The Changed Life

You need to change your diet.

Nobody likes to hear that. You need to cut back on sugar. You need to lower your sodium or salt intake. You need to eat more of this or less of that.

The problem is that it almost makes you want it more, just because you’re not supposed to have it.

A doctor once told a man that he could no longer have red meat. He wasn’t happy about it, but he knew that it was important to his health. So he stopped putting ketchup on his hamburgers.

Nobody likes change. We’ll cut corners to change a little, but never fully commit to the change.

We are changed by Jesus to be different from the world around us.

Ephesians 4:17–19 “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles (Early Christians thought of themselves as the third race, not Jew or Gentile, but Christ’s.) do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding (Greeks looked at light as being synonymous with truth and knowledge.), alienated from the life of God (Life is only found in being connected to God our Creator.) because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart (They don’t know the truth because they don’t want to know the truth.). They have become callous (They refuse to listen and over time, they stop hearing.) and have given themselves up to sensuality (reckless, out of control indulgence.), greedy to practice every kind of impurity.”

The world has no idea how sinful it is.

“callous” means numb. I play the guitar from time to time. The problem is that I don’t play it regularly so I don’t have the callouses I need to play for a long time. If I were to pick up a guitar and try to play through a church service, my fingers would be hurting somewhere around the middle of song 2.

Over time the callouses form after you play consistently. It finally gets to a point where you can play and it doesn’t hurt as bad.

If you work with your hands alot, you eventually form callouses so you don’t get as many blisters. It all comes down to building up a defense against what is causing pain.

To become callous to God is the worst thing you can be. You push up against the law of God written on your heart trying to go against it and it hurts. You push up against it again and again, and again, until your heart is hardened to the conviction of God.

It’s interesting that Paul writes here that they gave themselves up, but in Romans, Paul writes that God gives them up. What it boils down to is we are giving ourselves over and there comes a place where God gives us over.

That doesn’t mean that God has given up on them, sometimes God gives them up for discipline so that they will turn to Him for salvation.

The world is callous. You were callous before you came to Christ. You had no idea how sinful you were.

Paul’s point here is after you are saved, you should know better.

Ephesians 4:20–21 “But that is not the way you learned (discipled by) Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus,”

What are we taught to do by Christ?

Salvation is a decision you make to allow Jesus to change you.

Ephesians 4:22–24 “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.”

“to put off” and “to put on” are in an interesting tense in the greek. At first glance and even looking at it for a few minutes, it sounds like we are constantly putting off and putting on, but it’s not.

Paul is describing what salvation is, how they “learned Christ” is to repent (put off the old self), and believe (put on the new self).

The old self is corrupt and you can’t fix it. You know that you need to be changed when God through His Word and His Spirit come to convict and draw you. God reveals Himself to you. And then the question is, will you surrender to Him and allow Him to save you, to change you?

The Greeks would use this term all the time to refer to putting off bad behavior and put on good behavior. They would use this in regards to attributes and virtues. But never had they heard someone refer to this as putting off a whole person’s self, their psyche. Paul is telling them to put off everything that was once them and put on everything that is Christ.

Notice what happens. This new self is created after the likeness of God. It’s no mistake that Paul uses this language. He wants us to see a re-creation of that which was once corrupt in the garden.

Now our new self is free from corruption and sinful desire, we are free to life in true righteousness and holiness.

Paul is giving a warning though, because we can default to our old muscle memory of sin. Sin’s temptation still exists and still affects us. But we have something we did not have. We have someone with us, the Holy Spirit who is easily able to defeat these things in our lives.

Only Jesus is able to change us because He put off His glory and put on our sin.

On the cross, Jesus laid aside His glory and He took all of our sin upon Himself.

That is your motivation to live for Him He died to give you this. How do we live for Him?

Ephesians 4:23 “and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds,”

This phrase is not a completed action, but a continuous one. Just like in Romans 12, Paul is calling his readers to be renewing their minds.

The Holy Spirit is constantly changing us to make us more like Jesus.

This renewal comes from reading the Word of God. God’s Word is a purifying agent, adding what we need and neutralizing what is harmful and needs to go.

As we read God’s Word, we’ll come across things in our life that we need to stop doing. And then we’ll come across things in our life that we need to start doing.

We remind ourselves of the Gospel and what Jesus did and let that fill us with so much wonder and love that we can’t help but respond by living for Him.

Ephesians 4:25–32 “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of 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.”

Are you living a changed life? Do you have a changed life?

Augustine used to be a sex addict. He was traveling through a town he hadn’t been to in a while. This was about 2 years after he had been saved. An old mistress of his recognized him and began to make herself very familiar with him. She flirted and he did his best to remain cordial. After a few words, he walked off. She was confused and blindsided by this. She didn’t expect him to brush her off like that.

She turned and called out to him, “Augustine, it is I.”

He turned around and replied, “Yes, but it is not I.”

That is the power of a changed life.

If you are His disciple, then you need to live in that.