Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

This passage contains an astounding truth—believers are neither Gentiles nor Jews; they are a third race of people.

Therefore, they are not to walk like men; they are to walk like Christ.

The believer is not to walk after the Gentiles, or after men (vv.

17–19).

The believer is to walk after Christ (vv.

20–24).

The believer is not to walk as the Gentiles, that is, as ungodly men.

This is very significant.

Remember: Paul is writing to Gentiles.

The church at Ephesus was a Gentile church.

Now note the verse.The believers are told to no longer walk as “other Gentiles” walk.

That is, believers are set off and set apart from other Gentiles.

Who then are believers?

The point being made is that they are a new creation; the creation of a new body of people, a new nation, a new race.

They are the children of God who are to inhabit the new heavens and earth.

Christians are “a new race,” a race distinct from Jews and Greeks.

The point is this:

Believers are not to walk as other men walk.

Because believers are new creatures in Christ Jesus, and the walk of other men does not please God.

What is it that other men do that does not please God?

This passage gives five traits about unbelievers that displease God.

Remember: believers are to have nothing to do with any of these.

They are never to return to the paths of their former life.

Unbelievers walk in the vanity of their mind

The mind includes the ability to will and to do the truth as well as know the truth; it includes morality as well as reasoning and understanding.

We might understand it as “mentality” or “state of mind”.

The word “vain” means empty, futile, senseless, aimless, unsuccessful, worthless.

When men push God out of their minds, their minds are void and empty of God and of His truth and morality.

God is not in their thoughts.

Their minds are ready to be filled with some other god or supremacy, that is, with the things of the world:

⇒ worldly pleasures

⇒ worldly possessions

⇒ worldly power

⇒ worldly position

⇒ worldly religions

⇒ worldly ideas

⇒ worldly honor

⇒ worldly gods

The mind of man walks after these things, neglecting, ignoring, and rejecting God.

The believer must never return to the walk of an empty mind; he must never again allow his mind to become empty of God.

Unbelievers walk with their understanding darkened

To understand means to grasp, comprehend, perceive.

To be darkened means to be blinded, and unable to see.

The unbeliever does not grasp or understand God; his understanding is darkened and blinded, and unable to see God.

He often understands this world and the things of this world, and he gives his life over to the things of this world.

But he is not able to understand God and His eternal plan for the world through the Lord Jesus Christ.

The believer is not to allow his understanding to become darkened.

He is not to return to the world of the spiritually blind, the world of those who walk with darkened understanding.

Unbelievers walk alienated from the life of God.

Unbelievers are spiritually dead and doomed to eternal death.

Alienated means to be estranged, separated, cut off, detached.

There are always unfriendly or hostile feelings involved in alienation.

The unbeliever is alienated from the life of God.

He is …

• estranged from God with unfriendly or hostile feelings

• separated from God with unfriendly or hostile feelings

• cut off from God with unfriendly or hostile feelings

• detached from God with unfriendly or hostile feelings

Why?

Not because of God.

The Bible is clear about this issue.

Unbelievers are alienated from God because of their own willful ignorance and hardness of heart.

The word blindness is translated darkened or hardness, as well.

Note the words “in them.”

The cause is “in them”:

⇒ They choose to be ignorant within their minds—choose to be ignorant of God.

⇒ They choose to harden their own hearts.

Unbelievers are responsible for their own death.

God has provided the fountain of youth for man, the way for man to live forever.

God has given His life, that is, eternal life, to man.

The only way man can miss God’s gift of eternal life is to reject God and His gift.

Unbelievers are past feeling.

Unbelievers have reached a point where they no longer have feelings for God and His standard of morality.

To be past feeling means to become callous, insensible, hardened.

The more a person walks without God the more callous a person becomes to God.

The more a person walks in sin, the more callous his conscience becomes to righteousness.

Sin becomes more and more acceptable.

The person’s conscience no longer bothers him.

He reaches a point of being past feeling.

The believer is not to return to sin.

He is not to walk as other men walk—in sin, becoming callous and insensitive to God.

Unbelievers give themselves over to lasciviousness

In other words to all forms of sensual living

Lasciviousness is filthiness, indecency, shamelessness.

A chief characteristic of the behavior is open and shameless indecency.

It means unrestrained evil thoughts and behavior.

It is giving in to your basest and lustful desires, a readiness for any pleasure.

It is a man who knows no restraint, a man who has sinned so much that he no longer cares what people say or think.

It is something far more distasteful than just doing wrong.

The man who sins usually tries to hide his wrong, but a lascivious man does not care who knows about his sin or shame.

He wants; therefore, he seeks to take and gratify.

Decency and opinion do not matter.

Initially when he began to sin, he did as all men do: he did it in secret.

But eventually, the sin got the best of him—to the point that he no longer cared who saw or knew.

He became the subject of a master—the master of habit, of the thing itself.

Men become the slaves of such things as unbridled lust, wantonness, licentiousness, outrageousness, shamelessness, insolence, wanton manners, filthy words, indecent abody movements, immoral handling of males and females, public display of affection, carnality, gluttony, and sexual immorality.

Unbelievers indulge in all uncleanness with greediness.

The word uncleanness means to be dirty and filthy; to be infested with every kind of unclean, immoral, dirty, and polluted behavior.

It is the most immoral behavior imaginable.

The word greediness means avarice, coveting, craving, grasping, desiring to have more and more; hoarding all one can get and still craving more.

It is being enslaved and held in bondage by the things of this earth: for example, food, drink, and a host of fleshly sins and self-centered behavior.