I want to begin our time together this morning by reading four different verses from the Bible followed by a story and then ask a question that I hope to answer in a way that is helpful. So here are the four different verses which are from four different books in the Bible, and from four different authors:
“Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in this same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matt. 5:11–12)
“It is through many tribulations that we must enter the kingdom of God.”” (Acts 14:22)
“Indeed, all who want to live in a godly way in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” (2 Tim. 3:12)
“Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though something strange were happening to you;” (1 Pet. 4:12)
Jesus said of anyone who might be thinking about becoming a Christian: “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matt. 16:24–25). Some of you are hanging by a thread emotionally, perhaps spiritually, and maybe even physically… and you are wondering: “Is it worth it?”
It is my hope that by the end of this sermon, you will be able to answer that question yourself.
Remember that Chasing After the World was a Dead End (vv. 17-19)
The point of verses 17-19 is not to point the proverbial finger at the gentiles as if to say: “Yuck… look at those gross Gentile sinners!” The point is to remind the Ephesian Christians of what they were once, contrasted with who they are now. Within verse 17 is a command to, “no longer walk just as the Gentiles also walk…”. Why? Because it makes no sense! What we read in this verse is not all that different than what Paul wrote in Romans 6:1-4,
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? Far from it! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life. (Rom. 6:1–4)
The Bible never separates belief from action. If you believe something to be true, your behavior will be affected by that belief. What we believe in our minds will inevitably affect how we conduct our lives. Is this not the point that Jesus made in His sermon on the mount? Listen to what Jesus said: “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is narrow and the way is constricted that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matt. 7:13–14).
So, Paul commands his readers: “…you are to no longer walk just as the Gentiles also walk…”. He then explains what it was that compelled them to walk the way they walked: It was (1) “the futility of their minds,” (2) “being darkened in their understanding,” and (3) “excluded from the life of God.” Notice that the way the unbeliever thinks results in the way that unbeliever acts.
The word for “futility” literally means empty in the Greek. What this means is that the mind of a person without God is a person without a true understanding of what their purpose is, and how can a person have any real sense of purpose if they reject the Creator who created us to know Him? To be without purpose because you are without God, is to have a mind that is darkened; A person without purpose is a person who stumbles through life like the person who stumbles in a pitch-black room without any real sense of direction for how to get out but does an excellent job at running into wall after wall. The person excluded from the life of God is a person who chases after the idols of the world and the heart thinking it might satisfy when all that it does is prove to be empty.
According to Paul, people act the way they think, and what a person thinks is always connected to their heart. James Boice put it this way: “People act as they think, and the reason they are constantly messing up is that they are vain in their thinking and darkened in their understanding as a consequence of being separated from God.”[1]
The person who is spiritually dead does not only have a problem with a mind that does not know God, but also has a problem of the heart. If you are excluded from the life of God, then you are spiritually dead. If you are spiritually dead before God, then your heart is hard towards God to the point of stone. The Greek word used for “hardness” is pōrōsiswhich is also used for marble. To have a stone heart is to have a heart unable to feel or love God because it has grown “calloused” towards God and what matters to God. In our home in Colorado, we had a granite island. I had the bright idea to do a box jump onto the granite countertop, and against the wisdom and sage advice from my wife to not try it, I ignored her and did it anyway. When I jumped, my toes caught the edge of the granite countertop just enough so that my shins could feel the full force of my weight has I came down; needless to say, it hurt a lot.
The heart of the unbeliever is a heart that is unreceptive to the Word of God in the same way the granite countertop was unreceptive to my shins! Our hearts were not only hard towards God but calloused in the sense that instead of running towards God, we chased after anything but God, namely the idols of our hearts. According to verse 19, before Jesus redeemed us, we were like the Gentile pagans in Ephesus who gave, “themselves up to indecent behavior for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.”
But what was true of you Christian, is not true of you today! This is the point Paul is making, and he is encouraging you to not only celebrate your life in Christ, but to live in the reality of who you are in Jesus.
Chasing After Jesus is Life (vv. 20-24)
Ephesians 4:10 is the equivalent of Ephesians 2:4-5! “And you were dead in your offenses and sins…. But, God being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our wrongdoings, made us alive together with Christ” (2:1, 4-5). In the passage before us today, we whose minds were darkened, without purpose, and had marble like stone hearts… have received Jesus Christ and we have never been the same since! We who were dead in our sins, are now alive in Jesus. We whose minds were darkened, have been enlightened by the light of the Gospel! We who were once without purpose because we did not know God, now have found our purpose in Christ!
How did this happen? You heard the truth of the gospel and at the same time God supernaturally and miraculously changed your heart. What you experienced is the thing we read about in 2 Corinthians 4:3-6,
And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they will not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your bond-servants on account of Jesus. For God, who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness,” is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. (2 Cor. 4:3–6)
Christian, you who were once dead in your sins, are now alive in Jesus! You who chased after the idols of your heart thinking that they would satisfy have been found by the One who said: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. The one who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37-38); you have received Him because you heard Him and have been taught in Him (v. 21)!
There are three verbs used to describe how it is that you went from being dead in your sins to being alive with Christ in Ephesians 4:20-21. The first verb is “learned” which comes from the Greek word emathete; literally this verse should read: “you learned Christ.” So, how do you learn somebody? Well you don’t do it by simply collecting some historic facts about that person! In Philippians we get an idea for how we have “learned Christ” and how we are learning Christ: “that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; if somehow I may attain to the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3:10-11).
The second verb that is used to describe how we have gone from death to life is the word “heard” which comes from the Greek word ēkousate and it is translated in the NASB the way it should be: “you have heard Him.” How have you heard Christ? You heard Him through His word; you heard His voice through the good news that He lived the life you could not live and died a death for your sins that you deserved in your place, and on the third day, He conquered the grave through His resurrection. You heard His voice in the way Jesus Himself said you would: “My sheep listen to My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give them eternal life, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of the Father’s hand” (John 10:27-28).
The third verb that is used to describe how we have gone from death to life is the word edidachthēte and is translated “you have been taught in Him.” You were not taught by Him, but in Him. James Boice wrote of this word that it most likely means that, “Jesus is the atmosphere within which the teaching takes place. We might say that Jesus is the school, as well as the teacher and the subject of instruction.”[2]
What’s the point? The point is that you who were once lost are now found, and even though you may have been a great sinner, Jesus is a great savior. No longer are you futile in your thinking. No longer are you chasing after idols in the dark. The life you once lived is now your former way of life according to Ephesians 4:22, so why would you even want to go back to your old self? Of course you do not want to go back to your old way of life because it is futile, it was purposeless, it was empty of God, it was a drinking from one toilet after the other only to discover that not only were you thirstier than before, but sick too!
But now… now you have Jesus, and because you have Jesus… you have life! You have been made alive by Jesus and He who is, “the Way, and the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6) has given you purpose. And so now we find ourselves before Ephesians 4:22-24! In regard to your former way of life, “you are to rid yourselves of the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you are to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.” Listen, it is here in these verses that being made alive in Jesus intersects with the relationship we were created for.
Listen, there are some Christians from whom all you hear out of their mouths is how you must rid yourself of this and rid yourself of that for the purpose of looking and behaving a certain way, and much of it has to do with how you look and behave on the outside, which is no different than the legalism of the Pharisees Jesus spoke against. There are others from whom all you hear that comes out of their mouths is, “Grace this and grace that… it doesn’t matter how you live because it is all grace.” This is also known as antinomianism which is the belief that the Christians is free from having to obey God’s moral law. Neither legalism nor antinomianism is the point of these verses!
Conclusion
What is the point of Ephesians 4:22-24 then? The point is that we who were once dead in our sins, have experienced the power of God for salvation through the gospel of Jesus Christ (Rom. 1:16)! The point is that we were once dead and now we are alive in Jesus (2:1-5). The point is that “we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (2:10). The point is that while we were dead in our sins, the closest thing we could come to discovering our purpose and finding true satisfaction is by drinking from the toilet bowl of the world only to grow sicker! Now that we are alive in Christ, we have purpose in God, and have the ability to delight in the God who made us for Himself!
The point of Ephesians 4:22-24 is delight! The point is that we rid ourselves of the old self by chasing after the Jesus who is the light of the world (John 8:12). We rid ourselves of the old self by feasting on Jesus who is the bread of life (John 6:35). We rid ourselves of the old self by discovering in Him our true north as, “the Way, and the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6). We rid ourselves of the old self and put on the new self by hungering and thirsting after the only One who can satisfy, for it is Jesus who said: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied” (Matt. 5:6).
The author of Life and our Redeemer said: “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matt. 16:24–25). These are the words that inspired Jim Elliot to pen his famous words: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Little did he know that sometime later his life would become the catalyst to reach a violent unreached tribe, the Waodani tribe in South America, with the gospel; his death being the catalyst.
So, is it worth it? Yes, He is worth it! He is worth it because even if it seems that we have lost it all, in Jesus we have not lost a thing. When all is said and done, all we have is Christ!
