Take Off the Old Put on the New

INTRODUCTION

I want you to imagine something with me.

You've been living in a shack. Leaking roof. Cold floors. Mold on the walls. Then one day, someone hands you the keys to a brand-new house, fully furnished, paid in full, your name on the deed. You move in. But every morning, out of habit, you walk back to the shack. You sit in the cold. Because it's familiar.

That's what Paul is talking about in Ephesians 4.

Paul is saying: Now live like it. Stop going back to the shack.

We live in a day of soft religion, faith with no muscle, grace with no backbone. And there's a word we've shoved onto a forgotten shelf: sanctification.

The same light that exposes social sin also exposes personal sin. Our faith is personal, but it’s never private. I have yet to find a personal sin that doesn't boil over and burn someone else.

We are now in the season of Lent. Forty days of honest reckoning, standing in front of the mirror of your life with enough honesty to name what needs to come off, and enough trust in Christ to believe something new is waiting.

Paul gives us three words this morning: Take Off. Be Renewed. Put On.

Read Ephesians 4:17–24.

POINT ONE: The Old Walk — Your Former Life Was a Lie

(Verses 17–19, 22)

Paul gives us a four-step portrait of life without God, and notice it's a progression. Nobody ends up in the deep end all at once. You drift there.

Futility of thinking — busy, chasing, exhausted, but going nowhere. A treadmill dressed up like a highway.

Darkened understanding — separated from the life of God. You can be educated and sophisticated and spiritually blind at the same time.

Hardness of heart — What once convicted you, you now joke about. What once broke your heart, you now scroll past.

Given themselves over — drift becomes surrender. The door of the will swings open and darkness moves in as a tenant.

Sin — and the world operating under sin's logic — always tries to hand you a false identity. Colonialism told our ancestors: our image is defective, our culture is the old self, assimilation is salvation.

The gospel says: that is a lie.

God made you in his image. Like a king placing his living statue in a temple to represent his rule — God placed his image, humanity, in his creation and said: You are mine. You represent me.

Sin vandalized the image. But Paul says God is creating a new self, restored to his likeness, in righteousness and holiness.

Sanctification for this people is not erasure. It is reclamation of who you always were before anyone tried to take it.

Let me tell you something that happened to me in seminary. My last year at Duke, I was in Goldsboro helping my daddy paint. It was a North Carolina summer — hot, hard, and by the end of the week your clothes were carrying every bit of evidence of where you'd been. Paint. Sweat. Dirt. The smell of work on everything.

Right in the middle of that week, my scholarship money came in.

I looked at that deposit. I looked at my work clothes. I walked over to my uncle and said: "I am trading in these work clothes for a new outfit. I am no longer working for Saffo."

The work clothes came off. Something new went on. And something shifted — not just on the outside, but on the inside.

That's a small story about a hot summer. But Paul is telling a bigger version to every person in this room.

The scholarship has come in — not from a financial aid office, but paid by the blood of Jesus Christ. And the Father is looking at the clothes you've been wearing and saying: You don't work for that anymore. Take it off. Something new is waiting.

Will you make the trade?

POINT TWO: The New Classroom — You Learned Christ

Verse 20: "That is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ."

He doesn't say you learned about Christ. He says you learned Christ.

Christ is the subject, the teacher, and the classroom. The truth is in Jesus— not just from him.

Sanctification is not willpower or behavior modification. It is learning Christ — being formed by his Person until your habits and desires begin to look like his.

Ask yourself: Who is teaching you how to live?

Because the world is a teacher too. I want to talk to the young people for a minute — and everyone else lean in.

TikTok has a curriculum. Instagram has a curriculum. The music in your earbuds has a curriculum: Your worth is your views. Your body is your asset. If life feels empty — numb it, scroll past it, post something. That is a rival school, open 24 hours a day, and it only costs your attention and your soul.

Paul says the old walk produces "futility of mind" — constantly stimulated, spiritually empty. I see young people in this community exhausted not from working hard, but from performing — managing an image online that doesn't even match who they really are.

Jesus is not asking you to throw your phone in the river. He is asking you to know who your real Teacher is.

And here is the grace in it: Jesus is not pressing you into a religious mold. He doesn't want carbon copies. He calls you to your own God-given uniqueness — your own Spirit-shaped way of being in the world. What he wants is your allegiance— learning from him until you want what he wants, love what he loves, grieve what grieves him.

That is sanctification.

POINT THREE: Three Decisions Every Morning

(Verses 22–24)

Take Off (v.22)

The old self has been crucified in Christ — that's the once-for-all reality. But you still walk to the closet every morning and choose.

Some of us didn't reach for the old clothes on our own. We were dressed by someone else. Before we were old enough to choose, somebody put the coat of anger on us. Somebody handed us the shoes of shame. The generational wardrobe is real.

But here is the gospel: the generational wardrobe can stop with you. You can be the one in your family line who names it, takes it off, and refuses to hand it to your children.

Name it. Right now, quietly. You cannot take off what you refuse to identify.

Be Renewed (v.23)

"Be made new in the attitude of your minds." Present tense — keep on being renewed.

The Spirit is at work like a master restorer, scraping off the graffiti that sin and the world have sprayed over the image of God in you — until you look like what you were always meant to be.

What story is playing on a loop inside you? The world's story — you'll never change, this is just who you are — or the Spirit's story — new creation, the old is gone, there is a future and a hope?

This is what Lenten fasting is really about. Not proving you can go without. But practicing release — one small denial at a time — until letting go becomes a habit of the soul.

Put On (v.24)

"Put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness."

Notice — the new self is created by God. You didn't sew these clothes. You didn't earn them. God made them and your name is sewn into them.

You're not dressing up to become a child of God. You're dressing to match who you already are.

We are still in Lent. Still between the cross and the empty tomb. But Easter is coming. And on that morning, everything Paul describes here will be on full display — because the One who was buried put death itself off and put on resurrection life. And he is making you the same way.

CONCLUSION

Come back to where we started.

You have a brand-new house, paid in full, your name on the deed. Every morning the question is the same: Will you live there? Or walk back to the shack?

God has always given people a new name, a new identity. Abram became Abraham. Jacob became Israel. Simon became Peter. And he is doing it with you. Right here.

The scholarship has come in. The new clothes are ready. Let's make the trade — together. Right now.

Open your hands. Palms up.

Name what you're releasing. Quietly. Between you and the Lord.

(Pause — 20 seconds.)

Now repeat after me:

"I take off the old self."

"I will no longer walk in the old way."

"Renew my mind, Holy Spirit."

"I put on the new self — created in the likeness of God."

"I am his image. I am his sign. I belong to him."

Now close your hands. Hold it. Don't let it go.

TRANSITION TO THE TABLE

In a moment we come to this Table. We are not coming because we've already put on the new self perfectly. We are coming because we cannot do it without him.

This is where the trade gets sealed. You don't come to earn the new clothes — you come because the One who purchased them is inviting you to sit down, be fed, and be reminded: you belong to him now.

On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread, broke it, and said: This is my body, broken for you. He took the cup and said: This is my blood of the new covenant, poured out for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in remembrance of me.

Take. Eat. Remember.