Let's Be Different Together
Ephesians 4:17-22
Ephesus was a pagan city.
By this I mean that the people who lived there neither followed the one, true God, nor did they know much about him. Like any people today who haven’t yet heard the message of the gospel, they could see the evidence of God’s sovereignty and power in the natural world around them. They also possessed an inner, basic sense of what was right and wrong due to their God-given conscience. Yet they had ignored, suppressed, and rejected this knowledge in favor of other things – things that are contrary to God’s nature and ways and our created design and purpose.
Evidence of ungodly living abounded in Ephesus. This city was home to the pagan Temple of Diana (or Artemis), one of the seven ancient wonders of the world on par with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Great Pyramid of Egypt. The worship practices that occurred at this temple were horrible. They featured degrading immoral behavior such as prostitution and more.
Since this type of behavior was a regular part of the cultural religion in Ephesus, we would be correct to assume that the everyday lives of its citizens were also immoral in every way imaginable. In addition to immoral behavior, the culture of Ephesus was rife with crime, financial dishonesty, theft, idolatry, broken relationships, laziness, and occultic practices – even though it was a leading center for commerce and trade.
When we read Paul’s letter to the Ephesian church, we envision a godly Christian audience of church members who are nice and well-behaved. While this may be true to some degree, Paul did not take this for granted. After all, he knew that many of them (if not most of them) had been rescued by Christ from the same lawless and immoral lifestyle of nonbelievers around them.
In addition to their pagan background, though the church had grown, its members were still a minority demographic in the city. So their lingering sinful desires, prevailing social pressure, and past lifestyles still exerted pressure on them to conform, or rather to revert back to their former way of living. Though God had made them saints through faith in Jesus Christ (Eph 1:1), they still faced a daily temptation to live the way they used to live before they turned to Christ. And we face the same temptations today – the temptation to revert back to our former lifestyles and habits, the way we lived before we learned and believed the truth about Jesus.
In this letter to the Ephesian church, Paul appealed directly to its members. We know that he urged them to unify around the core doctrines of the Christian faith (Eph 4:1-10), and we know that he urged them to get involved in loving, Christlike service to one another (Eph 4:11-16). But he also urged them to do something else, or rather to stop doing something – to stop doing the bad, ungodly things they used to do before we believed on Jesus. Now that’s the main point of this message:
Let’s stop doing the pagan things we did before Jesus saved us.
Though we may not live in Ephesus today (that city was abandoned in the 1400s), we do live in a pagan culture. I suppose we could debate that to some degree, because to some degree the United States of America has and does, in various ways, reflect biblical, Christian values.
Yet who can argue that we are in reality – not on paper – functioning as a Christian nation? Technically, it’s more correct to describe the United States as a post-Christian nation. The majority of our political leaders (or so it seems), from the top down, promote ungodly values and agendas, and they live ungodly, dishonest, immoral lives as well. Our press promotes a godless, secular agenda, our celebrities and superstars model (often literally) an immoral, ungodly lifestyle, our public educational system (though some schools and Christian teachers are an exception) indoctrinates our minds with godless philosophies, values, and theories, our materialistic, money-hungry economy stirs up all sorts of wasteful choices, and our technology and devices foster all sorts of enslaving habits.
In so many ways and maybe more, our own society is just as pagan if not worse than the culture of Ephesus. Would you agree? Yet the purpose of this message is not to point the finger of blame and shame at the unsaved, unbelieving world around us. The purpose is to point the finger at we who are saints and the children of God.
You see – as we all well know – a true believer can behave like a nonbeliever sometimes. Yet even though this happens, it’s not okay, and that’s the point that Paul is making in this section of the letter. If we’ve believed on Jesus, it’s not okay to keep on doing the bad, ungodly things we used to do before we believed on Jesus.
Let’s stop walking in the dark. (Eph 4:17-19)
That’s what Paul says here when he wrote: “This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.”
As we may already know, “walk” is one of the ways that the Bible describes our lifestyle. Just as we walk around and go places one step at a time and one foot after the other, that’s how we live. This doesn’t refer so much to isolated decisions we make here and there, whether good or bad. Instead, it refers to our lifestyles over time, our habits, and the way we choose to live our lives day by day.
Here Paul makes it very clear that those who’ve believed on Christ as God and Savior should take a new path in life. They should turn around and walk the other way. We should “no longer” live the way that nonbelievers live around them, even though we used to live that way ourselves. And how do they live (and how did we live, too)? In the dark.
Here Paul describes the lifestyle of a nonbeliever in a very unflattering way. In fact, if a nonbeliever were to stumble across this portion of Paul’s letter, they might easily be offended by what he says.
First, he says they live meaningless lives (“the futility of their minds”). No matter how busy they may be and how many good things they may try to do, all of their thoughts, plans, and intentions are ultimately useless because they’re making plans based upon godless philosophies, unproven theories, and an uncertain view of eternity. As I quoted in a previous message in this series, one well-known pop song urges listeners to:
Live like there's no tomorrow
'Cause all we have is here, right now
Love like it's all that we know
The only chance that we ever found
Believe in what we feel inside
Believe and it will never die
Selena Gomez
These lyrics vividly but sadly illustrate how Paul told the Ephesian believers not to think. This is what it means to “walk in the futility of their minds” It’s the motto tempers nearly every movie Disney makes – if you just believe in yourself, you can make magic happen. That sounds nice, but it’s hollow. It doesn’t mean anything. So why do nonbelievers follow such worthless plans and philosophies?
They turned off the lights in their minds.
“Having their understanding darkened” means that their reasoning and way of thinking is dark – that is, it’s as though the lights have been turned off in their heads so that they’re incapable of seeing and understand the reality of God.
If you know what it’s like to be in a lit room without windows and then someone turns the lights off. You can’t see what’s in front of you. Nonbelievers are that way in a spiritual sense. They can’t see the obvious reality of God through the external, natural world, nor can they see the plain reality of God through their inner conscience even though it’s there. As a result, they are “alienated” (or “total strangers”) to the true, eternal life that comes from God, the giver of life.
Beyond this, Paul goes on to paint an even more sorry picture. He says that they have “ignorance” in them, which means they don’t know what they don’t know. They might know a lot of things (many smart people don’t believe in Christ), but they don’t know what’s most important. In other words, no matter how smart or intelligent they may be, they don’t even know what they’re missing.
It’s like trying to explain marriage to a toddler or color to a person who was born blind. No matter what we say, we just can’t get them to understand. They don’t know what they’re missing, so they’re ignorant. In fact, that’s what Paul even says himself, that nonbelievers have “blindness of their heart.” A blind person can’t see shadows. They can’t see anything, even if it’s sitting right in front of them. That’s the way that nonbelievers think.
Now Paul doesn’t stop there. He keeps on going, painting an even sorrier, sadder picture of those apart from Christ. Not only do they live without spiritual sight, but they live without spiritual feelings, too. He says that they’re “past feeling,” which means “without feelings or sensations, calloused.” This word “carries the idea of being rock-hard. It was used by physicians to describe the calcification that forms around broken bones and becomes harder than the bone itself.”[1]
It’s also helpful to think about being “calloused” from the standpoint of fire. If you’re blind and you come near a bonfire, what will you do? You’ll turn away, right? But if you’re a blind person who can’t feel anything, then you’ll probably walk right in and not feel a thing. Is that good? Are you a special, powerful person because you can’t feel the flame? No, not at all. You’re a person who’s about to die and you don’t even know it.
Don’t envy smiling people who indulge in sinful lifestyles.
Just because they’re running around in the fire with a smile on their face doesn’t mean they’re okay – that they’re not being burned alive. They’re just calloused, that’s all.
And to what are nonbelievers calloused? What’s the fire they play with as they laugh and smile? “Lewdness,” or licentiousness, which means living as though we have a free pass to do whatever we want, period. This word specifically refers to unrestrained immorality or sexual gratification.
Paul is not speaking here about the intimacy God gives to a husband and wife; there’s nothing bad about that at all – in fact, it’s very good. He’s speaking instead about all the other, endless list of varieties and ways that Satan has twisted and perverted that God-given blessing. Paul describes such things as “uncleanness,” which highlights the utter inappropriateness and impurity of those things. By “uncleanness” he may also be alluding to the many harmful, even deadly, side-effects of a profligate lifestyle (STDs, etc.).
Fascinatingly enough, Paul describes this “anything goes” lifestyle not like a carefree party, but as a job. The word “to work” refers generically to applying yourself to something. So, this isn’t something people fall into by accident; it’s something they choose to do and to keep on doing. To make this even more clear, Paul points out that people don’t live sinful lives because they’ve been backed into a corner. Quite the opposite.
People choose to hand themselves over to sin.
They’ve literally “given themselves over” to live this way, which means “to hand over” and give themselves away to this lifestyle. They’re not ignorant and deceived by sin because they had no chance. They’re like that because they chose to be.
This word “work” also has an added layer, one that implies running a business and making a financial profit. Just as prostitution and other inappropriate lifestyles earned people money in first-century Ephesus, so such inappropriate behavior turns a profit today. Though it doesn’t make the headlines of the Wall Street Journal, the business of immorality is a multimillion-dollar enterprise in America alone.
The word “greediness” is also insightful for understanding the true spiritual condition of the unbelieving world. From one angle and in some contexts, it describes exploitation, which is taking advantage of people and situations to get more money and pleasure out of them for yourself, no matter what happens to the other parties involved, and this is applicable today for sure.
Then in a general sense, it also describes an insatiable appetite for more. Jump ahead for a moment to Eph 4:22, which says, “The old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts.” This explains further how our sinful appetites actually work. They’re deceptive. Our sinful nature says, “Feed me once – just a little bit – and I’ll go away.” So we feed it just a little, then it says, “Oops. Sorry. I just got bigger. Give me more!”
Brothers and sisters in Christ, to borrow a line from former President Barack Obama:
“You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”
No matter how hard we think about it and what angle we take, sin is always sin and it’s every bit as bad, awful, and ugly as Paul describes. Yet the world likes to dress it up in all sorts of ways. The glitz. The glamor. The great big white smiles and the bulging muscles. The fame, the fortune, the freedom. It parades all of this and more in front of us every day in so many ways, but underneath all the lipstick and glitter, it’s still a filthy old pig.
In a letter that Peter wrote to some other first-century believers, he said, “For we have spent enough of our past lifetime in doing the will of the Gentiles—when we walked in lewdness (sensual living), lusts (uncontrolled appetites for all sorts of things), drunkenness (intoxication and – by extension – other forms of substance additions), revelries (wild parties), drinking parties (drinking as a group, not just alone), and abominable idolatries (which refers not only to worshiping idols, but to prostitution, abortions, and other terrible things that often accompany idol worship, whether secretly or in public)” (1 Pet 4:3).
Here’s the point, nonbelievers may be running around in the fires of sin today as the normal way of living in our culture. Yet, just because they’re smiling, having all sorts of fun, and making heaps of money along the way, doesn’t mean that we should follow. They’re doing these things because they have no meaningful purpose beyond the sensory, material, temporal experiences of this life. They’re walking around in the dark. They’re blind. They’re calloused. They have no idea how badly they’re hurting themselves and how terribly they’re exploiting one another.
If we know Christ, then we know better. (Eph 4:20-21)
Having described the lifestyle of nonbelievers in dismal and graphic terms, Paul goes on to make a strong contrast between the way they live (and we used to live, too) and the way that we should live as Christians. “But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus.”
The word “but” is the hinge, the turning point, and the line of clear distinction. You see, as the saying goes (and the saying is true), “We don’t have to be like the world to reach the world.” We need to be different. After all, we’re supposed to pull people out of the fire, not play around in the fire with them as they burn.
To begin with, Paul points out that we “have not so learned Christ … as the truth is in Jesus.” By inserting the phrase “if indeed you have heard him and have been taught by him,” he isn’t kind of “wondering out loud” if the members of the Ephesian church were possibly unsaved. In Greek, this phrase is a way of saying, “After all, you have heard him and been taught by him, haven’t you?”[2] This isn’t a statement of doubt, it’s a statement of relative certainty. Though only God knew for sure, Paul had seen and heard enough of those believer’s testimonies to speak to them directly as brothers and sisters in Christ.
How had the members of the church in Ephesus “learned” and “heard” the truth of Christ? Through the initial evangelism and mentoring of people like Aquila and Priscilla, Apollos, and Paul. Then how had they “been taught” the truth of Jesus? By the ongoing ministry of pastors and teachers in the church, just as he has spoken about and encouraged them to keep on doing (Eph 4:11-16).
By referring to “the truth” that “is in Jesus,” Paul rightly associates Jesus with truth. How is “the truth in Jesus” exactly? Well so much could be said, couldn’t it? But let’s point out two clear facts. First, Jesus himself is truth (John 14:6). There is no truth apart from him and he is the source of truth. Second, Jesus is true. You see, just before John 14:6 (“I am the truth”), Jesus claimed to speak the truth. He said, “If it were not so, I would have told you” (John 14:2).
In other words, not only is Jesus truth but he always speaks the truth and never lies. Unlike the unbelieving world which lies to themselves and exploits others, and unlike our own sinful self that lies to us as well, we can dig straight into the truth of Scripture and the teachings of Christ to find the straightforward truth of God. As Paul said elsewhere to the believers in Rome, “Let God be true but every man a liar” (Rom 3:4).
The world may put lipstick on pigs and we may choose to kiss them when it does, but the truth is always with Jesus. We may not always like what we learn from Jesus, but we can know that whatever he says, it is the truth. If we will be wise and live like the saints and children of God we’ve been called to be, then we’ll follow the teaching of Jesus whether it contradicts with our deceptive sinful nature or not – and especially when it does.
And what had they learned? Not only how to become a child of God by believing on Christ alone for salvation, but also how to behave like the saints God had saved them to be. To make his point clear, Paul uses a very easy-to-understand analogy. He says to “put off” “our former conduct, the old man” (or “way of life”) and to “put on” the “new man.” In other words:
Let’s break out our new uniforms.
(Our spiritual clothing, that is.) Paul says, “That you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:21-22).
With these words, he is describing what we do (or I hope we do!) every day. When we get out of bed in the morning, we take off our sleeping clothes (our pajamas) and we put on our outfit for the day. Then we do the same thing at nighttime before we go to bed, only we take off our day clothes and put on our pajamas instead.
Let’s intensify this illustration a little more by imaging that you play for a major league sports team, like, perhaps, the Boston Red Sox. Then imagine that in the middle of your career, you get traded to your division rival, the New York Yankees. A few days after the trade becomes official, you have to sit down for a press conference in front of the cameras to be presented as an official member of the NY Yankees. Those of us who follow baseball know that an important moment in this ritual occurs your new manager hands you the jersey for your new team. Now imagine that standing there in front of the cameras, you look at your new Yankees jersey and stare. Then you reach into a bag below the table to pull out a Red Sox jersey instead and you proceed to put it on. Now let me ask you, how will the press respond? Even worse, how will the Yankees’ fanbase respond when they hear that you spurned your Yankees jersey wear a Red Sox one?
That’s what Paul is saying here. When he mentions “old man” and “new man,” he’s speaking about your “old self” and your “new self.” The kind of person you “used to be” before Christ (the kind that Paul described in Eph 4:17-19) and the kind that you are now as a follower of Christ, forgiven from sins and empowered by the Holy Spirit.
As we already observed, Paul reminds us that the lifestyle of the “old self” took advantage of us by growing and increasing in its size and strength through the art of deception. Back then, before Christ, our sinful nature would say, “Feed me once and I’ll go away.” So, we fed it and then it would say, “Oops. I just got bigger!” But guess what? It does the same thing today, even though we’re Christians.
Have we figured that out yet? For whatever reason, our sinful nature attempts to deceive us into thinking that since we’re born-again children of God, we can play around with sin and win, but that’s not true. So what we need is to be “renewed in the spirit of our mind.”
But how? As one commentator explains, “You are what you think. You move in the direction of what you put into your mind and what you allow your mind to dwell on. So if you are not what you want to be, then you must begin to think differently. If you are to think differently, you must put into your mind that which you want to become.”[3] In Rom 12:2, Paul makes a similar observation when he says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
To grow as a Christian, we must stop “working all uncleanness with greediness” and “giving ourselves over to lewdness” (Eph 4:19). Instead, we must:
Let’s do the good things we’ve learned from Jesus.
Paul brought this up before in Eph 2:10, “We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” But also notice what Paul also said in Eph 2:10, “Which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” This corresponds with what he says here in Eph 4:24, “which was created according to God.” Here Paul uses the same Greek word (ktizō) which refers to the creative act of God, not just our own personal effort to do something.
When we choose day by day, moment by moment, choice by choice, and thought by thought (and that’s the key, “thought by thought”) to “put on the new man” (or “new self”), we are choosing to think and act according to the truth that is in Jesus. What’s more, because of our union with Christ (our oneness with him as believers), we don’t produce or achieve righteousness and holiness by doing good works. Quite the opposite is the case. We actually bring out or work out what God has already created in us through Christ.
What is “righteousness?” It’s a common word that simply means “rightness,” to be “right” in the eyes of the law, or more simply “to do the right thing.” The more we think about our union with Christ and close relationship to God (in line with all that Ephesians as taught us so far), then the more ours mind will be renewed and the more we will learn to lean on Christ to do the right thing in the moments and decisions and steps of everyday life.
What is “holiness?” It’s a special word that’s not used very often in the NT. It refers to being dedicated or consecrated to God. It’s like saying when we’re tempted to sin, “Sorry, I can’t do that because I belong to God and I love him.” So, is that how we think when we’re tempted? Or do we decide instead to let our fallen, sinful nature deceive us once again by following the breadcrumb trail of deception, one lie at a time?
As believers, let’s embrace what Paul is telling us here because we have heard, learned, and been taught the truth in Jesus. What’s more, our eyes have been opened and our conscience has been awakened to the deceptiveness of those sinful, pagan appetites that exploited us before we were saved. Let’s look past the teeth-whitened smiles of the blind and calloused world as they dance in the fires of sensuality and materialism.
Let’s train our minds to seek and savor Christ.
Let’s imagine a church whose members have chosen to seek and savor Jesus one day after another, one moment after another, one thought after another. A church that seeks and thinks about Christ like we used to seek and think about sin. Let’s take off our “old self” and put on our “new self” instead. Let’s stop letting this world’s useless pleasures deceive us and live out the new life that God’s created within us to live. In this way, let’s stop living the way we used to live before we were saved. Let’s be different together. Let’s pray.
[1] John MacArthur, Ephesians, MacArthur NT Commentary (Chicago: Moody, 1986), 169.
[2] Hoehner, Harold, Ephesians, Kindle ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002), Loc. 12062-12097.
[3] Max Anders, Galatians-Colossians, vol. 8, Holman NT Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1999), 154-155.
