Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

If you had to guess the occupation of the individual on the screen, what would you say?

Most of you said a policeman.

What clues helped you make this guess?

Among other things, the primary clue was his uniform.

Now, this individual is certainly a policeman, however they only wear this uniform whenever they are on duty.

This individual has a list of responsibilities because of their occupation, and sometimes even whenever they are off the clock, they are called into action.

With that said, though, there are times where a policeman or a firefighter, or a doctor are off duty.

Their uniforms are off and their work responsibilities are placed on hold because they are “free”.

Whenever you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and become adopted into His family, you receive a new identity.

You have a new uniform, if you will, and with it comes a list of new responsibilities.

Whenever you become a Christian, you put on a new set of clothes and you are clothed in Christ.

Obviously there are Christians who are policemen, however the difference between a Christian and a policeman is that the Christian does not get to take off his uniform, ever.

You are literally a new creation and you live a completely different life than you lived before.

What we see Paul do in is talk about the new identity of Christians and how we receive a new set of clothes.

This is a theme that Paul talks about often in the New Testament (, and all come to mind).

This is a positive message for Christians as Paul calls us to see who we now are in Jesus Christ.

Today, we will tackle what our new identity looks like in .

Do not live like a non-Christian (17-19)

Paul begins this passage of Scripture with a strong, urgent message to stop walking as the Gentiles walked.

This is a message that would have been difficult for the Ephesian church to hear and it is one that is difficult for Christians to hear today.

If you became a Christian later in your life, it can be easy to want to continue to do some of the things that you did before your conversion.

We all know people today who try and add things to Jesus.

Jesus + works or Jesus + money are very popular beliefs in the Western church.

The call from Paul in verse 17 is to not walk as non-Christians walk and he claims that his authority is from Jesus Christ.

This is a radical call to action by Paul, not only are Christians supposed to not believe in pagan gods/goddesses but Paul states that they are supposed to live a completely different life!

This is the exact same call for Christians today.

We are to walk in a manner worthy of our calling, as we saw in , and we are to devote our entire lives to Jesus Christ - He doesn’t just get your Sunday morning and Wednesday evening.

He doesn’t just get you during VBS week.

He gets all of you 24/7.

We are to devote our entire lives to Him and to stop walking and living as a non-Christian!

Paul uses these opening verses to remind his audience (and us) of where we were before Christ came into our lives.

Our thoughts, actions and feelings were bleak.

Paul says that we lived in futility of our minds.

Futility can mean idolatry in the sense of these 1st century Gentiles (and us for that matter) worshipping a false god before coming to a saving relationship with Jesus, or it can mean the condition of their mind/heart.

These individuals genuinely did whatever they wanted to do whenever they desired to do it.

With this one word (futility), Paul described the majority of people in the Greco-Roman world at his time.

These people lived their lives, did whatever they so desired and the sum of their lives is nothing because their minds are darkened and they have meaningless goals.

This can be something that we hear in Scripture and we ask ourselves, “This is really harsh, I wonder what these individuals were doing around Paul that would cause him to say this?”

The painful truth comes in verse 18 as we see Paul say that these people were darkened in their understanding.

This is our story just as much as it was these Gentiles in Paul’s day.

We were darkened and we did not understand how lost we were.

Imagine for a moment walking into a place where they taught that various conspiracies were in fact true.

Whether it be that aliens live among us, that the earth is flat or that the moon landing was in fact fake.

You walk into this situation and you try to tell them, using whatever evidence you have, that these conspiracies are in fact false.

Generally speaking, these people would look at you and laugh.

Nothing positive would be accomplished because they simply don’t understand.

This is the situation that we were in before having our eyes opened by the Holy Spirit.

We were lost and without hope.

We believed all sorts of false things and, as we looked at last week, we were led astray by every wind of false doctrine.

Paul tells these believers that they are called to not revert back to this way of life.

This should serve as a reminder to us whenever we try to evangelize and share the Gospel and it doesn’t take hold in the person’s life that we must continue to share the truth of the Gospel because we were once lost as well.

Our eyes were blinded to the truth and we didn’t see the Gospel as something that we needed.

Paul writes that the Gospel is offensive and foolish to the world.

That is still true today.

There are many people in our lives who have heard the truth of the Gospel and they have a hardened heart.

They have had many opportunities to hear the truth buy they have refused repeatedly.

As the New Testament says, they have forsaken the true God for a manmade god.

Paul says in verse 19 that these individuals have given themselves over for the practice of every kind of impurity because they lack a moral restraint.

These individuals live a life that is in total defiance to the way that God made us.

We look around in our world today and we ask ourselves, how can there be a good God with all of the evil taking place around us? How can there be a good God whenever things like abortion are becoming normalized in our culture and school shootings are becoming a weekly news story?

For there to be evil in the universe, there has to be good or else how would we know that evil was in fact evil?

There has to be a moral compass that is given to each of us by God.

Even though we possess this compass, though, even though we know that some things are good and somethings are not, we desperately need a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

You can be a “good person” by the standards of the world but you fall woefully short of God’s standards.

You must have a personal relationship with Jesus!

We are corrupt, sinful beings who are blinded from our desperate need for saving.

We were darkened and ignorant.

We had hard hearts and were greedy.

We did things the way that we wanted to do them!

The great news if you are a born-again believer today is that God can transform anyone by His grace!

As Paul was writing this letter, many Christians in the Ephesian church could relate to the dark description found in verses 17-19, however they became a new creation not because of anything that they did but because of what Jesus Christ has done.

Aren’t you thankful today, as a child of the King, that you were once lost but you are now found?

As Paul continues this passage of Scripture, he begins to transition from talking about how we were once non-Christians to instead talking about living as a new creation.

We have the ability to live as a new creation in Jesus Christ.

We are to think differently, react differently and act differently than non-Christians around us.

We are able to do this by the Holy Spirit.

This does not mean that Christians should never be around non-Christians, however it does mean that we live in the world but not of it.

Jesus Himself modeled this for us as He lived a holy life even though He was around sinners daily.

Our task as a new creation is to live a life that is set apart from those around us so that a non-Christian can see something different in our lives.

Let’s see how we are to live as a new creation in verses 20-24.

Live as a New Creation (20-24)

Paul gives us several different images to illustrate how we come to Christ: a school, changing clothes, and as a new creation.

Paul begins by stating that these individuals who were once non-Christians did not come to know Jesus Christ in this way.

Paul is reminding these people of his personal experience.

Paul experienced Christ on the Damascus Road encounter but he was invested in by people like Ananias, Peter and Barnabas.

Later we see that Paul invests in others like Timothy.

You do not learn about Jesus by doing things that non-Christians do.

You do not do what is right in your own mind and learn about Jesus Christ.

This teaching is not formal education but instead transformational education.

It is something that is not simply something that is learned but it is experienced and completely changes your life from the inside out!

Paul says that “You learned Christ” - Christ is the subject.

This phrase, to learn a person, is not found anywhere else in the Bible.

What Paul is hammering home to these Christians is that they don’t just come to know about Christ in the sense of them knowing about the emperor or about a Christian in 2019 knowing about the President of the United States.

It is so much deeper than that!

It is developing a personal relationship with Jesus.

Not Bible facts, but a relationship.

Paul continues this thought in verse 21 as he says “if you have heard about Him”.

Paul had been to this city several years before and he had taught them about the resurrected Jesus Christ, however much has happened in the years since.

We talked about the background of the city of Ephesus several months ago and saw how this was a city that was very large and diverse in beliefs.