Lifestyles of the Old and New, Ephesians 4:17-5:21

The Futility and Darkness of the Old Way of Life

Ephesians chapter four, starting verse 17, hear the word of the Lord. Now, this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart.

They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learn Christ, assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds to put on the new self created after the likeness of God and true righteousness and holiness.

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down in your anger and give no opportunity to the devil.

Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor doing honest work with his own hands so that he may have something to share with with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouth mouths, but only such as is good for building up as fits the occasion that it may give grace to those who hear and 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 and tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.

The New Self: Truth, Work, and Gracious Speech

Therefore, be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. A fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you as is proper among saints.

Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving. For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure or who is covetous, that is an idolater, has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

Let no one deceive you with empty words. For because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore, do not do not become partners with them. For at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.

Walk as children of light for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.

For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible. For anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore, it says awake, oh sleeper, and arise from the dead and Christ will shine on you.

Look carefully, then, how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise, making the best use of the time because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is and do not get drunk with wine for that is debauchery.

They may be filled with the spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God, the father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

The Christian Lifestyle as a Change of Walk

May the Lord add his blessings. The reading of his holy word. Well, what's your lifestyle? See it right there, I'm asking. Is it the lifestyle of the rich and famous? Maybe the country lifestyle. Maybe the modern wired in lifestyle.

Maybe the active sports lifestyle. Got any of that here? Busy business lifestyle. Maybe the American kind of southern lifestyle or maybe the African-American lifestyle or the Chinese lifestyle or maybe the senior lifestyle or the working adult, the teen lifestyle, you know, even babies have lifestyles.

Now, I find it very hard at first to adapt to the Singaporean lifestyle. When I live there, I'm from the south. I'm used to trees and living in houses that aren't attached to other things, driving everywhere you go.

And then I go to Singapore, live in these concrete high rise apartments on the ninth or the eleventh or whatever floor, traveling by walking to a bus stop or a train stop. And then you take the bus and then the train and then you walk again and taking my shoes off at the door, eating lots of rice, looking out the window in my apartment and seeing only more high rise apartments packed with people.

At that time, about three million people stuffed into a space smaller than Caswell County. They've actually grown some since then. It was definitely a change of lifestyle for me. After just a few weeks there into while I was there, I actually had a dream one night of my car.

I miss my car. Well, what's your lifestyle? You know what I mean, right? But did you know that about if we were 40 years ago, you might not have even understood the word. Someone came up to you, said lifestyle 40 years ago.

You might have to take it apart. Think about it. Life and style. OK, it's a style of life, which is the way you live. OK. Oh, I understand. The word didn't really start to appear until the 1950s and didn't occur in a dictionary until 1977.

But it turned out to be a very useful and very popular word. A new word popping up by 1985. It was so widespread, it appeared in a in the title of a popular television show, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which showed here in America with an Australian host named Robin Leach, who enthusiastically wishes all his viewers champagne wishes and caviar dreams.

That's the best I could do in Australian accent. Anyway, it celebrated lifestyles that many people envied. I want to live like a mansions and driving Rolls Royce with the chauffeurs.

And that kind of thing.

Today, many newspapers have an entire section called the lifestyle section. You know, they'll have the news section, the sports section and the lifestyle section where you'll find usually the movies and the TV listings and the articles and cooking and home design and relationships and even religion.

All that's supposed to be a matter of your chosen lifestyle. There's a facelift procedure seen over the TV the past year advertised lifestyle lift. Not only will it lift your face, I guess, apparently it will lift your lifestyle somehow.

There's a chain of exercise places called Lifestyle Family Fitness, which I guess they want to make exercise a part of your lifestyle, especially if they can make a lot of money off of it. Paired with the word alternative, it is a euphemism for homosexuality as in an alternative lifestyle.

And so it's it is value neutral, right? No judgments there. And that's really part of the attraction of the word for modern people in our diversity loving age. Think about it. It makes no more sense to condemn the the style of life of someone than it would be to condemn their style of art, their style of music, maybe their style of furniture.

You have a degraded, depraved style of furniture. Does that make any sense? Their interior decor, their style of clothes or their hairstyle. You know, you don't say you dirty, disgusting person for parting your hair on the right.

No, you don't do that. Some things we say are just matters of just matters of style. And so, you know, do as you please, as you like it. The assumption originally behind the word lifestyle is individualistic.

My style celebrating diversity. You know, some people want to eat with chopsticks. That's their style. If someone eat with forks, that's their style. Everything then is a matter of individual preference.

And as the actor Hugh Grant said, I don't believe in truth. I believe in style. Put like that, though, immediately, Christians should begin to notice that something is wrong. Sure, there are some things that are just merely stylistic preferences.

You want to eat with chopsticks? That's fine. You might like deep, rich paints on your wall. Others of you might like pastels, you know, whatever. That's your choice. But are there matters of style, of lifestyle that go beyond mere kind of value, neutral, individual preference and step into the area of truth, of right and wrong of God?

Well, what's your lifestyle? Here, the Apostle Paul, this passage we read describes for us what he really is, he is talking about here is a Christian or the Christian lifestyle, and he describes it in four parts.

First, the change. Second, the charge. Then the children. And fourth, the choice. I got alliteration this time. I'm so proud of myself for four times, four parts there. Now, four times in this passage, Paul talks about walking, you know, like picking up from what we saw last week in chapter four, verse one, where he told us to walk in a manner worthy of our calling walk.

And we talked a little bit about that last time. But here in verse 17, where we started, we are no longer to walk. As the Gentiles, that's the nations, the non-Jewish pagan people. We could call it the world.

Don't walk like them. Or, as he says in chapter chapter four, verse 22, don't have a manner of life that is like them. In chapter five, verse two, we're told to walk in love. In chapter five, verse eight, walk as children of light.

And then finally, chapter five, verse 15, we have to look carefully how we walk. Now, what he calls walk here or manner of life is what we'd probably call lifestyle. First in chapter four, verses 17 to 24, the change, change your lifestyle.

It's not as though being a Christian is merely changing what you believe and it won't affect your lifestyle. It will. If you've been changed on the inside by being born again, that will transform your lifestyle.

Paul testifies to this starting in verse 17, like he is giving evidence in court. You know, I, I, I urge, I testify, he says, change by no longer living like the world. Then he takes us down. You know, it's five steps descending step by step.

It's not so clear in English, but in Greek, it's very clear. He's one is connected with another. He's like he's going down step by step into the pit of the world's lifestyle, beginning with the most obvious on the surface and then going down to the root.

First, the lifestyle of the world is futile. It's vain. It's empty. You know, the things they think about are they're consumed with. They're really nothing. Ironically, often the world will think Christians are the boring ones, you know, with their talk of theology.

And they'll go listen to these long sermons once a week to talk about things they can't really see from this old book that they can hardly understand. But really, it's the world that is boring in the world, pretty boring.

There are people, adults in the world who will be obsessed with, you know, consume much of their life with finding Star Wars memorabilia. Really? You know, I like to watch Star Wars some, but I can't imagine spending my weekends regularly going to search for Star Wars action figures.

Really? That's interesting. I like sports, but surely we realize it's a distraction. Now, so what if Alabama wins another national championship next year? Let's hope. But so what? It's only another trophy that goes on a shelf that someone might drop and break like they did one a couple of years ago.

And next year, Alabama will have to start all over again. Just goes, what's it really mean? Now, sports is fine as entertainment, but if you are up and down based on whether Carolina or Duke is is winning, well, your life is really kind of empty.

At the most meaningful. The most meaningful the world gets to is relationships, particularly, of course, they put so much emphasis, at least in America, on finding that one special romance. And they say that's the most important thing in life.

And what do they do then? Well, then they'll end up destroying that relationship with their selfishness. And of course, that's what motivated them to get in the relationship in the first place was their selfishness, which destroys it.

And the end is like Ecclesiastes says. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, a chasing after the wind. Now, in Greek, the sentence continues into verse 18. It's all one sentence long. Not the whole passage, not one long sentence.

But here this section is one sentence into verse 18 where we're told that the world's lifestyle is futile because this is the reason is futile because their minds are darkened. The reason they go obsessing about Star Wars memorabilia or college football trophies or things like that is because they're just so dark into their mind.

They can't see what's important and what's not. Their understanding of life is like our ability to see things, say, on a dark night and the lights out. No night vision goggles. Sorry, it's just dark. You can't see what's around you.

Can't even see your hand in front of your face. Now, I think we see that clearly in the debate over homosexuality. It's really very obvious. Does it take much light to see that male and female were made for each other?

There's not only the testimony of the vast majority of people, but also the facts of anatomy and reproduction. Paul says in Romans one that it should be plain. I find this odd. Could Christians often quote Romans one to say that homosexuality is wrong?

That's not only to say that. Paul says there, it's so plain. It's so obvious that even people in the world without the Bible, these Gentiles that he's talking about, they should be able to see it. They only had a little bit of light, but they don't see it because their minds are are darkened.

He goes even another layer down into the heart of the world's lifestyle, their minds are darkened because he says they are alienated from the life of God in verse 18. That is, they are they are cut off.

They are estranged from the from the life that God gives. The spiritual problem of being separated from God affects their ability to think clearly, especially about moral and spiritual issues. Sin in the heart affects reasoning in the mind.

And then and then that affects the whole lifestyle. The deeper you get into the world's lifestyle, the more depraved it gets. They are alienated from the life of God. And so ignorant of God, because he says next, they're calloused.

Literally, the word there is where we use for petrified. So a piece of wood is petrified. Their hearts are petrified. They should be soft, you know, tender, but they're turning to stone. They're insensitive to right and to wrong, to God and to holiness.

They don't feel anything. Stone feels nothing. Their petrified hearts feel nothing. What for what they should be feeling. And you'll find this if you try to reason with them about truth and goodness about the Lord.

You know, it's like trying to stick a hypodermic needle into a rock.

Just won't go.

It's been they've been petrified. And we see this in the lately in there. If you follow the news, any of it, Kermit Gosnell case in Philadelphia. Now, not only are his alleged crimes the epitome of hard heartedness and abortion is to actually severed the spinal cords of of live delivered babies, but also the national media had to be shamed into reporting it.

Hard heartedness led to a widespread just ignoring the story. People don't care about what they are hard hearted toward. And if they are hard hearted about abortion, they don't care what Kermit Gosnell did.

And the word translated callous in verse 19 can also be just translated as cease to care is cease to care. And the word has a lifestyle that has ceased to care for life, for justice, for truth, for God.

The result is the fifth element in the word world's lifestyle. It has given itself over, he says, to sensuality, given itself over. And now we reach the bottom of the pit of depravity. People who live in futile lives, living only for now and for themselves.

You know, they have no reason not to grasp for every physical pleasure they can get. So they're they give themselves over to sensuality. They give themselves up everything that feels good to them now.

And that sensuality. That's why to the world, the highest, most persuasive argument for something. Is that it feels good. If it feels good, do it. That's the world's morality. The result, then, of that, as he says here, is lewdness.

In our culture, it's expressed in the prevalence of pornography, the growing acceptance of immoral, hurtful sexual practices like sadism, as shown by the popularity of a book called Fifty Shades of Grey, but so millions of copies last year.

The lifestyle of the world has given up here by themselves. And he says, actually, not just passively, they give themselves up to work. They're exerting themselves at every kind of impurity.

They're greedy for it.

They are like the greedy man who's never satisfied with what he has, always wanting more. And that's what drives the lifestyle of the world. It's an insatiable thirst for sensuality. And it's like a man lost at sea in a lifeboat drinking the seawater, but never able to quench his thirst.

But in verse 20, there's another great one of these great adversitives in Ephesians, but a revolutionary change. That's not the way you learned about Christ, he says. You didn't learn about Jesus by following your greed for impurity.

That's not what got you there. If you really heard about, heard and were taught by Jesus, then he would have taught you the truth. And that truth is that you need to change. You need to change your lifestyle like the way people this time of year probably changed your wardrobe, probably done it already here.

But off your winter clothes, maybe storm, maybe even storm away and get your summer clothes ready. Put off the old, put on the new. And here the word old is the old way of life. It's futile, darkened, alienated, callous, abandoned to sensuality.

Put that away. It comes from, he says, your old self or old man. That is what you were before you were born again. You know, you had adopted a lifestyle that he that was, he says, corrupt because of deceitful desires.

Desires that said that you you can be satisfied. I get the desires are wooing you say I can satisfy you just a little more money. It's all you need. There's another new sexual experience. Our partner or something intoxicating.

Try this. It promises you like a mirage on the horizon that paradise is almost here.

Just a little more.

It's all you need. Only pursue it. It's all you need to do. And if you give yourself to it. You'll find it's always on the horizon. It never really arrives. It's deceiving you now that there is a new you, Paul says, you need to put away that old lifestyle and put on a new one.

Be renewed in verse 23 in the spirit of your mind, spirit, your heart, your mind, your thinking, your way of thinking so that you're no longer thinking like like the world, like the way you used to think, the way you were taught by the world to think, the way you were, the way you thought just kind of naturally as a carnal person living for now and me and myself, my pleasure.

That's all that matters. Well, that needs to change. Put that off like your winter sweater. Put on something new. Now, this passage is not all about what we should do. Just just a series of commands. It relies really first on what God has done.

If God has made us new, a new creation created to be like God, he says here in true righteousness and a good other was in a real relationship with God, with the father and holiness and holy. If God has done that in you, then your lifestyle should show it.

If you've had a changed heart, then you must have a changed lifestyle. Now, because of that truth, changed heart must produce changed lifestyle. That truth comes then. Is this the way the world is? But it shouldn't be part of yours.

Instead, speak the truth with each other. He gives us a reason. He says we're members of each other. We're connected. Why would you lie to each other? One part of the body shouldn't lie to another. That makes no sense.

The famous ancient preacher John Chrysostom said, if the eye sees a serpent snake slithering on the ground,.

Does it deceive the foot?

If the tongue tastes what is bitter, does it deceive the stomach? Oh, the world deceives because it thinks it's disconnected from each other. We should tell the truth. Because we know we're not. We're charged to be angry without sin, quoting from Psalm four here.

Those who are given over just to following their feelings are often slaves of their anger, even if they learn how to disguise it. But we're to be different. There is a right anger. So he says, be angry, but do not sin.

There is a right anger, especially anger at injustice. But it's difficult to handle. Kind of like hot coals. You can hold it, but not for long, without getting burned. So let it let it expire. Let the anger cool down along with the sunlight.

If you don't, if you seethe in it for for hours and days, you give Satan, he says, an open door into your life. OK, we're charged to no longer no longer steal. Got to cut your stealing out. All of you don't take what's not yours.

The world does that, you know, whenever there's an opportunity and they think they can get away with it because they only care about themselves. They're callous to other people. They're given over to their own desires, and they don't really believe that there is a God who sees them taking.

What no one else can see them doing. But we're to be different rather than pilfering. He says we're to labor that is working in honest work with our own hands. Every job is a way to serve God. You don't have to be a pastor to serve God or a missionary or anything like that to serve God.

You are all called to work either in homemaking or teaching or floor repair. There's David building mail delivery, nursing, studying, cooking and selling the food. The Christian lifestyle doesn't mean just going to church and prayer and Bible reading as important as those things are.

And they're very important. But it also means work. That's a part of your service to God. Work. You are called by God to work. And we're given a reason for our work. In the second half of verse 28, he says there, notice that your Bible.

So that that's the purpose statement. Work honestly with your own hands so that you may have something to share with anyone in need. There's the reason for your work. The purpose of your working isn't just so you can have more and better things, you know, a nicer house, a better car, those luxurious vacations, you know, the lifestyle of the rich and famous.

The purpose is so that you can give. I don't work and you don't earn, you don't have anything to give. So go to work so you can give a giving is the reason for your job in the world that that old lifestyle work is for themselves.

Right. You work so I can have everything I want for the things. But that's that's the feudal. That's the dark and that's the alienated. That's the hard hearted life that's given over to sensuality and the new lifestyle coming out of a new creation.

We work not for the weekend, not for what we can buy with with the paycheck, but for what we can give with the paycheck. A while back, one of Mary's friends, a businesswoman said she wanted to be successful in business so that she could give to support Christian ministries.

She did. And we're sitting in this building because of it.

Sometimes it works, doesn't it?

So if you've been thinking, I'll start giving one day after I've taken care of myself, you know, upgraded all the vehicles and got in the house that I've always wanted with a pool in the back and gone on those vacations have been dreaming about and gotten all the gadgets we need.

Then after all that, then. I'll start to give. Of course, the reality is you'll find always be something more you're going to get for yourself. But if that's your mentality, you're still living the world's lifestyle.

The charge is to change here.

To work, to give.

And the charges to change our talk. Our words should not be corrupting to others. He says that's telling jokes that make light of sin, that maybe are sexually suggestive just because it's funny or maybe revile our leaders and encourage others to disrespect them just because we don't like their politics, corrupting others by encouraging them to be arrogant rebels.

Mary tells how at Fuller Seminary she babysat for a fundamentalist family and her lived in her same apartment building. And the little girl told her that her daddy told her that she is smarter than all those professors in the seminary.

Puffing up a little child like that. Now, that doesn't give her grace. It does the opposite because God gives grace to the humble. And that father was teaching her his daughter to be prideful. Instead, our words should build up others, give them grace.

He says sometimes maybe that means correcting them if they are puffed up and need to be humbled to experience grace. Often it means encouraging them.

Graciously.

Corrupting talk, Paul says here, grieves. It makes sad the Holy Spirit when all true, you know, that all true Christians are sealed with you. You're a true Christian. You have this Holy Spirit with you that you speak corrupting words.

You make him sad. He's keeping you for that final day when we're brought back, we're redeemed from sin and death. He's preserving us. And so while since he's with us, he's hearing what we say. And we don't want the Holy Spirit to be saddened.

While he's preserving us. Finally, we're charged in those lofty words and verses 31 and 32. It's a good memory verse versus he says to let let these things allow them to be let go of all the things about our old heart and old lifestyle that cause us to have bitterness, even if we have been deeply hurt and wrath and anger.

That selfish. Consuming fire that says, how dare he or she cheat me like that? And clamor, those loud fits, you're messing with the wrong one. Saw some clamor at the last baseball game Tuesday night, upset.

There's a bad call. Your team was disadvantaged. How do you mess it with the wrong one? And the call was actually in Joshua's favor. And it was a bad call. Whatever it just got so bad, I had to call the police to calm it down.

There's clamor over a bad call at a baseball game and slander, he says. And let let it all be put away along with all malice. That's wishing people destruction and harm. Instead, the chart, the charge to us is the Jesus lifestyle.

Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. God, through what he sent Jesus to do by living a perfect life and taking the punishment for our sins. Forgave us.

So now can't we forgive each other when we wrong each other again? Like I said last week, you know, being a church doesn't mean we'll have a lack of offenses, especially if you hang around me. But it should mean we have what it takes to forgive each other because the father gave us what it takes.

Imitating God as Beloved Children

Well, that's the charge to change. And we do it, he says, because we're children. Starting in chapter five, the top of chapter five, therefore, because of what happened already, because God in Christ forgave us.

Be imitators of God. The Greek word there is the same word where we got our word, English word for mimic always says mimic God, copy God. This is he forgave us, forgive each other. And notice he's talking about relationships, particularly among Christians.

This one new humanity that God is making through Jesus. The church, that's the one another there. That's why it's such a grievous thing. When Christians just can't get along because of some perceived are real slights because their feelings were hurt or their advice wasn't listened to, whatever, something was done they didn't like, even if the offenses are real.

And, you know, our offenses against God were real. You do realize that, don't you? We're just perceived slights against God. Our sins against God were real. If we're to be copiers of God, though, we need to forgive.

As much as we believe in this church, in church discipline and discipleship and accountability, we also believe we need to forgive. God did. And we should copy him. When he gives repentance and he gives the repentance, he also gives forgiveness.

Now, we can't give repentance to someone else. You know, we can't put it from our heart, put it in their heart. But when they have repentance, we can give them forgiveness. We copy him, he says in verse one, as beloved children.

We are loved by God and children of God. And so like children, we should mimic our parents, you know. Children mimic their parents, so we should mimic our father. That's what guides our lifestyle. Above all, more than more than culture, our upbringing.

What guides us is our whether our natural DNA, our spiritual DNA, we're children of the father. Being his children, we are to be marked by love, he says in verse two, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us.

That is, he is the model, the example of our self-giving love. Christ's sacrifice is is first a work done for us. Here is it calls it a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God. And it's on our behalf.

It's a sacrifice to God, just like the sacrifices in Leviticus. God looked at it, said it's a fragrant offering, smelled good to him. The offering of Christ on the cross smelled good to the father because it made us right with him.

And those his sacrifice takes away that alienation from the life of God that's at the root of the world's lifestyle. And so we have something different as the basis of our lifestyle. We have a connection with God, with the life of God.

We have a reconciled relationship with the Lord. We can know Jesus. And so looking for human relationships doesn't have to be the goal of our futile life. We are because of what Jesus did for us, beloved children of God.

Then having given us that life. Our style of living should follow Jesus's style, sacrificial giving. Not driven by his immediate self-centered pleasures, but by the good of others, especially those other people for whom Jesus gave himself as a sacrifice for that is.

The church, if Jesus sacrificed himself for them. Then so should we. Our lifestyle should be characterized by love. But not by this kind of selfish perversions of love, by sexual indulgences that often go under the cover of of love.

And verse three, in our family, in our this family, the family of God, we live differently from the world by being free of sexual immorality. That's sex outside of marriage and impurity, like being slaves to pornography and materialism, living for wealth and for houses and for cards and expensive vacations.

Those old lifestyles, he says, should not even be named among us. That is, no one outside should be able to point to us, the church, and say, yeah, they do the same thing. Unlike the world. He tells us we shouldn't have filthy language, foolish talk, dirty jokes, coarse kind of conversation.

Those are out of place, he says. They're not appropriate for people who are children of God. When I was a small kid, about five or six, we visited my grandmother in Arkansas who repeatedly used the word I never heard at home, a word to refer to black people, the N-word.

On our ride back to Alabama, I used that word. And I was mimicking my grandmother. And my father immediately cut me off and said very forcefully, we do not use that word in this family. We're in a different family with a different lifestyle.

Some some ways that that they talk in the world, words they use, conversations they use, jokes they say. We don't do in this family. Our families talk instead should be full of Thanksgiving. Some will say, okay, that sounds all very nice, ideal, these great ideals, sure, we should put on the new self.

We should be loving and abstain from immorality and not be greedy. But we can have a new self on the inside while still living that old lifestyle on the outside. You know, it's kind of like wearing old clothes or a coat in the summertime.

You shouldn't, but you can. And that's some people's idea. Some people's idea, even reading this. These are great ideals. But, you know, come on, we opt out. It's OK. And to a point, there is a struggle that Paul described in Roman chapter seven, that the old self coming back and our own tendency to fall back into the habits of the old lifestyle.