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Ephesians 4:22-24
All right, everyone, grab your Bibles and turn with me to Ephesians chapter 4. Ephesians chapter 4, and we will be continuing on in our series through Paul's letter to the churches in Ephesus. Ephesians chapter 4, and we'll be looking specifically at verses 22 through 24 this morning, and the title of today's message is The Killing of the Old Man.
And so if you would, please stand with me for the honoring and reading of God's holy, infallible, and all-sufficient word. And for the sake of context, I will begin reading in verse 17 of chapter 4. This is the word of God.
Therefore, this I say and testify in the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their mind, alienated 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 heard him and were taught in him, just as truth is in Jesus, to lay aside in reference to your former conduct the old man which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and to be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and to put on the new man which is in the likeness of God, which in the likeness of God, rather, has been created in a righteousness and holiness of the truth.
The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever. Amen? Amen. Go ahead and have a seat and get your eyes on verse 22. Verse 22. Two. One of, if not the most dangerous realities that exists in the church today is what I might call, or what the Bible hints at here, spiritual amnesia.
Oftentimes, when we fall into sin, it's because we believe, if we in fact are believers, something different, even if it's only for a few minutes, than what has been revealed to us in the scriptures. We shuffle into the sanctuaries or into the fellowship groups wearing the tattered rags of our former selves, and we do not remember that we have, in fact, been changed from the inside.
We have been, in other words, transformed by the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. And more than that, the pulpit too often remains silent on these issues, tolerating compromise instead of proclaiming both unyielding grace as well as the need for holiness.
It is both true that we are saved by God, for God, through the work of the Son of God, and that we have nothing to add to our salvation, and that he works in and through us. And it is also true that we must, because of that, put off the old man.
We must put off the old man if we are going to put on the new man. And so the question becomes, what does that look like? Well, as we look at Ephesians chapter 4, specifically verses 22 through 24 today, the truth that is presented is going to pierce through, if we let it, the lethargy that we oftentimes engage in.
And it's going to demand nothing less than a radical shedding of the sinful self and an embrace of the identity that we have been given in Christ at our regeneration. But more than that, and I hope you see this as we look through this text, a robust understanding that Christianity is not about behavior modification, although it's not less than that.
It's about transformation that leads to holy living. And so the text before us is, in many ways, Paul's battle cry against spiritual complacency. And it beckons us to the power that rests in God himself.
And so, as we look at verse 22 here, we're going to see the power of God at play. We're going to see the power of God at play. And we're going to see what regeneration actually does. Now, before we look at verse 22, I want you to look at what is going on in context.
If you remember, last week we looked at 17 through 21. And Paul is continuing his argument on how one ought to do church, how one ought to think about the church, and how we as a body must live in the context of the church.
He told us that many of us are not thinking about things the way we ought to think about them, namely that every single person in the body has been gifted with a particular gift to serve the body. And out of those people, there are certain people who have been given as gifts themselves to be leaders of the church.
They are men gifts given. And we saw that as we look specifically at chapter 4, verse 11 and 12. These word offices, pastors and teachers, namely being the only ones that are still in operation today alongside the evangelists, they have a slightly different purpose today, the apostles and prophets having been ceased.
And then, of course, he tells us the reason he gives these men gifts to the church as he does. And he does that so that he can train, equip, and help the body do the work of ministry, to love on one another, to minister to one another, and to protect them from being tossed to and fro doctrinally, right?
Because if we are on an island all to ourselves and we are unwilling to submit to a local body and the pastors there, then we are going to run rogue in our thoughts and in our doctrine. I know that because it is most evident in people that I have seen who abandon the local church, but also this is what the scriptures principally teach.
And so each member of the body, verse 16, is to act like a real body that has joints and all of that. And we are to essentially be there for one another, helping each other walk in this newness of life.
And then, of course, when we get to verse 17, he tells us that specifically what it looks like on our day-to-day basis is to not live according to the pattern of the Gentiles, that is, the sinners. Of course, we're all sinners, but of course he's speaking about the people whom reject God, who are pagans, and who cherish love and live in sin, right?
Because we are not alienated from God. We have been brought together with the people of God to sit under our King Jesus, the great shepherd and high priest of the church. And then, of course, we said that he told us that we ought not to do that if we have been taught in Christ and have heard Christ.
In other words, if we had been in Christ's schoolhouse, having been learned of Christ, having learned Christ rather. And today we're going to really look at what that means. What does it mean that we have been taught in Christ and that we have heard Christ and that we have sat underneath, in other words, his teaching?
Well, of course, he's not speaking about the reality that Jesus Christ came and preached often to the Ephesians, right? Because Jesus is where? Heaven. We already saw that as we looked at chapter 1 and chapter 2.
Specifically in chapter 1, he's been raised, now sits enthroned. And so here he's going to tell us what that means. And he's going to do so by describing some inherent realities of the truth in Jesus, right?
That's how it ends in verse 21. If indeed you have, you heard him and were taught in him, just as truth is in Jesus. And then you'll see if you have a legacy standard Bible, a dash there, which means it's kind of concluding this parenthetical statement.
And so here we're going to look at how we heard and how we were taught. In other words, how we were converted. How we were converted. Now, as we look at chapter 4, verse 22, one of the things that we have to say on the front end is that everything that's going to be thrown at us is essentially infinitives.
Now, that doesn't mean a whole lot to many of you, probably. That's speaking of the Greek here. But what that tells us is that essentially when we see these three seemingly commands or imperatives be renewed, put on, and lay aside, we need to understand that they are not imperatives.
That's what the infinitives clue us in on. They are realities that have already happened if you have been taught in Christ. In other words, they are reminders of us prior to Christ and what happened at our conversion in Christ.
They are there for us as rejoice-worthy truths. In other words, instead of these being imperatives because of how they are presented in the Creek, they are actually indicatives. Indicatives. So, you've heard me say quite often here at Heritage that there are, in fact, imperatives and indicatives in the Bible.
Imperatives being commands, indicatives truths, beautiful promises, these sorts of things. And it's often those indicatives, actually, it's always those indicatives that empower the imperatives. In other words, how in the world do you obey Christ's commands?
You believe in love, his truth, and his promises, and what he has done in the person and work of Jesus Christ the righteous. And so, the first thing that I want you to see here, and this is my first point, is the rejecting of the old man.
The rejecting of the old man. Look with me at verse 22. He says, to lay aside in reference to your former conduct the old man. Now, the reason I say that this is a building off of this idea that this is how we learn Christ is because, well, in verse 20, you have, but you did not learn Christ this way, dash, indicating parenthetical statement, and then verse 21, dash.
Now, I understand those dashes are not in the Greek, but it is quite evident that this is pointing back to the way in which we learned Christ. So, one way you might put this that might help you, if it sounds confusing, is instead of saying, to lay aside in reference to your former conduct the old man, and I'm not suggesting change it, I'm just suggesting think about it this way.
You were taught that you have put off the old man, right? So, in other words, you, but you did not learn Christ in this way, to lay aside in reference to your former conduct the old man. You see what's going on here.
Paul commands a decisive severing from the former manner of life, but this command is one that has already been done by Christ himself. So, in many ways, it's not a command, though some scholars and commentaries will render these infinitives in a weird way.
And this Greek verb, lay aside or cast off in many translations, implies a forceful and final removal as one would tear off literally a filthy, disease-ridding bit of clothing. So, it's like it's there and it needs to get put away.
It needs to be burned. It's not worth anything. We got to get rid of it, right? That's the idea going on here, and it's talking about essentially the sovereign act of regeneration, that God changes our hearts.
And this imagery is going to pop up all over the place in the Bible, this old man, new man imagery, and it's talking about this radical transformation that happens when Christ reaches down and saves a sinner.
And when he saves a sinner, the sinner puts off and rejects the old man. In other words, when we hear the gospel, it becomes a spirit-empowered necessity that we do away with our old way of living, our old pattern of life.
If you are a new man, you need a new wardrobe. You need new characteristics. If you are a new man, you need a different way of walking, right? And that's the imagery that's happening here, right? In the beginning of chapter 4, we are told by Paul to walk worthy.
And then in verse 17, he tells us that the Gentiles are not walking worthy, but rather they are walking in the futility of their minds. They are walking in ways that essentially detest God and are flooding their mind because of their ignorance, their willful ignorance, and because of the hardness of their heart.
And so really what this is teaching at a base level is repentance from sin and submission to God. Putting off the old man is repenting of sin, hating sin, turning in the other way, and submitting to God and loving God and his son Jesus, whom he sent to be the propitiation of our sin.
And the reason for that is because the old man is corrupt. The old man is corrupt. The old man is the fallen man. It's not the man that God created in Genesis chapter 1. It is one who has been inundated, has been flooded by sin, and everything that he is has been touched by sin.
So this is not, when we're talking about the old man, some sort of cosmetic flaw. It is a, to use the theological language, it is a depravedness, a totally depravedness inherited from our first father, Adam.
Jesus Christ, of course, being the second Adam. In Romans chapter 5 verse 12, Paul says, just as though through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.
You see here, it is literally irredeemably corruptness. But praise God we have a God who can redeem the irredeemable. Amen? He goes on to say, being corrupted, if you look with me at our first verse here, we are to lay aside in reference to our former conduct, the old man, our old way of walking, the way in which we lived our lives, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit.
Did you catch that? It's teaching us that it is a decaying and progressively so reality, an all-consuming ate-upness. Not an area of your personhood apart from Christ was unaffected. We have been told in the Bible that we were, in Ephesians chapter 2, physically dead and spiritually dead and physically dying because of our sin.
We are totally depraved. There is not one area of our lives that sin has not touched. We have been also engaged in it. We are born into sin and we suffer from cardiac sclerosis, this hard-heartedness.
And the good truth, or the good news rather, is that this goes both ways. As much as sin has destroyed, grace has abounded all the more. And so every single thing that has been thrown at us because of our fallenness, and I don't mean we are victims.
We asked for, we wanted that throwing in our direction. Christ, in this regenerating work, undoes. And so we see here that the conduct of the old man is one that is marked by the world. We see that in Ephesians chapter 2.
When we look back, it says, we formally walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air. The spirit is now working in the sons of disobedience, the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Like a dead fish swept downstream, the sinner flows with the current stream and capable of the true righteousness required by God. And this is saying that when we were converted, God did away with it.
He did away with our old pattern of life, and we are given a new one. That is the promise of Jeremiah 31, the promise of the new covenant, which promises that he would write the law on our heart, that he would give us a new heart and cause us to walk worthy, using Paul's language.
Now, in doing that, as I said already, there is a necessity to slaughter the old man. So Christ changes our hearts so that we can, looking back at our theme verse, lay aside this old man. So in other words, what Paul is saying here to the Ephesian church and us by extension, is that we are to live opposite of the old man who continually resists and rejects God and lives in the sphere of dominating sin, and we are to lean into and to walk worthy a new manner of life that has been given to us by resting in him, by being in him because of his work.
And we can see this in a parallel passage. Colossians chapter 3 verses 2 and 4 says, Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth, for you died and your life has been hidden with Christ and God.
When Christ, who is your life, is manifest, then you also will be manifested with him in glory. So you see here the same piece of imagery is going on, and yet there's something interesting going on. He's talking about it as death, for you died and your life has been hidden in Christ, it says.
And what happens when Christ, who is our life now, having been regenerated by the power of the Holy Spirit based on the finished work of Christ, we can now do just that. We can now do just that. And what's interesting about this laying asideness, if you will, is that the tense tier is, in the Greek, the aorist middle.
And what that means is that it indicates for us the reality that it has been done decisively, once and forever, for the believer of salvation by one mightier than he. He has laid it aside, therefore we slay.
This is why John Owen, for example, made the famous assertion, be killing sin or it will be killing you. And so because we have been given the gift of regeneration and the old man has been put aside, we are to lay it aside.
And we are to engage our sin and we are to slaughter the old man who clings ever so closely. And the reason for that is because, whether you know it or not, the Christian life is not a gentle stroll through a garden of morality.
It is a battlefield drenched in the blood of sin's casualties. And too often we do not remember that we have been freed from sin, that the old man has been put off, and we treat sin as a pet to manage rather than an enemy to annihilate.
But you see here, Paul, the great apostle, leaves no ambiguity here. Every believer is to put off the old man because it has been done for him. Now, if that sounds like a lot of weird philosophical weirdness, welcome to the Bible, right?
It's just truth. The Lord Jesus paid for us to be saved, to be reconciled to God Almighty and for the Spirit to apply his work to us. And so we are forensically justified and we are given a new heart, a new identity, and we are new creatures, 2 Corinthians chapter 5, in Christ Jesus.
And because of that, we are to put off that old man that he's put off over and over and over and over again. Why? Because we often are like the Israelites, wanting to return back to that old man. This is the truth of Romans chapter 6 and 7, and I know there's a lot of different interpretations of this passage, but, you know, I have one.
And, you know, Martin Lloyd-Jones refused to preach through the book of Romans until the end of his life. In fact, he didn't even finish it because he was afraid of what to do with Romans chapter 6 and 7.
And unfortunately, he spent his entire life overthinking the problem, and I believe he got it wrong. And you know how much I love Martin Lloyd-Jones, and it pains me every time I say such a thing. But Romans 6 teaches us, in Romans 7, what it looks like to struggle with sin as a Christian and how it ought to be slayed.
In other words, what we are trying to discern, and rather what I'm trying to say, is that we are in fact new. The old man has been put away, and yet we are not yet all new, and the old man still clings.
It's an already not yet kind of a deal, right? It has been done, and yet we have to war with it. We are righteous and holy as we stand before God under the wings of Christ, but we are yet not perfectly righteous and holy, and so we need to progressively be holy.
And so, as we contemplate that reality, I want you to see Romans chapter 6. It says, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May never be. How shall we who died in sin still live in it, or died to sin rather, still live in it?
Or do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ, Jesus, were baptized into his death? Therefore, we were buried with him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in a newness of life.
This word walk keeps coming up, pattern of life. For if we had become united with him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, an order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin, for he who has died has been justified from sin.
Now, if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him, knowing that Christ, having raised from the dead, is never to die again. Death no longer is master over him, for the death that he died, he died to sin once for all.
You see, we've died to sin once for all, and yet we have to continually put off, lay aside, this old man, this nasty man, this horrible disease-ridden man, and do it over. But you need to understand, and this text then teaches, as does the rest of it, that this is not just an improved human, not an improved man, but a new man.
Even though Paul is going to say in Romans chapter 7 right after this that he does the sin that he doesn't want to do, but right there's a picture of what's going on. He doesn't want to do sin. Before, he did.
He wanted to sin because that's who we are apart from Christ, and yet as a Christian, having the new man put on for us, and yet we are to continue to put him on, Paul says, yet I do it. I sin. There's the wanting to do good, but then I sin.
And there's this battle that's going on in his heart. You know, the law shows me sin, so I'm thankful for it. It can't save me, but it shows me my sin, and then I see, oh, I don't actually live according to God's righteousness, and there's this constant internal battle.
But the reality is we are one new man. One new man is a church, and we are a new man in Christ Jesus. 2 Corinthians chapter 5 verse 17 says this when Paul says, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.
The old things passed away. Behold, new things have come. Every Christian has an identical formal conduct. That is that they lived in sin, and now they have an identical new life in Christ Jesus, though we might struggle with different things.
Now, I know it's been a second, but children, would you look up here, right? I want you to think about this. This is actually something I'm stealing from Charles Spurgeon, but I think you'll like it. Commenting on this passage, and many other passages for that matter, Charles Spurgeon told the story of a pig.
So when he's thinking about what it looks like to be a new creation in Christ Jesus, he does so by showing us this. Let me tell you this story. Imagine if there was a pig in the back of the room, and this pig had one desire on his mind, which is what every pig has on their mind all the time.
And what is that? Do you know? To eat. Eat. And to eat slop. To eat nasty, horrible things that we would throw away in our trash cans at home. And so say we put that trash that you got at your house this morning, out of your trash bag, and you brought it to church.
You put it here in the front of the room. That pig is going to go straight to that slop, and he's going to love it and eat it up. Charles Spurgeon says that's what a non-Christian is like. They want the slop.
They love the slop. They live for the slop. They can't think about anything but the slop. Now, what if in the back of that room there was a pig? That same pig. And we put trash up there, and we got from smoke right down the road a beautiful steak dinner, and we put it to the right of that trash.
And we let that pig come down. Where's that pig going? He's going to the slop every time and twice on Sunday. Why? Because they love slop. They want slop. They don't have a taste for the fine delicacies of a good steak.
Now, third illustration. What if that pig back there, we could turn into a man? Is he going to choose the slop, or is he going to choose the steak? Which one? Would you eat trash? No, he wouldn't even eat trash.
So, the man's going to come down, and he's going to choose the steak. And so, Charles Spurgeon says that's what regeneration looks like. That's what it looks like to put on the new man. It is a radical transformation.
Or as Paul Washer has said, it's like getting hit by a Mack truck. Right? If we came in today, and Chris came up, not a bruise on his body, his tie's still in perfect place, you know, no holes in his suit coat, and he says, I got hit by a Mack truck.
Sorry, I'm late. And we went, that's impossible. If you were hit by a Mack truck, we'd be able to tell. One, because you'd be in the hospital, or I'd be preparing a funeral. It's the same thing. When you meet Christ, when Christ regenerates you, and you have been made to put off the old man, and you're putting off the old man, your life looks different.
So, let me ask you this, Heritage. Does your life look different since you were saved? Since you confessed with your mouth that Jesus is Lord? Since you have been regenerated, or seemingly regenerated?
Or are you entertaining old habits, old desires, and old associations that oppose your identity in Christ? And that's what we're speaking about, right? Identity in Christ. That's like a huge theme in the book of Ephesians.
Just in the first 14 verses, this in Christ moniker is used more than 11 times. And here's what you have to do. If there is remaining sin in your life, and I know that there is, because we are all sinners, you must tear them out.
You must put them off. You must see them as disease, and discard them, and lay them aside. Why? Because they have already been laid aside, and to return back to it is to return to the pig slot. To return back to it is to spit in Christ's face, and to say, you did not purchase this new life for me.
And what that reveals is a neglect of the gospel, a perverting of the gospel, amnesia, if you will. Or it reveals that you actually never were taught in him to begin with. And so, secondly, and very quickly, in this converting, in this regenerating, in this new identity in Christ that we've been given as people who have thrown off or have and have killed the old man, by the power of the Spirit, we are killing, and it has already been killed by Christ.
We are to, and this is my second point, resist evil deception. Or to put it in terms of the indicatives, we have been given the gift of resisting evil deception. In verse 22, it says, which is being corrupted in accordance with lusts of deceit.
I just want to make this point very quickly before moving on, because it's important. Sin deceives by promoting satisfaction, but all it does is actually deliver ruin. That's why it says, in accordance with the lusts of deceit.
And this word here, deceit, conveys the cunning and treachery nature of sin, which lures each and individual sinner with false hope and false promises. The Puritans always used to say that it was this false joy, these false promises that look so beautiful that the tempter baited his hook with, and once he got you, he got you.
So we must do our best to understand the deceiving nature of it. The new man is given the gift to resist deceit by clinging to the truth of scripture. In John chapter 17, verse 7, Jesus says, now they have come to know that everything you have given me is from you.
When we understand that the Bible comes from God, and that it exposes error, and exposes us, right? Ephesians, or Hebrews chapter 4, the word lays us bare. It shows us our sin. It shows us our God, and it points us in the way of godliness, points us in the way of trusting Christ, and it breaks sin's hold as we study scripture, believe scripture, and love scripture.
Thirdly, and this is my third point here, the renewing of the regenerate mind. Look with me at verse 23. Paul continues on, not only are we to lay aside, or not only has God laid aside, our former conduct, but we were, were, and are, right?
These are, it's a both and kind of a deal, renewing our mind. And to be renewed, it says, verse 23, in the spirit of your mind. Now, in many ways, we already talked about this, right? Because that was the problem with the Gentile walk, that they were engaging in the futility of their mind.
They were darkened into their mind, and because of that, they were ignorant to God's truth, and their hearts were hardened, which was actually the problem of the brain, and the brain was the problem of the heart.
We talked about that, right? The splachna, the joining of the two that separates us from the biblical world, in terms of we have a different understanding of the heart and mind. The Bible saw them as very intricately related, where somehow we've convinced ourselves in the world that we can think one thing and love another.
No, no, no, no. We love, and that love influences our thinking, and we think, and that thinking influences our loving, and it's, it's both ends. We must love and think about the right things. And so here, Paul now moves from essentially what we do with our hands and our bodies to our minds, right?
Because everything flows from our minds. It's from our mind to our heart to our hands. So in that way, Christianity is largely cerebral, but that does not do away with the heart, once again. But this renewing is one that is continuing, and it is one that is continuing, and it is one that is empowered by the Holy Spirit.
That is why he says here, renewed in the spirit of your mind. And we know in Romans chapter 12, Paul says something very similar, because the mind is the control center of life. He says, and do not be conformed, verse 2, to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may approve what the will of God is, that which is good and pleasing and perfect.
Without this renewing of the mind, the old man remains enthroned. If we do not begin to learn the scriptures and let our minds be saturated by what God has done in Christ and what we are to do in light of what he has done in Christ, the old man remains entrenched.
The believer becomes stagnant, and he engages in spiritual amnesia. So one thing that you must understand is that, yes, just like what we just talked about, this renewing of the mind that happens at conversion and regeneration is something that also must be continued, but this thing that must be continued is also not self-help.
It's also not something that you are doing as you pull up your bootstrips. It is spirit-wrought, progressive sanctification, growing in holiness. Titus 3 .5 makes this clear when Paul is speaking to one of his students.
He says, he saved us, speaking of Jesus, not by works which we did in righteousness, but according to his mercy through the washing of regeneration and the renewing by the Holy Spirit. And so the word of God is the instrument by which the spirit reprograms our thinking.
We know this because Psalm 119 .11 says, your word I have treasured in my heart that I may not sin against you. In other words, that I may be growing in sanctification, that I may be continually renewed in my mind.
The word of God is how you renew your mind. That's how you learn to think God's thoughts after him. And that is essential to understand. As I think about this part of the passage, I think about the movie The Matrix.
And the reason I think about that is because I saw that when it first came out and it was mind-blowing to me. Lacey's not super impressed with it because she saw it later in life, but you know, that's okay.
And one of the things that happens when he gets... If you guys haven't seen this movie yet, it's a bazillion years later. Sorry, spoiler alert. But he gets programmed to think differently. He doesn't know, for instance, jujitsu.
And they pop a floppy disk into his head, but this is how you know they were behind in times, right? We know floppy disks are not going to be a thing in the future if this ever happens, but I digress.
They put this floppy disk in his brain essentially, and all of a sudden, he knows how to do things he did not know how to do before. He likes things that he didn't like before. He has a new understanding of what's happening that he didn't have before as he engages with some of these funny programs because he's in a computer program, which is why even one of the characters leans down to him while he's learning this and says, do you think that that's air that you're breathing, right?
He's learning all of these things. This is what the word of God does for us. It reprograms literally our thinking, and it teaches us how to think differently and teaches us how to live differently and do different things because our hearts, apart from Christ, did not want that.
And he changed our hearts to want that, to desire that, and to love that out of our own will. The renewed mind sees sin for what it is, that is that it is cancer, and it delights in the holiness of God and clings to the truths of Christ by faith.
Colossians 3 .10 says that when we put on the new man who is being renewed to a full knowledge according to the image of the one who created him, we are living as God has us to live. It shifts our desires from earthly pleasures to eternal pleasures, even if we will not be satisfied now, which we will in him, but we will ultimately be satisfied in the future.
John MacArthur says it like this. When a person becomes a Christian, he says, God initially renews his mind, give it a completely new spiritual and moral capability, a capability that most brilliant and educated minds apart from Christ can never achieve.
Now, I thought that was brilliant, right? Because there are a lot of smart people in the world, and there are a lot of smart people in the world who reject Christ, and there are a lot of smart people who reject Christ who are dumber than a box of rocks because they reject Christ.
They don't know what they need to know, and they don't live as they are as they ought to live because they are morally and spiritually compromised. They love what they are not to love, and they hate what they or they love what they should hate, and they hate what they should love.
Now, I'm mixing John MacArthur and me in here, but just deal with it. He goes on, this renewal continues through the believer's life as he is obedient to the word and will of God. The process is not a one-time accomplishment, but the continual work of the Spirit in the children of God.
Our resources are God's word and prayer. It is through these means that we gain the mind of Christ, and it is through that mind that we live the life of Christ. If that's true, let me ask you this. Are you burying your life in these words?
Is your nose in these scriptures? If they're not, how in the world can you expect to meet trials and tribulations in a godly way? How do you expect to be able to have the mind of Christ when you need it most?
How in the world do you expect to slay sin, put on the new man, and put off the old man as he's trying to cling and remember the promises of God that he has made to believers about how he's already done that?
So, live in it if your nose is not buried between the nooks and crannies of this pages. You must. You must. Your life literally depends on it. Do you believe that? Because it does. So, commit yourself to daily saturating your mind that is given over to amnesia, to wandering, right?
Because that, I mean, we sing that song all the time. Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. Why are we prone? Because we are sinners who reject God's word, and they're not buried in it like we should be.
If your thoughts are dominated by anything else other than Christ and his word, you are in danger. Do you hear me? You are in danger. Social media, worldly philosophies, these will eat you alive. But if you meditate on his word, it will reshape your thinking, and it will reshape your affections, and you will grow in sanctification.
My fourth point is this. The reflecting of the new man, right? So, that is the old man. That's our old life. That's what we were, and it's what we're battling against as we live in this life. But we can't just put off, we have to put on.
We not only vivify, or we not only mortify, rather, we vivify, right? We kill sin, and then we stuff the hole with Christ. And so, if you look with me at verse 24, he goes on, "...and to put on the new man, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.".
The new man, as we've already said, but I'll say again, is not just a refurbished version. It is a new creation, like a pig turned into a man. It is a completely new creation, as we looked at when we saw 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 17.
And by the way, for those of you who, in fact, are of the covenantal Presbyterian, you know, nature, in the Septuagint, this is the same word that is used for the new covenant in Jeremiah chapter 31. And so, there's a lot of truth to be had there, which we don't have time to talk about.
But it's something new. It's not refurbished. It's not something that is just fixed and prettied up. It's not a repainted house. It's a new thing. Like, you are a new thing. The new covenant where we are in Christ is a new thing, and that helps us to understand.
It is a redemptive reversal, in many ways, as well. "...that which was once darkened, that which was once ignorant, that which was once hardened, that which was once calloused, that which was once sensual, that which was once impure, that which was once greedy, is now enlightened with the truth of God's Word by the power of His Spirit because of the bloody work that Christ did on the cross.".
You have now learned the truth in Christ. You are now, if you are put on the new man and regenerated, sensitive to sin, able to slay it, you are pure and you are generous. You are not greedy. Whereas it was once characterized by wickedness and sin, your life ought to now be characterized by righteousness and holiness.
That's the idea here, right? Verse 24, "...put on the new man, which is in the likeness of God, has been created in a righteousness and holiness of the truth.". This is what Paul says in Colossians chapter 3, verse 12.
He says, "...so as the elect of God," those chosen of God, if you're using the New American Standard Bible, say law, "...holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.".
Right? If you've been chosen by God, if you are, in fact, because of that holy and you are loved, then you are to put on the new man. It's been put on for you and you must continually put it on. And this is strong language.
The identity -shaping understanding of this will blow you away. The new man is in the likeness of God. Now, what this does not mean, and I have to say this because I'm in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is that you are a little god, or because he renews you or regenerates you, you somehow are a god or a god.
No, no, no, none of that's true. None of that will ever be true. You will always be creature and he will always be creator, right? You will always be the saved and he will, in the center, and he will always be the perfect savior.
So when it's saying that you are putting on the new man, which is in the likeness of God, it's really echoing the image in us that was lost at the fall in Genesis chapter 1, where the old man, the original man, thrust us all into sin.
In Genesis 1, chapter 1, verse 26, remember it says that, then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness so that we will be, we have dominion over the fish of the sea and of the birds of the sky and the cattle and over all the earth and every creeping thing which creeps on the earth.
When you are regenerated, it restores that which sin has marred. And we are able to live in, because we have been made new creatures, that very likeness that we possess as being image bearers of God. But once again, it's not just fixing that up, right?
Because our hearts, our lives, our minds were forever tainted, and we need regenerated, not renovated. Galatians chapter 220 makes this clear. I have been crucified with Christ, Paul says, and it is no longer I who live.
The old me is gone, I'm done. I read this book in seminary, it blew my mind. As a matter of fact, I started a ministry called Dead Men because I read it, and nobody understood what in the world I was talking about.
To be fair, I could have been clearer. However, it's a beautiful truth, and I'm reading, by the way, if you guys have not read Holiness by Grace by Brian Chappell, change your life today and start reading it.
And one of the things he said in there was so provocative to me, especially growing up as a punk rocker, as he said, I want you to think about the cross, how Jesus was hung up there, bloodied, and beaten, and he died.
Now I want you to realize something. I want you to remember that you were there with him. And I was like, what? No, I wasn't. I'm not a time traveler, right? And then he began to bear this out throughout the rest of the book, and he began to talk about how, like, your name was written on his hands, so to speak, as they were pierced, his side as he was pierced, as he carried that up.
You were there, and you were, if you are in Christ, crucified with Christ. And you have been given, because of being crucified with Christ, the new life in Christ. That's what has been talked about all the way up to this point.
We have been crucified with Christ. The old man has been done away with. He was killed 2 ,000 years ago. That man is dead. Now you are alive. This is why you can say, I have been crucified with Christ.
Paul's alive, talking, so obviously he agrees with me. Or rather, I agree with him, right? I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live.
I thought you said you were crucified. You don't. Okay, all right. So you get what I'm saying, right? The life which I now live, in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.
Do you believe that, church? Because that will change how you engage the world. It will change how you put off the old man, and how you engage putting on the new man. Because this new man is one who is filled with integrity, because he promotes God's likeness, since it has been restored, not renovated, but regenerated.
And we also are made in the image of God, and so we do possess, especially as we are changed into new creatures, because there are communicable attributes which we can display. Patience, love, humility, all the things that you need to have a church that he's already talked about.
And so the new man is characterized by righteousness and holiness, albeit imperfectly, and in so doing reflects the moral purity of God. And these virtues that we prize, prioritize, and lean into, and rest in, are not natural, but they are divinely imparted.
This is why the Apostle Peter tells us that when we are saved, we become partakers of the divine nature. If you don't have this understanding, you'll do some weird things with that text, but the reality is we are caught up in God, because God, as John Piper has said, is the gospel, and he regenerates us and causes us to live according to the new man that he has given us, and this is the work of God's sovereign grace.
In many ways, this is echoing back to chapter 2, verse 4, when we are reminded that we have been but-godded. We stood in the path of the wrath of God, but God, right, saved us. He saved us, and he saved us to stand before him holy and blameless, chapter 1, verse 3 and 4, and that is beautiful, because when you get to verse 10 of chapter 2, he reminds us that we as Christians are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we would walk in them.
Do you let your identity shape your walk, your pattern of living, or do you just say it and quote-unquote believe it, but do nothing with it? Because to do that is to like, I don't know, and this is cliche, but it's true, get into a parachute or get into a plane and not believe that the parachute that was given to you, when you decided to sign up for it, is going to actually do its job.
If you believe it, you'll trust it, which is why I don't get on airplanes. Now, I'm running low on time, but I want to say this, because right now we could maybe walk away thinking something I don't want us to think, and I want to address it, and the thing that we can walk away thinking, which a lot of people do wind up thinking this way based on the truth that I have just told, is that if we really are good Christians, that we won't sin, but that's just not true.
That is just not true. We are able to put it to death. We are able to walk away from it, right, because our Holy Spirit is powerful, and yet we still sin, because we have not been glorified, and we will spend the rest of this life becoming more and more holy, right?
That's the truth of Hebrews chapter 12. We are disciplined, scourged, beat, and broken so that we might, what? Share in Christ's holiness, that we might be able to stand before God and not burst into flames, and so what that means for us is pain, and scourgings, and beatings, and hardships, and trials are a gift from the Lord Jesus Christ himself to make you look more like Jesus Christ himself, and he's purchased them for you, but what it does mean is that sin, though it might be present, is not prominent.
It is not the pattern or the walk of your life. It is no longer, as we have already seen in some of the scriptures that I brought up, the cross references, Jesus is. Jesus is our master, and we are slaves, according to Romans, of righteousness instead of being now slaves of sin.
I mentioned it in passing, but I want you to see it in its full bloom. After speaking of the finality of what Christ has done in Romans chapter 6 and the beauty that lays there, Paul begins in verse 17 saying this about his sin, even in light of what he just heard.
He says, so now no longer am I the one working it out, but sin which dwells in me, speaking of sin, for I know that nothing good dwells in me. That is in my flesh, the old man, for the willing is present in me, but the working out of it, of the good, is not.
For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one working it out, but sin which dwells in me.
I find them then, the principle that is in me, evil is present in me who wants to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in my members, waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which is in my members.
You see, when we do not renew our minds in the word of God, when we do not believe the indicatives, the promises of the gospel, that he will enable us to walk away from that sin and we forget that Christ has already paved the way, killed the old man, and given us a new life, then we give over to our members.
We give over to the flesh, we give over to the old man, and Christ says you don't have to do that, yet we do. So how do we succeed? Well, the key to success at any measure in regard to slaying sin, putting on the new man, putting off the old man, understanding it's already been done, but continuing to do it, lies in the grasping of grace.
Now, I understand there's a hard left turn in some ways, but that's good. I had a preaching mentor tell me one time, if you're never accused of being an antinomian, you're not preaching the gospel. In the same token, if you're not accused of being, you know, a legalist every once in a while, you're probably not doing it either, but hear me on this.
We must grasp grace if we want to slay the sin in our life. The blessedness of Christ and what he has accomplished and the power of being in union with him, having his spirit, because it's only the Holy Spirit who enables us to move forward, helps us to slay sin and all of its malignancy.
It can be put off. It can be. And when? It's not. If we are in Christ, the Bible tells us that we have an advocate with Jesus Christ, the righteous, who stands as a mediator for us, which brings me to my last point, and then I'm done.
I'll finish it quickly. The rejoicing in the spirit's power. So as we look at all of this, we are to be reminded of, and I'll read it for us, to lay aside in reference to your former conduct, verse 22, the old man, which has been corrupted in accordance with the lust of deceit and to be renewed in the spirit of your mind, to put on the new man, which is in the likeness of God, has been created in righteousness and holiness and truth.
All of this is not achieved by human effort, but by God's sovereign power. And that should enable us to rejoice in what God has done and what he is doing through the church. The same spirit who raised Christ from the dead indwells in every believer, helping him slay this old man.
This is true when we looked at Ephesians chapter 1, verse 19, when Paul prayed that the people would come to know and have a full knowledge of God. And not only that, but that they would come to know what is, verse 19, the surpassing greatness of his power toward us who believe according to the working of the might of his strength, toward us who believe.
And at this time, it's important for you to remember, if you are not a Christian, if you have not bowed your knee to Jesus, if you do not love him, if you do not cherish him, and you stand erect in hatred, this does not apply to you.
Romans 8, 11 goes on to say, but if the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who dwells in you.
So though we don't have the power to live apart from Christ in a way that is honoring to him, Christ's power, this Holy Spirit, makes the impossible possible, and he sanctifies us. He sanctifies us as he directs our gaze towards Christ.
This is why 2 Corinthians chapter 3, verse 18 says, but we all with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord the Spirit.
And be sure this God will do his work in you, right? Because Philippians chapter 1, 6 says, for I am confident of this very thing, that he who has began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ.
And so do you want to live as the new man that has been purchased for you in the cross of Jesus Christ? Then remember Jesus Christ. Remember what you heard. Remember what you were taught. And remember the schoolmaster of heaven and what he has done for you.
Understand the nature of regeneration and the miracle of God that it is, that it has transformed the sinner into a saint. And when that's done, it's done in the church, it's done in the world, the sufficiency of Christ is put on display.
The sanctifying work of the Spirit is put on display and God is glorified in the midst of the church and even in sinners. It must be about Christ and what he taught at regeneration. And this is why Charles Spurgeon once said, if Christ be anything, he must be everything.
Laying aside the old man that has already been laid aside, being renewed in your mind, which has already been renewed, and walking boldly as the new man in Christ must be done. And we can. Pray with me.
Father, we thank you. We thank you for these truths, these truths of the gospel. These truths that help us to live a life that is honoring to you. We ask that those, these things have happened in regeneration, that you would help us to continue to do them as you have sovereignly ordained us to do so.
We ask this in Jesus meritorious name. Amen.
