What is Paul up to in his letters? Paul’s core conviction is that fundamental change happens to us, when our very sense of who we are is completely revolutionized behavior, follows our sense of identity. Don’t live like the Gentiles, because we are something new, we are all new kinds of humans now, Ephesians 4:17-32. This is Paul’s bleak portrait that he paints of who these Christians are no longer. What Paul’s getting at with this description, he’s describing a state of human beings who’ve lost sensitivity to evil, he’s talking about moral formation, moral knowledge, moral sensitivity, he’s describing the story of someone who’s become calloused morally. Paul’s asking us to entertain this idea, how does the human being get to a place where something that’s clearly morally wrong or clearly destructive to their body or to other people, where they are fine with that. Paul uses this word of becoming calloused, someone gets to a place where they become so hardened to the well-being of other people or themselves, that they make decisions like that.
Paul says, it starts in your mind, in your thinking and your mindset, there’s some darkening, the lights turned off and our ability to make connections anymore. This is Paul’s greater portrait of human beings who estranged themselves from God by declaring themselves to be God and by declaring themselves to be the ultimate judges of right and wrong, they are the captain of the ship that their little subculture defines for them. Paul’s diagnosis leads to ruin for human beings, because slowly as we begin to redefine good and evil in ways that conveniently excuse our own flaws and failures and highlighting the hypocrisy about every body else. We begin to make compromises to our own advantage, we find ourselves down a road of decisions at a place where we never imagined, we all form these calluses in different ways. Paul says, it begins with your thinking, it begins by mistaking yourself for God.
Essentially what Paul is saying, when we hear the good news about Jesus is life, his death and resurrection, it’s this truth that invades our reality. We have this mindset, captain of our own ship, and the gospel comes along, the depths to which our selfish and compromised and self-focused ways are not really good news to hear. All this stuff is exposed within us and at the same time the gospel declares about us, this decision of God to absolutely love us and commit himself to us in spite of our deep flaws and failures and brokenness. We heard implications of this truth about Jesus and it opened up a completely different way of living, put off your old-humanity, be made new in the attitude of your minds and put on the new-humanity created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. Paul’s mixing all these different metaphors together at once, but the front side of Ephesians is Paul’s visions, chapters 1 through 3 is about God forming a new humanity in Jesus.
Deceitful desires, we are back to Paul’s view of how humans behave and why we behaved the way we do, but we have all these desires and their good desires, but in the old humanity where we’re darkened, where we become the judges of what’s right and what’s wrong, those desires, they’re deceitful. They will trick you, because those desires will make you think that they are ultimate ends in themselves and if we could just achieve career status or have that financial stability, then we’d be worth something. Those desires, if we could attain them, can never give us what we’re looking for, which is identity and meaning and worth. The old humanity that we took off, is just in a lifelong pursuit driven by desires that are constantly tricking us and letting us down, they’re ruining us, because we just go from one desire to the next, it’s an endless trail of breadcrumbs.
Someone who’s being made new in the attitude of their mind, but Paul doesn’t say take off that old humanity and then say the sinner’s prayer, there’s something much bigger involved, which is about the remaking of our mind, because we been enculturated with patterns of thinking about ourselves, our identity. The gospel enters our life, it’s just owning up to the fact that we thought we were perfectly fine getting by in this world, following our desires where they were taking us and some of us have a bigger trail of wreckage behind us than others, but we all have those secrets that we don’t want other people to know, we all have the compromises, but if we can just come to a place and just own it and recognize that whatever humanity is going to have going for it, it has to be from outside ourselves, our ability to become a good person and that’s the good news about Jesus, is God’s commitment to messed up people like us. God raised Jesus from the dead, showing that our sin and our guilt and even death itself, that’s been created in our world, does not have power over his love and his grace for us. The resurrection of Jesus means that our sin doesn’t get the last word, it means that our old humanity that we thought is just doing us in and that is just going to sink our life, that God’s resurrection power through Jesus to address us in our sin, to love us, to forgive us and to remake our mind. We’re a community of people that are discovering and experiencing and trying to understand what it means to live a life worthy of the calling that we’ve received.
Paul says, it starts in your mind, in your thinking and your mindset, there’s some darkening, the lights turned off and our ability to make connections anymore. This is Paul’s greater portrait of human beings who estranged themselves from God by declaring themselves to be God and by declaring themselves to be the ultimate judges of right and wrong, they are the captain of the ship that their little subculture defines for them. Paul’s diagnosis leads to ruin for human beings, because slowly as we begin to redefine good and evil in ways that conveniently excuse our own flaws and failures and highlighting the hypocrisy about every body else. We begin to make compromises to our own advantage, we find ourselves down a road of decisions at a place where we never imagined, we all form these calluses in different ways. Paul says, it begins with your thinking, it begins by mistaking yourself for God.
Essentially what Paul is saying, when we hear the good news about Jesus is life, his death and resurrection, it’s this truth that invades our reality. We have this mindset, captain of our own ship, and the gospel comes along, the depths to which our selfish and compromised and self-focused ways are not really good news to hear. All this stuff is exposed within us and at the same time the gospel declares about us, this decision of God to absolutely love us and commit himself to us in spite of our deep flaws and failures and brokenness. We heard implications of this truth about Jesus and it opened up a completely different way of living, put off your old-humanity, be made new in the attitude of your minds and put on the new-humanity created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. Paul’s mixing all these different metaphors together at once, but the front side of Ephesians is Paul’s visions, chapters 1 through 3 is about God forming a new humanity in Jesus.
Deceitful desires, we are back to Paul’s view of how humans behave and why we behaved the way we do, but we have all these desires and their good desires, but in the old humanity where we’re darkened, where we become the judges of what’s right and what’s wrong, those desires, they’re deceitful. They will trick you, because those desires will make you think that they are ultimate ends in themselves and if we could just achieve career status or have that financial stability, then we’d be worth something. Those desires, if we could attain them, can never give us what we’re looking for, which is identity and meaning and worth. The old humanity that we took off, is just in a lifelong pursuit driven by desires that are constantly tricking us and letting us down, they’re ruining us, because we just go from one desire to the next, it’s an endless trail of breadcrumbs.
Someone who’s being made new in the attitude of their mind, but Paul doesn’t say take off that old humanity and then say the sinner’s prayer, there’s something much bigger involved, which is about the remaking of our mind, because we been enculturated with patterns of thinking about ourselves, our identity. The gospel enters our life, it’s just owning up to the fact that we thought we were perfectly fine getting by in this world, following our desires where they were taking us and some of us have a bigger trail of wreckage behind us than others, but we all have those secrets that we don’t want other people to know, we all have the compromises, but if we can just come to a place and just own it and recognize that whatever humanity is going to have going for it, it has to be from outside ourselves, our ability to become a good person and that’s the good news about Jesus, is God’s commitment to messed up people like us. God raised Jesus from the dead, showing that our sin and our guilt and even death itself, that’s been created in our world, does not have power over his love and his grace for us. The resurrection of Jesus means that our sin doesn’t get the last word, it means that our old humanity that we thought is just doing us in and that is just going to sink our life, that God’s resurrection power through Jesus to address us in our sin, to love us, to forgive us and to remake our mind. We’re a community of people that are discovering and experiencing and trying to understand what it means to live a life worthy of the calling that we’ve received.
