Go ahead and grab your Bibles and open to Ephesians chapter 4. Yes, I got a haircut. Wow. Wow. I’m commencing phase two of the lead pastorate. I’m now a respectable figure for your children. Praying that my strength to lead and preach was not in my hair. All right. It’s out of the way.
My heart has been burdened this week as we approach Epheisans chapter 4 and continue to look at our walk in Christ and seeking a walk that is worthy of our calling. Let me just begin with a few questions that might spark your heart’s attention as we lean into this passage.
How many of you have struggled at times in your Christian walk with going back to your old ways of life? Have you ever found yourself, you know, around old friends and you begin to slip into the old patterns of the old self before you knew Christ? Or maybe you’ve come to know Christ and you’ve seen a pivot in your life toward the things of God, but you keep experiencing the same old sinful defeat. Have you experienced doing the things that you know you shouldn’t do as a believer or even doin the things you don’t want to do but victory over the old lifestyle seems to be a losing battle.
I’ve thought about that a lot this week, and it may encourage you to know that the apostle Paul spoke often of this tension in the life of the believer. He said in Romans 7:15 about himself, For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate.
In verse 18 he said this: For I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh, for I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.
The apostle Paul was undoubtedly saved. He was undoubtedly God’s chosen apostle to the Gentiles. But he seems to be describing a disconnect between his grace-given desires for what is right and his flesh-driven desires for the things of this world. This disconnect that he’s describing, it’s really a battle that he speaks of very well in Galatians 5:17. He says this: For the desires of the flesh are against the spirit, and the desires of the spirit are against the flesh. For these are opposed to each other to keep you from doing the things you want to do.
And for many of us that defines perfectly what we often feel in our daily lives as we seek to honor CHrist and walk in a manner worthy of our wealth. Our human affections and our human desires often oppose what we know the Spirit has called us to in the Christian walk.
Sometimes it would appear that we are living a double life. We say one thing about our walk with Christ and behind closed doors we do another. And brothers and sisters, this morning this is not the way of Christ. This is not the pattern worthy of our calling. You are not some unique case cursed by God to struggle with the sins that you struggle with. The good news for everyone who is in CHrist is that you can have victory over your sin this side of heaven. Not only can you have victory, you’ve been given everything you need to live in victory over your sin.
The Bible says in Corinthians that the old is gone and the new has come. You are a new creation in CHrsit Jesus, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have to fight. And it doesn’t mean that every day you won’t be aware of the already but not yet. I’m already chosen and blameless and holy to God, and yet I live in this broken and sinful world that continuity reminds me of my need for Christ.
So the big idea that I want to dive into today with you is this. Your mind is the path to your heart, and only the gospel can transform your heart to produce a walk that is worthy. I’ll leave that up there for a moment. But your mind is the path to your heart, and only the gospel can transform your heart to produce a walk that is worthy.
I heard Pastor Mitch say last week as we started Core Doctrine class that it’s possible to take Core Doctrine and totally miss the point. It’s possible to know all of the doctrines and truths in Scripture and totally miss the point because God is not after your intellect and your brain full of information. God is after your heart. But I also heard Pastor Mitch say that the path to your heart is through your brain. As we fill our minds with the things of God’s Word, with the truths of God’s Word, it will eventually transform our hearts that we might live and walk in a manner worthy of our calling.
Your mind is the path to your heart, and only the gospel can transform your heart to produce a walk that is worthy. Can you turn to Ephesians 4 starting in verse 17? And let’s read God’s Word in this place today and then we’ll dive in.
It says this. Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. (Ephesians 4:17-24)
Now as we were reading that this morning, you should have noticed two paths. Both paths started in the mind. They traveled to the heart. One path led to a deceived and plummeting life. The other path led to a holy and righteous life.
And before we dive into each verse, I want to unpack a little bit of doctrine that I believe is important for every believer to understand. It’s probably the lesser of the spoken about doctrines when you think about the doctrine justification, sanctification and glorification. Justification is the fact that God has declared you, the sinner, righteous. It happens in an instant. Glorification speaks of the day when you will step into the heavenly places and you will be eternally be made new. You will finally be what you are in Christ that God has already given you through HIs grace.
But there’s this middle ground that every believer finds themself in this side of heaven, this side of eternity. And it’s called sanctification. It’s the process of God helping you through this tension of not giving into your fleshly desires, but following the path toward righteousness, having your grace-given desires play out and lived out in your life.
So here’s a definition for sanctification that I was chewing on all week and thinking about all week. Sancitifciatn is a divine Holy Spirit-led process developing new affections that lead to new desires that produce holy living as believers become what we already are. You’re already chosen and blameless. You’re already sealed. But often why is it that we don’t seem to live in that reality as if that is true, as if that is so?
So many of us struggle with the old manner of life. Sanctification is a divine, Holy Spirit-led process developing new affections, which start in your mind, that lead to new desires, which are in your heart. And when your heart is transformed to desire the things of God, it will produce holy living as you become what you already are. Every believer this side of glorification is in the process of sanctification. If you’re truly a believer, you’re in this process. God doesn’t choose some special candidates to enroll in the process of sanctification. We are all placed in this process.
So if there is no sanctification in your life, there may be no salvation. You may not have surrendered your life to the lordship of Jesus Chrsit. Sanctification should be producing holiness in our lives. It is the reality that He who began a good work in us is faithful to complete it and will be till the day of Jesus CHrist.
So the sanctification that God is working in our lives is a reality that as we walk with the Lord we will begin to sin less and our walk will look more like Jesus. By the grace of God, I’m not where I am today where I was five years ago. And by the grace of God I won’t be five years from now where I am today because sanctification is moving me along and moving me toward my eternal state, my eternal reality that has been given to me by the grace of God.
John Calvin says this about sanctification. Sanctification is the work of the Holy Spirit restoring the image of God in us by continually mortifying the lusts of the flesh and renewing the whole man in our union with Christ in order to serve Him. That’s great. As we abide with Christ, as we’ve been unified to Christ, as we have union with CHrist, the Spirit is cutting off every branch that does not bear fruit so that our tree is producing the fruit of the Spirit and not the fruit of this world. That’s really what Paul is trying to help us see.
Ephesians chapter 4 where we’re at today is zooming in on the individual members of the Body. So if you look back at verse 16 where we were last week it says, “When each part is working properly, it makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”
And now in 17 Paul zooms the microscope in on what does it look like for the individual members of the Body doing their part? What does it look like for you to do your part, to contribute properly to the Body?
Before it has anything to do with your service, before it has anything to do with your unique spiritual gift, I think that it looks like holiness. I think that it looks like sanctification in your life, the process of being made holy. I think that it looks like walking in a manner worthy of your call.
And so he says in verse 17, “Now this I say and testify in the Lord.” So it’s as if Paul is shifting now. Like when you talk to your children you’re like, “Hey, I want you to lean in. I’m about to say something very important to you.”
He says, “Now this I say and I testify.” This word “testify” is insisting. The apostle Pual is insisting that these believers listen and heed the instruction that he’s about to give. Notice where he puts the source of authority as he writes. Now this I say and testify in the Lord. Because who was ultimately writing in Ephesians chapter 4? It’s not the apostle Paul. Paul is penning the letter but he’s under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And so God wrote a book. That’s what we believe. And it’s profitable for reproof and training and correction in righteousness.
And so these words are from our God so that we would carry out the life that He has called us to live. The important instruction in insisting is first tied to how you should not walk if you are truly walk if you are in Christ. Because saved people do not walk like dead people. And yet as we’ve already acknowledged, often that’s the way that we live and operate in this world. So he says, “Now this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do.” You, the saints in Ephesus and the faithful in Christ, no longer walk.
So Paul is pulling out a distinction between how these believers once walked and how they are now called to walk. And so let me just ask, do you remember your former ways of living? Do you remember your former life? Do you remember how you walked apart from the grace of God?
For some of us it’s like night and day. You could look and be like, “Man, I was going this way and the Lord just stopped me dead in my tracks and ever since I’ve been on a path toward righteousness.” Some of us it’s a little less coherent. We don’t know exactly what God took away from us and we still know that we have struggles. But all of this is obliterating the idea that you can have Jesus and continue in your sin. It’s demolishing the thought that you can claim the benefits of the gospel without having a renovated heart and a holy life.
And so I want you to notice two paths as I already said in the text today. And I’m going to drill down on this first one because it’s the root of all of our problems. It’s the root of all of the tension that we face this side of eternity as believers seeking to walk in a manner worthy.
So point number one is this. A futile mind leads to all kinds of sin. A futile mind leads to all kinds of sin. Paul wrote, “Now this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk like the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. Were called to walk in a manner worthy of our call. But Paul is saying that the Gentiles do the opposite of that. Now Paul is writing to Gentiles, but he’s writing to those who have been grafted into the Body of Christ. He’s writing to Gentiles that have been saved by the power of the gospel.
So he’s not using the word “Gentiles” here in the ethnic sense; Paul is using it in the moral sense. It’d be like us talking about the unregenerate world. They’re unregenerate. They’re pagan. They’re heathen. They’re idolatrous. They walk dead in their trespasses and sins, following the course of this world. They’re by nature sons and daughters of disobedience, children of wrath. And such were some of us.
So if sanctification that we talked about is helping the believer through a mind to heart path of new infections that produce new desires that produce holy living, then Ephesians 4:17-19 is showing us the mind to heart path of the unbeliever. It starts in the futility of our minds. It leads to darkened thoughts. It leads to ignorance toward the things of God because of a hardened heart and then ultimately to callousness and greed toward sin that opposes God.
So how do the Gentiles walk that Paul is writing about? It starts with the futility of their minds. So let me talk about this word futility. It means uselessness and pointlessness. It’s what Solomon described in Ecclesiastes after experiencing all that the world had to offer. Solomon was the wealthiest man, the most powerful man that the ancient world had ever known, the most wise man. And after experiencing all that the world had, in Ecclesiastes 1:14 he says, “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and striving after the wind.” That’s futility.
Marcus Barth, a commentator, he writes this. “With one single word Paul describes the majority of the inhabitants of the Greco Roman Empire as aiming with silly methods at meaningless goals.” Aiming with silly methods at meaningless goals. Foolish methods. Foolish goals. Meaningless methods. Could there be a sadder place to get?
And you might be tempted to ask what’s so important? Why does it matter if I live a pointless life? Why does it matter if I have useless or pointless intellect? And it’s really not that offensive unless you understand the meaning of life itself. This all has to do with your worldview.
How you view the world, what your worldview is determines the way that you live. Much of the world views themselves as the center of attention and so therefore a pointless life, a useless life, isn’t all that offensive. And yet when you’ve come to understand and recognize that the meaning of life is to the praise of God’s glorious grace, a futile mind is one of the saddest places you could ever go.
And so the reason a futile mind is a direct affront on God is because it’s the rejection of what every human deep down can’t deny, that there is a God and there is a Creator, and He has a law in order to help us, and we were created to worship Him.
I want to show you in Romans chapter 1. You can turn there if you want. Romans 1:18-23. But keep a finger in Ephesians 4. But you know Romans 1. It describes this downward spiral of those who are outside of Christ.
It says this. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. (Romans 1:18-23)
And you know that Romans continues to spiral out of control as these futile thinkers their hearts are darkened and hardened and they begin to give themselves over to all kinds of sin as they get further and further from God’s law, as they suppress the fact that God is real and God is Creator.
How do we know that God is real, God is Creator? Because every day that you wake up your breath testifies that there is a God. Everyday that you wake up and the sun rises and at night when the sun sets and all of the science and all of the things that keep the tide pushing and pulling and keep the stars aligned and the solar system where it is and the earth spinning on an axis, all of it is testifying that there is a God and that He is good and that He’s worthy of worship.
And so every human being is without excuse. And the more you reject that reality, the more futile your thinking becomes. And this is only the start of a life outside of Christ. Unbelievers who live and operate in the futility of their minds rejecting the purpose of life and the knowledge of God live deceived and plummeting lives.
So look at Ephesians 4 going into 18. In the futility of their minds, they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. Why does a futile mind lead to all kinds of sin? Because our rejection of the Creator God has led to a darkened understanding.
Sin is literally blacking us out to the goodness of God. Sin is literally causing a mind malfunction that then travels to our heart. And we get ignorant toward the things of God and our hearts become hard. Darkened thoughts lead to a hardened heart. And a hardened heart only proves the impossible chasm between God and man.
You ask, “What does a hardened heart look like?” It looks like callousness toward things that separate us from God. You know what callousness is? I play guitar as you know. I haven’t played guitar in a while. So the callousness on my fingers are a little weak. The more you play guitar, the less sensitive your fingertips become to the rough strings and pressing down and holding the chords. So the more you play, the more callous builds up on your fingers and you can play for longer and it doesn’t hurt and you don’t have bruises and all that kind of thing.
So that happens to our hearts when we have futile thinking. You become more and more insensitive to sin, to immorality and what obviously opposes God. and this is spiritual deadness. It’s loss of feeling for what is right and wrong, moral and immoral, holy and unholy, righteous and unrighteous.
Verse 19 says that they have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, to greedy practices of every kind, to impurity. Given themselves up to sensuality. That’s giving up and giving in to what our flesh wants. Isn’t that a sad place to be? Sensuality, this word, is the absence of all moral restraint, especially regarding sexual sin.
One commentator writes this that it’s a position of the soul incapable of bearing the pain of discipline. You can discipline yourself to get up. You can discipline yourself to eat a meal. You can discipline yourself to go to work. What a sad place to get to where your heart is so hard that you can’t bear the discipline of putting off the sin of this world and walking in righteousness.
You can’t bear the pain of denying yourself what your flesh actually wants. And that leads to you being greedy to practice every kind of impurity. There is no too far to that. No too far. This is a person that has become so selfish that they live for what they want.
And I understand that this is rampant in our culture. And it’s so sad. We live in a culture where our world leaders and our doctors and our politicians tell us we deserve to have anything we want, and that’s because they’re futile in their thinking. They’re hard in their hearts. And it leads to their own greed and their own impurity.
And why is it that as this spirals out of control, the more we set ourselves up as gods, the more greedy we become toward things that have to do with money and power and sexuality. Because that is the way that we set ourselves up to be gods. That’s the most powerful place that humankind can go, that humankind can try to figure out their identity rather than placing it in Christ. And so we spiral out of control and we give ourselves to the passions and lusts of the flesh. And the world tells us that it’s good and that it’s ok.
And you see the sadness of it all around us. There’s no too far to this. You can’t be impure and not greedy. Any sexual sin or perversion outside of the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman for a lifetime, which is God’s design, is you being greedy. That’s greed. That’s you taking something that is not yours. That’s you taking something that has not been given to you by God. This is giving up and giving in to sensuality, to the passions of our flesh, and it’s in the mind and it travels to the heart and eventually comes out in our living.
SPLIT HERE
It’s why pornography is so destructive because it wrecks your mind and it starts to give you thoughts and ideas and fantasies that you think are ok. And over time, the more you go, the harder your heart gets, the more calloused your heart gets to the vileness and the grossness of this world. And it will undoubtedly come out of your life.
And often even those of us who claim to be in Christ and who step foot in the church and who have professed Jesus as Lord of our lives, you see why it’s so offensive to move on in your sin if Christ has changed you. If Christ has truly given you everything that Ephesians 1 through 3 says that He’s given us, then how offensive is it to carry on in the futility of our minds when you’ve been opened up to the knowledge of God in the heavenly places?
This is how all sorts of twisted perversion happens because where there is no concern of consequence, only concern for what I want when I want it, and you see the downward spiral of all of those who are without Christ; it characterizes every unbeliever. Sure, everyone is not as bad as they could be, but everyone is as bad off as they could be. There’s common grace. There’s government. There’s God’s law written on our hearts. Why doesn’t every angry person murder people? Because they know they’ll go to jail. There’s a common grace of government holds you back.
And yet Jesus came. Some people get so angry that they follow through with it because they’ve become so calloused and hard and they just move forward. But Jesus said that if you have hatred in your heart toward a brother, it’s as if you’ve already committed the murder. You see that God wants to transform your heart. And all of it is as wicked and separating as the most heinous crime you could think up in your mind. A futile mind leads to all kinds of sin.
And ultimately it’s a lordship issue. It’s not Christ plus the things that I want to hold onto. It’s not Christ plus the things that bring me pleasure. It’s Christ exalted over all. And until we get that right, we will not be able to walk in a manner worthy of our call.
Now the second path that we see is the one that we want to be on. And it’s this. A renewed mind leads to the likeness of God. A renewed mind leads to the likeness of God. Verse 20 says, “But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus.”
I think it’s important for every believer here at Gospel City Church this morning to heed Paul’s two warnings. The first was in verse 17. You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, which means there are people who profess Jesus Christ who try to walk like the heathen pagan world outside of Him. Isn’t that sad? Some of you experience that. Some of you feel that tension every day. Some of you know that that’s true of your life.
And Paul is saying, “I insist that you do not walk like the world outside.”
Verse 20. But this is not the way you learned Christ. What a great phrase. What a great sentence. And then he says, “Assuming that you have.”
Could it be that some of the people in Ephesians, the church in Ephesus, were moving back to their old manner of life? You think about Acts chapter 19. Paul is in Ephesus. Remember the dark arts and the occult of this city, and that’s what they were steeped in. and God cast out the demons of the sons of Sceva and they go running.
And what happens? They got nine million dollars in dark arts books and they burned them in the streets. A revival breaks out in Ephesus. That’s how they learned Christ. I’m going to take all of my old intellect and knowledge, I’m going to burn it in the streets.
And then they committed themselves to the teaching and preaching of God’s Word. Everyday the apostle Paul spoke in the school of Tyrannus. They began to fill their mind with new knowledge that would lead to their heart and produce holy living in their lives. Versus the old way of studying, hardened heart and living in the darkness and deceit of this world.
Futile thinking leads to all sorts of sin, but a renewed mind leads to righteousness, leads to the likeness of God. How did you learn Christ? I, by the grace of God, learned Him at the age of five that God is holy and other and Creator and I am sinful and deceived and wicked and I deserve hell. But Jesus is a perfect, loving Savior who gave His life as a servant on a cross in my place for my sins and He rose again from the dead, defeating hell and the grave.
And I have an opportunity because of His Spirit to repent, to turn away from evil, and to believe that He is Lord, that He is King, that He is sovereign over all of this world. That’s how I learned Christ. That’s how you learned Christ if you truly know Christ.
And yet sometimes in my ignorance I can allow the things of this world to creep back into my mind. If I’m not careful, those things can travel to my heart. And before long, the things that I once was doing in honor of Christ grow cold, and the things of this world begin to come out of my life. And I recognize that I’m a sinner.
And if you don’t make war on this, you may not be anything more than someone that professes with their mouth but your faith is dead, because it is without works.
So Paul gives us three steps for the believer, which is really the process of sanctification in our lives. Every believer, everyday should submit to the battle of putting off the old self and putting on the new. Look at what he says. “Put off your old self,” in verse 22, “which belongs to the former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
So here’s a helpful little thing you can jot down if you want or just think on. Sanctification is helping you put off the old self, renew your mind, put on the new self so that you become what you already are. That’s the process of sanctification in your life, the process of new affections, creating new desires, creating holy living as you become what you are. Put off the old self. Renew your mind. Put on the new self and become like Christ.
So how you learned Christ, how you received the gospel is really the progression. You’ve got to put off, turn from, your old patterns of living. It looks like making war on your sin. Jesus said in Matthew 18, “If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes and be thrown into the hell of fire.” That’s pretty serious about your sin. That’s making war on your sin.
He says the same thing about your arm. If you can’t keep from stealing. If he were here today he may say, “It’s better for you to not have social media on your phone if you can’t keep your eyes from impure things. It’s better for you to not have that friend group than to hide all sorts of sin and impurity from the people who truly love you. It’s better for you to get rid of all of these types of things rather than enter eternity with all of these secret places in your heart that you’ve been harboring because it really just declares that you are Lord of your own life.
You have to make war on your old patterns of living and cut it off. And then you start to renew your mind. That’s the second piece. And as your mind is renewed it will travel to your heart, no longer rejecting God and His law but craving it and reforming your life to it. And as your mind is renewed, your affections for what is holy will be renewed.
Romans 12:1 says, Be transformed by the renewing of your minds. You’ve got to think to yourself, “Garbage in; garbage out.” If I fill my mind with a bunch of garbage, it’s for sure going to come out of my life because it’s going to get to my heart and it’s going to be produced in my life.
Our attitudes and our complaining and our grumbling and our worrying is all of a result of the enemy trying to take over our minds, and it’s space that needs to be claimed with God’s thoughts and not our fleshly thoughts. So you’ve got to claim that space every day. You’ve got to fight for it.
And what’s it look like? It looks like getting in your Bible. Hide God’s Word in your heart that you might not sin against Him. return to the things that you did at first. Return to the way you learned Christ. When you first learned Christ you couldn’t get enough of this. And then time slips in and life happened and this gets put on a shelf, and we do the things we’ve got to do. And that is part of life. But we have to crave devotion with our God or the things of this world will slowly change our thinking.
So memorize Scripture. Read Scripture. Fight for your time with the Lord. This is the way to renew your mind.
And then finally, you’ve got to put on the new self, recognizing what Christ has made you, and lean into your eternal position. Putting on the new self is putting on the likeness of God that you’ve already been created in. That’s why it matters deeply how you live. It’s why it matters deeply your conduct. It’s why it matters deeply that you live what you claim with your mouth, because it’s harmful and it’s hurtful to the church and to the Body when we claim one thing and do another. So you put on the likeness of God.
I want to show you a wonderful verse that Isiaah wrote in Isaiah 61:10. This is what God has done for you. I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall exult in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation;
he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
That’s what God has done for you, the sinner. You were an orphan. And the good deeds that you bring before God, your moral goodness is as filthy rags to Him. That’s how holy and perfect He is. But God, He not only adopts you, He not only chooses you, He not only makes you blameless and forgives you, but He clothes you. He takes your filthy orphanage rags and He gives you a royal robe.
And so every day that you wake up and you choose your sin over righteousness, you choose your sin over what His Word says, it’s as if you’re picking up your old, filthy rags when you could be dressing in the King’s attire. And I know that some of you struggle with it, and I know that we’re all human. And I see people in this community who desperately need the love of Jesus, and yet I know that their hearts are hard and calloused.
And so our job is not to prop ourselves up as Christians and think we’re better than everyone. Our job is to live out the holiness and the righteousness and the compassion and the tempthay and the worthiness of what God has given us because we don’t deserve it. So every time we sin, it’s an affront on what God has given us. It’s an affront on His grace. And it says something to the hardened world around us. It says I don’t need what they have. I don’t need that religion thing because it hasn’t changed him.
And my heart is just so burdened and my prayer is that we would end together in repentance. I may even follow up tomorrow through an email with some things to encourage you. But just as the mind is the path to the heart that leads to our living, for every person here today you should be somewhat convicted because all of us struggle with this tension. And the only path that’s appropriate to a passage like this is from here to here.
Until we’re willing to lay down our rights and to make Jesus Lord of our hearts, we’ll harbor things that aren’t worthy of our call. And it’s easy for that to slip its way into the church, and it’s easy for that to slip its way into our faith. And it’s easy for the enemy to use that to darken our thoughts and move us toward ignorance and harden our hearts and cause us to live a double life. Not here. Not in your home. Not in your life.
And so I’ve asked the team just to sing a song of repentance. And I’ve been praying that today would be a victory Sunday for some of you, that you could leave the old man behind, that you’d leave it at the feet of Jesus. I want to invite you to come to the altar, the front. There aren’t going to be pastors and elders. Just time for you to get alone with God for a few moments and repent and confess your sins. I think there’s beauty when we do that together, a collectiveness of the Body saying, “We need your help God. make us holy as You are holy.”
And so I want to invite you to come as they sing and just let’s use this space and this time to put off the old, to renew our mind and to put on the new.
So Father, you hear our collective prayers of repentance. Lord, I’ve heard from several over the last few weeks that just desire for their walk to be worthy. Lord, I want mine to be as well. And this is a cry to make us desperate for You. This is a cry to help us return to the ways of old, the ways that we learned, Christ, to put off the things of this world and to put on Your righteousness.
And Lord we pray for brothers and sisters who are stuck. God, we pray that Your Spirit would show them that they don’t have to do this all on their own, that they don’t have to fight these battles alone, that You, God, are good and gracious and fighting for them. And so Lord, would You sever the old man today? Would you sever the branches that are of no help to our spirituality, no help to our holiness? And God, would we leave them at this altar. Would we leave them in this place and walk out in the new life, reflecting the righteousness and the holiness and the likeness of God. We believe You can do it.
