00:00:00:25 – 00:00:33:00
Clint Loveall
Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Thanks for being with us. We are, moving through chapter four here in Ephesians. Today we find ourselves starting with the 17th verse. I would I think my goal for my memory is hanging in there. This might be the first little bit of correction or. I mean negativity might be a strong word but this there’s a little edge to this in a way that I don’t think we’ve seen before.

00:00:33:00 – 00:00:54:38
Clint Loveall
So let’s jump in, I’ll read a few verses. We’ll come back and and have some discussion. Now I affirm and insist on this in the Lord. You must no longer live as Gentiles, live in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart.

00:00:54:43 – 00:01:38:46
Clint Loveall
They’ve lost all sensitivity, have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. That is not the way you learned Christ. For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him. As truth is in Jesus you were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and debased by its lusts, to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

00:01:38:51 – 00:02:18:33
Clint Loveall
So, interesting here that in a letter written ostensibly to Gentiles, or at least largely to Gentiles, Paul knows that many Gentiles will be among those hearing the letter, he now says that he insists that they no longer live as the Gentiles live, and, that could sound pretty harsh, I think. But if we take literally what Paul has already said, that the in Christ there are no longer Jews and Gentiles now, Gentiles here would not be a contrast to Jewish people, but a contrast to the Christian way of life.

00:02:18:37 – 00:02:54:04
Clint Loveall
It would be, sort of a way of saying pagan, way of saying, people outside of the faith. And Paul obviously does not have a high sense of how they live. So he is warning these Christians that the way of life outside of the church is to be shunned is to be avoided. That the way people live in what Paul would call the world is not the way of life for those in the church, for those in Christ.

00:02:54:09 – 00:03:02:09
Clint Loveall
I think if you give this a careful reading, Michael, he’s not particularly harsh on the church people here, but he certainly does say some hard things.

00:03:02:14 – 00:03:28:33
Michael Gewecke
I think that this is a fascinating turn in the text like this, because to your previous point, there is a sense in which here Paul has moved into a corrective tone, and there is a kind of course setting happening here. We see this more clearly in a book like First or Second Corinthians, where, quite frankly, there’s a laundry list of items that need addressed and you can sort of go in bullet point form from one concern to another.

00:03:28:33 – 00:04:00:15
Michael Gewecke
Here it’s interesting, the concern being lifted. You have to remember all of the times that we’ve spent together so far and we’ve talked about unity, we’ve talked about the idea of barriers come down. We’ve talked about the difficulty of differing groups coming in and being united together in the reality of the faith here, isn’t it striking once we start looking at where the rubber meets the road, the moral understanding of what the faith inculcates within the people, the question, how then shall we live?

00:04:00:19 – 00:04:45:59
Michael Gewecke
We come down to the concern about dark and understanding, alienation from the life of God. Why? Because of ignorance and hardness of hearts. That itself is a very powerful description, and I think it’s worth pausing for a moment to think about. The problem here is a lack of understanding. The problem is a hard heart. The problem is that there’s this lack of seeing exactly how God has put the world together, and a kind of callousness to the reality of how the patterns of living in the world are creating a negative lifestyle, and a negative in the sense that it’s outside of God’s plan, outside of God’s best, outside of God’s will.

00:04:46:12 – 00:05:12:21
Michael Gewecke
And so therefore, there’s a kind of correction that needs to come for those inside the church. The opposite. The antonym is. Of course, you need to have understanding and you need to have softened hearts. You need to be the kind of people who are sensitive. And we have that in verse 19. The Gentiles, in this context, they’ve lost sensitivity and abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greed, to practice every kind of impurity.

00:05:12:30 – 00:05:35:01
Michael Gewecke
There’s a kind of the they don’t know better subtext written here. And I think that’s a really striking way to understand the difference between those who are inside God’s plan. Those who know better, those who have been told and have been shown and modeled and seen in Jesus Christ. What it’s like to be knit together into this other way of living.

00:05:35:06 – 00:06:02:35
Michael Gewecke
Those who don’t have that are living in a completely different understanding of the world. And there’s a kind of call here. Back to the basics to say that fundamentally, the only thing that matters is that you live out what you learned in Christ. That’s verse 20, and fundamentally, that’s going to call you away from a kind of, listless or a foundation less life like, you see, for those outside the church.

00:06:02:40 – 00:06:32:47
Clint Loveall
I just said this in another Bible study context that the New Testament is not optimistic about the way of life out in the world, but it is also never surprised when the world acts like the world didn’t. If you read this description of life outside of the church, you know they’re diluted, they’re debased, there’s every kind of impurity, etc., etc. The New Testament just takes that for granted.

00:06:32:48 – 00:06:59:27
Clint Loveall
It’s not. It. It’s even hard to call it a criticism for the for the New Testament. It’s just, essentially it’s calling water wet. It’s just saying that that’s how it is outside of Christ. And so whenever we might be surprised about, can you imagine people would act like that? Can you imagine this happens or that happens? The the New Testament says, yeah, definitely.

00:06:59:27 – 00:07:27:38
Clint Loveall
I can certainly imagine that. And Paul seems to reflect that here. What that does for Paul, though, is to put the idea of choice constantly before the Christian. You are no longer that he says to people of faith. You have learned a different thing. That is not the way that you learned Christ. You’ve heard about him and you were taught in him.

00:07:27:43 – 00:07:44:12
Clint Loveall
And the truth is, in Jesus you were taught to put away that life, your old self, which is corrupt and deluded by lusts, and to be renewed, to be made new,

00:07:44:16 – 00:08:15:36
Clint Loveall
I one of our struggles, perhaps, Michael, is that we are very much always kind of tempted to think of ourselves as generally good people. And sometimes I think that makes this language about being remade, that that really in Jesus, we are called to be different than we would be without him. We are not just decent humans who add Jesus to our our mix, right?

00:08:15:36 – 00:08:47:26
Clint Loveall
We are. We are called to be different. We’re called to different morals, to different standards, to different speech, to different conduct. We are to be made new, renewed in Jesus Christ because of our faith and to clothe ourselves with. And there’s the language again, a new self according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness, and, you know, we have to be careful of that, because you could certainly wield it as a club.

00:08:47:31 – 00:09:04:12
Clint Loveall
But that’s the invitation that Paul sees in the gospel that we could live beyond the standards of the world, and that in Christ we could become something new, something different, something I mean, Paul would undoubtedly say something better, something improved.

00:09:04:17 – 00:09:31:21
Michael Gewecke
I think that it’s important that we see the difference between these two ways of being in the world and the source from which they come, because it really matters. We’re supposed to here in verse 22, put away the former way of life old, self, corrupt and deluded by what its lusts. That’s important to be renewed in the spirit of your minds.

00:09:31:26 – 00:10:01:31
Michael Gewecke
There’s going to be a lot of theological work done on this. There’s a lot of historical cultural commentary done about this. So we’re not going to be able to scratch this, but it’s worth pointing out here that this is a constant tension, certainly throughout Pauline letters. But also in the New Testament writ large, this tension between the lust, between the flesh, between the the body, it sometimes gets said, and the mind, the spirit.

00:10:01:31 – 00:10:31:08
Michael Gewecke
This activity of God’s work, this foothold inside our reality, these two things are set against each other. Sometimes we’ve gone way off the path, I think, looking for the distinctions between them and how they’re connected. And sometimes we’ve gotten so in the weeds. We’ve missed the point. If you’ve ever, you know, been around a child or been around a young person and you’ve seen them do something crazy, like you’ve seen a kid just take a rock and look at it and have the thought gone in their mind.

00:10:31:08 – 00:10:47:22
Michael Gewecke
I wonder what happens if I throw this at the window, and then they throw it out the window and you can see sort of over their forehead, like the ticker that says, oh, I didn’t think it was going to break the window. And you would like to ask, well, what did you think was going to happen that there’s a little bit of that in a text like this?

00:10:47:22 – 00:11:22:23
Michael Gewecke
Clint. The other way of living in the world’s way of living, it’s the passion and impulse of the flesh. It’s the non moderated, non thoughtful, non spirit transformed part of us that if left onto its own device, we just go crashing into the world. And all of these, lack of responsibility and lack of restraint and all of the things that can be dangerous in the community just flow out of us because of this sinfulness that lives at the center of our hearts.

00:11:22:28 – 00:11:48:41
Michael Gewecke
But then the reality is Christ is at work. There is a kind of renewing that comes even in the spirit of our minds, and that renewing as a way of restraining this part of us. And it allows us to participate more and more in the very likeness of Jesus Christ Himself. There is a kind of perfection that is constantly at work within us, renewing and making us such that we are able to live in that community in a new way.

00:11:48:54 – 00:12:14:58
Michael Gewecke
It it respects the fact that we’re still human, we still have brokenness. And even as we continue to grow, we’re merely growing as humans. But yet the fact of the matter remains that if we just take off the bounds, we live as the Gentiles do, without any law, without any guidance, without any gospel. Fundamentally, we’re just going to be crashing through the forest of life, doing whatever things feels right to us.

00:12:15:12 – 00:12:23:33
Michael Gewecke
And Paul’s argument would be that that is fundamentally a darkened way of living, and not the path Christians are called to live.

00:12:23:38 – 00:12:54:27
Clint Loveall
One of the troubling criticisms leveled against the church in every age has been to notice that often, the church doesn’t look particularly different than the world that people in the church can be judgmental and selfish and greedy and take advantage of one another, can gossip, and can struggle with all of the temptations and give in to the temptations of the people in the world around them.

00:12:54:27 – 00:13:42:46
Clint Loveall
And of all the things that the church could be critiqued for, that one, I think in some ways is most damning because it so goes against the grain of of the New Testament ideal of the New Testament imagination for the people of Christ. Paul falls directly in step here with the rest of the New Testament, that the people of Jesus Christ, the Church of Jesus Christ, the body of Christ, should be something different than the world around it, that it should be demonstrably different, that it should be quantifiably different, that there ought to be different standards, different ways of treating one another, and and that we ought to be known for such.

00:13:42:46 – 00:14:27:18
Clint Loveall
And I think one of the one of the hard realities of the church is that sometimes we look kind of like the world around us in ways that maybe aren’t, aren’t always good. And so, this is in every generation, I think, a call, a clarion call to for the church to seek to do its best and not not in a sense of superiority, not to be better than others, but certainly to try and live up to a different standard in Jesus Christ, and to do so, faithfully, successfully, publicly, and noticeably so.

00:14:27:23 – 00:14:39:28
Michael Gewecke
One of the difficult parts of reading a text like this is to come across a word that we don’t use very often. I can’t remember the last time I’ve said the word licentious cleanse. Yeah, and which.

00:14:39:28 – 00:14:42:22
Clint Loveall
Is a nicer word in English than it is in Greek.

00:14:42:28 – 00:15:06:36
Michael Gewecke
Yeah. So I just wanted to quickly. We have nine of these in the New Testament and they’re translated slightly differently. You’ve got no, I’m. Yeah. So six times you have it, the word is translated, lascivious. And then you have wanton twice and filthy once. But this is, I think maybe a helpful way to understand that word.

00:15:06:41 – 00:15:37:24
Michael Gewecke
There’s a wantonness or outrageousness or shamelessness. And I think that connects when you live in the world and you’re causing destruction to people and you’re causing destruction to community, and you’re. By the way, we just left a section where the chief subject was love, that being knit together in Christ brought a community of love. So here, this idea that there’s a shamelessness, a wantonness, there’s no boundary at all.

00:15:37:24 – 00:16:11:57
Michael Gewecke
And people live out of that in the world in a way that causes destruction in the world and in the community. When you think of that from the perspective of the Christian church, when you think of that, of the struggles we’ve already teased out within the churches of Ephesus, it is fascinating, then, that the idea that taking off all structure and all support and all guidance and just allowing people to live out of their feelings, out of their gut and do whatever feels right, it doesn’t take a PhD.

00:16:12:01 – 00:16:36:36
Michael Gewecke
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that is going to, over time, degrade the strength of the Christian community. It’s going to detract from the effort of differing people with lots of boundary walls that they would love to build back up, that have been torn down. It’s going to make it very hard, then, to create a kind of unified place where Jesus Christ is at the center.

00:16:36:36 – 00:17:00:32
Michael Gewecke
So the whole point of this diatribe, I’m sorry that was so long, is just simply to say, don’t mistake this for being a simple moralism. This isn’t just Gentiles are bad. Don’t be bad. It’s it has a intended outcome. There’s a powerful why. The why is we seek to be people who live in to the way of Christ, because it will build us up.

00:17:00:32 – 00:17:31:07
Michael Gewecke
Because it will build love, because it will be a fundamental, unifying feature of what it means to be in this new kingdom. It’s all about good. It’s all about developing into who God calls us to be. It’s not about name calling and sin finding and moral isms and hyperbole. That’s not the point of this text. And if we understand the heart behind it and the function it’s intended to serve, then I think it helps get us closer to why it transitions at this point in the text.

00:17:31:12 – 00:17:53:53
Clint Loveall
I think some of this will be easy to see with tomorrow’s text, but there is a sense here in which Paul is saying, you know, you were in the world, you were Gentiles, now you’re something else. Don’t let the world come with you into the church. Don’t go back to being those other things. You’ve been called to be something new.

00:17:53:58 – 00:18:20:11
Clint Loveall
So don’t let your old life get a foothold in ways that that don’t help you follow Christ. And again, who doesn’t need to hear that? And I don’t think there’s any of us that don’t need to struggle regularly with making sure that our life in Christ mirrors what Christ would have for us, and not what the world around us would teach us or approve of or condone or or whatever.

00:18:20:16 – 00:18:24:43
Clint Loveall
We are of a different standard in Jesus.

00:18:24:48 – 00:18:40:50
Michael Gewecke
Well, we’re glad that you are with us. Clearly we understand, you know, just barely scratching the surface of a text like this, but certainly hope that this been encouraging, informative for you. If it helps you, the light helps others find it in their own study. Subscribe so you can stick with us on studies like this. And friends, we look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

00:18:40:55 – 00:18:41:32
Clint Loveall
Thanks everybody!