How To Mortify Your Old Self

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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With our Bibles turned to Ephesians chapter 4 and verse 17, we will read verses 17 through 24 together.

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This is God's holy and inspired word. It reads,

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Now to this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the

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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.

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They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

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But this is not the way that you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus.

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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 and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God, in true righteousness and holiness.

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This afternoon we find ourselves at another point of transition in Paul's letter to the

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Ephesians. Now that the apostle has started his address on the practical points of the

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Christian life, what he began in Ephesians chapter 4, we're now coming to this point of the pursuit of Christian maturity, of holy living, of righteousness.

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And so we've looked at unity, we've looked at the use of gifts and offices and now this topic of holy living.

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And for many of us, the mention of holy living should immediately capture our attention.

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Because for those of us who have been truly saved from our sins by the shed blood of Jesus Christ, for those of us who have been regenerated by the almighty power of God, who have the

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Holy Spirit dwelling within us, we, along with the whole of creation, long for the fulfillment of God's redemption in us, the glorification of our bodies and the ultimate putting off of sin.

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For the healthy Christian, who possesses a sincere and growing faith in our

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Lord Jesus, one of the greatest longings in our heart, I trust,

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I hope, I pray, is that we would be like Christ, wholly committed to Him, wholly conformed to Him, that in our hearts sin would be put away with and that we would be holy as He is holy.

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For every faithful Christian, for every faithful Christian in this room, I hope that our yearning desire in our heart of hearts is to be holy as God is holy.

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That we would travail like Paul as in the pains of childbirth until Christ is fully formed in us.

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Brethren, do we long for holiness? If we do, this passage is for us.

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And yet we fail, don't we? We fail spectacularly again and again and again so that the regenerate believer, as regenerate believers, when we are in our clearest state of mind, having walked with the

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Lord perhaps that day, having spent good time in the Word, having kept short accounts with God, we would trade almost anything for holiness.

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Would we not, brothers and sisters, when you think about your clearest frame of mind, would you not trade absolutely everything that you have that you could be rid of sin, fully given, fully devoted, fully offered to Christ and to His service?

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Spurgeon once put words to this deeply held desire. He said, I would sooner be holy than happy if the two things could be divorced.

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Were it possible for a man to always feel sorrow and yet to be pure,

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I would choose the sorrow if I might win the purity. And he says, for to be free from the power of sin and to be made to love holiness is true happiness.

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A text about holy living should grip us because we desire holiness and yet none of us have attained it perfectly.

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Even for those of us who are in the reformed camp, if I can call it that, we quote people like John Owen.

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We wear t -shirts that read, be killing sin or sin will be killing you. Sometimes we might be tempted or in fact do it and smugly quote this point to point out a speck in our neighbor's eye.

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But when we take a good, honest look at our own lives in the mirror of God's word, we must confess that we actually know very little about killing sin in our mortal bodies.

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Instead, we must say with the apostle Paul, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?

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And as we come to Ephesians chapter 4 and verse 17, Paul does not give us the silver bullet for mortifying our sin.

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But he, in this passage, he offers counsel that is impossible for us to ignore because here he teaches us how we are to mortify our old selves, how we are to put that old man that still lives within us to death.

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How to clear the tangled mess of unrighteousness in our lives to make room for a runway to holy living.

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Brothers and sisters, do you want to live a holy life? A more holy life in an hour's time than an hour ago?

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Paul gives us many helpful answers here. And as we look at these first eight verses together, we find that those sinful characteristics of our old selves must be, can be, need to be rooted out, cut off and destroyed.

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And Paul shows us how we are to do that and then to lay building blocks to build a foundation for holy living.

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And today it's a two -point sermon. You'll see in the insert in your bulletin, there's one side of the text or one side of the notepad for one point, one side for the other.

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We're going to spend a bit more time on the first point, but this afternoon we're going to look at how it is that we mortify our old selves through the aggressive removal of the old man and through the joyful replacement of that old man with the new man that we have and are in Christ.

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So we're going to look first at the aggressive removal of that old self.

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How is it that we do this? The old divines would call this the mortification of sin or of the old man.

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And Paul writes in verse 17, in verse A, he says, now this I say and testify in the

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Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do.

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As we know by now, Paul has taken great pains to convince the Ephesians that they are no longer

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Gentiles in the sight of God, though they are Gentiles in the flesh, as it says in Ephesians chapter two and verse 11.

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In the flesh, but in a spiritual sense, redeemed Gentiles are the new and the true

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Israel of God. And therefore they no longer walk. They are not to walk any longer as the

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Gentiles do. And this is what Paul is after. The Christian is no longer defined by his former identity as a pagan outsider, though he lives in a world filled with pagan outsiders, but he has a new identity in Christ that is not only the basis for a new standing with God, but it is the basis for a new standing with the world.

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And here is Paul lays this out in verse 17, that you must no longer walk as the

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Gentiles do. What he is saying could be summarized in two words.

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Be different. To walk differently from the world.

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To be separated from the world in a significant, meaningful sense.

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And if ever there was a time and a culture where Christians needed to hear this exhortation again and again, it is certainly today.

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Christian, if you are to grow and to have any meaningful growth in holiness, any success in mortifying the powers of indwelling sin, you must be content to live differently from the world.

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To look differently. To sound differently. To smell differently. God has not redeemed us so that we can win the world by being just like the world.

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But he has redeemed us and given us a new nature so that we might walk in a way that is altogether different from the world's ways.

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And though this is difficult, though it is uncomfortable to be different from all of those who are around us, to be the one who stands when everyone bows, to be the one who speaks when everyone is silent, this is what the

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Christian is commanded to do according to the word of God, by the power of the indwelt spirit of God.

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And yet if we're honest, many of us struggle with this. Isn't this the case? That we look at the world around us and we see all of the pitfalls and we want to be different and yet we find that very often we are not.

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We find that the pull of the world sometimes almost to be stronger than the force of gravity.

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We think to ourselves, if I could just escape the corrupting influences of this world, then, then

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I could be holy. Have you ever had that thought? Or you thought, you know, if I could just get away from working with unbelievers or going to school with unbelievers, then, oh, then

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I could be righteous. Then I could be holy. I discovered in the early 2010s when

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I had a job where I worked entirely on my own with no unbelievers around me.

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I saw unbelievers for the first 30 minutes of the day and the last 30 minutes of the day. And I found still the corrupting influences of the world, not in others, but in myself.

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Sometimes we see commandments like this in verse 17 and we think we rationalize our conformity to the world by telling us that it must have been easier in Bible times.

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Surely the Christians in Ephesus did not deal with the same pressures to walk as the

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Gentiles do. But we've looked at the life of the

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Ephesian church already and their surrounding culture. We've heard about the occult practices and the books, all the books that needed burning.

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We've heard about the vile pagan worship that filled the city. And as it goes with progressive revelation, as we make our way through the book of Ephesians, I get to reveal even more about the

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Ephesian culture that surrounded them. The epicenter of wickedness in Ephesus was the temple of Artemis.

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We've heard about that, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world because of its scale.

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It was home to hordes of temple prostitutes, of dancers, of eunuchs, of priests and priestesses whose lives were devoted to serving.

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Picture this with me in your mind for a moment. A hideous blackened statue of a goddess, you can stop imagining, of a sex goddess that was more half cow and half wolf than resembling anything human.

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And the effects of this idolatry spread beyond the walls of the temple. Because no one dared to steal from the temple and incur the wrath of Artemis, it became a bank of sorts for many in Ephesus so that they would bring their money and their possessions and their valuables and store it in the temple.

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At one point, the temple contained the most expensive art collection in existence because it was just safe to keep artwork there.

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And because belongings were safe, it also became a place where criminals could remain safe from the long arm of the law.

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And so for a quarter of a mile around the temple, criminals were allowed to seek asylum where they could continue their trade and wreak havoc on the surrounding city by proxy.

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The city was so bad that a Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, referred to Ephesus as the darkness of vileness.

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If you've ever thought that you live in a dark world, maybe be glad that you didn't live in Ephesus in the first century where you could find the darkness of vileness.

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And he went on, he said, the morals were lower than animals and the inhabitants of Ephesus are fit only to be drowned.

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Therefore, to be a Christian in Ephesus was to endure violence. You could not store your possessions in the temple.

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It was to endure the loss of property and persecutions and social isolation and a whole host of formidable temptations to sin.

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If anything, it was far worse than the culture that we are surrounded by today. And yet, as Paul speaks to his audience, he looks directly at them and he says, you must be different from the world around you.

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You're a Christian, that is God's command to you. That in this dark world in which we live, we must be different, irrespective of the tempting influences that surround us.

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Even though evil is around us as water is around fish, we must be different.

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We must not walk as the Gentiles do. Now, some might just say that, be different and then move along.

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But Paul very helpfully gives us some practical counsel on how to do that.

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As we look at this idea of aggressively putting off, aggressively mortifying the sin in our lives, he gives us four points that we can look at.

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These are four sub points under that main point. He mentions first at the very end of verse 17.

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Look there with me. He says, as the Gentiles do, we are to put off the futility of mind.

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The Greek word that Paul uses for futility denotes an emptiness, a uselessness, to be hopelessly confused, to lack in content, to be futile in one's thinking, is to assess reason and to rationalize apart from God, with no thought given to God and therefore nothing to show for it.

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There will one day, I thought about it this week, there will one day be a sea before God of countless philosophers and academics and authors and worldly thinkers.

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And in a second, all of their degrees and their theories and their theses and their books and their lives' work in a second will be burned up and they will have absolutely nothing to show for it.

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Why? Because their thinking was godless and as Paul would say in verse 17, futile.

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Similarly, all those who do not believe in Christ are ultimately living, who are ultimately living only for this life, with their minds set on things that are below, with their minds full of thoughts, and yet, every one of them, all of those thoughts are ultimately, will ultimately be found to be unproductive and ultimately destructive.

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This is characteristic of the thinking of Gentiles, to be darkened, confused, and to be led astray.

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We see this in places like Romans chapter one in verse 28. You'll remember this as Paul is speaking about those who suppressed the truth of God in unrighteousness.

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He said, and since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

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Or speaking about the worldly wise men, in Corinth, Paul said, the

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Lord knows the thoughts of the wise that they are futile. Brethren, we must put off all godless, futile thinking.

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Ecclesiastes 2 and verse 26 paints a vivid picture of the fruits of futile thinking.

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The author writes, for to the one who pleases him, God, God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner, and picture this with me, you see this in the world everywhere, he has given the business of gathering and collecting only to give to the one who pleases

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God. This also is vanity, a striving after the wind.

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Brethren, at one time, we went from point A to point B to point C, everywhere that we could go, collecting and gathering who knows what, and for what purpose.

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It was futile. We were futile in our thinking. One commentator says, the life of an unbeliever is bound up in thinking and acting in an arena of ultimate trivia.

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We see ourselves in this description. He consumes himself in the pursuit of goals that are purely selfish, in the accumulation of what is temporary, and in looking for satisfaction, that which is intrinsically deceptive, sorry, in that, which is intrinsically deceptive and disappointing.

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Brethren, this is how we once lived, striving after the wind. In Paul's words, we must not be like unreasoning animals, creatures of instinct, living in ignorance as we formerly did, with our minds filled with godless thoughts.

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Putting off our self then begins, our old selves begins with the mind.

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It begins by putting off the futile and directing our minds Godward to the things that please

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Him, to the things that are above. It is to stop asking like the

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Gentiles, what do I do, what do I want, excuse me, what do I think, what do

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I feel? And it begins by asking, what does

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God will? What has God said? Brothers and sisters, we must put off futile thinking, the thinking that once dominated our minds, thinking where self was

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God and God was nothing. Every moment that we have the opportunity to turn our thinking

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Godward, to meditate on the mighty works of God, to preach the gospel to ourselves.

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Secondly, Paul goes and deals with the aggressive removal of the ignorance of God.

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He says in verse 18, 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.

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When Paul speaks about Gentiles being darkened in their understanding, he uses a grammatical construction that conveys that this is a continuing condition of persistent darkness.

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It's not darkness in the past tense, it's actually darkness in the perfect tense, meaning that it's in a continued state of being.

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It is to be ignorant of the things of God. It is to be unresponsive to biblical truth.

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It is to be blind and deaf to the realities of the gospel. This is a term or this is an example that should bring up a clear theological term in our minds when we come to read it.

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Total depravity, a mind in a disposition that is altogether hardened toward God, totally unable to respond to the call of the gospel, facilitated in part by the devil himself.

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In 2 Corinthians 4, in verse 4, we read there that in their case, the

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God of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

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And this spiritual condition is not bound up in the ears or in the mind alone, but it is bound up in the heart.

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It is a spiritual deafness in the ears caused by a spiritual deadness in the heart.

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And Paul says in verse 18 that it is due right at the very end there, it is due to hardness of heart.

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Now that word that Paul uses for hardness, it denotes a rock hardness.

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There's actually the Greek word, it's parosis. If you were to Google parosis today, you'd find that it's actually a medical term that is used when someone breaks a bone and the bone is reset and then calcification takes place over the bone.

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That calcification actually becomes harder than the bone. That is the term that Paul is using here.

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Rock hard hearts. And we know, brothers and sisters, that we are inclined to hardness of heart.

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We often wake up and our hearts are cold and calcified by sin within us.

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We're tempted at all times to be rigid and unresponsive as our old selves were to God's word.

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And yet, brothers and sisters, we must put off this ignorance of God, this unresponsiveness, this hardness of heart.

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We've been given new hearts and we are to use them. In Ezekiel 36 and verse 26, we read about the promise of this new heart where the

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Lord says, and I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and to be careful to obey my rules.

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Do not let that hard heart that once lived inside of you, for some of us, for so long, far too long, do not let it live within us but put it off.

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Repent until the Lord softens it. Read it tender. Pray it back to life.

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Brethren, are we guarding our hearts that we would be responsive to the

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Lord? If we're to be holy, we must put off these old hearts. Thirdly, we see that we must put away callousness of soul.

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In verse 19, he says, they have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

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One observer writes, when people continue in sin and turn themselves away from the life of God, they become apathetic and insensitive about the moral and spiritual things.

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They reject all standards of righteousness and do not care about the consequences of their unrighteousness.

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Friends, at one time, our consciences were seared and unfeeling.

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We've all had callouses somewhere. For those of you who work much harder than me, as I sit behind my keyboard, you have callouses on your hands, right?

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And they get tough and they can be bumped against things and brushed up against things and they just get harder instead of softer.

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Such were our souls at one time. And yet the

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Lord would have us to put away that callousness of heart. That callousness of heart ultimately leads to destruction.

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When Paul was writing to Timothy in 1 Timothy 4 and dealing with false teachers, he said, now the spirit, in chapter 4 and verse 1, expressly says that in later times, some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons through the insincerity of liars.

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Now, have you ever watched the false teachers on YouTube or TBN or some kind of other place where you see prosperity gospel preachers and they're buying their second and their third and their fourth private jet and you wonder to yourselves, do they really believe it?

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Do they really believe that message that they preach? Or do they know that this is a hoax?

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How can someone possibly go that far being a peddler of God's word, a false gospel leading millions astray for the sake of temporal wealth?

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How can someone do something like that? Paul says, they devote themselves to deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons through insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared.

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And then he goes into to all that they forbid that is good. Brethren, we need to put off calloused consciences and seek to have sensitive consciences, consciences that are responsive to God's word, consciences that are responsive to the spirit's work within us as we grieve him.

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Children, I want to share a story with you about how important it is to keep a good conscience.

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And adults, we can learn something of this. There's a story, John MacArthur tells it in one of his commentaries.

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It's an ancient Greek story about a Spartan youth, maybe Noah your age or a little bit older, who stole a fox from one of his neighbors and stealing this fox from his neighbor, he sought to take it home and as he was trying to escape with the fox, he found the owner of the fox coming opposite of him on the roadway.

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And so wanting to hide the fox, he took it and tucked it under his clothes. Now, I don't know how thick his clothing was.

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It's a folk tale, so we can suspend disbelief. But sticking this fox up in his clothes, he held the fox and tried to stay perfectly still so that he wouldn't catch the attention of the owner of this fox.

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And as he stood before the owner, not moving a muscle, how do you think a fox would respond being stuffed under the clothing of an unknown stranger?

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But the fox started to resist and to scratch and the man seeking to hold still, wanting not to let anybody off that he had stolen this fox, held this fox.

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And as it continued its violent assault, initially the scratches were painful.

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And then eventually, like anything, if you tap in one spot in your skin long enough, what happens?

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It went from painful to numb. And then the youth realized that the cost of trying to conceal his sin when from under his clothing came his vital organs pouring out of him.

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Now that's a pretty grotesque image of an old Greek folktale, but what is the point of the story?

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That if we protect secret sin in our lives, at first, even for us

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Christians, at first it will hurt. But then that spot grows numb and then eventually that sin will kill us.

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Friends, you know the sins that reside in the recesses of your heart.

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You know the sins that you entertain. You know the sins that only you know.

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And let me ask you, are you allowing your conscience to grow calloused by that sin?

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Entertaining just a little sin, just a little bit at a time. First it hurts, and then it grows numb, and then it kills you.

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We once lived without any regard for our consciences, but now

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God has cleansed our consciences from dead works that we might serve the living

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God. Brothers and sisters, we must put off the unfeeling conscience of the old man.

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And never mind if people mock you for it, but be the man or the woman who has a sensitive conscience.

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Who does not laugh at foolish and vile jokes. Who is not entertained by foolish and debauched movies and music and books and magazines and humor.

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In Acts 24 -16, we read, So I always take pains to have a clear conscience toward both

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God and man. That was Paul. Or in 1 Peter 3, in verse 15,

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Peter says, But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks for the reason of the hope that is in you, and yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may not put you, sorry, who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.

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And the fourth aspect, characteristic that we are to put away is moral impurity.

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He says in verse 19, They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

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Think about what your life was at one time before Christ saved you. If you can think back to that time, if you were an adult or a young man or a young woman, giving yourself to anything and everything, seeking the next fleeting pleasure of sin, and what did that life lead to?

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But shame, but regret, as I said, pleasure for a moment, and then death.

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Even in my home, growing up, where the only time I heard the name of the Lord Jesus was when it was used as a swear word.

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I remember entertaining secret sins in my life, and even though I claimed not to believe in God, I knew there was a

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God and I was accountable to Him. What a freeing thing.

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The most beautiful thing in all the world, when the Lord not only saved me from the consequences of those sins, but the power of those sins.

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Matthew Henry says, Sinful desires are deceitful lusts. They promise men happiness, but render them more miserable, and then bring them to destruction, if not subdued and mortified.

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In the story of the Chronicles of Narnia and the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, young boys and girls, we remember the story of Turkish delight.

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Who was it that was given the Turkish delight? Does anyone remember? Edmund? It's Edmund, right?

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I think so. Every time he had Turkish delight, what happened? He just became hungry for more

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Turkish delight. He became enslaved to it. Such are the effects of sin.

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When most people speak about mortifying sin, they say,

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I'm going to stop doing that thing that dishonors God. I'm going to stop wasting time.

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I'm going to stop misusing the internet. I'm going to stop being slothful. And so they seek to put away these morally impure desires, these sinful compulsions in their lives.

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And then by sheer force of will, they seek to keep themselves from those things.

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But where Paul is taking us, what we need to realize is that if we are to have any success in mortifying our flesh, in killing the sin in our lives, it's not merely enough to put off these things.

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If we put off these old deeds, we'll simply remain unclothed.

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But in order to effectively put on, that which is put off must be replaced by something new that is to be put on.

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And this principle is displayed in Matthew chapter 12 when we read about the unclean spirits who came out of a person, if you recall that, in verse 43.

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When the unclean spirit had gone out of a person, it has gone out, it passes through waterless places seeking to find rest, but finds none.

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Then it says, I will return to the house from which I came. And when it comes, it finds the house empty and swept and put in order.

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Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there.

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And the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also it will be with this evil generation.

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Brethren, if we are to put off futility of mind and ignorance toward God and callousness of soul and every kind of sensuality, it is not enough to put off and then to leave it there.

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It's like giving children an instruction, don't think about purple polar bears.

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What is the first thing that enters your mind but a purple polar bear or some variation of it?

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It's not enough simply to put off, but we must put off the old.

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And having put off the old, we put on the new. And so we become aggressive in our putting off of sin.

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And then, what we want to look at from verse 20 is what I'm calling the joyful replacement, the joyful replacement.

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Paul says, but that is not the way that you learned

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Christ. In verse 21, assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus.

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Verse 22, to put off the old self. And verse 24, if we can jump ahead for a second, and he says, to put on the new self.

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Now it's not perfectly symmetrical, but we were given four things to put off. I'm going to give us three quick things that we must put on as we seek to mortify that old self.

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And the first is this, we must put on a true knowledge of Christ.

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That is, put on true salvation. And in verse 20, we see how this is pictured.

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When Paul says, that's not how you learned Christ. There's a threefold aspect to this.

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Assuming that you have heard about him and you were taught in him. Now one commentator points out that these three figurative descriptions point to salvation, to the new birth, what it means to hear, to teach, to understand, to respond to who

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Christ is. And there are some of you probably in this room, I hope not, but probably, there are some in this room that you have never known success, the success of killing sin, of living a new life in Christ, because you are seeking to live a new life apart from Christ.

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In John chapter five, 15, excuse me, in verse five, the Lord says there, apart from me, you can do, what?

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Something? A little thing? Our sister in the front row knows it. Nothing.

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Apart from Jesus Christ, we can do absolutely nothing.

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And dear friends, there are some of you perhaps in this room, you are seeking to live the Christian life, if it were possible, apart from Christ.

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There's a good picture of a man who tried to do that once. If you look at the life of John and Charles Wesley, you might know their story that early on, before they were even believers, they were attending college and they started a club that was called the

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Holiness Club. And there in the Holiness Club, made up of young zealots, we'll call them, they sought to keep the laws of God perfectly, to establish perfect holiness and righteousness, to be morally impeccable, to be pure.

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Why else would you join a club called the Holiness Club when others have the Hellfire Club and the

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Cricket Club and the Polo Club? As for me and my house, we will join the Holiness Club. And yet, what the

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Wesleys experienced is that any perceived progress that they made as members of the

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Holiness Club was undone by the fact that they were undone themselves.

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They were altogether unregenerate, that they did not have a living relationship with their

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Lord Jesus Christ. It wasn't until much later as they found themselves on a boat back from Georgia to Britain and encountered

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Moravian missionaries that they came to understand the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

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And only after that, John Wesley said, he said, the essential part of Christian holiness is giving the heart wholly to God.

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Speaking about salvation, the essential part of Christian holiness is

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Christ. Dear friends, that Christ saved us from living a futile life, enslaved to sin, seeking to keep the law perfectly, seeking to establish our own righteousness, and having freed us from that slavery to sin and freed us from that slavery to a works righteousness.

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He redeemed us, as it says in Titus, to be zealous for good works.

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In order for you to be glorified, sorry, to glorify God with your bodies, you must first be purchased with a price.

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Now for some of you, if you are sitting here and you're thinking, I'm trying to live a morally upright lifestyle,

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I'm trying to be a godly man, I'm trying to be a godly woman, I'm trying to submit to my husband as Christ submits to the church,

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I'm trying to love my wife as Christ loved the church, sorry, the church submits to Christ, I'd like to love my wife as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

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The reason why you are not having any success is because you have not first repented of your sins.

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That is a change of mind. Turn to God and trust it in Christ.

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Not for what you can do, but for what he has done already for you on the cross in your place.

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Brethren, that is the, whether saved or unsaved, this is the open door through which the

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Christian pursues holiness. The open door that Christ himself opened through the shedding of his own blood on a cross in first century

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Israel. And having believed on Christ, having hoped in Christ alone that he alone can save us, then we can put on what he has purchased for us.

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He says in verse 22, Paul, to put off your old self which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires and be renewed in the spirits, spirit,

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I keep wanting to say spirits, spirit of your minds. Just as we put off the old mind, the futile mind.

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So now in putting on the new self comes the renewed, or being renewed, excuse me, in the spirit of our minds.

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We see this language in other places, like Romans chapter 12 in verse 2.

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Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is the good, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

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When the Lord saves a person, he doesn't just declare them not guilty.

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He doesn't just declare them justified, but he gives us a new mind and a renewing mind by the washing of the word through regeneration.

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Scientists have discovered that we have some 100 billion neurons in our brains.

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In case you don't know, a neuron is a nerve cell that's responsible for receiving sensory input from the outside world.

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When you hear my voice, when you see me wave my hands, those are neurons that are capturing and interpreting that data.

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They send motor commands. So you put your thumb up, it's a neuron, probably a few billion at work.

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They send electrical signals. They're the cells that do, that the heavy lifting in our thinking processes to make observations, to learn and to do.

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And God has put 100 billion neurons in your brain.

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And that's a hard thing to conceive of, 100 billion. In order to capture this image, we could get into an airplane and fly, almost to our brother

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Alex, and Rafaela and your family, almost to your home or past your home, to the

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Amazon rainforest. And there in the Amazon rainforest, the largest rainforest in the world that spans some eight countries, only then would we be able to conceive of this number, 100 billion.

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The footprint of the Amazon rainforest is 6 .7 billion square kilometers, sorry, million, million square kilometers.

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Scientists believe that packed into that rainforest that's two -thirds the size of the entire continental

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United States, there are 100 billion trees. The same number of neurons that are at work in the awe -inspiring brain that God has given us, that he has put between our ears.

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It takes 6 .7 million square kilometers to put that many trees, and the Lord has put that many in this little space between our temples.

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And what purpose, for what purpose, has he given us so many neurons?

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Such a complex mind that these minds, once delivered from futility, might be renewed and put to work for the glory of the triune

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God. Some people think that maybe our sermons here can be a bit too cerebral.

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We're addressing too much of the mind. More emotions, less mind. What does the scripture say?

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How does a Christian attain to greater holiness? Is it through the renewing of the emotions?

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Is it through the renewing of my feelings? It is through the use of 100 billion neurons renewed in the service of God, instructed through the word, and through other ordinary means of grace.

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John Piper said, your mind was made to know and love God. This requires hard work, but it yields rewards.

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And he continues, he says, if you cannot embrace the pain of learning, but must have instant gratification, you forfeit the greatest rewards of life.

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God is renewing our minds. He's taken us from a place of mental darkness, of cognitive ignorance, to a place where we can use these glorious minds for the purpose of knowing and loving and exalting our great

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God and Savior above all things. John MacArthur says,

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Christianity is cognitive before it is experiential. It is our thinking that makes us consider the gospel and our thinking that causes us to believe the historic facts and spiritual truths of the gospel and to receive

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Christ as Lord and Savior. This is why the first step in repentance is a change of mind about oneself and one's spiritual condition and about God.

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It's been said that the discipline then toward holiness begins with the

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Word of God, of filling our minds with it. We're seeking as a church to memorize a verse or two a week.

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Brothers and sisters, it's not just to promote something that we have on the back of the bulletin.

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It's not to look spiritual. It is to fill our minds with the Word of God.

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And because it's only one verse or two verses, take the other five days of the week and fill your minds with whole chapters of the

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Bible. So that like bunion, when you're cut, you bleed bibline.

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This is not an advertisement for the book table, but we have a book table. Go and pick up some good books and read them.

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Write in them. Disagree with them. Rejoice in the truths you find in them. Think Christianly with the

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Christian mind that the Lord, your God, is redeemed. And then, when you have a true and saving faith in Christ and you have a renewed mind marked by repentance and meditating on the things of God and filling that mind with the truths of God, rich in the

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Word about Christ, then, Paul says in verse 24, and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

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Put on the new self. The new self.

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That word new, it's interesting. I guess this is where some of my studies in Greek have been really helpful.

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That word for new, it's the Greek word kainos. And how

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I remember that word kainos is I imagine myself going to a store and asking the person at the store,

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I don't want a used cane, I want a brand new cane. Give me a brand new one.

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Kainos, it means brand new or unused. Putting on the new self is not putting on moral reformation.

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It is not putting on a Christian makeover. It is not putting on my best behavior before a watching world that does not arise from a renewed heart but from an old dead one.

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Putting on the new self is putting on a self that God himself has given to us, purchased by the blood of Christ.

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Not a reformed personality but a transformed personality.

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And see this with me. Put on the new self created after the likeness of God.

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Translated literalistically, it reads, put on the new self according to what

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God is. The dear Christians, that the power of true holiness comes from something that we cannot produce which is a new self created according to what

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God is. That the new Christian in his or her identity is one who has been made like God.

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Put on the new self made like God. And when we put on that supernatural self, having taken off the old, like an old garment, and putting on the new, waking up in the morning and saying,

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Lord, I am a new man. I am a new woman. I desire to walk and to live in light of who

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I am already. Putting on that new self created after the likeness of God.

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Then we pursue righteousness and holiness. Righteousness, it has been said, relates to conduct that is in obedience to the second table of the law.

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The two tables of the moral law. The first table would be the first four commandments.

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Commandments 1 through 4 are conduct in relation to God. The second table of the law are commandments 5 through 10 dealing with our moral obligation toward our neighbor.

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Righteousness then pertains to that second table. Not to murder, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to covet.

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It is a moral uprightness, a morally upright life lived in relation to one another.

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And holiness, it has been said, relates to obedience to God in the first table of the law.

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Commandments 1 through 4 dealing with our moral conduct toward God. What does it mean to put on the new man in righteousness and holiness?

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It is a picture of a complete man. Of a man or woman who is wholly devoted to God.

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Who honors God above all things. Who puts God first. Who seeks to honor

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Him in the smallest, the most, the minutiae of the details.

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And it's seeking to live uprightly amongst brother and sister, as our brother prayed, to those who are in the household of God.

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And then everyone after that. It is to pursue love of God and love of neighbor every day as we take up our cross and follow the

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Lord Jesus Christ. It's to be a complete man, a complete woman, in spite of failing again and again and again.

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Let me encourage you if you are failing frequently that the fact that you are failing tells me you're headed in the right direction.

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Jerry Bridges says, if we would succeed in our pursuit of holiness, we must persevere in spite of failure.

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We fall, we repent, and with our minds renewed, we get up, we put on the new self and we follow

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Him again. Never trusting in our works.

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Never trusting in our increase in righteousness by God's grace. Never trusting in our own attainments of holiness.

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But trusting in the finished work of Christ alone. Seeking holiness.

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Seeking righteousness. Dying a sinner. Trusting in Christ. I'll finish with these words from Paul.

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He said in 2 Corinthians 7, verse 1. Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.