Wait a minute, hold that tattoo!  

Ephesians 4:17-24 

Sermon by Pastor Dennis Gleason -- February 22, 2004

There are some things in life that are not as permanent as a tattoo! Kathy would know all about that wouldn’t she? 

Things do change. People change. There are aspects of our culture that will not look the same to us years from now. The Bible is quite clear that we are pilgrims just passing through this world on our way to another, better place. Because of that fact, we are encouraged not to buy into the culture that surrounds us. In fact we should be part of the counter culture…but more about that later.

The Apostle Paul has a very important message for us in the passage that is our text today. It is found in Epheisans 4;17-24.

      17With the Lord’s authority let me say this: Live no longer as the ungodly? do, for they are hopelessly confused. 18Their closed minds are full of darkness; they are far away from the life of God because they have shut their minds and hardened their hearts against him. 19They don’t care anymore about right and wrong, and they have given themselves over to immoral ways. Their lives are filled with all kinds of impurity and greed.
      20But that isn’t what you were taught when you learned about Christ. 21Since you have heard all about him and have learned the truth that is in Jesus, 22throw off your old evil nature and your former way of life, which is rotten through and through, full of lust and deception. 23Instead, there must be a spiritual renewal of your thoughts and attitudes. 24You must display a new nature because you are a new person, created in God’s likeness—righteous, holy, and true.

The Apostle Paul in this section of his letter discusses the responsibility we, as believers in Jesus Christ, have to walk or live as children of the light.  In order to accomplish his goal, Paul teaches us here that we have a responsibility to live in a manner that is pleasing to God. And to make that responsibility clear, he makes a comparison between us and the gentiles who do not believe in Jesus at all. We must not live like they do.

Paul speaks about their condition first of all (verses 17-19a) and then he speaks of their conduct. He makes it clear that we are to avoid both the condition they are in and how they live (vs. 19b).That gives us their conduct. We are not to live like they do.

Paul goes on to characterize what the gentiles are like: 

* Their thinking leads to futility. The text tells us that they live with futility of their minds. Futility is purposelessness.  The part of us that Paul is talking about here is that part of us, the mind, that is the part of us that is like God. The part of them that is not working is that part which has an intimate knowledge of God and divine things.

* This futility is an absence of purpose. When mankind lost this understanding of the divine because of sin, the result was a darkening of man’s understanding of who God is and how divine things work. This darkening of the mind means that they were blinded in their mind or understanding of the things of God. Paul uses the tense in the Greek language that says “were blinded in their understanding of God and still are. This result of all of this is permanent.

This blindness is a hardening, a callousness. The word that Paul uses here is one that means “hard skin”. It is used for moral and spiritual hardening. These Gentiles were alienated from God (and still are), through their moral and spiritual ignorance and through the hardening of their hearts.

* They were also separated from God and therefore, from the life of God. That meant that the gentiles were dead in their trespasses and sin. The word for separated is the word “alienated”, to be estranged. The life of God that every believer possesses is the life that God has in himself. Their alienation has as its source within themselves, that is in a culpable ignorance in their own hearts.

* The end result of all of this is that they have become a people who have become those who are of such a nature that they have come to be past feelings…” This is another verb that indicates that they were and still are past feelings. The word here is one that means “to cease to feel pain or grief, to become callous, insensible to pain, apathetic.” This is a deadness that comes to man when he gives himself over to the things around him.

Because of this spiritual deadness these Gentiles acknowledge no restraints. This is an abandonment to wantonness
Paul simply says that we are not to live that way.

Think back into your Old Testament for the next several minutes. In Jeremiah 2:14 we find an interesting thought.

      3For my people have done two evil things: They have forsaken me—the fountain of living water. And they have dug for themselves cracked cisterns that can hold no water at all! 

    God is speaking through Jeremiah here and clearly says that His people have committed two evils:
1. They have forsaken Him.  God is the very fountain of life. Mankind has left the clear, free flowing water of life and has settled for stagnant water in cisterns. Now, we know that a cistern is a place usually carved into rock where rain water was stored. Jeremiah says that God’s people forsook him and then because there was still a spiritual need took on the responsibility of coming up with an alternative.
2. Man’s solution (the cisterns) won’t hold any water because they are broken and leak. They will never satisfy the human heart and mind because they are empty and offer only empty promises.

The world system always argues against God and giving God his proper place in our lives.  The end result is a cultural system that governs how we live. This world system promises us everything we need to live our lives without God.

What is culture? It is the ways of thinking, living, and behaving that define a people and underlie its achievements. It is a nation's collective mind, its sense of right and wrong, the way it perceives reality, and its definition of self. Culture is the morals and habits a mother strives to instill in her children. It is the obligations we acknowledge toward our neighbors, our community, and our government. It is the worker's dedication to craftsmanship and the owner's acceptance of the responsibilities of stewardship. It is the standards we set and enforce for ourselves and for others: our definitions of duty, honor, and character. It is our collective conscience. 
--Robert P. Dugan, Jr., Winning the New Civil War,  p. 169.

Columnist Ellen Goodman wrote a powerful editorial on this topic, a portion of which follows:

Sooner or later; most Americans become card-carrying members of the counterculture. This is not an underground holdout of Hippies. No beads are required. All you need to join is a child. At some point between Lamaze and PTA, it becomes clear that one of your main jobs as a parent is to counter the culture. What the media deliver to children by the masses, you are expected to rebut one at a time. But it occurs to me now that the call for "parental responsibility" is increasing in direct proportion to the irresponsibility of the marketplace. Parents are expected to protect their children from an increasingly hostile environment. Are the kids being sold junk food? Just say no. Is TV bad? Turn it off. Are there messages about sex, drugs, violence all around? Counter the culture. Mothers and fathers are expected to screen virtually every aspect of their children's lives. To check the ratings on the movies, to read the labels on the CDs, to find out if there's MTV in the house next door. All the while keeping in touch with school and in their free time, earning a living.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, a research associate at the Institute for American Values, found this out in interviews with middle-class parents. "A common complaint I heard from parents was their sense of being overwhelmed by the culture. They felt relatively more helpless than their parents." "Parents," she notes, "see themselves in a struggle for the hearts and minds of their own children." It isn't that they can't say no. It's that there's so much more to say no to. Without wallowing in false nostalgia, there has been a fundamental shift.

Americans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition.
Once the chorus of cultural values was full of ministers, teachers, neighbors, leaders. They demanded more conformity, but offered more support. Now the messengers are Ninja Turtles, Madonna, rap groups, and celebrities pushing sneakers. Parents are considered "responsible" only if they are successful in their resistance. It's what makes child-raising harder. It's why parents feel more isolated. It's not just that American families have less time with their kids, it's that we have to spend more of this time doing battle with our own culture. It's rather like trying to get your kids to eat their green beans after they've been told all day about the wonders of Milky Way. Come to think of it, it's exactly like that.

"Battling Our Culture Is Parents' Task," Ellen Goodman, Chicago Tribune, August 18, 1993, Focus on the Family Newsletter, February, 1994.

Jesus was speaking about this danger in His comments on leaven (yeast). He warned His disciples to "beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees" (Matthew 16:6, RSV) "and the leaven of Herod (Mark 8:15 , RSV). Leaven symbolizes human imperfection (see Exodus 12:15-20, 13:3-8; Leviticus 2:11; 1 Corinthians 5:6-8). Jesus was warning against mixing imperfect human ideas with God's truth. The Pharisees had mixed their own religious traditions with the teaching of the Scriptures; the Sadducees were the philosophers of Jewish society; and Herod represented the world system. These three influences -- tradition, philosophy, and society -- seem inevitably to work their way into and become part of the value system of any Christian community to such an extent that it is possible to be a Christian, but live almost entirely within a pagan value system, and not even perceive it.

This possibility began to dawn on me when we moved to Brazil and changed cultures. Culture is hardly perceived as long as we do not leave the only one we really know. A fish doesn't perceive the water in which it swims, and neither are we aware of our culture, or the influence it exerts on our thoughts and actions. Often we must step outside of it to understand it -- and to understand ourselves! 
Jim Peterson, Living Proof,  NavPress, 1989, p. 100.

In the church we often try to counter all of the wrong influence of our culture by adopting a set of rules to govern how we live. In the church we call it legalism. The danger is found in the fact that we might refrain from doing certain things without really committing our lives to Christ.

A number of years ago there was a young man in our church who joined the Navy. He lived in Minnesota and wanted to see the world. He had been raised in a very legalistic home environment. He had a whole list of rules to live by. However, his heart was not committed properly to the things of God.  He took a bus to Minneapolis and while he was waiting to go on to boot camp he took time to do the things that he had been kept from doing. He bought his first pack of cigarettes, had his first drink and went to his first movie. The rules he had been given told him not to do those things and for years he had kept the rules. But of course the problem was that his heart was not in tune with the rules he was charged with keeping.

The sin that characterizes the Gentiles starts with
* insensitivity toward God and divine things.
* From there it goes on to ignorance of God,
* separation from God is a reality
* It leads next to darkness – a clouding of our minds about spiritual things.
* From there it leads to purposelessness.
* The end result of this purposelessness is found in verse 19 where Paul speaks about the fact that they were with out feelings, callous
* Being past feelings, they have given themselves to wantonness with a continual lust for more...

Paul tells us that we are not to live like the Gentiles do. We are different than they are. We have the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal Savior and the Lord of our lives.  We have become a new creation in Christ. Therefore, we are alive in Him and have the responsibility of putting off the old life – like we are taking off a garment and to put on the new self in Christ.

-- Dennis Gleason