Living Hope

Pastor Philip Miller: It's ironic. We think of ourselves as these hyper-rational creatures. We even named ourselves Homo sapiens, the wise being, right? But the reality is, and this is what Paul is pointing out, that apart from grace in our fallen human condition, we are largely ruled by our desires.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: This is Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy and we're glad you're joining us today as we consider the old life that we had under sin but more importantly, this new life that we have. As the old folks would say, He's brought us a mighty long way. So tell us about this new life.

Pastor Philip Miller: It is dramatic, isn't it? This new life we have in Christ that has rescued us from this old darkness, this old messed-up way of life where we're trapped in our desires. What Paul's doing in this passage that we're going to look at today is he's contrasting the beauty of the new life we have in Christ. To do that, he puts it against the backdrop of the darkness of our sinful life prior to Christ and before grace.

He's going to show us that you had a very different kind of life and you were stuck in it and you couldn't do anything about it. But Christ is changing you and He's given you a whole new life. So that old life just doesn't fit anymore. You need to step into this new life. There are new family rules to be a part of the family of God. You have to live differently now that grace and salvation have dropped into your life. So he's going to go back, and then in looking back, he's going to show us the beauty of all that Christ has done in our lives.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Amen. Let's go now to the pulpit of the Moody Church as we examine the old way of life under sin. This is part one of the sermon New Life.

Pastor Philip Miller: Like any family, the Miller family has house rules. There are certain words we don't use. There are certain movies we don't watch or music we don't listen to or devices that we put parameters around. Sometimes our kids wonder why we're so strange compared to other families. We have a phrase that we use. We say, "In our family, we choose to live differently."

You've got to navigate this world. We're trying to protect the beauty of our kids' childhood. We're trying to instill godly patterns in their lives, and we're okay with being different. It's who we are. In a sense, that's what Paul is saying in Ephesians chapter 4. Now that we're alive as sons and daughters of God, now that we're children in the forever family of God, members of His household, the house rules have changed.

This new family doesn't live like other families do. We're different, and it's okay to be different. It's who we are. In God's family, we choose to be different. That's what Ephesians chapter 4, verse 17, down to chapter 5, verse 2, is all over. That's our passage for this morning. Would you listen as I read these words from the Lord?

"Now I say this and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardness of their hearts. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

But that is not the way you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard about Him and were taught in Him as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members of one another. Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.

Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you along with all malice.

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God." Thanks be to the Lord for the reading of His word.

This morning I want to structure our thoughts around just three headings: the old, the new, and the change. Let's pray as we dive in. Heavenly Father, we long to be new, to be changed from the inside out. Father, our old life before Christ was filled with all kinds of mess and sin, and You are giving us a new way, a new life in Jesus Christ by the power of Your Holy Spirit. Help us to walk in newness of life, the life that You have for us. Teach us what it means to follow You, to live by the power of the Holy Spirit. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen.

First of all, the old. Chapter 4, verse 17. "Now this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds." Pause there just for a moment. "This I say and testify in the Lord." That's how Paul begins. This is language that's reminiscent of an official witness on the stand in a court of law. This is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It's a solemn declaration. He's saying, sit up and take notice. This is really important.

What is important, Paul? You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do. You once walked like the Gentiles. You once lived a Gentile lifestyle when you were one of them, when you were dead in your trespasses and sins, when you were following the course of this world, when you were following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience.

But no longer, Paul says. Now that you are alive in Christ, now that you are beloved children of the Father, now that you are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, now that you are following the crucified, risen, and exalted Son of God, you can't live like you used to. You can't live like that anymore. I urge you to walk in a manner that is worthy of the calling to which you have been called.

You must no longer walk the way the Gentiles do, he says, in the futility of their minds. If you do a word study on futility and you go back through the Old Testament, you will find that this word is normally used of idolatry, idol worship, worship of false gods, and of the empty pursuit of life in all the wrong places.

Instead of looking to God for the significance, security, and satisfaction that our souls long for, when we have this futility of mind, it means we're looking anywhere other than God for our deep soul fulfillment. So here you have the Gentiles. Paul describes them. They're running after career and sex and money and power and luxury and decadence, endlessly searching, desperately trying to scrape together some sort of semblance of identity and self-worth and meaning and purpose and security and stability and happiness and fulfillment in life.

But all their best ideas are shot through with futility because it always leaves them looking for more. Paul continues in verse 18. They're darkened in their understanding. They think they see but they're actually stumbling around in the dark, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them. Having ignored God and the life He has to offer, they find themselves ignorant of God and the abundant life that is in Him.

This ignorance, Paul says, is due to their hardness of heart. As we stubbornly go through life insisting on our own way to try to be happy, we are pushing God away. They've become callous, verse 19, desensitized, numb, and have given themselves up to sensuality. Let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. Greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

The idea here is pushing the limits of moral decency in search of more and more twisted things. It's not a pretty picture, is it? And it's not hard to recognize in these verses the cycles of addiction and violence and ever-increasing darkness and moral decay that plagues our world even today. But Paul's not quite finished here. He has one more description to add down in verse 22.

He says, "Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires." This old self, this Gentile lifestyle, Paul says, was corrupt through deceitful desires. So it's a desire-driven way of living. It's the kind of life that is always trying to gratify its appetites. And he says those are deceitful desires. In other words, they never deliver on what they promise.

He says they're corrupting. The more we give in to those kinds of desires, the more twisted and dehumanized we become. And Paul is saying that was us. That was you. That was me before Christ. Our old selves, apart from grace, before we were made alive through the saving work of Jesus, we were trapped in this cycle. We were trapped in this lifestyle.

Our desires promised us the world. If only we had that career or that money or that sex or that power or that decadence or that experience, then we'd be happy, then we'd be fulfilled. So we ran after it with everything we had, only to find out that it was a fraud. The real life we were looking for wasn't found in those things.

But having been disillusioned, we didn't change course. No, we doubled down. We went further and deeper and we tried more and more, trying to be happy, and those temporary jolts of pleasure evaporated into profound emptiness. We ended up numb and jaded and bent and twisted and dehumanized. Paul says that kind of living messes up our thinking.

He calls it futility of mind. He calls it darkened understanding, ignorance due to the hardness of our hearts, corruption through deceitful desires. He says when we're living like Gentiles, when we're living a desire-driven life, we're actually not thinking straight. Paul is describing here what moral philosophers call akrasia: A-K-R-A-S-I-A. Akrasia. It's when you go against your own better judgment.

We all know what this is like. It's when you eat that extra slice of pizza you know you shouldn't. It's when you buy that car you really can't afford because you just can't say no. It's when you give in to something you know you're going to regret in the morning. Have you ever wondered why your desires so often override your better judgment? Have you ever wondered how that even happens?

It's ironic. We think of ourselves as these hyper-rational creatures. We even named ourselves Homo sapiens, the wise being, right? But the reality is, and this is what Paul is pointing out, that apart from grace in our fallen human condition, we are largely ruled by our desires. Here's how it works: what the heart desires, the will embraces, the mind rationalizes, and then the conscience justifies.

What the heart desires, the will embraces, the mind rationalizes, and then the conscience justifies. That's how you end up buying a car you can't afford. Your heart desires it. So your will embraces it. Your mind rationalizes it. "I needed something more reliable, and my repair bill on my old car was equal to a car payment, so it made sense. I got low interest. I deserve to treat myself." And then your conscience justifies it. "I really made a wise investment here. It was a good choice. I really needed this. It's the right thing to do."

It's astounding, isn't it? It's astounding how your reason was given by God to you to help you see reality so that you could make objective, wise choices. That's why God gave you rationality. But you see what's happened. Your rationality has been pressed into service of your desires, pressed into rationalizing whatever it is you wanted to do in the first place. We become masters of self-delusion. Human beings are masters of self-delusionary thinking.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: This is Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy and we are so glad you joined us today. Pastor Miller, I'm just going to jump right into it. You use a term here that I think a lot of people aren't familiar with: akrasia. A-K-R-A-S-I-A. Where is akrasia? Are you Akrasian?

Pastor Philip Miller: Akrasia is this idea of without command, the mind rationalizing the desires that we have. In other words, it's the self-justifying muscle that we have that almost without thinking, we self-justify. "I did it because of this." In other words, when our desires lead the way and what we're living for, and we just do what we want, then our mind gets pressed into service of our desires and we just end up justifying what it is we did anyway because it's what we wanted, which is not rationality. We're not thinking; we're rationalizing, which is a different thing and it's a function of our self-delusion.

It's all over the Bible if you think about it. Jeremiah talks about the heart being deceitful and wicked and who can know it. In other words, our hearts are bent and broken. And then the will turns and embraces whatever it is the heart desires. So then we want what we desire. Jesus says we're slaves of sin. We don't actually have the freedom to not choose sin. We're bent and broken. And then the mind comes in and rationalizes. Paul says in Romans 8 our minds are set on the flesh. We need the renewing of our minds.

And then the conscience comes in and justifies. Paul talks about our consciences can get seared. In other words, they're twisted. This self-delusion, self-justifying posture. So the reality is, when we live for our desires apart from grace, apart from salvation, we're not functioning the way we were designed. Our brains are in a sense enslaved. Our rationality has been coerced in order to justify behaviors and decisions and desires that we already want to do. We're living almost like animals where we're just living on impulse and for self-gratification and then if you ask us why, we just come up with a whole bunch of reasons why we're going to keep doing what we're doing and why we're justified in it. Paul looks at that and says that is subhuman. That is not the way God created us. That's a symptom of the darkness of the sin of the messed-up past that God has rescued us out of. That's not how He intends us to live. He has a new life for us.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: I want to stay there for a moment if we can because a lot of this process that you're describing, it sounds almost like an addiction. Because you'll hear people who are addicted and caught up and ensnared with that rationalization, blame, denial, and then justifying. So there's lots of places where people get ensnared by this justifying sin.

Pastor Philip Miller: We're all addicted at some level to our sin. That's why Jesus calls us slaves of sin. We're not free to not do these things. We're always doing the things we don't want to do and the things we should do, we're not doing.

For example, let's say you're in a relationship and your heart really desires respect and you feel like you're not getting that from your spouse or your kids or whatever. And so you get angry. I think a lot of our listeners just said amen. We all know what that feels like. And so we get angry and our will then chooses to act on that anger. We act it out and we're mean to someone who's not giving us the respect we want.

And then our mind rationalizes it: "Well, I was justified in my anger and my mistreatment because they did this to me and they're not loving me the way they're supposed to." And so I blame them and now I'm rationalizing. And my conscience comes along and justifies my actions: "Well, you were right to stick it to them because they're not loving you the way you should."

You see how we go? And all of a sudden, we're not even living in reality. We don't see them as image bearers of God. We're not seeing all the good things they're doing for us and the love that they're showing us. We're not seeing their humanity. We're treating them as a transaction and an object and I need all this from them. So it's distorting our relationship. It's destroying it. It's distorting our own mental framework, the way we're thinking about these people in our lives. And then we start just keeping a list of all the bad things they ever do to us, which is not fair to them.

But it's, again, our minds have been twisted and bent and we're not actually as free as we think we are. And so in comes the gospel now. And the gospel, you're loved for Jesus' sake. We're children of God. You can't get much more respect than that when the Father has pronounced you as a child of God. You have a baseline of respect and honor in the gospel that you can't get anywhere else. And if you drink deeply of that, then you're not quite so dependent on getting respect from everybody else, which allows you to then respond to an offense or a disrespectful statement with empathy and kindness and love and not repay evil for evil.

And all of a sudden you can see them as an image bearer. You can understand the entailments of the gospel for them and you can start living in love. So this is the renewing of your mind as the gospel changes your whole outlook, the way you see the world. And that's how God changes us. So Paul's point is we've been moved from this old way of life to a new way of life, a new set of clothes. This is what God has for us.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Thank you, Pastor Philip. So next time we're comparing the old way of life in sin and the new way of life in Christ. Now if you'd like to grow in Christ through the discipline of prayer, we have a resource available to you. I think it'll be a blessing for you.

We often pray, "Lord, help me," but we don't often pray, "Lord, change me." Many of us are hoping for a financial windfall or a change in circumstances, but deep down, we're resisting the one thing God really wants to do, and that's change us. Sometimes when God says no to a request, He often protects us from sinking deeper into slavery to our own evil passions. We can come to God with selfish desires, asking wrongly and spending it on our own passions.

That's why Dr. Erwin Lutzer's new book, Why Doesn't God Answer My Prayers? You will learn to recognize the difference between godly and ungodly passions and how to submit your ambitions to Christ. Beloved, your personal transformation always lies at the heart of prayer regardless of God's answer. I'm praying with you, "Lord, change me."

And for a limited time, we're offering Why Doesn't God Answer My Prayers? for a donation of any amount. Now to request your copy simply go to livinghopeoffer.com or call us at 1-800-215-5001. That's livinghopeoffer.com, 1-800-215-5001. You can also write us at Moody Church Media, 1635 North LaSalle, Chicago, Illinois 60614. Thanks for joining us for Living Hope where you'll always find the gospel truth for the journey of a lifetime. Living Hope is a production of Moody Church Media and is sponsored by the Moody Church.