Good morning.
I have a few Scriptures to read, and then I want to look to the Lord.
Colossians 1:13:
For He rescued us from the domain of darkness,
and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son.
Then, in 2 Peter 1, beginning with verse 1:
Simon Peter, a bond-servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,
to those who have received a faith of the same kind as ours,
by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ:
Grace and peace be multiplied to you
in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.Seeing that His divine power has granted to us
everything pertaining to life and godliness,
through the true knowledge of Him who called us
by His own glory and excellence.For by these He has granted to us
His precious and magnificent promises,
so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature,
having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.
And then one other verse, Philippians 3:14:
I press on toward the goal
for the prize of the upward call of God
in Christ Jesus.
Let us pray.
Lord, we want to agree this morning with some of these songs that we are singing: how You are worthy. Lord, we just want to tell You that that is true, that You are worthy, and it witnesses to us.
We come to You, Lord, the Worthy One, the One who, as it says in Revelation, is worthy to break the seal of the book. Lord, we come to You asking that You, who are worthy, would be willing to open up the Word to us today and minister it to us by Your Spirit, to our spirits.
May we no longer walk in darkness and the futility of our minds, but walk in the revelation of what You have to show us in Your Word. Lord, You know that there is just no way that it is humanly possible to do these things.
We thank You, Lord, that we are not left to our own minds and our own selves, but You have given us a Helper, the Holy Spirit. Lord, we pray that You would allow Him to open the Word to us, take it into our hearts, and let it sit there, Lord, so that it can bring the fruit that You want from it.
Lord, this is only possible by You. So we commit Your Word to You, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Getting warmed up for school.
I have been speaking out of Ephesians for the last several times I have been speaking, which I do not even remember. But it has been quite a while. It has been the whole summer, because the brothers have been very gracious to me with the responsibilities that I have had, giving me some time off.
Now it is time to go back to work, they said.
I do not want to say “review” so much, because I am not going to give a review, but let us recall some of the things we have been seeing in this book. First of all, in the first three chapters, we have seen what we have in Christ. That is what it has all talked about: what we have in Christ.
Paul even prays in the first chapter that we would see what we have, that our eyes would be opened. Then a brother called out that song, “Jesus, I Am Resting, Resting.” Why are we to know these things? First of all, so that we can rest in them, that we can just be confident in what we have in Christ.
We do not have to worry anymore about this or that because we are confident. There are two times that I think a baby is really adorable—only two.
One is when they are resting. I am not talking about a one-year-old; I am talking about a baby. When one is resting, you can see that they are at perfect peace. They are not worried about anything. They are completely trusting the one whose arms they are in—no worries in the world at all. They are not frightened or anything.
When you see that type of peace on a face, that is adorable. You just see that perfect rest, and it makes you think, you know, that is what the Lord wants for us: that type of rest, that we can rest in His Son in that same way.
The second time I think babies are most adorable is when they first begin to walk. When they first begin to walk, there is a joy on their face that you cannot hide, because they are just so ecstatic that they are no longer pinned to the floor anymore. They are able to go places they had never dreamed of.
They have this freedom and excitement about what is ahead of them. When you see that joy on their face—not the mischief in their eyes, but the joy on that face—that is the same thing that God wants for us.
He says, “Not only do I want you to rest in My Son, but I also want you to walk out of that rest in My Son.”
As we come to Ephesians 4, we have talked about this as being the practical part of the letter. It starts out in Ephesians 4:1:
I implore you to walk in a manner worthy
of the calling with which you have been called.
Ephesians 4 and Ephesians 5 use the term walk five or six times. So this is all about walking. But I believe that the idea, “walk in a manner worthy,” is really behind all these other things where it talks about walking.
Today we will see, “walk no longer as the Gentiles.” Well, that goes back to walking in a manner worthy. “Walk as imitators of God” is walking in a manner worthy. When it talks about walking in the light, that is walking in a manner worthy of this calling that we have.
That is all I wanted to say as far as review and what we are looking at today.
When we first touched Ephesians 4, walking in a manner worthy started as a corporate thing. It said that in walking in a manner worthy, you want to preserve the unity that is in the body. There is a unity, and we want to preserve it in our walk. We are not all walking separate ways, going here and there, but there is a unity in the body.
To keep that unity, God has given gifts. Those gifts were apostles, prophets, teachers, pastors, and evangelists. They were to equip the saints for the ministry, and they are ministering to the Lord.
Some of these other things we will be talking about today, I am going to look at in an individual sense. But we can always look at things individually, and we can always look at them corporately too, because there is a walk together as well as a separate walk.
It is by your separate walk that you are enabled to walk together. That is what brings the fullness out of a corporate walk: everybody having their own walk for the Lord, but coming together, and that makes it even fuller.
This morning, we want to look at the rest of this chapter. I know I have been trying to go verse by verse, but I figure I will probably have this and two other times, and I will finish Ephesians. That is my thinking, anyway.
Let us read from Ephesians 4:17 to the end of the chapter, and then we will go on to what the Lord has laid on my heart.
So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord,
that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk,
in the futility of their mind,
being darkened in their understanding,
excluded from the life of God
because of the ignorance that is in them,
because of the hardness of their heart.And they, having become callous,
have given themselves over to sensuality
for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.But you did not learn Christ in this way,
if indeed you have heard Him
and have been taught in Him,
just as truth is in Jesus,
that, in reference to your former manner of life,
you lay aside the old man,
which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit,
and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind,
and put on the new man,
which in the likeness of God has been created
in righteousness and holiness of the truth.Therefore, laying aside falsehood,
speak truth, each one of you with his neighbor,
for we are members of one another.Be angry, and yet do not sin;
do not let the sun go down on your anger,
and do not give the devil an opportunity.He who steals must steal no longer;
but rather, he must labor,
performing with his own hands what is good,
so that he will have something to share with one who has need.Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth,
but only such a word as is good for edification
according to the need of the moment,
so that it will give grace to those who hear.Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God,
by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander
be put away from you, along with all malice.Be kind to one another, tender-hearted,
forgiving each other,
just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.
I want to touch on just this little phrase: “Walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk.” I think this is the crux of the matter in this section.
What does that mean to us? Most of the Ephesian Christians were Gentiles. They were not Jewish Christians. I will say again, there is no such thing as Jewish Christians; there are only Christians. That is my ten cents.
But they were Gentiles. Another thing about these people is that they had all this wonderful teaching. Paul was in Ephesus for, what was it, three years? At the school of Tyrannus, teaching them. They had all this great teaching, and yet he has to say, “Do not walk like the Gentiles.”
Is that not kind of weird? You would think with all this great teaching there would be no problem. They would say, “We are so far beyond that.” But they were not. Do you know why? Because they were human beings, just like you and I—human beings with a fallen nature.
It was easy for them to fall into traps, to fall into that type of living again. A lot of these people were probably slaves or uneducated, but even if they were educated, it would not make a difference. Education does not save you. Education does not make you more amenable to revelation from God.
Paul has to say, “Do not walk at a low level of Christianity.”
As an athlete, I found this out: if I were playing against people who were not as good as me, I would play down to their level. It was like a natural thing. “Oh, they are not that good. I can just goof around.” That is our human nature.
Brothers and sisters, when we see things going around, I think one of the young brothers at testimony time talked about Psalm 73. He looked at the world and said, “Gee whiz, they have got it so good. I am going to dumb down my testimony. I want to enjoy some of the world.”
That is a natural tendency. We see these people going around without guilt and seeming to be enjoying themselves. Of course, we do not see the emptiness that they have. But you look at that, and it looks so good on the outside.
Paul says, “Do not walk at a low level of Christianity.” Then he goes on to tell about the Gentiles and their walk.
They walk “in the futility of their mind.” What does that mean? When something is futile, it has no point. Sometimes, when I repair something, I am well acquainted with futility, because I know there is no point to me doing this, because it is not going to get done.
The mind is not talking about the intellect here. It is talking about your outlook on life—your entire outlook on life. In other words, they are aimless because they do not know the purpose for life.
As Christians, if we are walking at a low level of Christianity, it is because we are not walking according to the purpose, and we are not even aware of the purpose that God has for us.
Paul is saying, “Remember those three chapters earlier in the letter, where I talked about what we have in Christ and what the purpose is? Walk according to that. That is what I want you to do.”
If you are going to walk like the Gentiles, it is because you are not aware. You are aimless. You are not grounded. You are like a ship without a rudder or an anchor. You cannot stop yourself; you just slide on.
There is no point to what we are doing: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Let us just go on like that. There is no purpose to anything. That very thing drove me to the Lord a long, long time ago.
Or how about this bumper sticker: “Whoever has the most toys at the end wins.” What aim in life is that? Collect all these material possessions you have, and then when you die, who gets them? That is aimless. What is the point?
Or how about looking at eternity? I love The Far Side. There is one Far Side comic that shows you what he thought about eternity. You have a man sitting on a cloud with his robe on, because he is in heaven. He has little wings and a halo, and he is sitting there with his harp. You can tell he is bored.
The caption says, “I wish I’d brought a magazine.” Do you understand the idea? This is what the world thinks of eternity: it is just going to be boring.
I was really into Bob Dylan as a young man. I liked the way he draws pictures with his writing. In his song “Visions of Johanna,” there is one line that says:
Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial;
voices echo, “This is what salvation must be like after a while.”
In other words, salvation—we have nothing else to do, so we are going to try infinity. That is the idea. What a terrible way to think of eternity. It is going to be boring. There is no purpose to it. There is no point to it.
No, brothers and sisters, do we think that way as Christians? Do we look at eternity as something where we are just going to be singing all the rest of eternity? Is that how you look at it? If so, then we need to have some rearrangement in our thinking.
Then it says, “being darkened in their understanding.” Now this is the intellect: darkened in their understanding.
If you go back a couple of pages in your Bible to 2 Corinthians 3, I believe this is what it is talking about. Beginning with 2 Corinthians 3:12:
Therefore, having such a hope,
we use great boldness in our speech,
and are not like Moses,
who used to put a veil over his face
so that the sons of Israel would not look intently
at the end of what was fading away.But their minds were hardened;
for until this very day, at the reading of the old covenant,
the same veil remains unlifted,
because it is removed in Christ.But to this day, whenever Moses is read,
a veil lies over their heart;
but whenever a person turns to the Lord,
the veil is taken away.
Intellect darkened. You cannot know God by your intellect. You cannot fathom Him. You cannot understand His salvation by intellect.
That does not mean that people do not have great mental capacities. How can you say that people like Euclid or Pythagoras did not have great mental capacity? They did. But they were still veiled when it comes to God and knowing God, because it is not the intellect that gets you there.
Are you walking by your intellect? Are you walking in your Christian life by your intellect? Your intellect is not going to give you any revelation—nothing at all.
Matter of fact, sometimes your intellect will say, “You know something? This contradicts. This does not make sense. You cannot do this.” Look at Thomas Jefferson—a great Virginian. UVA, that is right.
He went so far as to make his own translation of the Gospels. His intellect said miracles and such could not happen, so he was going to write the things that probably did happen, and the other stuff that did not, he would just blank out. That is his great intellect: “God cannot do these things. These things cannot be done.” Just crossing them out.
Here is the big thing: alienated, or some versions say excluded, from the life of God. This really is the big issue. To be excluded from the life of God is not simply to be excluded from knowledge about God. You can know a lot of things about God, but still be excluded from the life of God.
It is like when the Pharisees came to Jesus, and He said to them:
You search the Scriptures,
thinking that in them you have eternal life;
and they are those that speak of Me,
and you will not come to Me.
That is the whole thing. We look everywhere else for life, but life is in the Son, and we will not come to Him. This life is also in us who believe.
You are excluded because of ignorance. You are unaware of the life of God because you are running by your own mind. You think, “I am a Christian now, so what do I do? Oh, I do good things.”
You look at verse 25: “Laying aside falsehood, speak truth with each other.” You say, “That is what I will do. I will just start telling the truth to everybody.” Then you read, “Be angry.” “I can be angry. That is cool. I like that.” “Steal no longer.” “No problem. I will not steal.”
But do you see? That is not what He is talking about. He is not saying, “I am going to give you a list of things.” You are unaware that it is the life of God that He has put in you that is going to do some of these things for you.
Then there is the hardness of heart. You begin to harden, and God says, “You are not going to turn to Me. Go your way. I am just going to let you go your way.”
Because of that, you become callous. Then you are open to all sorts of other things because you are beyond feeling. You do not sense God anymore. You do not sense your conscience anymore. You do not sense what sin is anymore. It means nothing to you—your own callousness.
That is Romans 1, is it not? God gave them up to the desires of their heart. Even look at the nation of Israel. They wanted idolatry so much, so God said, “You want idolatry? Send them to Babylon—all expenses paid. It is all yours.” They learned their lesson.
This is not the type of existence that God wants for us. He does not want us to be alienated from His life. He does not want us to have a wrong outlook on what salvation is. He does not want us to walk in the futility of our mind and our intellect only.
That is a low level. When we have our Christianity at that level, it is no better than what the world and other religions have. But we have not been called to that. We have been called, as I read out of Philippians, to the upward call in Christ Jesus.
Let us get out of the human mind. Let us get out of our old man. Let us get into what God has for us.
We should not be in this type of state because we are aware of many heavenly truths. Secondly, they are in darkness, but we have had revelation. They are alienated from the life of God, but Christ lives in us.
Since these things are true about you—you have revelation and Christ living in you—you cannot continue to live your life as though you did not have these things. That is what Paul is saying in verses 20 and 21.
What keeps you from this low level of Christianity? How do we get out of it? There are three things laid out in Ephesians 4:22–24:
You cannot say, “I will do one, and I will leave the other two.” You cannot. They all have to be working together. You cannot separate them. You cannot substitute something, like you go to the restaurant and say, “Can I have this instead of fries?” You cannot say, “Instead of laying aside the old man, can I have this?” You cannot do that.
First of all, the old man must be laid aside. That is evident from what we have learned in our own relationship with Christ.
When we are in union with the Lord, we are in fellowship with the Lord. It is like being yoked to Him. He says:
Come unto Me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden,
and I will give you rest.
Take My yoke upon you.
When you are yoked to Christ, in your relationship you may want to go this way, but the Lord just will not let you go that way. It is evident from your own relationship with the Lord. You want to go this way, and He says, “No. Stay the course.”
Who or what is this old man? Twenty or thirty years ago, I would have said, “It is my dad. It is my old man.” But I am not far wrong, because it is our dad. It is our Adamic nature. It is the nature we got from our father Adam.
This Adamic nature, this sin nature, is the governing principle in our life. It governs what we do, what we think, who we are. All this is governed by this old man.
Why must he be laid aside or cast out? First of all, he has been rejected by God.
When we first moved here, I think you guys were going through Genesis in the kids’ classes. We were talking about something on the way home, and Katie and Jane were asking why Cain’s sacrifice was not accepted. My younger daughter said, “Of course it was not accepted. He gave what was cursed, because remember God cursed the land.”
I thought, “My God, I never thought of that.” But it is true. It was cursed.
God has rejected this nature. When man sinned, God rejected man after Adam. He could not inherit anything, and therefore he was blinded to anything that God had for him.
In the same way, God has rejected this old man. It is like Saul, the king of Israel. God rejected him. He said, “You are not after what I want. You have gone a different way, and I am sorry that I made you king.”
The reason God has rejected him is because he has gone corrupt. If you look at Saul, once God really rejects him, you see him just getting worse and worse and worse. He is corrupted.
What do I mean by corrupt? I am going to give you a weird definition: corrupt is untrue. It is untrue. It is not aiming at the mark. It is off to the side. It is not true anymore. You are not going the same place anymore.
When Adam fell, he was not going the same place. God had a plan for him, but Adam said, “Oh, I am over here.” So he is corrupt, and he is growing corrupt.
The old man’s constant condition—there is no way he can get out of this condition—his constant characteristic of life is that he continues to get more and more corrupt. He continues to get further and further off the path where God wanted him.
Because the old man is like that, you have to lay him aside. You have to lay that nature aside.
What has corrupted this old man? It says he is corrupted by the lusts of deceit. Anytime people say “lust,” I think they think of dirty movies. Lust is much more than that.
Do not limit lust to sensual or pornographic things. Lust can be as simple as having a desire for gain, and that desire for gain takes over you. You want gain so much that you are saying, “God, You can take the back seat. I want this.”
Or power. You can want power. You can want fame. You can want wealth. You can want to be well liked. That can be a lust. “I want to be a sports superstar.” That can be a lust.
If it takes you away from God, it is a lust. We have natural desires, but when they get control of you, that is when they are out of bounds.
The old man must be laid aside. What I mean is that he has got to be taken off the throne. You cannot say, for example, that the old man has been put to death, and leave it at that. It is true, but it has got to be worked out.
You tell the old man, “You have been put to death,” and the old man is going to say, “Oh, really? I do not think so. Watch this.” All of a sudden, you are in a Romans 7 kind of deal.
The old man is not just a bad guy. There are good parts to the old man. If you look at types of the old man, the Adamic nature, take Esau, for example. A bad part of him is that he is hairy; Jacob was smooth. But the guy was an athlete. You cannot fault him for that. Great athlete.
He was a hunter. He was probably well spoken of by the other hunters around: “Yeah, he is a great hunter.” He had good parts to him. Saul, King Saul, when he became king, was so humble, hiding in the baggage. Such a good part.
I think I have told this joke before. A bride and groom are getting married, and the preacher says, “Will you take him for better or worse, in sickness and health, richer for poorer?” She says, “Well, let us say I will take him for richer, for healthy.”
You cannot do that. You cannot say to God, “The old man has got to go, except for these parts. Keep these because they are good. People like this.” No. The whole man has got to go, because he has no part in the kingdom of God.
The old man has no part. He is alienated from God. Romans 8:6 says:
For the mind set on the flesh is death,
but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace,
because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God;
for it does not subject itself to the law of God,
for it is not even able to do so,
and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
That is the old man—the good parts and the bad parts, whatever it is. He cannot please God. He cannot even submit himself to what God wants.
Look at Saul: “I want you to wait till I get my sacrifice.” “The people are leaving. I cannot submit to that.” “Kill all the sheep and everything, and kill Agag.” “Oh, but I saved Agag. See, they are good for sacrificing to You.”
The old man says, “I can do great things for God.” No, you cannot. You can do great things for yourself. That is it. They have no counting in the kingdom of God—nothing at all. They just do not count.
He has to be killed. He has to be crucified. But the thing is, who is going to crucify him? It has to be you, in the sense that it is you who has to lay him aside.
In The Great Divorce, there is a great little scene. This guy has a little red lizard on him, and the angel says, “I have got to get rid of that.” The man says, “No, no, he is really good. He is really nice.”
Later on, the angel says, “You have got to get rid of him.” I am paraphrasing it, but finally the man starts realizing that he needs to get rid of it. He says, “Why do You not just take it away?” The angel says, “I do not work that way. You have to be willing. You have to give it up.”
That is the wonderful thing about our Lord Jesus: He was not forced to go to the cross. He went willingly. It is the same thing with us. We have to give it up willingly. Otherwise it does not count. He will not take it when we are not willing to give it.
Now, I have got to hurry up.
We have got to move to this new man. If you get rid of the old man, if you lay aside the old man, now you have got a house that has been swept. What are you going to do?
Ephesians 4:23 says:
Be renewed in the spirit of your mind.
Now, the spirit of your mind is not talking about the Holy Spirit here. The spirit of your mind is the governing principle in your mind.
Before you were born again, what drove your thinking and your actions? Your own spirit, which was dead to God. The human spirit was dead to God, so it could not take anything that God wanted to do, because it was dead.
You cannot say to a dead person, “Can you get up and leave, please?” He cannot respond. He is dead. He cannot hear you. You could nudge him, and he would not move. He cannot do anything. He is dead.
It is the same thing with our human spirit. It was dead to God. So whenever God was trying to do something, it could not respond.
When you lay aside the old man, you have got to bring in new management. Your mind has all sorts of faculties. They do not go away. The only difference is, now the Holy Spirit is able to teach your mind, or give it a whole new database about what He wants.
The mind was dead and unresponsive to God’s will. Now, once you are born again, you are under this new management. You have whole new criteria, and a whole new life principle is introduced.
According to our old nature, what moves us? Our desires move us. Our appetites move us. But what about this new nature? What moves the new nature? What is the principle it moves by?
The principle is faith. That is the new principle of our life. We walk by faith, not by sight.
What do we put our faith in? Let us read a couple of verses. First Corinthians 2:12 says:
Now we have received, not the spirit of the world,
but the Spirit who is from God,
so that we may know the things freely given to us by God,
which things we also speak,
not in words taught by human wisdom,
but in those taught by the Spirit,
combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God,
for they are foolishness to him;
and he cannot understand them,
because they are spiritually appraised.
In other words, the Spirit starts showing us what is ours. Our intellect never brought us these things. The Spirit starts saying, “This is yours.”
It is like when Abraham went out. Remember when Lot moved away from him, and the Lord said to him, “Look around you. Everywhere you put your foot, that is yours.” Everywhere you put your foot, that is yours. The Spirit starts revealing what is ours.
I read 2 Peter, which talked about these promises by which we become partakers of the divine nature. A whole other nature is ours. We are no longer trapped in this nature of sin, but we have this whole other nature—a divine nature that can overcome sin.
Again, in Romans 8, backing up from the verses we read earlier, Romans 8:2 says:
For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus
has set you free from the law of sin and of death.For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh,
God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh
and as an offering for sin,
He condemned sin in the flesh,
so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us,
who do not walk according to the flesh
but according to the Spirit.
As the Spirit begins to lead us, and we start to walk under this new management, we find a power that has never been ours before. This is what God has intended for us.
This is not something for super-duper saints or something like that. This is what God has intended for everyone. The people He was writing to were slaves; they were illiterate. Does that count them out? No. It is to them as well as to us.
You do not have to be Einstein. You have to be like a child. A child may not have an exercised intellect, but what did Jesus like about children? Faith.
The new principle of life is faith. What God says, we walk into. We find a release; we find a power to do something else.
Now it says, “Put on the new man.” Who is the new man? I am not going to say it is Christ, but the new man is the new creation spoken of in 2 Corinthians 5. We are now new creatures. Yes, we are made after Christ.
This new man is a reflection of essential characteristics of God. What are the essentials of God? There are two listed here in Ephesians 4:24:
Put on the new man,
which in the likeness of God has been created
in righteousness and holiness of the truth.
What does it mean that He is created in righteousness? I read one man, and this just blew me away because I thought it was really neat. You know how man is a tripartite being: spirit, soul, and body.
Being righteous starts out with those being in perfect balance. In other words, you are no longer governed by the baser things of your nature. The soul is not overcoming the spirit. The body is not overcoming the spirit. They are in right balance, right where they should be, so that you can live unto God.
Because of that, the new creation loves what is right. And because he loves what is right, he loves to do what is right.
That is what we have in this new man: a character that wants to do what is right, longs to do what is right, and is looking for the leading to do what is right.
A lot of people say that this is in reference to actions toward fellow man—that he does what is right in treating his fellow man. That is certainly included.
What is meant by created in holiness? We can say that holiness is purity, but it is a purity that governs your being.
It is a purity that says, “I am not going to touch something that is unholy.” I am not saying by listing things, “This is unholy; I am not going to touch it.” It is saying that as I become aware of something that is unholy, I am going to stay away from it.
It governs our being. It governs our being because it is able to understand that God Himself is holy and hates sin.
It is created in this holiness, which has this purity governing all that it does, because it knows that God is holy and He hates sin. This holiness longs for fellowship with God.
What is meant by “created in righteousness and holiness of the truth”? Some people say, “true holiness,” but that is not a good translation. It is “holiness of the truth.”
First of all, the truth being talked about is the truth of God—in other words, what God is like, that God is true, the truth about who He is.
The old man cannot get the truth of God. Have you ever read that poem about the five blind men trying to figure out what an elephant was? One gets its tail and says, “An elephant is like a rope.” Another grabs its leg and says, “Oh, man, an elephant is like a tree.” But they cannot see.
What is the truth about God? This new man is created in the truth of what God is.
The entire life of the new man is characterized by truth—by what God truly is. His righteousness and holiness are produced by that truth because he sees God as He is.
He is going to be righteous. He is going to be holy because he sees that. They are stimulated by that truth, and they are encouraged to grow by that truth because they want to know Him more and more.
Now it says that we are to put on this new man. Boy, how do you do this?
First of all, putting on the new man is not behavior modification. “All right, I am just going to change the way I act a little bit, and that is the new man.” That is not the new man.
The new man is put on by faith. We have seen ourselves. We do not see the new man in ourselves; we look and see the old man everywhere.
The older we get, we do see the old man. Every morning I wake up, I look in the mirror, and I see the old man. He stares right back at me.
How do we put him on? Let me tell you how I get dressed.
First, I take a shower. That is part of my getting dressed. What I am saying is, I get clean. I take what I know is mine by faith, and I stand into it.
That is the first part of putting on the new man. I stand into Christ for what I have in Him as far as my redemption and my forgiveness of sins. I stand into that. That is mine. It cannot be taken away.
Then I put on my underwear. What I mean by this underwear is that, to me, it is the new man. I assume for myself all that the new man is for me. I assume it. I take it as mine.
It is close to me. It is underneath, because no one else really sees it to begin with.
Then third—and here is where I need help—what is appropriate to wear for today?
I told you a few times back, if you remember, that when I first started teaching, I was the cause of a new dress code for teachers. I used to come to school in a pocket T-shirt, corduroys, high-top tennies, and I shaved every third day. That is how I came to school.
It was a private school. It was a Christian school. That is okay, is it not? They had to change everything on me.
I could say, “That is my old man. This is just the way I am. This is the way the Lord bought me. Love it or leave it.” They said, “Leave it.” New dress code.
But today, you see, I was just a kid. I did not know any different. That is the whole thing: I did not know any different. I had never been a professional before. I had been a carpenter. I had worked in a greenhouse. I had never been anything like this before. I am professional now.
But today, I have a helper. You notice? Green, green, green, green. I have a helper.
Actually, I dressed myself today, although I did show Barb one time, and she said, “No.”
When it comes to putting this new man into practice, I need a helper. I need a helper.
That Helper is the Holy Spirit, who comes when you are walking in life, in the situations of life, and says, “Do not go there,” or, “Do not do that.” Then it is up to me to say, “Okay. Here is where I have to lay aside the old man and put on the new.”
I have a Helper. I am not left to my own wits: “Should I? Could I?” I have this witness in me: “This is not the way to go, Jim. This is not what you should do, or this is not the place you should be.”
At home, I have two helpers: my wife and Jamie. She is really color-coordinated, and I can ask her. Katie is just like me, so she goes, “Yeah, that is cool, Dad. Knock ’em dead.”
But we have the Holy Spirit to help us put on the new man. We put him on by faith. “Okay, I assume all that he is for me.”
When the practicality of putting on the new man comes, I have this Helper who is not going to let me down, and I am to obey Him.
When He says, “Lay this down,” that is the time I need to say, “I lay this down. I crucify that flesh.” Then I take up what He has for me in this new life.
When I walk in that, I find, as we see in Romans, that I find myself pleasing God because I am doing what He wants.
That is how you put on the new man. How do we apply this at home? This is where we end.
All these other verses talk about how that was applied for these people. It says you should not steal, you should not do these things, and then it gives what you should do. That is just a way of looking at the leading of the Holy Spirit.
Because you have the Holy Spirit, verse 30 says, “Do not grieve Him.” Do not grieve the Holy Spirit. He is living inside you. He is trying to do that.
When you grieve Him, it is like saying, “Holy Spirit, I just do not need Your help.” That is what I am talking about. It is when I refuse to lay down my rights, and I refuse to lay down my old man.
It hinders His leading us. It is not like He goes and sulks or something like that, but we cannot hear Him anymore because we put Him off. We put Him into the background somewhere, and He is not going to raise His voice.
He is not going to force Himself on you. If you put Him in the background, He is going to be in the background. You have to bring Him up. So do not grieve Him, because disobedience is going to strain your relationship.
This is what I will close with. Why are we to walk in this new creation? Why are we to live on this higher level of Christianity, this high calling? Why is it?
We can say because the Lord wants us as sons, and that is true. But I want to give you something else. We started out by saying, “Do not walk as the Gentiles, who walk in the futility of their mind.” To me, it is almost like this: how are they ever going to know? How will they ever know?
Let us read this one last verse. This is why we are to walk in this new creation. Second Corinthians 5:17 says:
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ,
he is a new creature;
the old things passed away;
behold, new things have come.Now all these things are from God,
who reconciled us to Himself through Christ
and gave us the ministry of reconciliation,
namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself,
not counting their trespasses against them,
and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ,
as though God were making an appeal through us;
we beg you on behalf of Christ,
be reconciled to God.
Brothers and sisters, this is not just about us. God’s heart is so big that He would not have anyone perish.
People might say they are intellectual, and they might look for a good argument, but they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Brothers and sisters, they need to see.
They need to see that we have a life of purpose. You cannot tell somebody, “Yeah, I have a life of purpose.” They have got to see it.
One of the reasons why God wants us to be on this higher level is so that He can say to these people, “I have a purpose for you. You do not have to walk in the futility of your mind. You do not have to go aimless anymore. I have something for you. I am holding it for you.”
Jesus said we are the salt of the earth. We are the light of the world. We are not supposed to be hidden.
If we go back and just live a low level of Christianity, what light is that? It is nothing. It just blends in with the light of the world.
We are not called to be like that. We are called to walk in the purpose that God has for us. Out of that, God can shine out to others and say, “I have purpose for you.”
This is what God wants for us. Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, we just want to tell You, first of all, that we are grateful that You have a high calling for us. Lord, we do not have to be stuck at some lower rung, because that is not Your will for us.
Your perfect will is that there is this high calling for us, that we might know the exercise of this new man in us, Lord, in righteousness and holiness.
How awesome it is to think of that: to have a purity in me that is going to direct my life and direct the course of my life, Lord, and to want to do right just because of knowing You as You are.
Oh, Lord, You have revealed Yourself to us in that way. I just want to thank You.
Lord, I want to thank You also that, in giving me this gift, this new life, You have also made it so that others might see it and be drawn to You.
Oh Lord, I pray for me, Lord, that my witness would be such in this world as a light to You—as someone who lives purposefully, who has a purpose that guides him.
Lord, I think, you know, we get all a-tizzy about an election, and yet we should be the ones who are the most peaceful of all, because we are in Your kingdom. Oh Lord, help us to see these things.
Lord, I thank You that You do not chide us about these things either, but You just present them and say, “This is what I have for you. This is all the things that I have for you. Know that you have this. Partake of it.”
“I have given it to you that your joy might be full.” Oh Lord, help us to see that. And because of that, Lord, bring others into Your purpose, as we pray in Jesus’ name.