is up front with us that this way isn’t easy, but He is not lying when He says that it is worth it. He isn’t lying when He says that this is the way of joy. How do we get to this point? It comes from being recreated. All of a sudden the things that you used to hate you now love and the things you used to love you now hate. That is what it means to put on the new man. That’s what it means to be recreated into what God always meant for you to be. Too many people try to “find themselves” in the mountains of Europe or in some job, but the real place to find yourself is in Christ. He is going to make you not some more instagramable person, but a person who doesn’t need that kind of validation. 

We are going to see in the coming weeks what that is going to look like. Paul is going to lay out some examples of laying down the old man and picking up the new. Paul will tell us not only to not lie but to also tell the truth. Don’t just not steal, but work honestly. Work honestly not even to hoard it for yourself but to share it with others who have need. That is a radical reworking, folks! The thief is going from someone who cares about others so little he steals from them to someone who cares so much about other people he will steal from himself as it were to meet the needs of others.  
I think this leaves us with a few implications. 

One, we need to be intentional in both directions of this passage. What I mean is, you have to intentionally leave behind your sins specifically and be renewed into the opposite of that sin. It isn’t just not getting frustrated with your kids. Getting the old man off isn’t just doing nothing with the kids. It is treating them well. It is getting down and playing with them. Putting off the old man involves stopping your bickering between you and your spouse. But putting on the new man is having a time of devotions with them. Going from tearing down to actively building up. Can you see what a better vision this is for the Christian life than we typically give it? This renewal isn’t just stopping us from sinning, but building into us the character and nature of God. Jesus doesn’t just help us quit pornography. He doesn’t just stop us from seeing people as objects for our pleasure. He continues all the way until we direct those passions, energy, and romance into one person for the rest of our lives. This happens so much so, we dedicate all the remaining parts of our lives to that person as well. That’s beautiful! 

Kids! Let me talk to you again here. Start this process of following after Jesus early. The more you get used to saying “no” to bad behavior, the easier it will be for you. And the more you say “yes” to what Jesus has for you, the easier it will be. If you can learn to be kind to your brothers and sisters now, you will be able to be kind to so many other people. Jesus loves you, and wants to see you living a good life that follows Him closely. 

I believe it was Augustine that said that God gives what He commands. In other words, God tells us what to do, and then makes it happen in our lives. This should give you tremendous hope as you look to the future. The sin struggle you have today can be made less, and the righteousness that you think is impossible is made possible with God. The biggest joy is yet to come. We will never be fully rid of the old man on this side of heaven, but one day, we will be removed from this world of sin and the sin that is inside us. One day it will all be gone, and we will feast with God Himself celebrating His victory. That hope is what we are going to be picturing here in just a few minutes as we turn to the Lord’s table. 

Christian, your relationship with sin can be further apart than you realized. And your experience of righteousness can be greater than you ever thought possible. 

Works Cited: 
Foulkes, Francis, Ephesians, Tyndale  
Merkle, Benjamin, Ephesians 
Thielman, Frank, Ephesians, Baker