Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

How many of you all are familiar with the show, “The Biggest Loser?”

For those of you who are not, this was one of the most popular television shows whenever I was growing up and offered a cash prize to the contestant who lost the greatest percentage of weight during the show.

Many contestants came into the show weighing 300, 400, even 500 pounds and many of them would lose upwards of 100 or 200 pounds on the show!

It would seem as though they had turned a corner because they began to exercise, eat healthier and work very hard to live a healthier life.

What is fascinating, though, is that many of these individuals (not all, but a considerable amount) would eventually gain back the weight that they had lost on the show.

They would go back to their bad habits, not exercising and not working hard to keep that weight off.

According to Psychology Today, Americans spend over $66 billion / year on weight loss products and services.

What we see, sadly, is that many people will go on a diet or workout program and experience some success initially, however within 6 months, they will be essentially just as unhealthy as they were whenever they started their diet or workout program.

What we are going to see this morning in Scripture is that it is vitally important for a Christian to replace bad habits with positive actions.

We have talked about the process of being “born again” numerous times as we have studied Ephesians.

Whenever you accept Jesus as your Savior and Lord, you are a new creation.

The old is gone and the new has come!

This means that you have to live a different life than you lived beforehand!

Some of those bad habits and actions that you had before now have to be changed.

Not only are you supposed to not do certain things like lie, steal and speak unwholesome words, but you are to replace those things with good things.

This is where we can go wrong sometimes.

We might think that we have a relationship with Jesus Christ because we “prayed a prayer” or we “were baptized”, but the fact of the matter is that your life changes radically whenever you accept Jesus.

Old actions change whenever Jesus comes into the equation.

This does not mean that we never mess up, but it does mean that nothing changes whenever we become a child of God.

Let’s see what Paul has to say in

Millions of people have “prayed a prayer” and lived their entire lives just as they did before praying a prayer.

Nothing changed!

Jesus does not want you to just “pray a prayer” - that is not found anywhere in Scripture but we hear pastors say it time after time today.

The fact of the matter is that salvation is so much greater than a 1 time prayer.

That is where it starts.

It starts with an acknowledgement of your sin before a holy God as tells us.

It then requires you to ask Jesus to forgive you of our sin.

It then moves to you making Jesus the Lord of your life.

At this point, everything changes in your life.

You live your life for Christ.

A prayer does not save you.

Baptismal waters do not save you.

Your pastor does not save you!

Only Jesus Christ can save you and He demands you to deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow Him!

This means that you have to make some wholesale changes in your life to follow Jesus.

This is what Paul is talking about in this passage of Scripture.

Last week, Paul said that these Christians have a new identity.

They have a new set of clothes and they are to live as a new creation!

This is our story today as a child of God.

As is common with Paul, though, is that he then gives these Ephesians believers some instruction on how to go about this.

These are very practical steps where believers are supposed to give up something negative and replace it with something positive.

This is our call as Christians today as well!

We are to give it all over to Christ.

We are not just to stop doing the desires of our flesh, we are to replace these actions with the fruits of the spirit and change the way we live our life based on the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives!

This list is not exhaustive and should not be the only behaviors that should mark our lives as Christians, but this is a great place to start as Paul gives us 5 examples of old habits that we must replace.

Replace lying with telling the truth (25)

In the Greek text, these examples are marked as imperatives or as commands.

These are not just suggestions that should be done but they are commands that we have to live by!

This verse involves a quote from as Paul commands his audience to speak the truth to one another.

Paul is adding the weight of the Old Testament to bolster is case here and the reason that this is so crucial is because we are all members of one another.

Church, your actions and words matter greatly to the ministry of the body!

Falsehood and lying are destructive in the family unit and carry devastating results in the church as well.

John Stott puts it like this, “A lie is a stab into the very vitals of the body of Christ.”

Think of the problems that could come into play if our eyes and hands were not on the same page.

If our eyes did not see the steam coming off of the stove top, our hands would certainly get burnt if they touched the stove!

Communication is crucial.

We are called to be united (as we saw in ) in faith and because of this, false words and actions hurt the body of Christ.

Falsehood stifles unity, truth strengthens unity.

Now not only are Christians called to not be liars or false-tellers, but they are to replace those lies with the truth.

They are called to tell the truth.

It can be easy for us to replace a lie with another lie whenever we look back on a situation, however it is another thing entirely for us to tell the truth.

Paul has emphasized the importance of telling the truth throughout .

God wants His people to be like Him.

He wants His people to tell the truth.

We should be known as a community of people who live an honest life.

We should be a people who are trusted.

We know that God hates lying ( and 12:19, 22) and that Satan is a liar.

It follows that whenever we tell the truth, we are imitating God.

When we lie, though, we imitate Satan.

As Christians who are called to live as a new creation, the desire of our heart should be to imitate God even in times of uncertainty or when that might get us in trouble.

Replace unrighteous anger with righteous anger (26-27)

Next comes a much different example as verses 26-27 show us that there is a certain type of anger that is permitted, yet restricted.

Another way of looking at this verse would be “in your anger, you do not sin.”

There is a type of anger that Christians should feel.

You’re probably wondering what this type of “righteous anger” looks like.

It does not mean whenever you stub your toe at night that you don’t cuss but instead substitute a fringe cuss word in its place.

It does not mean that you limit your anger towards one or two people instead of 5 or 6.

What it means is that you have a holy anger against sin.

We need to feel anger as Christians!

If you are simply indifferent to your sin or to sin in general then you will tolerate it and allow it to continue to have hold over you.

You must genuinely hate sin!

We know that our God hates sin as David wrote in

For crying out loud, Jesus Christ was angry several times.

In , Jesus expressed His anger by turning over the tables in the temple.

provides us another example of Jesus’ anger as Mark writes:

Jesus displayed a type of anger that was mixed with grief.

We too should be both grieved and angered with sin.

There is most definitely unrighteous anger in our lives and in our world, though.

Verse 31 tells us that unrighteous anger is one of the things that we are supposed to “put away” from us.

Now there is certainly a warning here for us because it can be easy to justify our anger with a great reason (I’m just trying to teach my kids a lesson, etc…) and fail to give others the same benefit of the doubt.

There is a great need in our world today for righteous Christian anger.

We should not be tolerant of evil, we should be angry.

We should be angry whenever we struggle with a sin.

We should be angry whenever we see babies being torn from the bellies of their mothers.

These things should stir up holy anger inside of us!

We must be aware of our own fallenness in these situations, though.

It can be easy for us to play the comparison game with others and say “I’m so glad that I don’t struggle with that sin” when in reality we should be angered with the sin that we do struggle with instead of thinking that we are “fine” compared to the type or amount of sin that someone else struggles with.

As tells us, we should be slow to anger.

Paul gives us 3 negatives to qualify his “be angry” statement.