Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - The New Self

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

We all want to change. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t say, “I really need to change.” And one of the greatest things about Christianity is Christianity gives you the resources to change. Jesus Christ was born into this world to give us second birth. The idea of being born again means radical change. Often we don’t quite know how change actually happens. But Ephesians 4 gives four concrete principles for how the gospel helps us change. What does change mean to Christians? It means you have to 1) make a decision, and 2) change from the inside. And you do that by 3) transforming your thinking, and 4) being captivated by him. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on December 12, 2011. Series: A Study of Ephesians: Who is the Church? Scripture: Ephesians 4:17–24. Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Welcome to Gospel in Life. When we look at the Christian church today, it's easy to see that there is polarization and disagreement between various groups and denominations. Yet, as Christians, we know the Bible calls us to unity. How can the Gospel bring us together? Join us as Tim Keller preaches through the book of Ephesians, which is all about the church and how Christians can experience deep unity across divisive issues. The scripture reading is from Ephesians chapter 4 verses 17 through 24. So I tell you this and insist on it in the Lord that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking. They are 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, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity with the continual lust for more.

You however did not come to know Christ that way. Surely you heard of him and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught with regard to your former way of life to put off your old self Which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires to be made new in the attitude of your minds and to put on the new self Created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. This is God's word The subject of Christmas is got an infinite number of aspects when it comes to Christian teaching. I'm only going to talk about one of them tonight. It's an aspect that comes

out in that famous carol hymn, Hark the Herald Angels Sing. And there, Charles Wesley has a sing, I forget which verse it is, there's a line that goes, born to raise us from the earth, born to give us second birth. So Jesus Christ was born into this world, why? Just so we could feel peace, love, and groovy vibes on the end of December? No.

Jesus Christ, the spiritual son of God, underwent a human birth so that we, human beings, could undergo a spiritual birth. He was born to give a second birth. One of the greatest things about Christianity is Christianity gives you the resources to change, the resources to change who you are. We all want to change.

I don't know of anybody who doesn't say I really need to change, but here's the resources. Now the idea of being born again, which means radical change, is a great idea. Very often we don't quite know how that change actually happens. In this passage, which is one of the most important passages, has been one of the most important passages to me in my life. When I was looking at my files on other Bible studies and sermons and things I've done on this part of Ephesians,

it is very thick, a very thick folder. And yet in this very, very short passage, it's very short, Paul is tremendously, if you read it carefully, specific. And there are four very concrete principles, I guess you could say, that will help us understand how the gospel, how Christianity helps us change. What does change mean to Christians? And the answer is four things.

It means you have to make a decision. It means you have to change from the inside. You do that by transforming your thinking and by being captivated by him. Okay, you make a decision, change from the inside out, transform your thinking, being captivated by him. Okay, you make a decision, change from the inside out, transform your thinking, being captivated by him. Let's look. First of all, making a decision. Now, obviously, the key to this whole passage is verse 22, you were

taught to put off your old self. And verse 24, to put on the new self. Now, right away, the term put off and put on the new self. Now right away the term put off and put on are very interesting. They're interesting because, and by the way, I want us all to be gracious to the translators, the English translators of the translation we're using tonight. Paul all through this passage coins words

and uses words in extremely unusual ways because he's trying to get across an absolutely unique, amazing set of truths. And as a result, these are very hard to translate. They're very hard to render into English. But put off and put on are in a Greek tense called the aorist, A-O-r-i-s-t. We don't have a tense like that. Not only don't have it in English,

but we hardly have it anywhere else either. And it refers to a single past finished action. And so what Paul's actually telling them is he's reminding them that they have put off the old self and they have put on. They've put off and they've put on. And even though this is, obviously you can tell, put off means put off the old way of life,

put on the new way of life, yeah. And yet, Paul's talking about single past actions, something's already happened, they've already done it, and he's reminding them that they have already done it. And that means, first of all, that to really change means a decisive, deliberate, conscious decision. How does that happen?

A decisive, deliberate, conscious decision, I'm gonna live like this, this is the way I'm gonna live, this is who I wanna be. There's a spot at which you do it. Because Paul's talking about it as if it's over for these Ephesians. They've done it. Now there's a lot more to do.

We'll get to that in a minute. But there is something decisive about what they've already done. What is that? And how does that happen? Well first of all, I think verses 17 to 19 tell us a little bit about it. Here's how it starts.

Notice how he says, I tell you this, verse 17, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do. But guess what? They are Gentiles, he's writing to. He's writing to Gentiles. He says in chapter 3, verse 1, you Gentiles. So what he's actually saying is that even though these were Gentiles, and of course they were living the way Gentiles do He's describing in verse 17 to 19 the way they had come to see their old pattern of life There is no way you know use Illustration is this metaphor is images useful in a lot of ways

don't ask a fish to tell you about water or write a paper on water because the fish will say what's water and most people Who need to make this decisive change can't make the decisive change because they don't see the kind of life. They're actually living Until you get a little distance until you start to be able to see what kind of life you're living You can't make the change now. What kind of life was it that they were living? And it's characterized by two things. One is futility and one is given over. See it says they were darkened in understanding

and the futility of their thinking. That word futility means what it looks like. It means be pointless, to be a waste, to not get what you actually are, what you want. And what Paul's saying is that these Christians had come to see that though at the moment they didn't feel like their life was meaningless, when they looked back at it, they came to realize at a certain point that everything they were doing was meaningless. Why? Because they were separated from the life of God. They're separated from the

life of God. See that? That's an interesting term. See, lots of people say, well, I'm a good person and I'm having a meaningful life and I'm not religious. I think I believe in God. Of course I believe in God, but I don't have this connection with God. I'm not deeply devout. I don't, you know, that sort of thing. Paul's looking back at people who certainly weren't irreligious. They certainly had a lot of belief. They were, a lot of them were religious, or maybe they believed in God,

but they were separated from the life of God. And if you are separated from the life of God, if you don't know there's a God, and if you don't know the God that is there, and if you're not confident of that connection, you realize that everything that makes life meaningful, everything that can make a human life meaningful will be taken away from you. It's almost worse than never having had it. I mean, what are the things that make a life meaningful for a human being? You want love.

Do you realize that no matter how much you think you found love, it's gonna be taken from you? If there's no God, it's all gonna go away. You'll be taken from him or her, them. They'll be taken from you. And then you say, well, I wanna make a difference. I wanna do something that really makes a difference. If there's no God, you know, if you're here by accident

and when you die, that's it, and eventually you'll be completely forgotten. Everything you've done will be forgotten. And everything that eventually, anything that anybody's done will eventually be forgotten. They came to realize, a person makes this change in life, when you come to realize that, you know, I didn't know I was having a meaningless life. Most people who are separated from God don't

feel like they're having a meaningless life, but the people who begin to realize, wait a minute, if I don't have God, then everything I'm doing in the end is fruitless. Nothing I do is really going to be meaning anything. And when you start to be able to see that, and secondly, when you start to see that you've been given over, having lost all sensitivity, they've given themselves over, this means most people think they're free. You're walking along, I don't have God in my life,

but I'm a free person. You're ready to make this big change when you actually begin to see, I'm not, I'm driven by fears. I'm driven by a need to prove myself. I'm driven by all kinds of stuff. There's all sorts of things I'm doing that I really wish I wasn't doing.

In other words, when you begin to see that your life without God is actually a life without real hope and without real control, now you're starting to get ready to say, I don't want that life anymore. See, to have a decisive break ready to say, I don't want that life anymore. See, to have a decisive break and to say, I don't want to live that way, I want to be ruled by this.

I don't want to be ruled and driven by this. I want to be ruled by Christ. I want to be ruled by a master that doesn't enslave me. And then you make the move. And you do it decisively and you say, this is what I'm going to do. That's got to happen at some point. There's gotta be a place in which you recognize

the kind of life you're living without God and you say, I'm not gonna live that way anymore. I want him in my life, I wanna be connected, I want a whole new way of living and you make the break. Now, by the way, I don't want to give you quite the impression that that necessarily happens at one point in time. Actually, over the years, I look back at my own, where did that happen to me?

When did I become a Christian? I mean, and I'll just give you my own narrative. Probably became a Christian when I was 20. Probably made the first of two of these decisions when I was 21. Probably made another one when I was 22 or 23. There was about a three or four year period in which I kind of went from now I'm a Christian, I think, and wait a minute, I don't want to live like this anymore,

I want to live like this. I mean, actually I often tell you, probably the single moment, not because you've got to, not because it has to necessarily work on you in the same way, but to show you what it means to put off and put on. I was at a conference, there was a woman Bible teacher. At one point she looked at us all and she said,

some of you heard this before, because it lives in me forever, if the distance between the Earth and the sun, 92 million miles, was actually just the thickness of this piece of paper, 92 million miles, was actually just the thickness of this piece of paper. 92 million miles. Then the distance between here and the nearest star would be a stack of paper 70 feet high.

And the distance between here and the end of the galaxy that we can, you know, just our galaxy, would be a stack of paper 310 miles high. And our galaxy is just a little speck of dust in the part of the universe that we can see. And if Hebrews 1 1 is right, that there is a God who created all this and he holds all together with a word of his power, she said, with his pinky as it were, is this the kind of God you ask into your life to be your assistant.

Who are you really living your life for? What are you really living your life for? Who calls the shots in your life? And then she said, I want everybody to walk outside and spend one hour asking yourself this question. Solitude, silence, nobody gets to talk. And the whole, you know, this is a camp. College student Christian camp. And she basically said, for one hour,

I want you to ask this question, who am I really living for, who calls the shots in my life? Yeah, I think that's probably where I put off and put on. Or maybe it was a year later. But you've got to find your epiphany, you've got to find your time in which you say, I've had it. This is how I'm going to live. So first of all, there's a decision.

And that put off, put on, because it's in that heiress tense, tells us that this is something that you do and it can be in the past. In spite of the fact, it's like, frankly, it's like getting married. You know why? Because when you get married, you're making these great promises and you've really just started a process, haven't you? You just started to do the things you vowed to do. You've got this enormously long process and yet marriage is a decision.

It's decisive. Before you're not married, now you are. Very similar. So you've got to make a decision. Secondly, that we learn here is that the change that happens, happens from the inside out. That's because Paul says not just you put off your old behavior and you put on your new behavior. That you can see that the terms that are translated, put off and put on, this is a Greek verb that means it's very well conveyed by this, these English words.

It means, it's a word that's usually meant to take off or put on a piece of clothing, a garment, a coat. And metaphorically, in ancient times, Greek writers did use it metaphorically to talk about behavior. And they would talk about putting off and putting on, you know, putting on virtues. So they would say, put off hate and put on love. Put off laziness and put on diligence, that was right. But nobody anywhere, anywhere in antiquity ever used the verb like this.

And that is, put off an old self and put on a new self. This is radical. Notice, well you can't notice quite, if you have the whole text in front of you, by the time you get down to verse 25 to 31 and following, you'll see suddenly Paul starts talking about behavior. He starts talking about it everywhere. He says, okay, he says, don't lie. I'm trying to remember it. It's right here. Don't lie. Don't resent. Don't, it says,

work hard. Care for the needy and the poor. Don't steal. So he has a whole list of behaviors, but he won't let you to that list until you go, you can't get to verse 25 to 31 until you go through verse 22 to 24. He's not talking about putting on and putting off behaviors. He's talking about something, a whole new self. Becoming a Christian is being something before it's doing something. It's a comprehensive inner change, not just to how you live, but to who you are now.

This is the biggest mistake people make, and it's the most common mistake. When I say it's the biggest, it's the worst, and it's the most common mistake people make about Christianity. Christianity is not, ultimately, becoming more moral. Morality, even Christian morality, even Jesus-centered ethics,

morality is not Christianity. When people, I mean, the years whenever I've talked to people who are thinking about becoming Christians, that's always where they go first. And they should never go there first. So what they always do is they say, well I'm thinking about this Christianity but I have a couple questions pastor. Will I have to stop sleeping with my girlfriend or boyfriend? Will I have to start changing the way in which I use my money, well, I have to give more of it away, spend less on myself. Well, I have to forgive my sister,

I haven't spoken to her in months. Well, I have to, you know, behaviors. If I become a Christian, well, I have to do these things or stop these things, and you know, I almost always sit there very, very uneasily and say, yeah. But this is the wrong question. Because you really don't understand what Christianity is all about. Yeah, ultimately, of course, all those behaviors

are down there, verse 25 to 20, 31, but you've got to go through verse 22 to 24. You've got to change yourself. Becoming a Christian is someone, is becoming a new person before, it's a new sets of behaviors. Fifty years ago, take two generations ago, if you took a, well even less than that, more like 25 years ago, if you did a survey of the American public, a little further back with Europe, but fairly recent within America,

if you took a survey and you asked them questions of private morality, particularly sexual morality, and said what do you think is right or wrong, by and large the American public would have pretty much lined up with traditional biblical ethics. And within just a couple decades that's just gone. And everybody says, what happened? And a lot of people, by the way, say, isn't that awful?

Well, here's what happened. You have a whole country of people who put off and put on morality and not put off and put on a new self. The reason why they believe what they believed and acted the way they acted was because that was social pressure. It was the expectation from the outside. It was the outside that said, this is how a decent American person lives.

Nobody does that. Nobody does that. You have to live like that. And we all felt it. And all the pressure's gone away. And what happened? We've changed. No, we really haven't. We never really changed our inside. Our inside was always empty it was all the outside outside pressure you see what we're talking about well you say well what does it mean then to change on the inside and the answer is something like this to change on the inside means at least this it means

getting a new set of motives it means getting a new identity and it means getting a new personal epistemology it means getting a new identity, and it means getting a new personal epistemology. It's easy to assume that if we understand the gospel and preach it faithfully, we will be shaped by it. But this is not always true. How can we make sure that our lives, churches, and ministries are being shaped by, centered on, and empowered with the gospel? Tim Keller's book, Shaped by the Gospel, is meant to help congregants, lay leaders, and pastors

understand how to make the gospel the center of all ministry. In Shaped by the Gospel, Dr. Keller shows how gospel-centered ministry is more theologically driven than program-driven. As you read, you'll discover how reflecting on the essence, the truths, and the patterns of the gospel lead to renewal in your churches and ministries.

This month, when you give to Gospel in Life, we'll send you Dr. Keller's book, Shaped by the Gospel, as our thanks for your gift. Just visit gospelinlife.com slash give. That's gospelinlife.com slash give. And thank you for your generosity, which helps us reach more people with Christ's love. for your generosity, which helps us reach more people with Christ's love. First of all, it means getting a new set of motives.

Why you do the things you do is critical. See up here, here's what we do. Down here, why we do it. You say, well, what does it matter why we do it if we're doing the right thing? Oh, it matters a lot. So for example, how do you get a kid growing up to be honest? How do you train your children to be honest?

Well, I'll tell you, one of the main ways we do it is through fear and pride. So fear goes like this. You better tell the truth truth because if you don't I'll punish you God will smack you around You'll be found out If you get older you lose your job You won't have any friends

Be very afraid if you don't tell the truth. The other thing is pride. There's another way to do it, pride. And here's how pride goes. You don't want to be like those awful people who lie. We're not that kind of people. Our family, our people, we don't like, we're truth tellers, we are. You don't want to be like that. So basically, what's the motivation? It's all about you.

It's not about the poor people that you're lying to. It's not about God who's looking at you all the time and who's a faithful God and who's a truth-telling God. It's all about you. And what that means is you may be an incredibly honest person, but if that's your motivation, basically the reason you're honest is because it pays off for you I can guarantee you there'll be a time coming when telling the truth will not pay off And if that's your motivation you will collapse you will embezzle you will lie

You will falsify and then you will be saying why did I do that? I wasn't raised to live like that. Yes, you were You were raised to look out for number one. Don't you see? Motivation means everything. What is your motivation? Right now, in every church in this whole country, you got people sitting alongside of each other, both of them praying, both of them trying to obey the Ten Commandments, both of them trying to read their Bible for two utterly different motives. One person out of fear and pride. The fear that says, boy, if I don't do this right, I'm gonna go to hell. The pride that says, I'm the good kind of person who comes to church and I read my Bible

and I obey the thing, I'm like these awfully moral people out there. And right next to him or her is somebody who's doing it strictly out of gratitude for free grace salvation. The spirit is different. There's a humility versus a pride. The attitude toward other people is different. There's not a condescension or there is a condescension.

I mean everything is different. Here's your behavior up here. You're doing the same things for utterly different motives. Those motives have got to change and the gospel changes them up radically. It's a set of truths that you take into your center to change the way you think about God, yourself, the world, everything.

And that's just the motivation. Secondly, there's your identity. What is your identity? Well, I think I told you about this. This is just too good an illustration to use. I think I mentioned this a couple weeks ago. I can't remember where, but I remember years ago in the early days of Redeeming there were two guys who both auditioned for the same role. I can't even remember if it was on Broadway or if it was in a television

program. It was a pretty big role and they both were actors and they auditioned for the role. One guy, however, was a pretty successful businessman and his acting was more of an avocation, sort of a sideline. The other guy was doing everything he possibly could, you know, odd jobs, trying to make it big and acting was everything for him. Well, they both auditioned for the same role, I remember that, and they both got turned down. And one guy was devastated, and the other guy was just disappointed.

One guy really had a lot of trouble even getting back on track. The other guy went right along with his life. You know why, you know who it was. See, one guy acting wasn't the core of who he was. And the, and the, the turndown, that is the, the rejection did not get at his identity. His identity wasn't something else. So the turndown didn't get at his identity. So he was okay. The other guy went right after his identity, right after the

thing that he was proud of, the thing that made him feel good about himself, the thing that made him feel like I'm going to count in this world, went right after him. Do you not realize that if you really understand the gospel and you really accept it and you believe its incredible claims about what Jesus has done for you and who you are in him, nothing that happens in this world can actually get at your identity except maybe your own disobedience to God in which you say I'm not really living up to what I what God has done for me and

even there it doesn't come from oh God's gonna now punish me because now there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus and so for you realize what what's going on when you shift that identity it makes all the difference to how you process everything. Everything that happens, rejections, disappointments, criticism, everything has changed because your identity's changed. Your life's changed because of the motivation,

your life changed because of the identity, and your life changes because of what I call personal epistemology. Some of you are saying, what is that? It's just a word that means this. How do you know what you know about right and wrong? How do you know what you know about right and wrong? How do you know what you know? People say, well, I believe this is right

and I believe this is wrong and I believe this is how people ought to live. Where do you get that from? Do you get it from television? Do you get it from popular culture? Do you get it from your friends? Do you get it from some kind of internal gut feeling? Or do you get it from the word of God? See, or do you get it from the word of God?

See, you're gonna get it from somewhere, and that's what we call our personal epistemology, epistemology meaning how you know things. And when that shifts to the word of God, that also changes the way you do everything. And only when this happens, and you begin to change from the inside, are you a Christian.

But you see, you've got to recognize that. Listen, Christianity and morality are so different in two ways. Morality, putting off and putting on morality means becoming nice. Putting off and putting on a new self means becoming new, new. Christianity's not about being nice,

it's about being new. It's not about niceness, it's about newness. And there's two things I can tell you that are very different between Christianity and just being a moral person. One is growth and one is warmth. Growth meaning, in morality, you look at your moral standards

and you applaud them. You applaud truth, you applaud morality. But in Christianity, you're supposed to take that truth into you. Colossians 3.16 says, let the word of God dwell in you richly. What's that mean? I don't even know.

But it means truth is a living thing and you take it into you and it changes you from the inside See nice people are just nice, but new people grow they become humbler wiser deeper happier And also there's a difference between morality and Christianity you can see in the area of warmth What I mean by warmth The trouble with all moral

systems that say, you don't need God, you don't need Jesus, all that matters is you be a good person. You set your standards and you get up the courage and you summons up everything in yourself and you live the way you want to live. That approach, which sounds very inspiring, only eventually. It's like a net that catches whales, but none of the guppies. It's only good for very cultured and very strong and unbelievably self-controlled people. People who are successes. What about us failures? Morality has nothing to say to failures. Has nothing to say when you are a failure.

Morality all by itself itself apart from the gospel, apart from the grace of God that says, in spite of your failures, I love you because of what Jesus has done. And morality is so, morality is beautiful. Moral standards are beautiful, like a snowflake. Intricate and freezing. Intricate and freezing.

Change from the inside out. Thirdly, briefly too, but it's crucial. The practical key to how this change actually comes about. Remember I told you it's like marriage. At marriage you just make the decision, but then you have to have this change on the inside. How does it work? And the answer is verse 23 is the key. I'll just give you one good illustration of it.

In verse 22 it says, you have put off the old way, the old self, and you have put on, verse 24, the new self. That's past tense. It's over. But in the present progressive is this thing in the middle. And be made new in the attitude of your minds. Again, let me, let's, I gotta tell you that the translation isn't very good here and it's actually got a problem. It literally says, Paul says, in the spirit of your minds,

be made new, be renewed. It's a present progressive, something you have to be doing all the time, in the spirit of your thinking, it says. Those are two words that almost never come together. What does it mean to be the spirit? That's literally what he says, the spirit of your thinking. And most experts, linguistic experts say, probably Paul seemed to be getting across the idea

of not so much as saying, I want you to think, you know, in this way or that way. He's not talking about logic or reasoning per se. He's talking about the very direction of your thinking, the theme of your thinking, the heart of your thinking. It's some kind of transformation to the very roots of your thinking. And I think I know what he's talking about.

He says, if you put off and put on, he says, I want you to basically live that out through the transformation of your thinking. How does that work? Almost everything I've learned about how to pastor people was taught to me by people, not by other pastors or professors or books. And then I found them in the scripture and said, oh, so that's why that happens. I remember years ago, one of the first people I met in my little town of Hopewell that was in my church, and he was a first person I got to know pretty well.

And he was a, he was functionally illiterate. He was an older man. He was physically disabled and he was mad. He was mad. He was mad. He was mad at people of other races. He was mad at his family, he was mad at his children for how they were living, he was mad at his wife, he was mad at everybody.

And then he came under the preaching of the word, and he began to understand the gospel, I'll never forget one day, that I was spending time with him because he clearly was changing. His wife said he was changing. The anger was going away. He was becoming a very different person from the inside out. And of course I spent some time with him knowing

that he was responding somehow, but I couldn't quite tell why and he couldn't either. But one day he says, well, here's the thing. He says, you know, whenever people do this or that to me, there's always, used to be always a voice I had no answer for. I said, what voice? Well, the voice would be, you are an illiterate,

you will never amount to anything. And I said, well, where did that come from? Is that your mother or father? He says, oh, don't psychoanalyze me. You know, he didn't say it like that. He didn't know that word, I'm sure. But he said, he says, no, it's just always been there. But he says, I got an answer now.

When the voice says, you will never amount to anything, he says, you know, what I've been learning from the gospel is that I used to think that God just had you on eternal probation until judgment day. And that you better really be good. He was like the worst schoolmaster, he was like the worst, my worst second grade teacher. He was like, you know, he said, I just thought it was awful.

And then I realized in the gospel, now there's no condemnation for me, and I'm accepted and he loves me. And if that's the case, then when I hear that voice saying, you are never amount to anything, I always say, I already am something. Because Jesus loves me so much that he was willing to do anything for me and I start telling myself the gospel. What was he doing? He'd been transformed

in the spirit of his mind. See, that's the difference because that's that is why he was more and more doing what Augustine did, very hard to have a better illustration than this. You know, St. Augustine was something of a sex addict, they say, and the story goes that a couple years after his conversion and his change, he was at some other city that he hadn't been in for a while and one of his old mistresses came running up to him

and started, you know, kind of being very familiar and he was very polite to her and he was very nice to her, but he didn't respond in the old way and he started walking away and she was puzzled and then, you know, why didn't he paw me? Why didn't he invite me? Why didn't we go? And she had an idea and she called to him as he was walking away and said, but Augustine, it is I. And he said, he turned around and he said, I know,

but it is not I. He'd been transformed. He was taking his new identity and he was using it. He was letting it transform his thinking. Hey, one last thing. Do you notice something very important? There's one obvious, but easily to miss anyway, and one unobvious thing that I need to close with.

It doesn't say make yourself new in the attitude of your minds. It doesn't say renew the spirit of your thinking. It says be renewed. It is not something you can actually do. It is something you can receive. It really means to be captured by something. And therefore some translators say, be renewed in the spirit of your thinking

means to have your imagination captured. Be caught up in something. And what is that something? Well, verse 20 again is a very, it's a very difficult verse to translate. Like I said, let's be kind. You, however, did not come to know Christ that way. But literally it says, you did not learn Christ that way.

And this is another one of those verbs that the experts in ancient Greek say, the word learn is always, it's a verb that can always be used with an object like a book or a body of truth. Nobody ever, ever is said in ancient antiquity is called to learn a person. But you see, my friend who finally overcame his inner demons about his illiteracy and that he wouldn't amount to anything.

He wasn't just thinking of abstraction, he wasn't thinking of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, even though it wouldn't amount to anything. He wasn't just thinking of abstraction, he wasn't thinking of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, even though it wouldn't have been a bad idea for him to think about it. He was thinking of Jesus. He was looking at Jesus. And here's the best way for you

to really have yourself changed from the inside out. Look at him doing the opposite, because it's Christmas. Look at him doing the opposite of what we now can do. We put off the old corrupting and corrupt nature, the weak nature. We put that off, we're putting on a new self, which is getting stronger and stronger, righteousness, holiness, and eventually will be glorious

and beautiful and perfect. That's what we're doing. You know why we're doing that? Because Jesus Christ did the opposite. He was glorious and perfect, Philippians 2. He was equal with the Father. He had a glorious perfect self, and what he did was he laid it aside,

and he took on a weak, suffering, vulnerable human nature, knowing what was gonna happen to him. He lost all of his beauty and glory and took on our weakness so that we could shed our weakness and take on beauty and glory. See, it's not enough just to learn abstract principles. Think about the truth in some general way. That's not what's going to transform your mind

and that's not what's going to change you from the inside out. It's learning a person, looking at what he did at Christmas for you. Let's pray. Our Father, we thank you that it is possible to change. And you've given it to us right here. We need to make a decision. We need to start looking at our insides before we look at our behavior. We need to be a decision. We need to start looking at our insides before we look at our behavior. We need to be transformed in the spirit of our thinking

by having our imaginations captured by Jesus and what you did, oh Lord, for us, and then applying it in the day in and day out, moment by moment, living of our lives. And we pray, Father, that you would help everybody hearing this message now. And we pray, Father, that you would help everybody hearing this message now, make a stronger commitment to change

and better practice speaking the gospel to their own hearts. And we pray that you would help us do this through Jesus. In His name we pray, amen. Thanks for listening to today's message from Tim Keller. If you have a story of how the gospel has changed your life or how Gospel in Life resources have encouraged or challenged you, we'd love to hear from you. You can share your story with us by visiting gospelinlife.com slash stories. That's gospelinlife.com slash stories. That's gospelandlife.com slash stories.

Today's sermon was recorded in 2011. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. you