Sermon Tone Analysis

Good morning and welcome to Dishman Baptist Church.

Please take your Bibles and turn in them with me to Ephesians 4, Ephesians 4.

There is something in many of us that loves the idea of something old becoming new again.

This is a fact that is well capitalized on by the HGTV network as well as the new Fixer Upper network and the number of flipping, renovating and otherwise renewing of old things.

Some of you may remember Bob Villa and This Old House.

He sort of pioneered the industry.

We may never have the financial means to flip a house or the skills necessary to take an old house and make it new but we love watching those who do.

This next section of Ephesians really could be entitled Soul Fixer Upper - and maybe that should be the title of a little mini-series that we’re now going to encounter in our study of this great book.

One of the best parts of those shows that I just mentioned is when the buyers or clients walk through an old dilapidated house with the hosts and they tell them all of the things that they are going to do to make an old house new again.

Paul, superintended by the Holy Spirit, is going to spend the next several verses telling us what things need to be renewed in our lives.

Like a master craftsman, he is going to lay bare the human heart and expose the underlying issues that need to be rooted out of the life of a Christian and then identify those attributes that need to be replaced.

And really what we’re going to learn starting this morning is that all of it needs to be razed and completely rebuilt.

There is no cool shiplap or hard wood floors in our spiritual lives that are worth restoring or keeping.

As we go through the next few weeks allow the Spirit to lay your heart bare and to identify as a master Craftsman those areas of each of our lives that need to be renewed.

This morning we need to start at the beginning - the initial charge that Paul delivers to the Ephesians at the outset of this rebuilding project.

Please look with me at Ephesians 4:17-24.

Paul has spent the last several verses - and in the case of the original letter, the last prolonged, run-on sentence - telling the Ephesians what they are meant to be corporately.

Here he is going to return to the individual emphasis that he began this practical section of the epistle with back in verses 1 and 2.

Notice the similarities in verse 1 with the beginning of verse 17 - Therefore I. Paul is gathering all of his credibility as an apostle and preparing to charge this church to act in a certain manner.

But, just like in verse 1, here he finds the basis of his credibility not simply in his positional authority as an apostle but rather in the One who had delivered that authority to him and entrusted him with the responsibilities that attend that role.

In verse 1 he highlights his condition as a prisoner in the Lord - just to remind us that he is a captive of Christ and is completely subservient to His desires and wishes - which also brings a deeper meaning to the picture he paints later in this section saying that Christ led the captives captive.

In these verse this morning Paul says “I say this and testify in the Lord”.

The word for testify is martyromai and it carries the sense of not a simple testimony the way we would interpret testimony today, but rather it means to insist, to implore.

It is a close synonym to the word in verse 1 translated as urge parakaleo.

It is also the same root word that Paul uses in 2 Timothy 4:1 to charge Timothy before God and Christ Jesus to preach the Word.

The point is that this is solemn and important information that Paul is about to impart to the Ephesians.

It is not something to be taken lightly or to be viewed as something that is optional.

These next verses are not a simple request but rather a command issued to the church by the Spirit.

Notice also the repetition of the word walk.

In verse 1 Paul tells the believers to walk worthy of the calling they have received.

Here it is the exact opposite - rather than walk that way, he says do not walk this way.

We’re going to come back to this opening statement of Paul’s later as I want to examine the two contrasts that he makes in the passage first and then return to this main statement that he makes at the beginning.

Not Like This

Paul begins his description of the Gentiles in a rather unflattering fashion.

Now it is important to recognize that Paul is not using the term gentile here in the ethnic sense as much of the church that he is writing to would have been made up of ethnic gentiles.

They would have remained uncircumcised and thus could not even be considered Jewish proselytes.

In using the term gentile he is referring to the spiritual status of the people who are outside of Christ - who are not a part of the entity that Paul has spent the better parts of chapters 2 and 3 teaching about.

They are not a part of the church.

Paul says that they have futile thoughts - that their thought process are marked by futility.

He is not saying that they can’t think but rather that the results of their thinking results in fruitlessness.

Their thinking is useless.

It is idle.

It is empty.

It is a term that was used in conjunction with references to idol worship.

That the gentiles, many of whom worshipped idols were by nature empty minded.

The author of Psalm 115 captures this idea as he writes

The church at Ephesus was surrounded by pagan idol worship.

The city of Ephesus was home to the temple of Artemis or Diana considered to be one of the wonders of the ancient world.

The sale and presence of idols surrounded them and those who worshipped these idols surrounded them as well.

Paul is saying here that the thinking of those who worshipped such abominations would ultimately turn useless because they were not acknowledging the true source knowledge and rational thought - God. Paul would write to the Roman church

This is familiar to us though isn’t it.

We live in a world where rational thought seems to be rapidly disappearing.

We used to fear that common sense was an endangered species - with quotes like “Common sense is the most limited of natural resources” and “Common sense is not a gift.

It is a punishment because you have to deal with everyone who doesn’t have it.”

But now it seems that even rational thought is disappearing rapidly from our society.

Evolution.

Global warming.

Common core math.

These are all examples of a loss of the ability to rationally process information.

To think that everything somehow came into existence from nothing.

To think that temperatures are now somehow higher than they were two thousand years ago - but have no data from that time to corroborate the theory.

I remember listening to a podcast a few years ago where an engineering student wouldn’t tell the host that 2+2 equals 5 was wrong.

In this environment I’m not worried about our old bridges even if they do collapse because they’ve stood for decades on solid engineering.

I’m worried about the new bridges that will be engineered by people who can’t answer the simple question of 2+2 equals 4.

Paul says that the reason this is happening, the reason that their thinking is futile, is because their understanding is darkened.

It is fairly safe to say that the darkened heart, the spiritually dead heart and mind is in the dark.

Paul is reminding his readers of what he said regarding their former state earlier as he wrote

They were dead in their trespasses and incapable of understanding not only the good nature of God but also the common workings of the world.

In many ways we experience much of the same issues today.

We are the most educated, most technologically advanced generation in the history of the world.

We’ve put men into outer space.

We’ve mapped the very building blocks of life.

And yet there are people who legitimately think that we’re all a part of some computer simulation.

That we’re the who’s that Horton hasn’t heard yet.

That we’re all a part of some massive Truman Show.

That everything is fake.

We’re so confused.

Not we - but the society we live in.

They’re so confused that they can’t see why this would be a problem - there was an article published this week with this headline “We’re uncomfortable in our own locker room.

Lia Thomas’ UPENN teammates tell how the trans swimmer doesn’t always cover up his (It actually reads her but I fixed the typo there) male genitals when changing and their concerns go ignored by their coach”.

I mean what could possibly be wrong with that?

The gentiles understanding is so darkened that they don’t see an issue with that.

And the result of this is that, as Paul writes in Romans 1:21 as we just read, their senseless hearts are darkened and they are excluded from the life of God.

The verb excluded in the perfect tense reminds the readers of what Paul said about them in Ephesians 2:12 - that they were at one time excluded from the covenant of God but have now been brought near through Christ.

What these readers once were the gentiles still are.

The perfect tense of the verb reinforces that the conditions that caused their exclusion in the past still exist and contribute to the continuance of their exclusion now.

Paul says that there are two reasons why they are excluded - their ignorance and the hardness of their hearts.

The term ignorance is a hard term to accept in most conversations.

Most people would prefer to be called just about anything except ignorant.

In second temple Judaism ignorance was often a way to refer to sins that may have been committed unintentionally.

It is the picture of the sacrifice described in Leviticus 5:18

And the way that Paul refers to sinners in Acts 17:30

Now Paul is not trying to minimize the seriousness of sin or the complicity of the gentiles in rebelling against God, in refusing to acknowledge Him or His truth and the resultant futility of thought that they have fallen in to, but he is seeking more to point out the factors that contribute to their lack of understanding than to highlight their guilt in sin.

Of course the next phrase draws them even further away from God.

While one might be excused for ignorance in Scripture - hence the expression for repentance in Acts 17:30 - a hard heart is the result of stubbornly refusing to repent and a continual denial of the God-ness of God.

It was the description used for the Pharisees in Mark 3 when they sought to have Jesus executed

The term here is a medical term that describes the calcification that forms around broken bones and becomes harder than the bone itself.

It also describes the hardening that can occur in joints making them immobile.

A hard heart is one that is permanently and completely against God with very little hope of it ever softening.

I don’t want to say no hope because there is the promise of God taking a heart of stone and replacing it with a heart of flesh in Ezekiel.