New Life
0 ratings
· 6 viewsLiving out our new life in Christ
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
This morning, we are going to go back to the next section in our study out of the book of Ephesians and look at what it means to have a new life in Christ. As a quick review, the first part of the letter to the Ephesians is focused on doctrinal truth, what we believe as Christians. In that section, we have perhaps the most important summary of the gospel which is found in chapter 2:8 - For by grace you have saved through faith. Then as a response to the gospel, we are commanded to live in a manner worthy of the calling to which we have been given. But contrary to our individualistic society, we see that the first thing that God calls us to do, is to be a part of His church and to eagerly maintain the unity of the Spirit. There is something very powerful about a community that holds to the same beliefs and is bound together by a love and commitment for one another. And in the end, it’s actually the combination of these two factors that bring about the conversion of others to Christianity.
The religious sociologist Rodney Stark discovered in his research of the rise of Christianity that:
“People tend to convert to a religious group when their social ties to members outweigh their ties to outsiders who might oppose the conversion...”
In some ways this is just human nature, most of us need to feel like we belong before we can actually believe. Unfortunately, I’ve seen this work backwards here in the Bay Area. Sadly, more people seem to get converted to the world than the other way around. This is known as the capital of the dechurched for a reason. Many Christians come here from other places in the country where church community is much stronger or from campus ministries where they were living with other believers and so the doctrines and beliefs of Christianity were reinforced by these relationships. But in a place like San Francisco, maybe for the first time for some, your main community is with non-believers and your spending the majority of your time with co-workers, roommates, friends who are not Christian. (My first job out of college was in a biotech firm and my co-workers would joke that we spend more time with one another than with our wives and friends.). And this certainly can’t be helped and we should be investing in these relationships but the inherent danger especially for those who are not strong in their faith is to simply adopt and assimilate the same views and ideologies of their new found secular community. In our passage today, we are given clear warning about this potential danger.
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. 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. 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.
Body
Body
The letter of Ephesians was written mainly to Gentile converts to Christianity and it serves as a warning not to go back to their old way of life. Most of them were probably brought up in the paganism that was common in the Roman Empire and became Christians as adults. It’s understandable that some of them were now having now doubts or finding it difficult to break away completely from the former lives.
When I converted to Christianity in my twenties, I was somewhat embarrassed to share with my friends that I had decided to become a follower of Jesus. If you have grown up in the church, you probably don’t know how crazy that sounds to the everyday, normal non-beleiver. You might as well tell them that you were abducted by aliens and brainwashed because that probably makes more sense to them. Sadly, over time I felt myself drifting further away in terms of the how I thought about the world, my priorities, relationships, and even recreation. I wish there was someone who could have been there to help me navigate through those friendships because I wasn’t strong enough to be able to balance my newfound faith and the pressure that my friends unknowingly placed on me to go back to my old life. And the last thing that I wanted to tell my friends was that “I am a new creation, the old has passed away and behold the new has come.” That makes you sound crazy, or arrogant, or both but I could not deny the growing divide that I felt in these friendships in contrast to the closeness that I felt with the brothers and sisters in the church.
And this passage explains why this is the case by pointing out the key difference from those who believe in Christ and those who don’t, namely: How we think about God and life. For the rest of message, I want to look at two opposing points:
The futility of the secular mind
The renewal of the Christian mind
When the apostle Paul warns these Christians not to walk in the ways of the world, he doesn’t begin by challenging their behavior. He doesn’t initially say, “Don’t drink like the world. Don’t have casual sex like the world. Don’t love money and fame like the world.” He’ll address those matters later but the more important issue is realizing the futility of how the world thinks. This isn’t to say that non-Christians are unintelligent or unable to think deeply. The ancient Middle East had some of the greatest thinkers and writers in the history of mankind. They developed philosophies that would become the pillars of modern civillization but where the futility comes in is the fact that all of this knowledge didn’t lead to a right understanding of God. Though they thought intelligently about so many other areas of life, we know that the mind of the typical Roman was still bound by the superstitions and religious beliefs of their mythological gods.
In the New Testament, the Greek word for futility is sometimes used to describe the ultimate outcome of someone who is stuck in an idoltrous pattern of thinking. And although this futility is not limited to idolatry, futility is always the result of a mind that has been conditioned to be idolatrous. This is what we read aboiut in the first chapter Romans.
For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools,
By virtue of the world that we live in, the creation that we behold everyday, the vast array of life on this planet, the billions of stars in the sky, the mind that is free of idols should be able to make the connection that there is a God who is eternally powerful and infinitely holy. Just as we can conclude that 1 plus 1 equals two, the evidence of creation should bring us the right understanding of God. But because our minds have been conditioned by the idols of this world, our understanding is darkened and therefore, we cannot make even the most fundamental conclusions about the nature of God. So when someone says, “How can God condemn people to hell who have never heard the gospel?’ The biblical answer is that God has made his existence and nature perfectly clear through his creation but mankind has chosen to ignore or distort it.
And before we assume that we have developed past the point of being blinded by our idols, we need to think again. Steve Jobs was arguably the creative genius of our time but even he fell to his idols. And you might be saying to yourself, Jobs had no religion and that might be true in the sense that he didn’t practice an oranized faith but like everyone else, he had an idol and believe it or not, it ultimately took his life. As strange as it may sound, Jobs had an idolatrous relationship with food. According to his biographer, Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003 but his doctors wer overjoyed that he had a version of the cancer that highly treatable. Most cancers of this type lead to death in a couple years but he had a slow-growing version that is almost always curable if you surgically remove the cancer right away.
But the thing is Jobs had an obsession with food, not like some of us who just enjoy eating at nice restaurants, which is probably an idol of a different kind. He believed that food was the way to control everything regarding his internal world and becasue of that faith in his diet, he refused the surgery to remove the tumor, electing to put himself on a strict vegan diet consisting of large amounts of juices, herbal remedies, and other natural treatments that he found on-line. And the crazy thing is, even when he knew was dying and finally conceded to the surgery, he refused to modify his diet so that he could better recover from his chemotherapy.
And here is the futility of the idols that we make up in our minds. They offer us the illusion of control over the uncertainty of the world, both our inner world and the outer world. And initially it seems like they work until the point that they don’t but then it’s too late because your mind is already entrapped in the worship of the idol. I love the way Andy Crouch describes the power of that this idol played in the premature death of Steve Jobs:
“He was in the terminal stage, not of cancer, but of idolatry, when the idol ceases entirely to deliver but exacts its full demands for unwavering worship.”
This doens’t apply only to those who have an obsessive personality, it applies to the secular mindset in general. It’s interesting how many people say that they are working extra hours for their family and the financial security of their loved ones but when those extra hours begin to tear their marriages apart and alienates their children, they are unable to stop working those long hours because their minds have already been conditioned by the idols that they worship. Something that I find frightening is even things that seem good, like the pursuit of social justice, can become an idol in our minds. When you are willing to bend and twist the clear teaching of Scripture to follow a secular view of justice, that’s idolatry.
Even in the ethical field, it is implied, the most strenuous efforts of pagans are vain, because they lack the inner power to enable them to live up to their highest ideals.
This is why the most compassionate man that the world has ever known, said this to his disciples when he heard them complaining that an expensive vial of perfume had been poured out over his feet instead of being sold for money and given to the poor:
For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me.
So much of the Christian life is dependent on what is found between our ears and what we choose to believe. For the Christian, the foundation of our view of life is based on the premise that God exists and that he is both holy and righteous. Holiness is the idea of being set apart from the world, being different and other worldly while his righteousness refers to the fact that only God can be the true standard of morality and reveal the difference between good and evil. If your view of God doesn’t begin there, you are worshipping an idol that has been made by the world and ingrained in your mind.
As a prerequisite, this passage only makes sense if you believe that faith in Christ is the catalyst that brings those who are dead spiritually to life, that this is the beginning of point of a new spiritual birth, and a new life that is lived in obedience to God. So when the apostle Paul, states that the Christians in the Ephesians church must no longer walk like the Gentiles in the futility of their minds, He is reminding them of who they are and what they profess to believe. He is not just throwing shade on the non-believing world, but reminding these former Gentiles, the new life that they had been given and the darkness that they had been rescued from.
One of the most difficult things to convince people of in a place like San Francisco, especially working with this demographic, is our need to be born again, which implies the beginnings of a new life. When we think about the phrase “born again”, we tend to stereotype that phrase with ignorant Christians who live out in the sticks and who don’t know any better. And those of us who are more sophisticated, more nuanced in our belief in God, think that we don’t necessarily need a radical transformation, we just need a simple touch up, and to change a couple of bad habits, and then we can go on enjoying the rest of our lives. It seems way to extreme to talk about a complete overhaul of who you are, how you think, and what it is you live for. But let me be honest about what true Christianity has to offer. If you are looking for minor improvements in your life so that you can feel good about yourself, you are looking in the wrong place but if in your heart, you realize that there is something deeply wrong with the human condition, then Christianity offers a solution.
I have been reading a book by a professor from the business school at the university of Michigan and to my surprise, he writes about everyone’s need for deep change and the reason why so many people fail to make the change that is needed.
“Deep change differs from incremental change in that it requires new ways of thinking and behaving. It is change that is major in scope, discontinuous with the past and generally irreversible. The deep change effort distorts existing patterns of action and involves taking risks. Deep change means surrendering control.”
As I read this paragraph, it dawned on me that this is simply a modern way of describing what the gospel offers us. There is no deeper change than the new birth that Christ offers us and Robert Quinn even gives us the reason why we reject this offer of transformation. He goes on to write that most us we build our identity on our competence, our knowledge, and our perceived strengths but in order to change deeply you have to abandon those things that you have built your entire life on and for many of us, this is a terrifying choice and so it is a natural tendency to deny any need for radical transformation.
And far from being some mystic, spiritual experience, this transformation begins first with the renewing of your mind so that it becomes like the mind of Christ.
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 good and acceptable and perfect.
Romans 12:1-2 teaches us that spiritual transformation begins with the renewing of our minds. Behavior is simply a indicator of a person’s real beliefs. What we believe and how we behave are intricately tied together.
The content of a belief helps determine how important the belief is for our character and behavior.
The strength of a belief determines whether or not it becomes a part of your soul.
The centrality of a belief determines the influence that belief has on all your other beliefs, i.e.worldview.
How do we change beliefs?
How do we change beliefs?
One cannot change their beliefs by a direct method.
We change our beliefs indirectly through a course of study that deals with the arguments and evidence for a certain belief.
In time, this changes the content, strength, and centrality of our beliefs and ultimately leads to changes in character and behavior.
Communion
Communion
The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
ADVERTISEMENT