A New Way of Living
January 28, 2024
If you’d like to know how God can change your life and show the world another way to live, then let me encourage you to open your Bible to Ephesians 4:17-24, where God’s Word shows us how we can experience a whole new way of living. But before we can embrace our new life, we need to know what to do with our old life. So, we’re going to begin by looking at verses 18 – 19, where Paul describes the way of life we’re to leave behind:
The Old Way of Life Without God: 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. 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. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. Ephesians 4:17-19
The old way of life was an empty way of life “you must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking,” The guiding philosophy of life behind their culture was devoid of meaning. It had no purpose. It had no substance. It was going nowhere. It was a culture built on satisfying the whims of the individual. And so, materialism, sexual immorality and violence were an everyday part of life. If you didn’t have what you wanted, you did whatever you could to get it, and often that meant using people to get what you want.
Sound familiar? This is how life works when you follow your own thinking. You become your own authority. You choose what you think is best for you. You do what you want. This is what the media constantly feeds us, through movies and in the classroom today. And what’s the result? “The life of an unbeliever is bound up in thinking and acting in an arena of ultimate trivia. He consumes himself in the pursuit of goals that are purely selfish, in the accumulation of that which is temporary, and in looking for satisfaction in that which is intrinsically deceptive and disappointing.”
The old way of life was an ignorant way of life: 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. People who live without God are ignorant of God’s truth and unable to understand His will or His ways. Since they are darkened in their understanding of God, they are strangers to God, and stubbornly resist God. No longer caring about right or wrong, they’ve thrown off all moral restraints, and embrace outrageous and immoral lifestyles.
Sound familiar? This is precisely what Hollywood promotes, what universities exalt, and what is becoming more and more acceptable in our culture today. Good is called evil and evil is celebrated as good. And yet, this is no surprise to God. For He said this would happen in the last days: But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God – having a form of godliness but denying its power. 2 Timothy 3:1-5
Your old way of life was an ignorant way of life. You didn’t know God and how good life could be with God. But now you’ve been delivered from this former way of living. However, you cannot make the mistake of thinking that now you’ve been delivered, somehow, you’re no longer susceptible to the devastating effects of sin. For here, Paul tells us that a heart hardened by sin is a life alienated from God. This is why God sometimes seems distant. And this may be why your love for God grows cold. For when you play with sin, you can unwittingly harden your heart to God. So, let’s take this teaching to heart. Don’t play with sin. It will harden your heart and distance you from God. T
The old way of life was a diminished way of life: They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. This is what happens when moral restraint is cast off and sin hardens our hearts. Living for self desensitizes you to all morals. It corrupts your desires, and results in unbridled self-indulgence and undiscipline obscenity. So yes, the old way of life isn’t just an empty way of life, it is a diminished way of life. It leaves us hardened to God and it diminishes your soul. God never intended for any one of us to be turned into an apathetic, unfeeling, self-indulgent people who uses others to satisfy their own lusts. But this is the result of pursuing a way of life that ignores God and lives for self.
Our New Way of Life With God:
Our life with God is a Jesus way of life 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 Paul makes an assumption about his readers here. He assumes that when you put your trust in Jesus, you started following Jesus. That another Christ follower came alongside and began to teach you about Jesus. In fact, he assumes you weren’t just taught by one person, but that you learned from other Christ followers as well. You became part of a community of faith, where the sole focus was to learn the truth that is in Jesus.
The new way of life with God is a life with Jesus. You find Jesus and you find truth. You find the way God intends for you to live. The Christian life isn’t about moral rule keeping, religious attendance, merely believing in God or knowing facts about God – it’s all about learning a new way of life with Jesus. When you become a Christian, you do not merely learn about the teachings of Jesus; you develop a relationship with Jesus and learn from Jesus how to live and love like Jesus.
You will learn the way of a servant. You will learn His way of humility; His way of meekness: His way of patience and forbearing love. You’ll learn the ways of His mercy, compassion, and kindness. And when His ways become your ways, the ways you are living will stand out in stark contrast to the ways of this world. You will be different.
Our life with God is a repenting way of life Now part of living this new way of life involves turning away from our former way of life. “to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, Ephesians 4:22 Like old clothes, Paul says you are to shed the identification of the person you once were. That person was enslaved to sin and caught up in the deceptive and futile ways of the world. That person is your old self. That person is who you were before Jesus saved you, cleaned you up and set you free. That person was crucified with Jesus on the cross. That person was buried with Jesus in the tomb. And because you put your faith in Jesus, that person no longer lives. So, God doesn’t see your old self, so neither should you. Instead, He wants you to have nothing to do with your old identity characterized by sin and selfishness. He wants you to discard your old self, and your old way of life. So throw off the corrupt garment of your old self, with all the empty ways of the world, so you can put on the new life of Christ.
What Paul is speaking of here is a lifestyle of continual repentance. This command is in the present tense, meaning that this is something we are to keep on doing. We are to continually throw out the trash. We don’t hold on to it, we don’t toy with it. We throw it out. And the reason we need to do this: to live this lifestyle of continual repentance is that the ways of the world are seductive. The temptations of the world are deceptive. They don’t satisfy you, they diminish you, and they keep you from living the new life God has for you. So, continually throwing out old sinful practices and deceptive ways is part of our new way of life with God.
Our life with God is a different way of life As you discard your former way of life you are to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Ephesians 4:23-24 In other words, when you’ve lived with a mind that has been darkened, hardened, calloused, made ignorant and impure by the corrupt desires of the flesh and deceitful practices of the world, living a new kind of life doesn’t come naturally. You need a new mind.
How does that work? We renew our minds by taking in His Word. As you immerse yourself in His truth, God renews your mind. It’s like this: Have you ever had a virus infect your computer? The first thing you do is download a program to remove the virus. Once the virus is gone, and your operating system is clean, you can reboot your system and it will then run the way it was intended to run, fast and true, without corruption. God’s Word is our new operating system. His Word cleanses our minds and renews them so we can begin to live this new life with Him: fast and true – without corruption. And the more He renews your mind and the more you put on the new self, the more He will fill you with the new operating system of Jesus. And you will begin to live according to the true righteousness and holiness of Jesus.
And when you are living in the true righteousness and holiness of Jesus, you will live a different kind life. For when you live with the righteousness of Christ, you will treat people right. And when you are filled with the holiness of Christ, you will be like Christ. Therefore, when you put off your old way of life and put on Christ, you will be completely different than you were before. And the world will see in you and whole new way to live.
Leave a Reply