The Purity of the New Man (Ephesians 4:17-24)
Introduction
How do you tell the difference between a black and navy suit coat? You hold them up next to each other. When they are apart, they can look nearly identical. But place them side by side and you have a marked contrast. It is through comparison that you can see which is which.
A similar phenomena happens between the church and the world. It is through the comparison between the church and the world that we can see the difference. If we look at the lives of individuals, on many levels we would look relatively the same. Families, children, jobs, houses, hobbies, etc. But if you put them side by side you begin to see the distinctions.
This is why Paul insists that we be different. “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do.” The church is called to be different from the world, because it is when we are distinct—when we don’t walk like they walk, live like they live—that we can be a witness to what God is doing.
This is an important point. We are called to witness to God’s work in the world. What is that work? God is renewing everything through Christ. He is healing the universe of its brokenness. While he has accomplished that work in Christ, its full realization has yet to be seen. Until it is, he has formed the church—uniting Jew and Gentile together in one new man—in order to be a foretaste of that future.
Through our fellowship, then, the world sees what God does and what he will do. We taste the peace of the future world in the church, primarily in the context of our unity. And that spiritual unity bears fruit within a society of renovated human beings equipped to serve one another in mutual ministry as we build one another up toward maturity in Jesus.
When we enter that fellowship, it is utterly unlike joining an exclusive country club or buying a membership to Costco. Rather, we enter into a new world, to the degree that we leave behind an old reality and enter a new one. When we step into a church, we step into the future, and all the things that will characterize the new heavens and earth ought to characterize the church now. Which is why we must strive for unity among our members through our mutual service toward one another. As Paul has just said in 4:15-16, the body makes the body grow as each joint works properly in the body. The fellowship of the saints is the soil from which unity and maturity grows.
But, as Paul says elsewhere, “What fellowship has light with darkness?” The unity and maturity of the body can only measure up to the practical holiness of its members. Yet, as we are so keenly aware, sin remains in us. We are walking contradictions: we are alive in a new world, yet we still have much of the old world living in us. But the old cannot have fellowship with the new, light cannot have fellowship with darkness, truth cannot have fellowship with lies. Whenever we act like the old humanity, we endanger the new humanity—the church. So Paul calls us to make progress toward resolving that contradiction for the sake of being a body that makes the body grow. And as we grow up in every way into him who is the head, we then present a picture of Christ to the world—we witness to the work of God through our fellowship.
Thus, we need purity in the church today. Too often, and too quickly worldliness in all its various forms infiltrates the church. Whether philosophy, worldview, moral issues, presuppositions, or the like, it comes into the church. We must vigorously guard against that. But before we let our minds run to politics or youtube debates or atheist evolutionists, we need to put the emphasis where Paul does: the remaining corruption in us. Put it this way: you and I are the biggest danger to our church, and the greatest protection against that danger is rigorous pursuit of holiness. In other words, sanctification preserves the unity of the church.
Paul teaches us how to pursue that holiness in these paragraphs. And in the verses under examination this morning, Paul gives two imperatives that promote the purity of the church: 1) Remember Who You Were and 2) Become Who You Are
I. Remember Who You Were (4:17-19)
The first imperative that promotes the purity of the church is Remember who you were. Just as in 2:11 there was an “at one time,” so also here, in 4:22, there is a “former manner of conduct.” There is a person who you used to be, and you are not that person anymore. And we need to learn to recognize the old man so that we can then put him to death.
Now, life centers on the mind. Look at how often Paul references the mind, or thinking, or truth. “Futility of the mind,” “darkened in mind,” “because of the ignorance.” That manner of life has changed primarily because of what has happened in the mind “learned Christ,” “heard him,” “were taught in him,” “the truth is in Jesus,” “renewed in the spirit of your mind,” “Recreated in righteousness and holiness of the truth.” This should resonate with the rest of the Epistle.
· 1:13, saved by the “word of truth” when we “heard” and “believed” it.
· 1:17, the spirit of revelation in the knowledge of him.
· 1:18, the eyes of the heart enlightened to know the truth.
· 2:3, the desires of the flesh “and the mind” directed our actions.
· 3:5, the mystery has been “revealed” to the apostles and prophets and
· 3:8 “proclaimed” to the Gentiles in order to bring God’s plan to light.
· Paul prays that they would be spiritually strengthened to “know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge.”
· It is no surprise then that a major emphasis of church life is the teaching. The leaders of the church are to “equip the saints for the work of ministry,” primarily through their teaching ministry (4:12-13).
When we were saved, something happened to our minds. The Bible is not against the intellect. It is not against learning. It isn’t against the academy necessarily. It is for rigorous studiousness, deep study and learning, thorough preaching. Just look at Paul’s example, or the example of the sermons in the Bible. James. Stephen. Apollos. Isaiah. Moses. Peter. Jesus himself. All schooled and deeply knowledgeable in the Scriptures. And they teach assuming that you are too.
It has rightly been said that our worship can only go as high as our understanding of the Bible goes deep. You can’t build a skyscraper with an 8 foot foundation. Often they have to go up to 100 feet deep (400 ft in the most extreme cases) in order to have enough structural stability to hold up what comes above. Foundations matter. And the foundation of the church is our understanding of sound doctrine. The mind matters.
That’s because the mind dramatically changed when we were saved. What were we like before we were saved? These verses give us one of the most comprehensive “behind the scenes” look at the unbelieving world.
1. Vain Mind
This is what the ESV means by “futility.” The mind’s vanity refers to the mind’s uselessness. It is vain to attempt to hold water in a cracked jar. It is vain to stave off the effects of aging. It is vain to spread a net before a bird. It’s useless! In the same way, the mind of the unbeliever is “vain.” Futile. Useless. Don’t accomplish the intended purpose. The mind was intended to be used to the glory of God, to grasp the truths about God. It was meant to look at food and see God’s goodness, to look at the stars and see his majesty, to look at the seasons and see his faithfulness. But rather it looks at those things and misunderstands them. The unbelieving mind cannot grasp truth, at least not in the way it should. The mind is futile.
As high as the intellectual achievements of unbelievers go, none will accomplish the intended effect. And this is especially the case in areas of religion or spirituality. There is no shortage of ideas floating around on the internet which tout wisdom on spiritual topics, and all of it is nonsense! It is incoherent, distorted, inadequate. It often misses the point and is colored more by the so-called expert’s personal passions and desires than by the truth. As the Preacher so aptly said, “I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind” (Eccl. 1:17).
2. Darkened Thinking
This is what it means by the understanding. It is a similar word to “mind” but refers to the thinking faculty, the part of us which processes thoughts. It is the conveyor belt of the intellect, the thought process. And that thought process is darkened—darkness everywhere being a symbol of ignorance, obscurity, folly, and sin. And the metaphor is apt: in darkness, you cannot see! My night vision has gotten worse and worse over the years. When you wake up in the night and have to get out of bed, we often stumble around trying to find what we’re looking for. We can’t see, so we don’t know where we are or where we need to go to get where we need to get.
So it is with the mind of an unbeliever. They are dark. Their thought processes are shrouded in darkness. They don’t have the right starting point. They don’t know where they are. They stumble around trying to figure out where they need to go but only and inevitably hurt themselves in the process. This is why sometimes you listen to someone give a reason for why they believe what they do and you walk away thinking, “What on earth did all that mean?” It’s the effect of sin on the mind.
3. Dying Separation
Those whose minds cannot grasp truth, and those whose thinking processes are shrouded in darkness demonstrate that they have been cut off from God’s life. God is a God of life. All life comes from him. He breathes life into Adam’s nostrils. As the Bible continuously says, “The Lord lives.” Thus, true life is found in our connection to him—being connected to God is what it means to be alive. So to be alienated from God’s life is to enter into death. That’s what happened in the garden: they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and thus they were cut off from the tree of life. In that day, they died.
Paul has already said this, “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked” (Eph 2:1). That’s what it means to be “alienated from the life of God.”
4. Willful Ignorance
That is because of “the ignorance that is in them.” This is not simply an uninformed brain as though the right information would simply fix the problem. In fact, Romans 1 tells us that unbelievers have all the information they need! It is evident to them that God exists, that he is righteous, and that they must obey him. Information isn’t the problem. The heart is. Thus, the kind of ignorance that Paul is talking about is a willful ignorance—a self-imposed blindness that is like squeezing the eyes shut tightly to the beauty of God. We willingly and willfully ignore God for our own selfish purposes.
5. Obstinate Rebellion
This comes from hardness of heart. It can also be translated “blindness of heart.” It is the insensibility of obstinacy. You remember Pharoah. He hardened his heart, the Lord hardened his heart. That is to say he obstinately continued in his rebellious path in spite of all the clear evidence around him that God was a righteous judge. And so our hearts are hard. We see around us the evidence of God’s grace. We heart the gospel preached to us. We eat God’s food and breathe God’s air and drink God’s water, and yet we remain hardened to him.
6. Callous Self-Indulgence
Which eventually leads to a callous self-indulgence. “Callous” means “dead to feeling.” A moral insensitivity that pays not heed to the consequences of sin, even though it knows its wrong. In other words, it is a seared conscience. Sin begets more sin, and that sin sears the conscience, and that seared conscience then leads them to “give themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.” Matthew Henry: “When men’s consciences are once seared, there are no bounds to their sins. When they set their hearts upon the gratification of their lusts, what can be expected but the most abominable sensuality and lewdness, and that their horrid enormities will abound?” Beware lest you sear your consciences.
And hear a call to repentance here! If you are here and you do not trust Christ, this is your state. Perhaps this helps you make sense of why you do what you do. Your reasoning and thoughts never seem to give you a sense of satisfaction. You can’t seem to understand yourself or others or life in general. You are not alive because you are separated from God. You willfully ignore the admonitions of Scripture, preaching, or of parents or friends who are Christians. Your heart is hard and you continue in your rebellion willfully. You are unfeeling when it comes to sin and you don’t have any problem giving yourself over to more of it, even as something niggling in the back of your mind tells you that it’s not right—but you stuff it down and keep on going. You are dead in your sin, and the life of Jesus is freely offered to you if you would turn from your sin and trust in Christ.
II. Become Who You Are (4:20-24)
The second imperative we must remember is that we must Become who we are. Notice the tension between 4:17 and 4:22. The original says in 4:17, “This I say and testify in the Lord that you no longer walk as the Gentiles.” He is testifying to a fact. You don’t walk that way anymore! You have changed! You are different! But then he goes on to say in 4:22, you have been taught “to put off the old man.”
There is a tension here! You are the new man. 2 Corinthians 5:17: “If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation; the old things passed away; behold, the new things have come.” As we have seen, you are alive in Christ. You are joined to the body of Christ. You are renewed.
Yet, at one and the same time, you must “put off the old man.” While we are new, we also are still being renewed. We have come out of the tomb, but we are still wearing the grave clothes of the old man. And here Paul calls us to put those clothes off and put on the clothes of the living.
This is a constant theme in Paul.
· Romans 7:13f
· Colossians 3:5, 12
· 1 Corinthians 5:7-8
· 2 Corinthians 3:18
The consistent logic here is clear: we strive after holiness because we are holy. We do not strive after holiness in order to achieve holiness. We strive after holiness because holiness has been achieved for us by Christ. We are new in him. Now we must become new in practice. And that gives us great confidence. Our good works do not prove anything to God! We are not attempting prove ourselves worthy of his love by making ourselves look impressive. You already are perfectly impressive in his sight—even as impressive as his own Son. And so we are freed from the slave driver named self-righteousness, liberated from the relentless inner self-reproach of a guilty conscience, all in order to run freely in the fields of forgiveness.
We have learned Christ. How is it that we become holy in him? We have “learned” him. This is a school of the soul, and Christ is the subject that we learn. It isn’t just learning about him in Sunday School or in a sermon. It is learning him. Knowing him, the same way the end of chapter 3 said we know him.
And there is something markedly different about learning Christ than how we used to be. Christ cannot be learned in a worldly way. He cannot be learned by a mind devoid of the Spirit, which is futile and dark and ignorant and hard and callous and recklessly abandoned to sin. Christ was not learned in that way! He was learned in a different way!
How was he learned? Initially, we hear him. Christ is not only the subject, but also the teacher. This is a moment in which the ESV is very unhelpful. The original is better captured by the LSB: “you heard him.” It is him that we hear when we learn him. Christ is the one who teaches us about Christ. That happens when the gospel is faithfully explained. Remember 1:13, “In him you also when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.”
That’s an amazing thing to think of. When you faithfully preach the gospel to an unbelieving family member, it’s not you who is speaking to them! It is Christ! Christ speaks in his word, and when we faithfully explain that word, we as it were step aside and Christ speaks. We are to be simply mouthpieces. Which should both humble us and give us a great sense of authority and purpose. But it’s also a trembling thing, because whenever someone comes up here and preaches, if they are faithful to the word, Christ speaks to us through them.
And in coming to know Christ, in hearing him speak to us, he imparts himself to us, which is nothing more than to say that he gives the truth to us. Do you remember 4:15, “truthing in love”? Well, the truth is in Jesus, and Jesus speaks to us through the ministry of the word among ourselves. Which means that when we speak the truth, when we teach the scriptures, when we live with uprightness and integrity, we speak Christ and image Christ to one another.
And what have we learned from him? Paul now lays out one of the few step-by-step processes for sanctification in the Scriptures. He doesn’t often give us a process, but when he does, we should tune in. It has three steps: 1) Put off the old man, 2) be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 3) put on the new man.
1. Put off the old man.
He says to take off the old person like a pair of dirty clothes. It is not fitting for a living person to wear grave clothes. Jesus left the linen wrappings in the grave. He commanded that Lazarus be unwrapped. In a similar way, our old lives are like clothes that we must take off in order to be free from our old life of deadness. So, he says you have learned Christ, you are alive in him, you are no longer dead: now act like it!
How do we know what part of us is the old man? It’s any part that acts according to the standard of your old manner of life. As the ESV has it, it “belongs to your former manner of life.” That was a lifestyle, the same lifestyle Paul described back in 2:3, a life “in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” The old manner of life is life dominated by idolatry, life dominated by desires which we relentlessly pursued in the hopes that they would satisfy our souls. It was a manner of life arising from our callousness, our hardheartedness, our willful ignorance, our darkened understanding, our futile mind. If you find yourself thinking and acting that way, put off that way of thinking and acting.
The first step of sanctification is to stop acting like your old self. A pastor once told me a story of a man he counseled who was afraid that he was heading down the road to adultery. There was a woman he kept talking to, felt drawn to. And so the pastor asked him whether or not he kept talking to this woman. He said yes. So the pastor said, “STOP!” If we don’t cut off bad behaviors, we will never make progress. We can’t grow vegetables unless we first pull out the weeds. You have to clear the forest before you can plant crops. So also you have to put off the old person if you are to put on the new.
2. Be renewed in the spirit of your minds.
That is bathe your minds with truth. This is the second essential step. It is not enough to simply stop bad behaviors. To do so without also changing your thinking about it is to set yourself up for failure. One of the most discouraging things to me when I’m trying to help someone come out of sin is if they talk the same way about their sin and themselves months after starting to work together. It’s an evidence that their thinking has not changed. We not only need to stop the sin, we also need to renew our minds!
And this makes perfect sense with what Paul has just said. Our minds were futile, darkened, ignorant, hard, callous. And we too often default to thinking in that old way. If that old way of thinking is what led us down the path to sin, then we need a brand new way of thinking! And that’s why we must continually bathe our minds in Scripture. That’s why Paul says in Romans 12:1, “I appeal to you in view of God’s mercies offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.” It is only within the view of what God has done for you, within the sight of truth that we can begin to offer our bodies to him as a living sacrifice.
Attempts at righteous living without doctrine to guide us is like riding a segway with one wheel. If you have the motivation and put forward the effort, but you don’t know what to do or why to do it or the proper attitudes or the proper method, then all you’re ever going to do is spin in circles. We need to be taught, trained, informed, enlightened. In other words, we need to learn Christ every day. And that is what renews the spirit of our minds. But even this is not yet enough, for we must finally…
3. Put on the new man
It’s not enough to stop sinning. Nor is it enough to stop sinning while learning about the truth. In fact, many people stop there and become self-righteous legalists. Too often and too quickly we confuse knowing a lot about the Bible with being a holy person. Knowledge and holiness are two different things—but you can have knowledge without holiness. So we must proceed all the way into implementing righteous behaviors.
It isn’t enough to stop sinning and bathe your mind with Scripture. It must be paired with active and intentional practices of righteousness. If you have damaged shingles, it doesn’t do your house any good to only tear off the damaged shingles! That leaves your house open to destruction! You need to then replace those old shingles with new ones. In the same way, we need to put off the old manner of life and replace it with a new manner of life.
This is where we fail most often. Sometimes people come and talk to me about their sin problems, and they’re super frustrated that they can’t make progress. And so I ask them what they’ve done about it. Most of the time, you know what they say? “I prayed about it.” Prayer is good! But that answer evidences a deep and fatal mistake—that if we pray about it, the problem will magically disappear. But it doesn’t work that way! Prayer is good, but prayer alone is insufficient.
Other people will say, “I just try to stop doing this sin, but every time I try to stop it gets harder to stop!” That’s like trying really hard not to think of fuzzy pink elephants. The harder you try to not think about fuzzy pink elephants, the more you think about them! Simply exerting your will against sin will not stop the sin. It is only when we replace our sins with righteousness that we grow into the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. The answer to anger is not simply prayer. Nor is it to get angry with yourself that you can’t stop being angry. Nor is it to simply learn about anger from the Scripture. It is also to replace anger with gentleness and love in the very moment you are tempted with anger. The answer to lust is not simply prayer, or internet filters. Nor is it simply trying to not think about it. Nor is it learning all about what the Bible says about impurity. It is actively replacing lustful thoughts with holy thoughts in the moment you are tempted. So on and so forth.
Now, Paul is going to give an extended series of examples to make sure that we know what he’s talking about, which we will address next week. Now, simply take away the basic premise: sanctification is a three step process—stopping unrighteous behaviors by continually renewing your mind and by replacing them with righteous behaviors.
Conclusion
All of which brings us back to the original thought: how are we to be the body of Christ? How do we present a picture of Christ to the world? How do we become a body which promotes self-sustaining growth? How do we become that ship in a body which points to what God is doing in the world? Answer: we grow in holiness. Your personal holiness is one of the most vital factors in our church’s health and maturity. If we are all people who look more like the old man than the new man, who are not being renewed in our minds, and who do not actively put on righteousness, then we will be an immature and ultimately a divided church. But if we are a people who always are striving after holiness, then we will have the kind of ministry that we ought to have to each other. We will grow with a growth that is from the Lord.