Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
0.13UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.12UNLIKELY
Fear
0.1UNLIKELY
Joy
0.63LIKELY
Sadness
0.2UNLIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.68LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.13UNLIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.83LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.42UNLIKELY
Extraversion
0.13UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.3UNLIKELY
Emotional Range
0.45UNLIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
Introduction
Do you have clothes that no longer fit you?
Most do, and they tend to hold onto them for one reason.
"I might get back into them one day."
But we all know we never do.
Instead, they take up space.
It's time to get rid of the old clothes.
Paul would agree with that.
In fact, he instructs the Ephesians to do just that.
But the Christians are not to go to their closets and declutter.
They are to open their lives and clean them out.
As we come to this lesson, it has a single big idea.
God's new plan in the church requires new people, not old ones.
If God's plan is to succeed, we must examine our own lives.
Discussion
The Gentile Life
It was a huge step when the Gentiles at Ephesus were converted to Christ.
They were leaving a religion, a way of life, and a culture that had shaped their lives from birth.
Now, they were God's children.
How were they to live?
This is Paul's monumental challenge.
How do you take Gentiles and put them into a church, so they live in a way that reflects Christ and his ways?
He begins this discussion in verse 17.
"Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds."
(Ephesians 4:17, ESV)
Paul is serious.
His language says that God is hearing his words and instructions.
What he tells them has the gravitas for their lives and the lives of the church.
They are to "no longer walk as Gentiles do."
We met the word in the first verse of this chapter, which forms the driving point of the last three chapters.
"I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called," (Ephesians 4:1, ESV)
Portraying daily living as a walk has a distinct spin.
Walking is not just an activity but a direction.
Paul is asking the Gentiles and everyone to ask a simple question.
What direction is your life headed?
We should never overlook that the daily activities of life will decide where we end.
The destination is determined daily.
For the Gentiles, they must consider it, but all must.
Paul begins not with behavior but their thinking.
Thinking is the seed that grows life.
Our minds create intention, which is then lived in life.
If you don't change your thinking, you cannot change your behavior.
Their minds had created a life of nothingness.
It was aimless and led nowhere worth going.
A life without the meaning God intends breeds despair that crushes the soul.
"They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart."
(Ephesians 4:18, ESV)
Paul uses three phrases to emphasize this worthless thinking that has driven their life.
He says their minds are darkened.
Their condition is a mind trapped in a way that cannot see a light to lead them in the right direction.
Second, he says they were alienated from God due to ignorance.
Their state was total separation from God.
Even if they could have seen the light, their mind was not prepared to grasp its importance.
This inability to open your eyes to truth erects a wall between a man and God.
Finally, he tells the Gentiles that it flowed from a hardness of heart.
The image is prevalent through scripture.
It described the stubborn Pharaoh who refused to let Israel God.
Stephen had called the Jewish leaders "hardened."
This, too, is a medical term referring to calcification.
When I was a boy, older people died from "hardening of the arteries."
The only way they knew to explain what we know now is a build-up of a fatty substance in the artery wall that shuts off blood flow.
The common name is a heart attack.
When you cannot open your heart because it is so calloused, you cannot approach God.
This darkened, closed-minded, calloused way of thinking produced something.
"They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity."
(Ephesians 4:19, ESV)
Paul describes a life of "callousness," which is a result.
Think about a piece of skin that grows hard and calloused.
It doesn't feel pain any longer.
It has lost sensation because of the tough hide.
Lives become that way.
It is not attractive when the apostle describes a life devoid of guilt or shame.
It is unrestrained without boundaries of right or wrong.
All life is determined by getting what I want when I want it regardless of the cost to another.
It is gutter living at its worst, rolling in the filth of sin and not caring about its odor.
In short, when a person rejects God, there will come a time when they cannot see what is wrong in their lives and cannot feel the guilt or shame associated with it.
It is crucial, for instance, when a child starts telling falsehoods that they are admonished and punished.
If ignored, it will be easier the next time until any associated feeling of remorse is gone.
That is the condition Paul's world and ours found themselves in.
Remember the question of this first part is, "what direction is your life headed?
A Changed Life
In verse 20, Paul slaps them with the reality of their change.
"But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus," (Ephesians 4:20–21, ESV)
What they were taught and learned in Christ was not the same.
A lifestyle that marked a Gentile did not fit with the teaching and life of Jesus Christ.
If you lived it, something was out of sync.
A more practical issue presents itself.
Remember, Paul is encouraging the unity of the church.
He is concerned with the differences in background.
Lingering in this passage is "how do you keep people who get irritated with each other from splitting the seams of the church?"
He gives the pathway in verse 22:
"to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires," (Ephesians 4:22, ESV)
He tells them to take off their old clothes.
His language is dramatic and decisive.
Once and for all, take off that old life that doesn't fit now.
Paul is not telling them to alter their life, to make some life hacks to improve them.
He says it is removal.
When I was a boy, a constant staple at our house was iron-on patches.
I suppose every boy has a sense that a new pair of jeans needs to be "broken in," and part of that was busting out the knee.
(If my mother had known how much ratty-looking jeans cost, she might have encouraged the practice.)
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9