Christ Church Washington D.C.

Ephesians 5, 7, he says, don’t become partners with them, the Gentiles. At one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. So walk as children of the light. Try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. And then 5, 15, look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise. Make the most of the time because the days are evil. So you can hear the contrast in all of those, right? So you can walk in sin or you can walk in good works. You can follow the course of the world or you can walk in love. You can imitate Christ.
You can walk in darkness. You can walk in light. You can walk wisely. You can walk unwisely. That’s the habitual pattern of life and conduct that characterizes you as a person. That’s what we mean by a walk. So then, what does it mean to walk like a Gentile? What does it mean? And here, Gentile, right, in the first century, Paul is referring to unbelievers, non-Jewish unbelievers. It’s a pagan. It’s a worldling. What does it mean to walk like them?
There’s an alienated existence, and there’s an ignorant and hardened heart. Let’s take those, walk through them a little bit. So the worldly walk is futile. It’s futile. It’s vain. It does not achieve its purpose. It has something it wants to accomplish and is unable to do so. That word, the word for futile,
futile is the same word that shows up over and over again in Ecclesiastes for vanity of vanities, emptiness, emptiness. So it’s a vain and futile and empty walk. The mind and heart are darkened. They’re unable to see clearly. It’s unable to make sense of reality. Everything is foggy and fuzzy and can’t be held together. Romans 1, this is a place where Paul kind of expands. I want you to hear the echoes from Romans 1 of how he talks in Ephesians 4. So here’s Romans 1, 21. He says,
You hear it? So they knew God, but they don’t honor Him as God. They don’t worship, and they’re ungrateful. They don’t give thanks to Him. And as a result, they became futile in their thinking. They had a futile mind. And their foolish hearts were darkened. Hear it again? Darkened in their understanding. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.
How? What was foolish? They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. So that’s, you can hear the echoes. Paul has the same idea in both passages. So what’s the idea? Well, idolatry and ingratitude lead to futility and folly. Idolatry and ingratitude, if you don’t honor God as God, if you don’t give thanks to Him, what does that lead to? It leads to futility and to foolishness. And the ignorance and that folly is an ignorance that
it’s not going to be fixed by more information. It’s not an information gap. It’s an ignorance, Paul says, owing to the hardness of their heart. So underneath the ignorance is not a lack of information. Underneath the ignorance is a heart that does not want to know. That’s what Paul says in Romans 1.18. He says that the wrath of God is revealed against ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. It’s a truth suppression. So you can think about this,
unrighteous truths about God, about ourselves, about humanity, about right and wrong. And those truths are evident and obvious and clear. They’re clear in creation and they’re clear in your conscience. They’re just there. And yet in our ungodliness, what do we do with those? We suppress them. We’re like the little children who don’t want to hear it and they just put their fingers in their ears and they just say, no, no, no, no, no. This is folly. We avoid these truths. We deny
these truths. We push them out of our minds. So in our darkened state, Paul has this series of dark exchanges in Romans 1, these trades. Think about these trades. Listen to the trades. You heard one of them. So claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man. So you can hear it. You have the immortal God and I’m going to trade that for images of mortal man. Or a few
about God for a lie. Exchange the truth about God for a lie. And they worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator. So rather than worshipping God, we’re going to worship creation. So think about this. Picture this like this. Picture a set of scales, like balancing scales, like an old market. And you’ve got on one side of the scales, you have God, the immortal God, the glory of the immortal God. And on the other side, you have all of creation, all of the good and great things he has in creation. And you have to ask yourself,
on the scales, which one of these is more valuable? Which one of these is more worthy, more precious? Which one is better? Which one is greater? And in other words, or you could say, if you could only have one of these, pick a side. Which side of the scales, if you could have all of creation or you could have the glory of the immortal God, which side do you pick? Okay. Well, this is what he says human beings do. We choose creation. We said, I’m treating
I’m going to say I could have this, but I’m going to trade this and I’m going to trade the glory of the immortal God and I’m going to take creation instead. And I’m going to think that I got a good deal. That’s folly. That’s that’s crazy. That’s why Paul says instead of receiving all that God gives to us in his creation as a gift from him and then acknowledging him, thanking him for it, and then following all of those good things back up to him to worship him as the greatest being in the universe. Instead, we say, no, I think I’ll just take the stuff and
leave you aside. We have the truth about God, but instead of celebrating it, we suppress it and exchange it for a lie, and we worship and serve things of earth rather than the maker of heaven and earth. And again, I just want you to, I want to underscore that the Bible over and over again looks at this and thinks it’s absolutely shocking. So Jeremiah 2, Jeremiah 2, I think is part of where Paul is drawing from in Romans. Listen to the, just Jeremiah 2, 11 to 13. I just want you to again hear,
do you hear the echo of Jeremiah in what Paul just said in Romans and what he says in Ephesians? Jeremiah says, has a nation changed its gods even though they are no gods? Has a nation ever taken a real god and exchanged it for a false god? And he says, my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit. So you can hear the exchange language there, right? So then what does he say? Be appalled, O heavens, at this. Be shocked.
Be utterly desolate, says the Lord. So you think about that. So here’s the prophet saying, be shocked. Heavens, angels, I want to show you something absolutely shocking. What is it? My people have committed two evils. My people have committed two evils. Listen to what the two evils are. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and they have hewed out for themselves broken cisterns
and they can hold no water. That’s shocking. So imagine this. Imagine it’s a hot day, summer day, and you’re outside and you’re playing ultimate frisbee or you’re playing whatever sport you like. And you’re out there and it’s a hot day. It’s a humid day. You’re getting parched. You kind of get that, you know what I’m talking about, that thing in the back of your throat, your tongue sticking to the roof of your mouth. And it’s hot and now you’ve been playing for an hour and you finally come off the field and you come over and there’s this big water cooler just full of ice cold water. You’re going to come over and you’re
thirsty and you walk over and you grab a cup and as you go to take the nozzle and fill up your cup, you pause and you look over and you see a big pile of dirt. And instead of going for the water, you take the cup and you scoop it into the dirt and you just kick it back and shovel it into your mouth. Feel it, right? Visual image to help you. The sensory stuff actually doesn’t matter here. Now imagine, okay, imagine it’s not you. Imagine,
you’re watching somebody do that. You can see them panting in exhaustion. They come over and you see them pause. You see them reach over and you see them chug dirt into their parched mouth. What are you thinking? You’re thinking that person is crazy. That person is insane. That’s absolutely insane. It’s insanity that they would do that. They’re thirsty rather than going for the water. They’re digging in the dirt and shoveling it into their mouth and trying to get
of satisfaction out of the dirt. This is insane. That’s what Paul says. Futility of their minds. I want a satisfaction for my thirst, and so I’m going to dig in the dirt. That’s futile. It’s insane. In other words, sin will make you stupid. Sin will make you stupid. And not only will it make you stupid, you will call your stupidity wisdom.
More than that, Paul goes on to say that it alienates us from God’s life. So God is the living God. We’re made to live with him, to have his kind of life, to partake of his life. But our sin cuts us off from that divine life. And it leaves us frustrated and isolated. And it leaves us calloused, desensitized to shame. Rather than having a sense of shame for our sin, we boast in it. We glory in the shame. You think about someone like Pharaoh.
This passage mentions hardness of heart. Anytime you hear hardness of heart in the Bible, what story do you think of? You think of Pharaoh. You should. That’s intentional. Pharaoh, right, persists in his rebellion even after it becomes plain to everybody else in Egypt that he is out of his league. His counselors and magicians are like, hey, this is above our pay grade. We can’t match this stuff. It’s getting really bad. And he is like, I’m still going to persist in my rebellion.
So even though when it’s clear that destruction is coming, not only that, not only do we are desensitized, we glory in it. We throw parades that celebrate lewdness and sin and sensuality. We silence the voice of conscience by the approval of other people. So your conscience is telling you this is wrong. And what do you do? You go find other people who will tell you it’s not wrong. You surround yourself with people who will applaud you and pat you on the back for that sin. And then it spreads.
It spreads. It seeks to fill every nook and cranny of your lives with its corruption, its decay, and its death. So notice what Paul says. He says, we give ourselves up to sensuality and lewdness, eager, it says greedy, to practice every kind of impurity. It’s like every kind of sin on this buffet, I’m going to sample it. I’m going to gorge myself on the sin. It gets worse and it gets wider. It expands. There’s greater variety and there’s greater depravity.
It never stays put. Okay. Obviously we read that and it mentions lewdness and sensuality and we can’t help but think of sexual sin and the way that it grows and expands. And that language actually of giving, we give ourselves over in Ephesians 4 has an echo in Romans 1 as well. In Romans 1 though, it’s God who gives us over to sin. God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity. God gave them up to dishonorable passions.
God gives them up. God gives them up. Just like Pharaoh, he gives him over. What does that mean? It means Pharaoh gives himself over. It means we give ourselves over. God’s work and ours work, our work is going in the same direction. We sink. Think about it this way. You sink into your sin. You sink into it. It becomes more and more a part of you, more pervasive, exchanging it, following our corrupt and deceitful desires into greater and greater corruptions. That right there, what I described, that’s what it means to walk like a Gentile.
That’s the pattern of life. Apart from grace, apart from God’s kindness, that’s the pattern of life that human beings have chosen for themselves and dug in on. I have gone to the mat. We will do it this way. This is our way. Which then brings up the last part. What’s the Christian walk? What’s the Christian walk? And then at the end, I’m going to apply all of this to us more specifically. This is just, what is the Christian walk? So notice a few things. The Christian walk is centered on a person.
So I’ve said it’s a conformity to a standard, but the Christian walk is a little bit different. It’s not just an abstract moral principle. It’s not just a list of rules somewhere that we conform to. There are rules, but here Paul wants to underline, this is not how you learned Christ. It’s not how you learned Christ. It’s not just learn a standard. It’s not just learn the rules. It’s learn him. There’s a him. It’s not an it. Or the truth that we should conform to is in Jesus.
Where’s the truth found? It’s not just some standard floating out in the sky. The truth is a person. The moral order of the universe is personal. The moral order of the universe is personal. It’s the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God who was made man for us and our salvation. So the standard we conform to isn’t just a standard. It’s a person. Second, how does the Christian walk work? Well, it includes two things. It includes a position and then progress in that order.
And the order matters. So follow me here. The Christian walk involves a new standing with God and then a new conduct that flows from that standing. In this passage, it’s described in terms of clothing. So did you see that part there? The put off, put on language that shows up in Ephesians 4. Put off, put on, put off, put on. And it says the old self in some translations. It’s old man. So you have an old man and you have a new man. What did we learn from Christ?
And this is a reference. This is like in terms of your whole Bible. Old man is Adam. New man is Christ. So you need to take off Adam. So you were born into Adam and you need to take off your Adam. You need to take off all the Adam. Drive all the Adam out of you. And you need to put on Christ. Fill yourself with Christ. Clothe yourself with Christ. And this is where the passage in Colossians 3 can be helpful. So listen to this one. This is Colossians 3.19. You can hear the similarity.
So you can hear the image likeness comparison, the put off and put on of the new man. And notice that the old man has practices. So you put on the old man with his practices and there’s a manner of life. And then you have a new man also has a manner of life. It’s being renewed in God’s image, in God’s likeness, in true righteousness and holiness.
And so throughout Paul’s letters, this is what he’s going to do. When he talks about the Christian life, he’s going to distinguish. He’s going to say, look, first you have to deal with your fundamental position before God. Your position matters first. And then he says, because of that new position, you should make progress in holiness. So God declares us righteous, right? You’re righteous in Christ. By faith alone, you are righteous.
Now walk righteously. Or God says, I’ve adopted you into my family. I’ve adopted you. Your position has now changed. And then he says, now walk as an obedient son. Or he says, look, I’ve set you apart for my purposes. I’ve sanctified you. I’ve consecrated you. I’ve done it decisively. It’s done. And then he says, now walk in light of my purposes. Walk in light of those purposes. He delivers you from the dominion of sin. And then he says, live as a free man.
I’ve delivered you from slavery. Now walk as a free man. So that’s the point. The Christian walk is your position comes first. God decisively does something in your standing in the universe. And then because he’s done that, he calls you to walk worthy of that, to live that out. But the order matters. And you can see the difference between these walks if you were to just flip the Gentile one on its head. So just, this is sometimes, this is a fun little, this is a Bible hack maybe.
Sometimes you’re trying to understand a passage. It’s helpful, especially in contrast passages. Just flip what he says about the Gentiles and just say, what would be the opposite? Sort of like the George Costanza approach, like everything I’ve done has always been wrong. And so now, whenever I think I’m going to do something, I just do the opposite. And all of a sudden, everything works out great. It’s that principle. Okay, so if you did that here, okay, he says, don’t walk as Gentiles. So instead, walk as Christians in the fruitfulness of their minds, not the futility of their minds.
Now you know what you’re made for. Now your purposes are divine purposes, and you can live into those. Now you’re not darkened in your understanding. What are you? You’re enlightened in your understanding. Now you’re not alienated from the life of God. You partake of the life of God. Why do you partake of that life? Because of the knowledge that’s in you, not the ignorance. Why is that knowledge in you? Because God has softened your heart. You don’t have a hard heart. You have a soft heart. You have a tender conscience, a humble conscience, and therefore you’re able to control your passions. They don’t lead you around by the nose.
Instead, you’re eagerly pursuing not lewdness and sensuality. You’re pursuing purity and holiness. That’s the Christian walk. Those are the two ways to live. So what does it mean for us? Because Paul here is contrasting this for Christians. So what do you do with these? So first, I just want to underline this. One of the things I appreciate about the Bible a lot is how well it reads me and how well it reads the world.
You don’t just read the Bible. The Bible sometimes reads you. You read it and you should say, ouch. Or you read it and then you look out in the world and you go, oh, that’s that. That’s that thing. This is describing that. So you look around and we’re shocked by the debauchery and depravity around us. And then you open your Bible and it explains why. It says this is where that’s coming from. This is what’s underneath it. God’s given people over to depraved mind and corrupt desires.
People have given themselves over to appetites and passions, and that’s led to a hardened crust of sin around their heart, and it’s maintained by a willful and defiant ignorance. That’s why. The Bible’s reading the world for us. The second thing is we ought to see from this passage how foolish it is to try and manage our sin. Manage our sin. This is a great temptation for both Christians and non-Christians.
Okay, so you look out in the world and recently maybe you’ve seen this sort of thing. You’ve heard some people express a desire, even non-Christians. We want to separate the TQ plus from the LGB. We want to keep the LGB, but we would like this whole TQ plus thing is a little bit much. So we’d like to just make a little separation, have a little divorce between those.
Or we’re going to condemn fornication and adultery, but we’re going to continue to indulge in pornography. Or we’re going to condemn the really bad kinds of pornography, but we’re going to be okay with the socially acceptable R-rated kind. That’s okay. In each case, what’s the goal? The goal is to manage sin rather than repent of it. It’s an attempt to manage and
control it. Human beings want to be a little bit pregnant. Some people want to be two months pregnant and stop. Other people are like, I would like to be four months pregnant and I would like to stop at four months. Other people are like six months and eight months. Some people want to go whole hog. Here’s the deal. That’s not how that works. It’s not how any of that works. You can’t be a little bit pregnant. When you indulge deceitful desires,
when you harden your heart so that it becomes callous and shameless, you give yourself over to it. And it’s a greed and a craving for more. Sin cannot be managed. It can only be killed. It cannot be managed. It doesn’t matter how little. You may go, oh, look how little and cute it is. It’s this little tiny sin. No big deal. No, it’s going to grow. And eventually you will have a large dragon that will devour you. So kill it when it’s small. How do you do that?
Right. We we kill it at the cross of Christ. It’s through repentance. We put off the old man and we put on the new man and then we make no provision for it. No provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. We don’t. So that’s from Romans 13. It’s another one of those walk passage. And Paul has this idea that you can make provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. This is that really weird thing that human human minds are able to do this where you go. Well, I’m not going to go look for sin technically.
But I am going to go be in a shady part of town at the wrong time of night. And we’ll just see what happens. Right. In other words, you leave yourself enough plausible deniability. But what are you doing? You’re creating room. And it’s sort of the opposite of when Jesus says, pray, lead me not into temptation. And you say, hey, sin, I would like you to lead me into temptation. Take me where the temptation is likely to be. And we’ll see what happens. And then we can say, oh, I didn’t I didn’t know. I was just standing there. I was just standing.
There when we kill our sin, we make no provision. We create no room. We leave no space. We go all the way to the root. Third thing, I want you to think a little more deeply about how hardening happens. OK, how does hardening happen? How does it happen specifically for Christians? OK, because he talks about the hardness of the Gentiles, but is hardening a danger for Christians? And it is. So listen to Hebrews 3. Hebrews 3, 12 says, take care, brothers. Take care, brothers, lest there be an
evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. Exhort one another every day, as long as it’s called today, that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. We’ve come to share in Christ if we hold our confidence to the end. As it is said today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. OK, so this is how hardening works. C.S. Lewis actually is really helpful on this. In Screwtape Letters, he describes how hardening happens. Here’s how it happens.
It all begins with drifting. It’s a little subtle tug along with our wider social environment. We conform ourselves to the pattern of the world. And at this point, you’re just passively responding. You’re just drifting, floating down the cultural river like a jellyfish. And at that point, the language that you use for sin becomes a little blurry. You start to euphemize. You don’t talk about sins as much. You talk about my brokenness, something like that.
It hardens into a habit by steady repetition. It hardens into a habit. So now you start to exercise your will and you start to excuse it by saying, well, that’s just my personality. I was born that way. I was reacting to something around me and that made me do it. I was I was tired. I was hungry. Right. So now I made the thing and I’m going to rationalize it. So now it’s drifting along to habitual choice. You then begin to draw arguments that create space for it. OK.
And sometimes it’s actually the first thing you do is you actually draw, you come up with arguments that give permission for other people to disobey. Because if everybody’s doing it, how could it be wrong? So I’ll excuse their sin first because it’s creating space for my sin to flourish. OK. The hearts deceive us. They drift along and we ditch basic obedience. Now, once the habit is in place, now that conformity to our environment, that habitual choice has to become a conviction.
We actually justify it. We have lofty ideas and theories, excuses, rationalizations that are built up to deceive ourselves and others. So any philosophy, right, that will justify it, we’ll just grab onto that and use it to get us off the hook. And so that story we tell ourselves reinforces our drift. We start to strengthen our hearts in the direction that we’re drifting. And then Screwtape describes the next step. He says,
So what is that? That’s hardening. Hardening of heart, like a stone. A deliberate, conscious rejection of God’s deadening the heart, numbing the heart to God. And what happens is circumstances may come in and try to interrupt it, like something happens.
In your life to try to shake you loose. And what do you do? You dig in. Rather than letting God’s providence unsettle your drifting, shaking your trajectory. No, no. I double down. Strengthen my heart in that direction. Or maybe what you do is you start avoiding other Christians. That’s what Hebrews is talking about. Don’t neglect meeting together. Exhort one another every day. Well, if they’re going to exhort me every day, I’m not going to go there anymore. If they’re going to correct it and rebuke it and puncture my little bubble that I built, I’m not going to be with those people.
Might even start mocking the people who believe and obey as we used to. We might pity them. Oh, they’re still shackled by that Christianity stuff. And then you just come to direct God’s word directly. He says, thou shalt not. And you say, but I will. We’re deadened. We’re numbed. We’re hardened. We say no. I just want to say to you, that’s you. Today, like today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart.
Last thing, frame yourself rightly. I mentioned framing in the exhortation. I want you to remember the flow of Ephesians again. In chapter one, God displayed his power by raising Jesus from the dead and seating him in the heavenly places. Far above all rule and authority, far above every name that’s named, Christ is seated at God’s right hand. Then in chapter two, he said, you are there too. You were dead in sins.
So chapter one, Jesus is elevated. Chapter two, God, by his grace, places you there by faith. Okay, that’s your position in the cosmos. You’re seated with Christ. And now in chapter four, he says, look, live like that’s true. Live like that’s true. Don’t walk like that’s true. Don’t walk like the Gentiles do. It’s not true of them. They’re dead in sins. That’s why they’re following the course of the world. That’s not true of you. You’re there. So live like that’s true.
Let’s pray. Our Father in God, we thank you for your great mercy to us. We thank you that you have, by your grace, invaded our hearts, softening them, taking out the heart of stone, putting in a heart of flesh, a soft heart that then repents of sin, puts off the old man, and embraces Christ wholeheartedly. Lord, we pray that you would help us then to walk that out.
To daily put to death the little sins that threaten to become big sins that will wreck and destroy us and everything around us. Begin with us. Help us to take the logs out of our own eyes before we go spec hunting and other people. And we ask that you would do it for Christ’s sake. And we pray this, Lord, in the words that Jesus taught us to pray, saying, Our Father, who art…