Exploring My Strange Bible - Ephesians Part 3: A New Humanity

Episode Date: November 1, 2017

This teaching comes from chapter 4. It is where Paul shifts, specifically from focusing on practical out-workings in day to day life of the grand vision of the good news about Jesus that he explored in the first half of his letter. In the first half of the letter, he shares this grand vision of Jesus as the redeemer and resurrected king of a new humanity that’s made up of every kind of person ethnically/socioeconomically/culturally. The second half of the letter, he explores what it is actually going to require. The character traits, life habits, moral commitment, and the relational commitment that is going to be required to live as this new and different kind of community together. Paul wanted these new followers of Jesus to live and become what they really are, adopting new identities.

Tim Mackey, Jr. utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have. On this podcast, I'm putting together the last 10 years worth of lectures and sermons where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith. And I hope this can be helpful for you too. I also help start this thing called The Bible Project. We make animated videos and podcasts about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology. You can find those resources at thebibleproject.com. With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week. All right. Well, we are in the middle of a series on the podcast where we're exploring key themes in Paul's letter to the Ephesians. These were teachings that I did a number of years ago as part of a series guiding our church through Paul's letter to the Ephesians.

This teaching comes from chapter four. where Paul shifts specifically to focus on the practical outworkings in day-to-day life of the grand vision of the good news about Jesus that he explored in the first half of the letter, chapters 1 through 3, which this grand vision of Jesus as the Redeemer and resurrected King of a new humanity that's made up of every different kind of person, ethnically, socioeconomically, culturally, and it's this super diverse family that's all come together to give their allegiance to Jesus. The second half of the letter, chapters four through six, he explores what it's actually going to require, the character traits, the life habits, the moral commitment, the relational commitment that's going to be required to live as this new and different kind of community together.

He opens up this second half of the letter in chapter 4 with this bold claim about these followers of Jesus in the ancient Roman world, right, living in Ephesus. He calls them new humans. He just straight up says they're new humans. And he just calls them that and then calls them to live like that. This is a classic example of what it means to self-identify as a Christian. It means to adopt a new story about myself. a new story about myself. Even if I don't always live up to that new story and new identity, Paul wanted these new followers of Jesus to live and become what they really are,

adopting a new identity. And so, this is very powerful, and there's a lot of stuff I learned in preparing for this teaching, and I hope it's helpful for you. Let's dive into Ephesians chapter 4. Paul's letter to the Ephesians, Ephesians chapter 4. Most of the letters in the New Testament have some point where you're kind of reading through the first few chapters, and there's a turning moment where it turns from talking about the story of Jesus and what he's all about and what he did to how we're supposed to live in response to that. And so think of Ephesians like a big door. Think about like if you have like a big front door you've ever seen, if your neighbor has

a big front door or something. It's this massive door, and the whole heavy thing just swings on these little hinges. And these hinges are, if you turn to chapter four with me, the beginning of chapter four is this hinge moment in the book of Ephesians. So look how he begins chapter four right here. He says, as a prisoner for the Lord, therefore, here. He says, as a prisoner for the Lord, therefore, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling that you have received. So this is Paul, the apostle. He's begun a number of churches. Specifically, there's a number of churches he's writing to that he personally was connected to

these people coming to faith and forming a church. He spent the first three chapters, which is really, what is that? It's two pages, two and a quarter pages in my Bible, at least. He spent two and a quarter pages telling the story of the good news about Jesus and unpacking its significance and of his life and his death and his resurrection of how Jesus is forming a new multi-ethnic family of people who have placed their faith in him, whose identity is grounded in him. And that's what chapters one through three is about. And so now he moves. Did you see it? He just swung the door right here and on the hinges. And he says, therefore, in light of this calling to be a follower of Jesus, to respond to his grace, I urge you to

live in a way that's worthy of this calling and of this story that you've been invited into. And so chapters four through six, it's like the backside of the door. And it's not like a series of unrelated topics or something. He's really pressing this issue. What does it mean to live out in day-to-day life and circumstances the reality of this gospel that's called us together into a family of people called the church or the new humanity. And so this is the part of the letter where Paul is really going to get specific. He's going to leave no stone unturned. He's going to address all these different areas of just daily life, life relationships and circumstances. And he's just going to rethink it in light of the

good news about Jesus. He's going to talk about anger. He's going to talk about sex. He's going to talk about marriage and parenting. He's going to talk about money and what you do with your money. He's going to talk about lying and truth-telling. He's going to talk about kindness. He's talking about your work ethic. I mean, he's going to talk about everything in life. He's thinking about every aspect of life in light of what he's explored in chapters one through three. Now, here's the catch for some of us. These next three chapters, and therefore the next, like, whatever, month and a half leading up till Christmas, are the parts of the letter where Paul, he gets really challenging. He gives these challenging, like, moral challenges,

moral directives, moral commands. And some of us, we kind of glaze over this part of the Bible because it's the thou shalt and the thou shalt not part, you know? And it's like, oh, yeah, Paul. And some of us, we think, yeah, that's great. It's really challenging. I love it. Others of us and many, you know, contemporaries in our culture think this is Paul at his worst in these parts of the letters because they think of him as like a helicopter parent, you know, who's just like hovering as the moral police over the lives of these Christians, and he's just overbearing, just telling them what to do, because he likes that kind of thing, you know? And I'm caricaturing that, but I think many of us can kind of get that feel when we read Paul's letters. It's like, dang, I really like that other stuff, but now he's

like getting in my business, you know, and telling me what to do, and I don't like that. I'm going to skip and go read the Gospel of John or something like that. That's how some of us react. And so we're going to go right into this section and just get into the nitty gritty. Here's what's most important. It's easy to read this section of Paul's letter to the Ephesians and just think like Paul's utmost concern is people's behavior and telling people what to do. And that's not true. That's not true. You might get that idea if you just did a surface reading. But if you pay close attention, like we're going to do, Paul's, the thing he's most concerned about is actually not just people's behavior. What he's really concerned about is about addressing the core sources and motivations of our behavior. And Paul has a core

conviction. And the moment you see it, it just pops up everywhere in his writings, especially in Ephesians. Paul has a conviction that our behavior, it's just like surface phenomenon, right? The way that we observe each other behaving and treating each other and talking, that's just the surface. What generates all that surface activity are deep, deep issues, deep character issues inside of us. And particularly, Paul, as he makes clear, he wants to address our source of identity. Paul believes that the way that we behave is generated and flows out of who you think you are, your identity, the kind of person you think you are, the kind of worth and value that you believe that you have or don't have, your sense of what makes you who you are, your identity. And that's what he's going right after

in these chapters. In light of the gospel, who are you? And if who you are is changing, then holy cow, Who are you? And if who you are is changing, then holy cow, your behavior is just, it's just going to change. It just follows. And so let's have that up as we go into this part of Paul's letter, and you'll just kind of see it. I'm putting the idea out there, and then we'll flesh it out in a million different ways. You guys ready to dive in? Okay. Ephesians chapter 4, verse 17. He says, Okay, Ephesians chapter 4, verse 17. He says, So I tell you this, and I insist on it in the Lord, that you, and again he's writing to these Christians who are living in the region of Ephesus,

that you all must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking. Now, I got us all riled up, and now we're going to stop for a bunch of minutes here. I just think about this. So, let's stop here. There's something that you could just read right over and see, because it's so subtle what he's doing here. This is so brilliant and powerful and profound, what he just did in that sentence right there. Look at it again. He says, all right, here we go. We're going to live a life worthy of

this calling of the good news about Jesus. I insist on it. You must no longer live as the Gentiles do. Now, Gentile, who used that word in conversation this last week? So that's just not really part of our English vocabulary. What's the meaning of the word? It's an ethnic category, and it just means non-Jewish person. Specifically, it's a word that originated in the Jewish communities to refer to people who are not us. So there are Jewish people, and then there are non-Jewish people, Gentiles. It's a way to refer to every ethnic group that is not Jewish. In other words, most of humanity, right? that is not Jewish. In other words, most of humanity. So don't live as the Gentiles do. Now, just stop and think this through. Who's Paul writing to? Flip the page back to the previous chapter, for example. Look at chapter 3. Look at the first sentence of chapter 3. Look at how he

starts chapter 3. He says, for this reason, I, Paul, am a prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles. Look back further one chapter. Look at chapter 2, verse 11. He says, therefore, remember that you all, you all formerly who are, what does he say? Gentiles by birth. You're not Jewish by ethnicity. And I'm writing to you because I'm in prison on the count of you Gentiles, by birth, you're not Jewish by ethnicity. And I'm writing to you because I'm in prison on the count of you Gentiles. But then all of a sudden in chapter four, he's like, yeah, don't live like the Gentiles anymore.

You're like, what? I am one. You know what I'm saying? It would be like Paul writing a letter to the American, a mess, living in America and saying, don't live like the Americans anymore. You're like, well, I do live in America. So what do you, but okay, so that's this obvious, he's either like mindlessly contradicting himself, which he's not. Can you see what he's doing? He's doing something very, very subtle here. Or maybe it's not so subtle once it's pointed out to you. In other

words, so Paul would, you know, an Ephesian would say back like, Paul, I am a Gentile. I don't, what do you mean? Are you talking about the Gentiles as if there's somebody other than me? And Paul would say, exactly, exactly. So yes, of course, technically you are Gentiles

by birth and ethnicity, but Paul's saying everything of what chapter one through three was about is that your identity is no longer, if you're a Christian, your identity is no longer primarily your ethnic or nationality background. That's not who you are anymore. Your primary identity is something, it's some other category. And so for Paul, you're not Jewish, but you're not a Gentile anymore. You're something else. And that something else, in just a few sentences, he's going to call it the new humanity.

You're a part of this new humanity begun with the new human. That is Jesus, who lived and died and was raised for us, and we'll get into that. But what he's doing right first, right from the first sentences, is he's challenging their sense of identity. The whole thing is going to be very specific commands about not lying and not moving towards anger and forgiveness and not stealing and having a good work ethic. He's going to get really practical. But he begins with this. He says, your primary identity is not what it used to be. You have a new identity. You are a Christian who just happens to be a Greek or a Roman.

You are a Christian who just happens to live in America. But please don't mistake your nationality for who you actually are. That's relative. Who you are is a new human in Jesus. You guys with me here? Now, I want to drill down on this just because this is such a foundational piece of how Paul thinks about the Christian life. Certainly, you know, people observing Christians living or observing religious communities, you know, they think it's like

we're like the moral police or we're all a community that's all about behavior change and just do this and be good religious people. And Paul would just say, wow, that's all about behavior change and just do this and be good religious people. And Paul would just say, wow, that's just misunderstanding everything on such a fundamental level. So the whole point of this thing, it's a change in who we are and that that outflows in a change and transformed behavior that kind of goes and fits and starts as we grow in Christ. That's how Paul always challenges people, to become who you actually are. Now, to give us just kind of a fresh angle on this from another person who did something like this, and then we'll come back into Ephesians chapter four here, but this is so worth exploring and I think wrapping our minds around. As I normally do, I'm going to show you a picture of a stranger and then tell their story because she has a really amazing story. This is a picture of a young woman named Crystal Jones.

I've actually never met Crystal Jones. She is alive. So I've got that going for this story. Normally I show you pictures of dead people, but Crystal's alive. She lives in Atlanta. And I came across her story in a book that was all about the psychology of behavior change. Super interesting. story in a book that was all about the psychology of behavior change. Super interesting. But I was so fascinated by her story, I just was like, well, I want to find more about that story. And so I just looked her up online and contacted her. And then we had this great exchange, and she was like, feel free to share my story. And so I've shared it in a couple contexts, and I'm about to share it with all of you. So Crystal Jones started volunteering with Teach for America. Teach for America. Yeah, sorry, I was thinking AmeriCorps.

It's very similar to AmeriCorps, but it's called Teach for America, which essentially it provides volunteer opportunities for young people, whether before, during, after college, whatever, in their 20s, just to go into lower income neighborhoods and communities in the US

and serve and volunteer. And so she ended up being assigned and going into an under-resourced elementary school in a low-income neighborhood in Atlanta. And so she was assigned over a first grade classroom. And so she didn't have her teaching certificate yet. She's just thrown baptism by fire. And so she's got this whole crew of first graders. In this school, there was no kindergarten. This is first grade, and this is the first time many of these kids are ever, ever sitting in a classroom. I just want to read her description of the kids to you.

Think about how you would feel if you were responsible for this crew. Day one, she says, At the beginning of the year, I had two or three students who could recognize kindergarten sight words, like dog or ball, I imagine. I also had some that didn't even know how to hold a pencil or even a book the right way up. The ones who had never been to school, their behavior just wasn't where it needed to be for them to be in the classroom for that long a period of time. I had students who didn't know their alphabet or their numbers. They were all on different levels.

And no one was where they needed to be for the first grade. What would you do? What would you do? And so here's what she did. And this is what really captured me about her story. She thought about the psychology of first graders. How do first graders think about the world? Who do they think they are? And who do they wish they could be? And she observed some kids, she said, playing on the playground, and it struck her. She

said, you know, when like the first through third graders are all out there during recess, what do the first graders want to be more than anything else? They want to be third graders. And if you've hung out around little kids, you know this. And it starts very early, actually. So I have a two-year-old son, and I think he gives all the indications of enjoying playing with me. And I enjoy playing with him a lot. We have a great time together.

And so we're around in the yard, whatever, and we're having a good time. The moment the neighbor kids come out, like the five-year-olds and the six-year-olds, I'm yesterday's news. You know what I'm saying? Like, he just, there's something, it's just this radar for other kids who are slightly older than him, and he's just mesmerized, you know? And if you think about it, that just kind of makes sense. Like, he looks at me, and I'm like an alien to him or something. I don't know what I am. Like, I'm like way taller than he is, and I speak a different language most of the time,

you know? And he's like, but that kid over there, he's like me. He's just faster, and he has a few more words than I do. And so he just gloms on to these five-year-olds. And so that's what Crystal observed. And so the idea hit on her about how to motivate change in these kids. So from day one, she got the kids in the classroom, and she made this declaration. She said, I'm Crystal Jones. I'm your teacher this year. And I, before June comes, I am going to turn all of you into third graders.

That's what we're going to do here. You're going to become third graders, like it or not. And they're all like, hmm. And so she said, everything we're going to do here. You know, third graders, they can run faster. And they're all like, hmm. And so she said, everything we're going to do here. You know, third graders, they can run faster. Oh, well, no, they can't. Yeah, okay, they can. Okay, well, you know, they can read better. Well, sure, they can do math better, but not for long, because I'm going to make you into third graders. And so obviously, she did all this. She shaped all her curriculum around becoming a third grader and everything

around tests and exams and so on. And so the other thing she did, this is so brilliant. So she instituted this system about how they were to refer to each other in the classroom. And so she began to refer to every student as scholar and then by their last name. So nobody called each other by their first names in her classrooms. It was always Scholar Smith or Scholar Johnson or this. Whenever anybody came in and visited the class, she would introduce the class as her group of budding third grade scholars. And then every morning, she would have the students recite the definition of a scholar. And they would all say out loud, a scholar is someone who lives to learn and is really good at it. And they would say this every day. And she was just this mantra of it.

And she just realized, by this time of year, November, she said it began to work. It began to work. Like people were bummed to miss out. Like if someone had a doctor's appointment, they would be really disappointed. Because like, what if I don't become a third grader? You know, what's going to happen? And she just said she had them. She had them. By Halloween, she knew she absolutely had them. And so here's this really amazing story. So by March comes spring break, and she did a reading comprehension exam six months into the school year, and every single student passed first grade reading comprehension. And for some of them, you know, that's like great progress. For some of them, they were learning ABC six months ago. It just struck me. Here's what she did. She created a community, an environment where she had made a decision about them.

You all are becoming third graders. That's what you all are doing. She didn't reckon about their past circumstances. She didn't base their identity on their skill level. She made a decision about them. You all are becoming third graders, right? And we're going to live to learn, and we're going to love it this year. And she created a community where people addressed each other according to their new identity. Not whatever poor kid from down the street, but you're a scholar, and you live to learn, and you sit right next to me,

and so you're paying attention because I'm going to become a third grader. Dang it. And she just created this environment. Do you guys see what she did here? This is, you guys see where I'm going right here? This is exactly what Paul is 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. It's what Paul's doing right here. As he says, I insist on it. Don't live like the Gentiles. What do you mean? I'm not a Gentile? No, you're not. You're something new. You're something new. And he's going to go on to explain what that something new is. We're going to work through

the rest of chapter four now, but asking and looking at it through this lens of the classroom, of you are all new kinds of humans now. You didn't know that. Did you know that? You're new humans. If you don't feel like it, you need to remind yourself of it every single day because that's who you really are.

Let's watch Paul at work here. Let's dive back in here at verse 17. He says, So I tell you this, and I insist on it, in the Lord, you must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking. They're darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God

because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, or some of your translations have, having become calloused, they've given themselves over to sensuality, so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they're full of greed. So this is Paul's, this is the bleak portrait that Paul paints of who these Christians are not anymore. This is his picture of who they are no longer. It's a really bleak portrait. There's lots of connections to chapter two, Paul's kind of diagnosis of, not kind of, Paul's diagnosis of the human condition. And Josh Gerrills just totally rocked that passage

and that was great. And so go listen to that if you weren't here. But here's, look at verse 19. I think this is what Paul's getting at here with this description. He says, he's describing a state of human beings who've lost sensitivity to evil. When he says like futility in thinking

or uses like darken and understanding or ignorant, he's not saying that, oh, if you're not a Christian, then that means you're stupid. You can't think straight. That's obviously not true. That's not what he's saying. He's talking about moral formation, moral knowledge, moral sensitivity. And because in verse 19 he's describing the story of someone who's become calloused morally. And so he's asking us to entertain this description here, entertain this idea. How does a person, and he's sitting in prison, so I imagine he has some pretty hardened figures in the cells around him. How does a human being get to a place where something that's clearly morally wrong or clearly just

destructive to their body or to themselves or to other people and so on, how does a person get to a place where they actually are fine with that and they think it's okay? And Paul uses this word of becoming calloused, calloused. And, you know, I did the try and be like jars of clay, whatever, play the guitar in college. That didn't really work out for me. But, you know, I did the try and be like jars of clay, whatever, play the guitar in college. That didn't really work out for me. But I did form some callouses. I just indicted myself by saying jars of clay, didn't I? Sorry about that. Anyway. And some of you are like jars of clay, what does that? Whatever. Whatever. Anyway. They're wonderful human beings. I actually had a chance to meet those guys last year. They're really great guys. Anyway, I didn't mean to say any of that. So what I want to talk about was calluses on your fingers.

So if you play the guitar regularly, you know, if you haven't played for a while, you start playing, it hurts, dude. It hurts really bad. Because you have these sensitive little soft nubbies here, right? These little pads on your fingers. The more that you play, right? Your fingers clearly were not designed to do that necessarily

because it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. You got to really get these calloused pads going for you for it not to hurt anymore. That's what he's describing. How does that happen to a person morally? How does that happen? 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. What Paul says, he says it starts in your mind, right? He says it starts in your thinking, in your mindset. There's some darkening, the lights turn off and your ability to make connections anymore. And this is part of Paul's greater portrait of human beings who have estranged themselves from God by declaring themselves to be God and by declaring ourselves to be the ultimate judges of right and wrong for me. And I'm not really interested in your input on that.

Thank you very much. And I'm just captain of my own ship. Here we go. Or I'm captain of the ship that my little subculture defines for me and we're finding our own way. What's right for me is right for me. What might be different than what's right for you.

That's his diagnosis, and it says it leads to ruin for human beings. Because slowly as we begin to redefine good and evil in ways that conveniently excuse my own flaws and failures, right, and create room for that, but highlighting the hypocrisy in everybody else. That's just conveniently how the lines of good and evil happen to fall. Isn't that convenient for all of us, right? And so that's just what happens to us. And so switches begin to turn off.

Things, we begin to make compromises to our own advantage. We find ourselves down a road of decisions at a place where we never imagined where we'd be three years ago or something. It's this moral callousness. And we all form these callouses in different ways. And Paul says it begins with your thinking. It begins by mistaking yourself for God. And so he goes on and he says, he begins to talk about their new identity. Look at verse 20. And he says, he begins to talk about their new identity. Look at verse 20. He says, that, however, is not,

it's not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ. Or some of your translations have that, that is that description up above. That's not how you learned Christ. If indeed you heard about him and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. This is a really dense little description here, but actually it's really accurate, I think. Essentially what he's

saying is when you hear the story about Jesus, the good news about Jesus is life is death and resurrection from you. It's this message in this story that just, if you haven't really heard it before or been internalized it before, it's just, it's like this truth that invades your reality. You have this mindset, this view of the world that you're just fine, captain of my own ship. And then the gospel comes along and just says, dude, you are so screwed up. Like the depths to which you're selfish and compromised and self-focused, like you don't even understand. And that's not really like good news to hear that, you know? But at the same time, the gospel just does this flip on us.

It says at the same time that we are judged and all this stuff is exposed within us, at the same time, it declares about us this decision of God to love us, to absolutely love us and commit himself to us in spite of our deep flaws and failures and brokenness. And so he says, listen, he says, you heard this truth about Jesus. You were taught to think through the implications of the good news about Jesus, and it opened up a completely different way of living. And it's this. He keeps going. He says, you were taught with regard to your former way of life, that is your former identity, you were taught three things, and these are so powerful. Three things here. Count them with me.

Three things. He says, first, you were taught to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by deceitful desires. Here's the second thing. You were taught to be made new in the attitude of your minds. And then the third thing, you were taught to put on the new self created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

And true to form, Paul's mixing all these different metaphors together at once. And there's so many cool things going on here. Let me just point out two. So the word, we're going to do a little Greek geek action here. So let me show you this word self. Do y'all have the word self right there? Take off your old self, put on your new self. Give me nods of affirmation here. Do you have the word self there in that spot? No. What do you have? If you don't have self, what do you have? Man. Okay, we're getting closer.

We're getting closer there. What's that? Or human. There you go. Yeah, exactly. All right, so man in 21st century English means male human. A hundred years ago, it meant humanity. Now we just say humanity, or at least I think we should.

Anyway, so when he uses the word self there, the word that he's using is the word anthropos. Anthropos. Which, there's two words that could be connected to in English. This might be kind of funny. What do you think of when you see anthropos? Anthropology. Now, which anthropology?

Right? So, the store that my wife does cartwheels over or the college curriculum like, you know, studying human cultures and so on. So, I think to really hear what Paul's saying, we need to insert this word humanity here. He's talking about self because he's talking about your humanity as an individual, but the whole front side of the door of Ephesians 1 through 3 is about God forming a new humanity in Jesus. And so he says, this is what you were taught. You heard this word of the good news about Jesus, and it taught you to take off your old identity. And take off, it's the same, he's just talking

about taking off clothes. It's a word about literally like disrobing. So take off your, just like an old shirt or like the bad cardigans that aren't cool anymore or something. I don't know. So take off that. Boom. You take it off. And we're thinking like, easier said than done, Paul. You know what I mean? Like, what do you mean just take it off? This is all wrapped together here. So you take off this old humanity. And how does he describe it here? This is so insightful. He says, you just take off that old humanity that's being corrupted by deceitful desires. This is so insightful. So we're back to Paul's view of how humans behave and why we behave the ways that we do. And so here

he gets through identity, kind of another angle here. He talks about desire. So humans, we have all these desires. And they're good desires. The desire to be in relationship. The desires to be known and know others. The desire to have sex. The desire to have my basic needs cared for. The desire to be in a community of people that know me.

These are good desires. the desire to have meaningful work and have a job where I might get to feel good about it and contribute something to my community. These are good desires. But Paul says, in the old humanity, where we're darkened, where we become the judges of what's right and what's wrong, for me, those desires, they'll trick you. They're deceitful.

They'll trick you. Because're deceitful. They'll trick you. Because those desires will make you think that they are ultimate ends in themselves. And if I could just achieve that kind of career status or just have that financial stability or just be in a relationship with that person, then I'd be worth something. Then my life would have value or meaning.

I'd be secure. My life would be okay. And Paul says, dude, you're buying into the illusion, right? Those desires, if you could attain them, can never give you what you're looking for, which is identity and meaning and worth. And so he says, the old humanity that you took off is just in a lifelong pursuit driven by desires that are constantly tricking you and letting you down. And he says, therefore, those deceitful desires, he says, they're corrupting you.

They're ruining you. Because you just go from one desire to the next to the next. It's just an endless trail of breadcrumbs. And so he says, dude, when you heard the good news about Jesus, you were taught, dude, just take that old humanity off good news about Jesus, you were taught, dude, just take that old humanity off. That's not who you are anymore. And the new you, the scholar, who lives to learn and is good at it, is this right here. It's someone who's being made new in the attitude of your minds, or some of you have in the spirit of your minds.

And so what Paul, you know, it might surprise us for some of us. Paul doesn't say you're taught to take off that old self and then say the sinner's prayer or something like that. He has something much bigger involved, which is about the remaking of your mind. We are all raised or born or enculturated with patterns of thinking about ourselves, ways of thinking about who you are, your identity, how you get by in the world, the worth or the

value that your life has, right? We're all raised with this. And essentially what he's saying is that the gospel enters your life, the story about what Jesus did for you, and it just messes with all of that. In fact, it just reshapes all of it. You need to start from ground zero again and just rebuild your whole view of yourself and of the world and of God and of other people. And so it's about this renewing of your mind. And specifically, again, if we're reading chapters one through three, it's just owning up to the fact that I thought I was perfectly fine getting by in this world, following my desires where they were taking me. And some of us have a bigger trail of wreckage behind us than others.

We all have the secrets that we don't want other people to know. We all have the compromises, the ways that we fudged the rules or done something for our own self-advantage because we declared it to be right and conveniently kind of excused my flaws, my failures. advantage because we declared it to be right and conveniently kind of excuse my flaws, my failures. And so Paul, he just says, if we can come to a place to just own that, just own it, dude. You're messed up. It's like, it's no secret to anybody else, you know. Just own it. Just own it and recognize that whatever humanity is going to have going for it, it has to be from outside ourselves.

Something other than just my ability to become a good person. And that's the good news about Jesus, is God's commitment to screwed up people like us is so permanent and so motivated by his love and care that he came among us as Jesus to live as the kind of human being he calls us to be, but we perpetually fail to be. And on the cross, he absorbs into himself just the collective results of our old humanity, right? Just the train wreck of many of our lives and of human history, the guilt and the sin and the pain. He just takes it all on the cross to its bitter end, to death. But because his love and his grace and his mercy towards people like you and me is so permanent, it's so committed to us,

he raised Jesus from the dead, showing that our sin, that our guilt, and even the 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 your sin doesn't get the last word. It means that your old humanity that you thought is just doing you in and that is just going to sink your life, that God's power, his resurrection power through Jesus to address you in your sin, to love you, to forgive you, and to remake your mind. It's real. It's real. And we're a community of people that are discovering that and experiencing that and trying to understand what it means to live a life worthy of the calling that we've received. Amen? That's this remaking of our minds. You don't do that in a day.

So like you begin that journey. Some of us begin our journey of following Jesus with a moment, with a prayer, with a moment of conviction and a conversation. For others of us, it was a very long, long process. But however you get there, Paul's saying this is about a perpetual renewal of your mind, a new way of thinking, adopting this new identity, which he refers to in the last, in the third thing here. So you've taken off your old humanity. You're letting your mind, your patterns of thinking, your sense of identity be reshaped by the gospel. And look at verse 24. He says, then you just put on this new humanity. You put it on. And what is that new humanity? It's the version of you that's created to perfectly reflect the

image of God. It's the version of you that's meant to be an accurate reflection of God's holiness and his righteousness and his goodness and his character. And so this is really powerful. You know, I don't know how you're feeling about yourself today. You know, if you are feeling crappy about yourself today, this is exactly what you need to hear. How is it that you just put on the new self? And for Paul, this is an act of faith and trust. And it's an act of faith and trust that in Jesus, Jesus has become the version of me that I cannot become for myself. As Josh quoted Karl Barth saying a few weeks ago, it's the courage to trust that I am, I just so perpetually fail to become the kind of person that even I would want to be. I mean,

I, you know, much less God's standard, I fail my own standards most of the time, you know? And so do you. And so the good news of the new self is that by faith I get to put on a version of me that I could only dream of becoming and that Jesus was on my behalf and that he's present with me every day to reshape my thinking and help me go there. Do you see what Paul's doing here?

He's declaring that you all are becoming third graders by the end of this year. And he's declaring that you're a scholar and that you live to learn. You're a new human. If you're grabbing onto Jesus, what's true of him is now true of you. You may not feel like it.

You might not feel like it for a while. That's why it stays, right? You're grabbing on. You just watch. You hang around people who are affirming that identity with you, and you just watch what happens. All of a sudden, patterns of thinking. You remind yourself every single day, whatever your weak spot is, and he's going to go, we're going to blitz Craig through a number of them, whether it's anger or having integrity or the way you talk to people or whatever. He's like, just watch. Just wake up every day for three months and pray these words aloud to yourself and declare who you are

because of what Jesus has done for you. And like set your alarm for noontime prayer. Get out your Bible again. You know what I'm saying? Like get gnarly, right? Get really intense and just see if something doesn't happen. I just might, we'll submit to you that something might happen if you actually took this seriously. If you took it seriously, which doesn't mean wait for Jesus to just bonk you on the head and make you a new person, right?

You got to work for it. You got to take on and put off. You have to do something. And Jesus partners with us in the reshaping of our character. Isn't this a great passage? I think this is good. It's so, well, I don't know.

Maybe you don't think it's practical yet. It's about to get very practical. So now he's just going to flesh this out. What does it mean to put on the new humanity? And he's just going to just go through all these different scenarios. And all these scenarios are all about our relationships. What it means to be in community and that the health of my personal relationships is one of the clearest indicators of whether or not I understand and appropriate my new identity. So look at verse 25. He says, therefore, each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body. So he addresses this old humanity practice

of lying, encounters it with the new humanity practice of truth-telling. And again, just think it through. Let your minds be made new about what's happening when I lie. What am I doing when I lie? I'm projecting a false version of myself, right? I'm projecting a false identity. Did you really say that about her? I mean, I heard that you said, did you say that? No, I didn't say that, right? What's going on in that moment, right? It's this inability to own up to a truth about what I've done. And I would much rather have a false view of myself floating out there in front of people so that people don't actually know who I really am. And that I am, apparently, right now, the kind of person who says those kinds of things. It's about

a false misrepresentation of who I am. It's about perception management. I'm lying to excuse or to cover over who I really am inside. And Paul says, dude, just tell the truth. I mean, you're members of one body together. We're a community of people that acknowledges that Jesus had to die for us. We're so screwed up. You know what I'm saying? Like that's about the worst thing you could say about anybody, you know, really. And so what you're doing in that moment is you're presenting this false view of yourself and it's like, yeah, I'm screwed up, but I'm not that screwed up. You know, you're covering over who you really are. up, but I'm not that screwed up. You're covering over who you really are. And as a community of truth, we expose the old man inside of us and we put it off. And it has to let the spotlight

shine on that. He goes on. He talks about another relational circumstance. He says, in your anger, do not sin. Don't let the sun go down while you're still angry. Don't give the devil a foothold. So I talked about this a couple weeks ago. He addresses this thing of relational conflict, which I'm guessing one or two of us in the room have had before with another person. So you have this relational conflict. And notice, does he say, don't get angry and don't sin?

Is that what he says? That's not what he says. Does the don't get angry and don't sin? Is that what he says? That's not what he says. Does the new humanity get angry? Totally. It's totally. When you get angry, if you're living in close community with other people, sharing about your lives,

dude, you're going to eventually at some point say something or do something and you're going to hurt somebody's feelings. It's going to happen. So how are you going to do? How are you going to deal with that? And so Paul says you have a choice in that moment, because your anger is just energy aroused to protect something, usually yourself. But it's not always bad. Anger might be energy that gets stirred up to protect another person, and that's really good. That's a positive thing. And so the question is, what do you do with this emotional energy in the new humanity? And Paul says, you use it to go

address the person and the situation in the relationship, and you talk it out. You talk it out and you work towards forgiveness. Otherwise, evil spiritual powers can begin to create rifts in the community of God's family. That's how we roll as the new humanity. We move towards conflict resolution. That's what we do. Let's keep going. Verse 28. Anyone who's been stealing must steal no longer,

but needs to get to work, doing something useful with their own hands so that they can have something to share with those in need. And so the old humanity that I've taken off puts myself at the center and will do whatever it takes to, you know, like satisfy my wants and my needs, right? And so the new humanity is just like, no, dude, Jesus is at the center and then right close to him are other people. And that's my mode of living. Jesus, love God and love other people.

That's just how we roll here in the new humanity. And so whatever I need to do, really it's about remaking your mind. Why do I think I want or need that? What is it that wants me to perpetually put myself at the center and just do whatever it takes to get stuff that I say I want or I need? You have to go there.

And you have to remake your mind and you have to think it through. Which means see a therapist or something. But you need to go there. You need to remake your mind so that you can put on this new identity. Let's keep going. He says, don't let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths. Only what's helpful for building others up according to their needs so that it can give grace to those who are listening. And don't grieve the Holy Spirit of God

with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. How many of you, up in verse 29, for unwholesome talk, how many of you have the word rot or rotten? Anybody? Unwholesome? Other translations? The word literally is rotten, like referring to a piece of soggy, mushy, rotten fruit sitting on your counter, right? Rotten. So he's saying don't talk in ways that introduce rot into other people's lives. And I don't think he's, I mean, he might be talking about like dirty jokes or something like that, but what he recommends is the new humanity practice in its place is whatever it is that you say to other people, have it be something so that they walk away feeling like they've been given a gift after being with you? Speech that builds them up, that seeks to encourage them. And so I think whatever rotten

speech is, it's speech that introduces rottenness into the community of God's people. Like, why would you do that, dude? That's your old humanity creeping, right? They're like, check that. Just check it. That's not how we do it here. This is a community of people that's built around the story of God's grace that's restoring and forgiving and transforming human beings. Why would you do that here? That doesn't make any sense at all.

That's not what a third grader does. Scholars don't act like that. Right? Finish it out. Verses 31 and then through the first sentences of five. He says, get rid of bitterness and rage, these intense negative emotions that burst out into what? Into anger, brawling, and slander, along with every form of malice. That's your old humanity. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God

forgave you. It's very, at the end of this kind of barrage of moral commands, it's very easy to feel like, I'm lame, whatever. It's really hard. Or you might feel like, dang, dude, quit telling me what to do. Some of you like the anti-authoritarians, you know? And so he wraps it around. He does exactly at the end here what he did at the beginning. Exactly what Crystal did.

Look at the first sentences of chapter 5. He says, Did you catch the repeated word there? Three times here. and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God. Did you catch the repeated word there three times here? Three times. What does he repeat three times? Some of you are awake. I know it.

The word love. Did you see it there? Love. Now, this is a call. This is the basic core ethic of a community of Jesus, and he doesn't appeal to a principle or some abstract ideal. He appeals to a story. He appeals to the story of the cross, Jesus's life and his death. And he calls that story an act of love. And this is a part of the way that the New Testament completely redefines

our concept of love. This is one area where our minds need to be made new. It's because in the Bible, in the New Testament, the word love, it's the word agape. And we think of love in English as an emotion. In the scriptures, love refers to an action. It refers to acting for the well-being of another person, regardless of how they respond to me. And Paul says this is the basic core ethic of the new humanity here, his agape love. And so he says, listen, walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself for us. We run every decision. We run every word that I speak. You run every way that you relate to somebody. You run every conflict that you're in and how you're going to resolve that conflict. You run it all through

this story. How do I love this person in this circumstance as a part, as an expression of my identity of being a new kind, a new kind of human? And notice he says, how do you, like how, what's the core motivation for loving? He says, because you yourselves are loved. Look at what he says here. You are loved. So walk in the way of love. He doesn't say like, you know, like chin up, pull up your bootstraps and just love people for goodness sakes. No, he's like, dude, you are loved. Do you grasp the significance of that? And it's not some abstract ideal. Like, 2,000 years ago, Jesus did something that was the ultimate act of love for you. And for the rest of your life, you can point to that and say, dude, that was for me. That was an act of God seeking

my well-being before I even existed, before I ever rejected him or knew about him in the first place. He's decided to commit himself to love me through Jesus' action on the cross. That's the defining story of this new humanity. And so it's this tension that Paul invites us into, and it's what I want us to reflect on as we move into our time of worship and the bread and the cup. And some of you, I don't know where you're at in your journey of growth and following Jesus. Some of you, who knows? We're just all over the map. It's door of hope. Trust me, I know this, right? We're just all over the map. And so you might be feeling horrible about yourself right now because you're like, if you actually followed me around with a camera, you'd just see old humanity everywhere.

And there might be some of you who are really experiencing growth for the first season of your life ever. And you're like, dude, the new humanity's popping out. It surprises me even sometimes. And that's really exciting when that does happen. And this is not abstract.

This has to do with anger and lying and your work ethic and the health of your relationships and what you do with your money. I mean, this is where the old and new humanity is at war in our lives. And so I do not know how any of the barrage of things that Paul said connects and speaks God's word to you

and what you need to hear tonight. But I trust that it does because that's what the scriptures do. They mess with us. The good news messes with us. connects and speaks God's word to you and what you need to hear tonight. But I trust that it does, because that's what the scriptures do. They mess with us. The good news messes with us. And so there's some of us here tonight where you just need to hear a reminder of that word of good news. If you've placed your faith in Jesus, you may not feel like it. You may not have lived like it in the last week. But dude, you're a new human because of what Jesus did for you in his life, in his death, in his resurrection. You don't have to live like that anymore. You're actually living out of sync with your true identity as one who has been loved

and forgiven by Jesus. And there might be some of us who are here tonight and we wouldn't self-identify as Christians, or we're just trying to figure out what that even means in the first place. It's this very simple, beautiful statement of what Paul's saying. Would you allow Jesus to become for you what you could never become for yourself? Which first means that you have to acknowledge the mess and the selfishness that's inside of you and means that you have to acknowledge the mess and the selfishness that's inside of you and let that die with him on the cross. And whatever a new, like healed, self-giving love version of you is going to come out the other side, it will simply be an act of his grace and his love at work in your life. Are you willing

to turn to Jesus in faith and let him begin to mess with you and do stuff with you? And I would just encourage you to take that seriously tonight. That's something you need to think about and maybe even pray about. So I'm going to close us in prayer and just allow us to do some heart searching.

Thanks you guys for listening. I hope exploring this passage was helpful for you, challenging that you're thinking new thoughts and have an open mind to new ways of thinking about God and the world and yourself. We're going to keep on in the letter to the Ephesians

on the next episode, so we'll see you then. Thanks for listening.