Title: Don’t Live Like the Sinful World!
When I was a kid, trends swept through school overnight.
Poodle skirts.
Parachute pants.
Crew cuts.
Mullet haircuts — business in the front, confusion in the back.
One week no one’s wearing it.
The next week, everyone is.
That’s how trends work.
But not all trends are harmless.
Remember when people were biting Tide Pods?
Nobody wakes up thinking, “I’d like to poison myself today.”
But when something becomes common — when everyone’s doing it — it stops feeling strange.
It just feels normal.
That’s how cultures drift.
That’s how minds darken.
That’s how hearts harden.
And when the Bible warns us not to follow the sinful world around us, it’s not talking about fashion cycles.
It’s talking about a downward spiral —
a way of thinking and living that leads to estrangement from God, shame, and destruction.
Our title sort of says it all this morning: Don’t Live Like the Sinful World!
Let’s read our verses from Ephesians 4:17-24.
* 17 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. 18 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. 19 They have become callous and have given
themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.
Paul transitions into this very practical section with a serious and solemn warning.
He’s not just saying, “Don’t act a fool like the Gentiles. They’re crazy folk!”
By saying “I… testify in the Lord,” he’s using court related verbiage like, “I’m standing as a witness.”
And He’s going to lay out why the Ephesian Christians should break away from living like their unsaved
neighbors.
Of course, ethnically, his readers are still Gentiles (non-Jews) as we are.
But, if you recall, Paul spent a good part of the theological section of this letter explaining how, as
Christians, we are no longer Jew or Gentile and have been made into a new people - God’s people.
Verses 20-24 get into why the Ephesian Church should be different
* 20 But that is not the way you learned Christ!— 21 assuming that you have heard about him and were taught
in him, as the truth is in Jesus, 22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and
is corrupt through deceitful desires, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to put on the
new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
Paul looks at Christians in Ephesus and says, ‘Don’t live like the sinful world.’
Why? Not because you’re better.
Not because you’re stronger.
But because you’re different.
You’ve been made new.
You’ve been changed by knowing Christ as your Savior
So, first, from verses 17-19, I want to challenge you to -
1. ABANDON THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL OF THE SINFUL WORLD.
* 17 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. 18 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. 19 They have become callous and have given
themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.
Inspired by God, Paul delivers a blistering evaluation of the Ephesian believers’ old way of life and the
culture which surrounded them.
* 17 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.
While there were certainly some noble figures within the Greek culture, even their own historical literature
describes the mass as being corrupt morally and spiritually.
With all of the intellectual sophistication learning of the Greek culture, it’s all the sadder that their efforts
should take place “in the futility of their minds.”
The term “futility” means without use or value, emptiness, futility, purposelessness.
It’s the same meaning as when Solomon complains in Ecclesiastes that all things in life that are without
God in the mix are “vanities of vanities” - worthless.
Before we go too far down the road of Paul’s Holy Spirit inspired description, let me point out that this isn’t
saying that all unbelievers are living useless lives.
But the truth is that the thinking of the one who rejects the Creator God is marred beyond repair.
Certainly, our unredeemed culture is not pointing people to God and the worship that He’s due.
These verses appear to be Paul’s shorter description which he gives in Romans 1:21-24
* Romans 1:21–24 21 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. 22 Claiming to be
wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling
mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. 24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of
their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves,
Verse 18 continues in this Romans 1 fashion explaining how their understanding is only as good as it can be
without light.
* 18 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’re described as estranged from God and the life that He intended for them.
This is due to anyone being ignorant without Christ.
This isn’t a lack of general knowledge of things.
Pivot Illus - “My sister-in-law told me once that I was a wealth of useless information, which is a high
compliment in my family.”
Due to a dullness of heart concerning the gospel, man’s knowledge may abound, but without Christ it
remains misdirected.
Soon, when the point of this whole temporal world is revealed, they will wail over the waste of their days.
The ignorance of what is most important is attributed to a hardness of heart, meaning it’s turned to stone.
Quote - One writer states, “In this case the ignorance is one that is [blameworthy], because it represents a
willful ignorance of those who have rejected the knowledge and acknowledgment of the true God out of
“the hardness of their hearts”.
And this hardness results in what was intended to be tender toward the Lord is callous.
* 19 They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of
impurity.
We’ve all had callouses or know what they’re like.
But it’s truly sad when it describes a person in general.
It means to have a deadened conscience - to not be bothered by the results of what one is doing.
Under the condition of being callous, the average unregenerated person does what they feel like doing.
This is what’s meant that they have given themselves up, abandoning themselves to their desires.
They betray their immortal souls (that will live forever) for their temporary impulses.
This is also called sensuality, which means doing what feels right at the moment.
And this term usually infers a direction which we won’t discuss in the presence of young ears.
As is seen in the description given in Roman’s 1, the end result is a continual lust for the for more impurity
or moral corruption with an almost religious fervor.
What’s doubly sad is that Paul seems to describe our day in which even preachers encourage believers to
live in the same way.
We read this in 1 Timothy 4:1–2
1 Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting
themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, 2 through the insincerity of liars whose
consciences are seared,
There’s something that’s becoming epidemic in our culture called “death scrolling.”
You pick up your phone for one reason — maybe to check the weather or respond to a text.
And twenty minutes later, you’re still scrolling through social media or youtube.
Your thumb keeps moving. Story after story. Video after video.
These can be images of Outrage. Lust. Comparison. Anger. Fear.
You didn’t plan to go there.
You didn’t wake up that morning thinking, “I would really like my soul dulled today.”
But you just kept scrolling.
And what happens?
At first, something shocks you.
Then it amuses you.
Then it normalizes.
Eventually, it doesn’t even register.
That’s what we’re being warned that we’re going to get.
Futility of mind — mindless consumption.
Darkened understanding — categories start shifting.
Alienation from the life of God — spiritual sensitivity dulls.
Callousness — things that once grieved you now entertain you.
Given over — you start wanting more of what once disturbed you.
Paul’s point is not merely “don’t do bad things.”
It’s: don’t immerse yourself in a system that reshapes your affections.
You don’t jump off a cliff.
You just keep swiping.
Abandon the Downward Spiral of the Sinful World.
If I keep consuming what dulls me, I am cooperating with what corrupts me.
You don’t drift upward. You spiral downward.
And abandoning the spiral may, very practically, mean:
Deleting the app.
Setting the boundary.
Refusing certain content.
Because whether we acknowledge it or not, the world is changing us one scroll at a time.
?- Would you describe your mindset as…
a. the unbelieving world is clueless about true reality?
b. biblical truth is less relevant to my everyday life?
?- Where do you need to change your relationship to the unsaved world?
a. To stop listening to their useless ideas about life.
b. To guard yourself against adopting their hardness of heart.
c. To avoid the sensuality with which it’s obsessed.
d. To be heartbroken over how most people are lost in sin.
Rather than being swept up in the Downward Spiral of the Sinful World,
2. ANCHOR YOURSELF IN THE TRUTH OF YOUR TRANSFORMATION.
* 20 But that is not the way you learned Christ!— 21 assuming that you have heard about him and were taught
in him, as the truth is in Jesus, 22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and
is corrupt through deceitful desires, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to put on the
new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
If verses 17–19 show us the spiral, verses 20–24 show us the anchor
Verse 20 points us to how Christians have always been taught to live - Like Christ.
* 20 But that is not the way you learned Christ!— 21 assuming that you have heard about him and were taught
in him, as the truth is in Jesus,
The discipleship of the Ephesian believers is being referred to here.
The term for learn means to gain knowledge or skill by instruction.
But yet we’re talking about learning a person, that is Christ.
And this embodies the paradox of discipleship for a believer.
We’re learning truth that opens our hearts and lives to the person who embodies truth.
This is also why, in contrast with the destruction that comes from the futility of the mind of the unsaved,
the TRUE TRUTH is in JESUS - the one that set us free and teaches us just how free we truly are.
The flow of his description of their journey follows what all believers experience.
They heard about Jesus in the gospel and accepted His righteousness in place of their sinful state before
God.
And they had been taught in Jesus accepting the truths of what it means to follow Christ.
So, Paul is assuming that the Ephesian believers have been discipled in the truths that contradict the idea
that they should go on living like the world around them.
His assumption is likely based in the common truths of discipleship that were taught to new believers.
This is the common thought because the truths that we’ll see here are so prominent in other NT epistles.
- that the believer has put off their sin nature and put on a new nature.
What follows is the specific truth which is in Jesus which is primary to discipleship, and this is –
* 22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful
desires, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to put on the new self, created after the
likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
These truths involve the shedding of an old identity, being renewed from the inside, and putting on our new
identity.
What can be confusing as we look at this is that these are truths that every believer must embrace as
having happened for them.
And they also involve living by these truths in a way that makes them practically evident in our lives.
I’ll try to reflect both of these for applicational purposes.
But this week is more about what is truly true about the believer.
While next week, we’ll see how these truths should impact our behavior, reflected in statements like,
“Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor.”
So, first, we see the truth every true believer should know of their relationship to our fallen world.
2a. IN CHRIST, YOUR SIN NATURE HAS BEEN STRIPPED OFF.
* 22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful
desires,
Those of you who grew up in Christian homes may not identify with the term “old self.”
Those of us who dove into the sin around us, Christian upbringing or not, may understand this better.
These Ephesian believers certainly had a former manner of life in a culture encouraging sin of all kinds.
Regardless, of our being able to identify with an old way of life, this is talking about the sin nature that we
all wrestle with when we give it power in our lives.
The old self is described as corrupt from the inside out through deceitful desires.
The term corrupt refers to something that is dead, rotting, and polluted.
In some ancient cultures, there was a horrible death sentence that might be enacted.
The person sentenced to death would be strapped to a corpse.
Aside from being psychologically traumatizing, the way it was a horrible death sentence is because of the
corrupting nature of the dead body.
Eventually, the convict strapped to the body would become diseased from the corrupted remains.
I thought about this practice when I read this quote from Barth
“Every trait of the Old Man’s behavior is putrid, crumbling, or inflated like rotting waste or cadavers, stinking, ripe for
being disposed of and forgotten”
=> This is likely what Paul is referring to when he declares in –
* Romans 7:24-25a 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
What’s so dangerous about our old selves, which is corrupted/rotting, is that it feels natural to us.
This is part of the draw back to it being our “old NATURE.”
If we don’t put it off, it will spread it’s destructive corruption into our lives.
But the work of Christ powerfully strips it from us, empower us to leave it off, and clothe us anew.
This agrees with other places where these discipling words are given by the Apostles.
=> Paul describes himself in the way that’s true of all who have received Christ in -
* Galatians 2:20 20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And
the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
He goes on to apply this to all of us -
* Galatians 5:24 24 And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions
and desires.
The reminder is given in -
* Colossians 3:3 3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
And, as we’ll see in Ephesians, these truths should impact the choices we make as we’re taught in -
* Colossians 3:9–10 9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with
its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of
its creator.
Quote - the New Testament Commentary restates these reminders as -
“Your lives are no longer dark, your minds no longer vain. You are no longer alienated but walking step by
step in the full light of the Lord, and in fellowship with him. So you must finish with all immorality, and the
passion for what is impure.”
The second step that salvation caused is our inward renewal as believers.
2b. IN CHRIST, YOU’VE BEEN INWARDLY AWAKENED.
* 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds,
This term for renewal is different than those that speak of the ongoing renewal that we must experience in
order to be continually transformed, as in Romans 12:2.
Think of this like a jumpstart of life in our inner being as a part of our regeneration.
And it’s part of the miraculous work of God that we should celebrate and pray for other’s to experience.
But the specific sphere that’s pointed to here has to do with the ethics of a person’s life rather than simply
being brought to life.
In contrast with the corruption of the old nature that leans toward the sinful condition of the world, the
believer’s been given a renewal of heart for loving God and others.
Think of a steam boatsteamboat that’s fire has gone out.
Instead of steaming on the sea like it was made for, it’s just bobbing on it’s anchor or cast adrift.
In order to get it back to what it was made for, someone enters the belly of the ship to relight the fire.
With that the boilers can heat, steam can flow, and the engine can power it as it should.
This is like the transformation of regeneration that comes when God lights His fire within the unbeliever.
As RC Sproul writes, “Once I have been made alive to God through his divine initiative, quickened by his
regenerating grace, my heart now throbs with spiritual life.”
Of course, our constant renewal is required as we live and grow in Him, as we’re told in
* 2 Corinthians 4:16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is
being renewed day by day.
Let me say that it’s hard to distinguish this renewal work from what follows in the putting on of the new
self.
It may be meant to be a part of God’s second stage of regeneration.
But according to the grammar of these verses, the third work of God that is done at salvation involves
clothing us with what’s nothing like the corrupt old self.
2c. IN CHRIST, YOU’VE BEEN RECLOTHED IN GOD’S LIKENESS.
* 24 and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
God didn’t leave us naked spiritually.
He clothed us with a new nature.
As regeneration points to the idea of being re-created, we’re given a newly created identity.
And it’s not in the image of our fallen patriarch Adam who was made in God’s image.
Sadly, that image was marred and corrupted by sin before we received it.
No, our new self is created in the likeness of God.
Quote - As one writer puts it, “this existence in the new man constitutes a new creation inaugurated when
newly minted citizens of this heavenly kingdom are “created after the likeness of God.”
Our lives are intended to reflect true righteousness and holiness rather than the callous greed and impurity
that marks the world around us.
You can wash a pig.
You can perfume a pig.
You can put a bow on a pig.
But the first mud puddle that pig sees—he’s gone.
“Why? Because you didn’t change his nature.”
Christianity isn’t pig-polishing. It’s new birth. A new nature. A new self.
What is needed is the decisive acceptance of “the new man”.
Soon we will read of Paul putting these truths in this way -
* Ephesians 5:8 8 for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children
of light
If you’re like me and Kelly, you’ve watched a lot of winter Olympics this week.
We sit there amazed as we watch the figure skating.
The things these people can do is almost inhuman in strength and skill.
I told Kelly, “I don’t think I could even lift you off the ground without dropping you.
I can’t imagine if someone told me that in order to be given a million dollars I needed to
1. Lift Kelly onto your shoulder.
2. Throw her up in the air.
3. Have Kelly twirl 3x in the air.
4. Catch her/Don’t kill her.
5. At the same time wear boots that force to me balance on a ¼” piece of metal.
6. Do all of this while sliding across a sheet of ice.
I’d have to tell them just keep your money.
If you’ve trusted Christ as your Savior, you’ve received something far more valuable than a million dollars.
What was needed to be done in order for you to receive it was far more difficult than Olympic ice skating.
It was only able to be done by God.
You needed to have your sin nature stripped off.
You had to be inwardly awakened by God.
You had to be reclothed in God’s likeness.
?- Which is harder for you to believe?
a. In Christ, you’re free from the power of your sinful nature.
b. In Christ, God has sparked a love in you for Him and others.
c. In Christ, you have a new identity that is made to worship God.
God has done what’s needed for us to abandon the downward spiral of the sinful world and be anchored in
the truth of our transformation
We don’t live differently to become new. We live differently because we have been made new.
?- Did you know that an elephant can be kept tied to a stake even though it could easily pull the stake out
of the ground?
In cultures where they’re domesticated from birth, an elephant might be tied to a tree or stake that’s too
strong for it to break away from in its youth.
Eventually, the young elephant accepts its bondage.
Later, even when it’s large and strong enough to yank the stake out of the ground, it typically won’t.
It’s come to believe that the stake is too strong for it.
The principle is called “Learned Helplessness”
And we can be very much like that elephant even though God has freed us and made us new.
God doesn’t tell us, “Try harder.”
He tells us, “Remember who you are in Christ.”
We don’t live differently to become new. We live differently because we have been made new.
God’s command isn’t, 'Try harder.' It is, 'Remember who you are.'
You are not tied anymore.
