Ephesians 4:17-24 • Life of Lizards and Stallions
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
7 Come, now is the time to worship 7
>>> Welcome to Grace Alive with Dr. Bryan Chapell.
Please join with us as we worship God and study His Word together.
7 Come, just as you are before your God 7
7 Come 7 7
>>> Lord, You are our Cornerstone.
And without You, we cannot stand.
We cannot breathe.
We cannot survive.
We're just so thankful that You are here for us and we can rest in Your eternal promises.
As we read the headlines, we need cornerstones in this world today, and You are it and You are the only Cornerstone that we need.
And we're so thankful for that.
And thankful for the day when we will stand before Your throne and be complete in You.
And it's in Jesus' precious name we pray.
Amen.
>>> You may be seated.
7 Son of Man 7
7 Our guilt upon your shoulders 7
7 Man of sorrows crushed beneath our shame 7
7 Stood condemned 7
7 The Spotless Lamb, You suffered 7
7 Crucified, You took the blame 7
7 By your blood, hope revealed 7
7 By your stripes we are healed 7
7 At the cross You were strong to save 7
7 By your love You have made a way 7
7 There You broke the power of sin 7
7 And the grave 7
7 At the cross 7
7 At the cross You were strong to save 7
7 You were strong to save 7
7 Crowned with thorns 7
7 Pierced for our transgressions 7
7 Lifted high and nailed upon a tree 7
7 Took the scorn of every generation 7
7 It is finished 7
7 You have won the victory 7
7 At the cross You were strong to save 7
7 By your love You have made a way 7
7 There You broke the power of sin 7
7 And the grave 7
7 At the cross 7
7 At the cross You were strong to save 7
7 You were strong to save 7
7 By Your blood, hope revealed 7
7 By Your stripes we are healed 7
7 By Your grace we are found 7
7 At Your feet we bow down 7
7 At the cross You were strong to save 7
7 By your love You have made a way 7
7 There You broke the power of sin 7
7 And the grave 7
7 At the cross 7
7 At the cross 7
7 At the cross You were strong to save 7
7 By your love You have made a way 7
7 There You broke the power of sin 7
7 And the grave 7
7 At the cross 7
7 At the cross You were strong to save 7
7 You were strong to save 7
7 You were strong to save 7 7
[Applause]
>>> For our scripture this morning, let me ask that you would look in your bibles at Ephesians chapter 4, Ephesians chapter 4, as we'll be looking at verses 17-24.
In your Grace bibles, that's page 978.
And while you're turning, it gives me a chance to show you slides of our vacation.
[Laughter]
It wasn't a vacation, but many of you know we did just get back from a trip to the Holy Land, and I wanted to give you just a quick review of some things that we were able to do if you'll look at the screens.
Some of the things we were able to do is worship and teach at the synagogue at Capernaum.
Now, that doesn't sound too significant to you.
This is where Jesus would have taught, the same synagogue.
Now, several excavations beneath this floor, but the same place, would have been where Jesus taught and we were able to have teaching there.
We were also able to, at the southern steps in Jerusalem, talk and teach where Jesus would have taught.
The southern steps are right below the Temple Mount, which means that during Passover in Jesus' time, tens, hundreds of thousands of Jews would be going up these steps to offer sacrifice in the temple.
You actually see some young people walking down.
While we were there, it was the National Independence Day of Israel, and so lots of Jewish children come also to celebrate on the southern steps.
And this was a class that was just coming down as we were teaching in that particular place.
We were able to have really wonderful worship.
This is in a church that's right beside the Pool of Bethesda.
The Pool of Bethesda, remember, where Jesus healed the man who couldn't get to the water ahead of other people and had to be first, supposedly, to be healed.
Jesus corrected that understanding, but He also healed the man.
And here you see Rachel and Maria.
>>> Rachel and Maria, hello.
>>> And there we had wonderful worship.
We also were able to go to some of the archeological sites that were more out in the open.
This is the aqueduct, the Roman aqueduct that is at Caesarea.
Now, reasons that this is important in Caesarea, there is a great amphitheater and within the lifetime of many of you here, there was a stone that was repurposed for one of the seats in the amphitheater.
And as archaeologists were excavating the theater, they turned over that stone and found a reference to Pontius Pilate, the first archaeological reference to Pilate that has ever happened.
And there has been literary reference to Pilate in the works of Josephus and in the Bible but never any hard evidence until the stone that was unearthed here at Caesarea.
And so we had opportunity to see and experience many wonderful things, and I wanted you to know of that trip.
And I'll be referring to it a little bit in the message as we go.
Have you found Ephesians 4?
Let's stand and we'll honor God's Word reading Ephesians 4 verses 17-24.
Paul, speaking to those whom he wants to live under the power and goodness of the gospel, 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 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."
Let's pray together.
>>> Father, what a good calling You put into our lives: not to chase after futility but to recognize You're actually calling us to be our dearest and most desired self, that which is made in the likeness of You; that You by the work of Your Son have given us righteousness and holiness and called us now to walk in a path where there is not futility but faith and freedom and fuel for a life with Christ.
Teach us what it means.
Give us the hope and the power of the gospel we pray.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.
>>> Please be seated.
In his book "The Great Divorce," C. S. Lewis describes a young man who is troubled by a red lizard that always sits on his shoulder.
The red lizard is an analogy for a besetting sin, things that he and we sometimes just cannot be rid of.
At the same moment, the red lizard attracts us and tells us what good things are available in the things of the world and at the same moment mocks us by saying, "When you get it, it really didn't satisfy, did it?"
One day, an angel comes to the young man and promises he can get rid of the red lizard.
And the young man is thrilled he can be rid of this mocking temptation in his life.
How?
He begins to discern it as the angel begins to glow red hot.
And suddenly the young man recognizes what the angel intends to do is to kill the red lizard.
And now he gets a little afraid.
What would life be like without this particular thing in his life?
And so he says to the angel, "Well, maybe another day.
I mean, you don't really have to kill it, do you?"
And the angel said, "This is the moment of all moments.
You must decide."
At that moment, the red lizard himself recognizes the danger that he is in and begins to plead with the young man.
"That angel can do what he says.
He can kill me.
One fatal word from you and he will.
And then you'll be without me forever and ever.
It's not natural.
How could you live without me?
You'll only be a sort of a ghost, not a real man as you are now.
That angel doesn't understand.
He's only a cold bloodless thing.
It may be natural for him to be holy but not us.
I know there's no real pleasures for you now.
I know you only dream about the things that are good, but dreams are better than nothing, aren't they?
And I promise you: I'll be so good in the future.
I admit sometimes I've gone too far in the past, but I promise I won't do it again.
I'll give you nothing but nice dreams.
They will be sweet and fresh and almost innocent."
And so the red lizard pleads for his life.
It's the internal conscience desiring the things that we know are not of God.
And the way we excuse them is sometime saying, "But, listen, it's only human.
I mean, I'm not superhuman.
And just to be some sort of dead, cold, holy thing is not really natural for anyone.
And beside, it's almost innocent what I'm pursuing.
It's not really hurting anybody.
It's got to be better than the alternative."
And the apostle Paul, dealing with such temptation that comes out of our own hearts, writes to us these hard but important words of verse 17 in Ephesians 4.
"Now this I say and I testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds."
He is saying simply that the calling of a Christian is to a separated path.
If what we are doing is simply walking down a path like everyone else, there is something radically wrong with our lives.
God is calling us to something different but not just different: better.
Because not to follow what the apostle Paul is calling us to, a life with Christ, is to live a life of futility.
Now, the apostle is honest that turning away from a life of futility, turning from the path that everybody else is walking on, is not always easy.
And so he says, "Now this I say and testify in the Lord."
That word testify is the Greek word "martureo" as in martyr, as when Sam Dunlap prayed just a little bit ago about the persecuted church and you could hear the tears in his voice as if to say, "To walk with Christ will cost you something."
What might it cost you?
I'm going to ask that the very last slide that I showed you from our trip be put back up on the screens and maybe show you something you did not notice the first time around.
Paul, the apostle, who wrote these words to those at Ephesus, about needing to testify, "martureo," be a martyr for the things of God, would himself have been imprisoned about three hundred yards to our right for three years, awaiting a trip to Rome so that he could testify to the things of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But that's not just an ancient thought that those who live for the Lord will have to spend something of themselves.
Did you notice between these two people in our group there are a couple of individuals in the aqueduct opening?
Do you see those two people?
Those are leaders of the Coptic church.
What do you know of the Coptic church happening just two months ago?
Twenty-one Coptic Christians beheaded in Libya for saying, "Jesus is my Lord."
Not only did we walk with Coptic Christians when we were in Israel: At the hotel we stayed, we stayed with Ethiopian Christians and some of you know that in the last week, thirty Ethiopian Christians were beheaded or shot for their faith.
For us to think that to walk with Christ, who sacrificed Himself for us to be united to Him, would cost us nothing is not to face the reality of what the apostle says is necessary.
To walk differently from the world is in itself costly.
The question for us is: Why then do it?
And the response of the apostle is because anything else is absolute futility.
It's actually what he has said at the end of verse 18, "that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles, in the futility of their minds."
I want you to think with me what it would mean to live in futility.
To live in futility is to keep grasping after something you cannot get or to get it and find out it does not satisfy.
It's fool's gold.
It's something hollow.
It's to live the life of a lizard, to just live to catch flies and having caught some want some more flies.
That's the life of futility the apostle is warning us against and saying I want you to know, I know it sounds shocking and arresting, but it's the way the apostle's addressing us, what it would be like to live the life of lizards, to have the earth, the terrain, the dirt, this material world be the only thing that drives you, the only thing in your existence, to live as the Gentiles, to live as those who don't know God.
What would that life be like?
He explains when he says in verse 18, "They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to the hardness of their heart."
The first mark of this lizard life, this terrestrial existence that's all we know, is to actually have absence of the light of spiritual understanding, to live in a darkened world that no longer has the Spirit's light coming in.
For those of us who were just in Israel, there was a time at which we'd go to the Wailing Wall where, you know, even now, centuries and centuries after the temple of Solomon has been destroyed, people go there regularly to pray and put little prayer notes in the cracks in the wall as somehow that's a holy or better place.
But that is not as discouraging as to actually go in the tunnel beside the wall and to get to the one place where Jews believe that beyond that wall where the Muslims now control, beneath the earth is the Holy of holies and to be in this dark tunnel where women come every day and sit in chairs in the dark and pray to the wall and to grieve, darkened in understanding as though somehow being in the right place and playing at the, praying at the right place and the right wall is somehow going to bring the Spirit of God to you.
It's darkened in understanding.
But more painful is the apostle saying that those who are darkened in their understanding, verse 18 in the middle, "are alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to the hardness of their hearts."
That they are alienated from God.
There is not the penetration to the reality of the spiritual world that God intends, the light really to come in, to make your life bright and free and have the power of God there.
Some of you snowbirds are back now, and so when I talk about geckos, you recognize that's not just something in an insurance commercial, right?
[Laughter]
When you're in Florida, the geckos are everywhere, right?
They're on your path.
They're on your patio.
They're on your screens.
And sometimes when we have gone to Florida, you know, and need to entertain my kids, I'll take one of the geckos off the screen and hold him to my finger and it just clings to me, doesn't even try to escape, because its only reality is the extent of its instincts and the patio.
That's the only world it knows.
And the apostle is saying that to be darkened in understanding, to be futile in what you are pursuing, is not to have the life of God, because all you know is the terrestrial existence.
Your experience is only that of the material world.
And the reasil--, reason that is the only experience of those who are turning away from God is, the apostle says the end of verse 18, "the hardness of their hearts."
This is not pleasant to talk about.
The word hardness there actually is a word talking about the stubbornness of people.
As though there has been the opportunity to see beyond the terrestrial world, to lift your eyes above the dirt, to know something beyond the material.
But there is resistance.
There's a stubbornness, a hardness of heart.
We experienced it in our trip.
And those of you who travel in Israel know that you typically will have a Jewish-Israeli guide, even as you go to the Christian sites.
And they kind of know what Christians expect to hear and they kind of know what Christians expect to be told about.
But it was interesting on this particular trip as we would go tradit--, to traditional sites that our particular guide had not heard some of the explanations that we were talking about: how when Jesus came into the world He made specific actions and trips that were declaring Himself to be the greater Abraham; that He did very specific things to prove that He was the greater Moses; that He went in a specific way to prove that He was the greater David; that He made a specific path to show He was the greater Joshua; that God was putting together this mosaic through the Old Testament, one common thread going across time, centuries, and armies and nations to say, "When Jesus comes, what He does will declare Himself to be the culmination of all things."
And our Jewish guide began to get it, to actually say, "Jesus was doing things that no other prophet had done, that no other person had done."
And he actually in our very last stop began to say it: that when David was king over Israel he said to those who were lame and blind they could not enter the Holy City, but when Jesus performed His miracles in Jerusalem, there were only two.
He healed the lame and the blind within the city walls.
And our guide said, "To show that He was the greater David."
And we're thinking, "He gets it."
We're not telling him the story: He's now telling us the story.
And so at dinner that night, some of our brave co-travelers actually said to our guide, "If you believe that Jesus is the greater David, why do you not believe that He is your Messiah?"
And the answer was, "Because then I could not be a Jew."
I could not be the person that I want to be.
It's not that I haven't had opportunity.
It's not that I don't know the story.
It's not that I heard--, that I haven't heard the Word.
But there is this refusal to accept.
By the way, there's a pastor going to stay with him fairly soon for two weeks just to be a witness of the gospel to him: Pray about that, as an openness is growing.
But it's the hardness of the heart that can turn it away.
And I know when you hear that, we all will think, "Well, I'm glad that's not me."
But it's just not what Paul is saying.
He is warning people, "Listen, have you really said I know what God says, but then I can't be the person I want to be, so I reject it?"
In marriage decisions, "I can't do what the Bible says because then I could not be the person I want to be or be with the person I want to be."
In our entertainments, "Well, I can't walk the walk of Christ because then I could not have the fun that I want to have."
In our ethics and our generosity, "I can't give up that position, I can't give up that money because then I could not have the things that I want to make me who I am."
And we think it's just somebody out there somewhere who by the hardness of their heart is not going to walk in the goodness and the glory of the gospel.
And yet, over and over again this is our temptation: to recognize that we are living just as the Gentiles, just like the rest of the world.
If there's no different path that we are on, there is something wrong with our priorities according to scripture.
And what we're ultimately doing is pursuing the futile things, the things that promise help but actually turn us dead.
I cannot help but think of the occasion when a pastor friend told me some years ago of meeting with a man who was now pursuing a woman not his wife.
And at the breakfast table in the restaurant, the pastor said, "Look what you're doing to yourself, to your family, to your witness."
And the man's response was, "I have never felt more alive."
But my pastor friend said, "He said it with steely cold eyes as though his heart was dead."
We think it's going to make us more alive, but the apostle says precisely what happens: The hardness of their hearts takes over and the consequence of that hard heart he begins to explain.
Do you see it?
Verse 19, "They have become callous and given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity."
It's just a process.
That if there's a willingness to turn away from the things of God, if there's a hardness, a stubbornness not to receive it, our hearts get hardened.
And when your heart gets hard, your body, your senses, the things of this world you just become insensitive to.
I've experienced it.
Some of you have too.
When you're in a hospital or you're in a home at that death moment.
And as the sclerosis of a heart is the hardening, as the deadening of the heart occurs, you can hold the hand of a loved one and at the very moment their heart is dying, what are their minds screaming for?
"I want to feel you."
"I'm holding your hand."
"I don't feel it.
Squeeze me.
Squeeze.
I don't feel it.
Squeeze harder, harder."
Or you put your arms around them and you hold them, "Hold me tighter, tighter," because as the heart is dying, the body, the mind is actually craving for the senses to be fulfilled.
And we recognize it happens even spiritually: that when we turn away from the things of God, we think I'll pursue this entertainment, this career, this person, this passion, and I, and I'll feel fulfillment.
Instead, as our hearts die and become hard, what happens is our passions, our bodies, our senses just begin to crave more.
It's precisely what the apostle says will happen.
Verse 19, "They have become callous, have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity."
I mean, those of you who are in the psychology professions, the medical professions, you know these truths.
I mean, we sometimes tease about it that so much indulgence of internet pornography actually desensitizes the body to passion.
And so people just now long for more and more: more graphic, more aggressive, more of it.
I just want to feel something again.
Because the indulgence of the thing that is ungodly actually is hardening your heart and your body now just wants more.
And, of course, the thing that is most precious which is the pattern of sexuality that God intends for a man and a woman just doesn't satisfy anymore.
And so we become greedy for every kind of impurity just to feel something again.
The people who lust for money pursue it and pursue it until ultimately they are desensitized to the satisfaction of present possessions.
I need something more.
How much more?
Just more, more and more because I'm looking for the things of earth to satisfy.
The people who have a passion for a higher position and so they get desensitized to the privileges of the place God has put them in life: to be the witness, to be the light to people around them.
I want more.
I want higher, I--.
Why?
Do you recognize you're the lizard chasing flies?
And when you get the fly, you're just going to want another fly.
It's the path we go.
The people who feed on bitterness because somebody has hurt them or hurt their family and not being able to forgive, they want vengeance and satisfaction.
And what's actually happening when we do not pursue the priorities of scripture is our own hearts get hard.
And the loveliness of family, people uniting and wanting to be close to us, they actually begin to stand away from us because they sense the bitterness in us.
It may even be justified.
But as our hearts become hard, we even stop feeling the goodness of the love that God would bring into our lives.
And so we long for it.
I want somebody to love me, care for me.
But the vengeance, the greed, the bitterness hardens us.
And so we don't even enjoy the very thing that God intends to bring us the compensation, as it were, for the hurt that came by the love that is near but doesn't touch us anymore because of our hard hearts.
Now, I must tell you that when I hear sermons myself, like the one I'm just now preaching to you, about the dangers and the futility of being driven by money and sex and power, I recognize the easiest thing for me to do is to be glad that this message does not apply to me.
[Laughter]
To be happy that I'm not living a lizard life.
And then I recognize that sometimes God must remind me that I'm easily tempted to the very things I preach against.
I can always logically understand the hedonistic paradox that if you get everything you want you actually want more, that you become calloused to the very thing that you were pursuing.
I understand that.
I've had psychology classes.
I know the logic of all of that.
What surprises me is how subtle is the world's embrace that is actually hardening my heart when I don't even recognize it's happening.
And so sometimes what actually happens is God brings loss into my life so that I will feel again.
Do you know what I mean?
Those of you who have watched your retirement accounts kind of do this in recent years and recognize, now I know some of us, that makes us grasp all the tighter, but there are others of us who recognize what I gave myself to do, to build the account, and I begin to sense the futility of it: I begin to recognize God may have another purpose for my funds.
I mean, I recognize that I've already lost thousands and thousands, that when my own child needs some help with a down payment, it doesn't hurt me so much to give it anymore.
I mean, what--, it's just kind of going to go anyway.
I have no ultimate control.
I find myself getting generous again but not becoming grasping of the things of the world.
I find at times when I have lost position or prestige that my family somehow becomes more dear to me.
And I recognize I was willing to sacrifice what's more important for position or fame or pride or whatever it is and recognize that the world can just kind of so subtly come in and begin to squeeze our hearts into hardness.
And God, knowing that, is warning us here but also telling us there is an alternative.
Telling us so much about the futility of living in the material world alone, he says in verse 20, "But that is not the way you learned Christ."
There is something else.
There's another path.
It's the better path.
The reason we don't just persist in futility is it's not God's plan.
He's got something better in mind.
C. S. Lewis expresses it in that account in "The Great Divorce" by saying, "At some point the young man actually gives the angel entry.
And the angel, glowing fire, destroys the red lizard and it falls to the ground only to rise again as a mighty stallion on which the young man can ride."
It's really a wonderfully insightful analogy.
As what C. S. Lewis is reminding us is the very things that are controlling us by the world, if we begin to operate with the priorities and the motivations of scripture, what God does is He takes the things that put us in bondage and actually makes us master of them.
When our priorities change, God takes the very things which we have skill in and control in and power in and talent in and instead of letting them control us by the expectations and the obsessions of the world, we begin to be free to be our true selves.
Now think what that means.
That means for some people, you know, who are engineers, God when He saves your heart and turns your life around is probably not going to make you a poet.
[Laughter]
What is God probably going to do?
He's going to let you use your talents and your abilities with freedom, saying, "How can God best use this?
How can I best demonstrate the grace and the goodness before God?"
And suddenly you become your best self.
Lit--, living for God against the intimidations and the obsessions of boss or peer or neighbor or even your own desires.
Free to live for Him.
It's unlikely, you know, that God is going to take a C.P.A. and say, "Now I'm going to make you a painter or a teacher, a trucker."
You know, what is God most likely to do?
He's probably not going to so much change your talents as sanctify them.
Not so much change who you are as give you the direction that's ultimate fulfillment.
And say, "I've given you this mind, this heart, these talents, these abilities," and now instead of having this oppression of expectation and the futility of just going after one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, you actually begin to live in the freedom of the gospel.
And that means you pursue the things you most desire and actually do it with the greatest joy that God intends.
How does that happen where you're no longer pursued by lizards but riding the horses of heaven?
Verse 20, "This 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."
Now what, what's a life not lived among the lizards but lived on heaven's horsepower?
It's first the life that hears the Savior.
Paul says it in really kind of wonderfully matched ways.
"Assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him."
What have you heard about this Jesus?
Well, Paul has said several things.
If you just look at chapter 2 and verse 4, "God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive with Christ, by grace you have been saved, and raised up with him and seated with him in the heavenly places."
What have you heard about Jesus?
But, He's the expression of the kindness of God toward you, that He intends the best for you.
God is not intending for you to pursue a life of futility but a life of resonance with the reality of the gifts that God has given you.
And in doing so, you trust that and you believe that, because God has told you about Jesus.
Until you begin to hear with reality that's true.
And the reason is because you have been, the language of the apostle, not only heard about Jesus but taught in Him.
Now, I've done a lot of talking and we've gone through the book of Ephesians about that language of being united to Christ.
And maybe here's another time to mention it.
You know, if you ever stay up and watch, you know, late night commercials, you know, you learn that on-the-job training is a big deal.
Right?
That you learn the most when you're actually doing the thing, when you're actually experiencing what you're supposed to be learning.
And so the apostle says you've not only heard about Jesus, but you've been taught in Him, as though united to Him, knowing your sin is forgiven, knowing God is for you now.
You're actually able to pursue the greatest things that God calls you to, because you're actually hearing the truth of the gospel.
In Him, united to Him.
He's helping.
He desires to help.
One of the really funny and scary moments on our trip in Israel was where we were at the Dead Sea and, of course, people want to float in the Dead Sea.
It has the same water density of a watermelon.
Right?
So you can just kind of float in a watermelon.
You know, you got to do it once in life, you know.
[Laughter]
And so we'd been floating for about an hour.
And then, coming down the hill, is Kathy's ancient third cousin, Aldred, that we only discovered on Ancestry.com about three years ago.
[Laughter]
And here she is.
She's hardly able to walk anymore.
And she's coming down this steep slope to float in the Dead Sea.
Well, when I see that, I got out of the water and I start walking up the hill to intersect Aldred and say, "You can't come," only to have Dick Fredericks, the emergency room physician of this congregation, kind of get in front of me, cut me off at the path, and say, "Aldred, if you're willing to try, I'll get you in."
[Laughter]
And then Dick Fredericks and our elder, Tom Allen, on both sides of her got her down in the--, "We're here to help."
[Chuckles]
"We can."
[Chuckles]
"We can help you fulfill your desire to actually float in the Dead Sea."
They were for her.
They helped her.
They were her human walking canes, you know.
They just did everything to help her do most what she wanted to do.
And here's the apostle Paul saying, "Don't you remember?
I'm assuming that you have heard about Jesus and you have been taught in Him, so that you can now pursue the life that is glory in Him."
How do you do that?
You, verse 22, "Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and you're renewed in the spirit of your minds by putting on the new self, created after the likeness of God."
Now, listen, when you're on these long trips, you know, what was it?
Fourteen hours coming back, you know, you've got to do something.
So you watch every movie you can possibly tolerate, right?
You listen to every song.
But what actually makes it a little more tolerable for people is the noise canceling headphones, right?
So you can actually hear what's going on.
And what do those headphones do?
Well, they exclude some things and they amplify other things, so that you can actually know what's going on in the movie or the song or whatever it is.
And what Paul is saying here is if you're really going to hear Christ saying, "I'm for you, I will help you fulfill what God intends for you so that you could be in true righteousness and holiness living in this world, fulfilling the purposes of God for your life," you're going to have to exclude some things.
Don't just listen to the voices of the world: their expectations, their obsessions, their threats.
It's not just keeping up with the Joneses and it's not just doing what the boss says.
It's not just doing what your peers say makes you happy.
It's actually excluding the things that you know are futility, that even if you did what they said, even if you got what they said, you would just want more.
It's a life different than chasing flies.
What--, turn that off.
And instead, amplify what God is saying: to be renewed in the spirit of your mind, to actually hear Christ saying to you, "I am for you now; I intend the best for you."
Don't let the things of the world control you.
Instead, take the horsepower of heaven and ride on the path that God gives you to ride, which is going to be the most fulfilling thing that you can do in this life.
And you believe that because you've turned off the voice of the world and you've listened to the voice of the Spirit who is saying ultimately what does God intend for you?
I don't want you to miss it.
The end of verse 24, "To live your new self, created after the likeness of God, in true righteousness and holiness."
We were made in the image of God from the very beginning.
And now what God intends for His people is that we would be our truest self, that we would live without the encumbrances of sin, we would live without the encumbrances of the world's expectations, that we would rise above the dirt and actually live in the likeness of God, called to the holiness and righteousness, a life in this world that's not just captured by the slavery to the sin that's all about us.
And the promise that God is making is when we do that, we will live in the best that He intends for our lives.
And so He says, listen, turn off the world's voice, listen to the voice of Christ, and you will hear what will allow you to do what God most wants you to do and what your heart's dearest desires longs to do as well.
That's the promise.
That walking with Him will allow His power to work in your heart and life, even, even when other things would seem for a moment to satisfy more.
Many of you will know the account: July 30, 1945, the heavy cruiser, the U.S.S. Indianapolis, returning from its mission to deliver enriched uranium, which would help end World War II, was returning to the United States, did not make it because of a Japanese torpedo.
Within minutes, nine hundred men in the water, many wounded in the water without water and surrounded by sharks.
In the four days that it took to be found and rescued, the nine hundred men had become three hundred.
And the chief medical officer wrote the account, which has become famous of how hard it was to survive when there was water that seemed to be saving all around you.
Captain Lewis Haynes wrote, "There was nothing I could do but give advice, bury the dead at sea but save their life jackets, and try to keep the men from drinking the saltwater.
When the hot sun came out and we were in this crystal-clear water, you were so thirsty you couldn't believe that it wasn't good enough to drink.
I had a hard time convincing the men they should not drink.
The young ones: You take away their hope, you take away their water and the food and they would drink the saltwater and go fast.
I can remember striking men who were drinking the saltwater to try to stop them.
They would get dehydrated and become maniacal.
And there were mass hallucinations.
I was amazed how everyone would see the same thing.
One man would see something; then everyone else would see it.
Even I had to fight off the hallucinations and not drink the saltwater."
All around us, sometimes even Christians are saying, "This won't really hurt.
This isn't really bad for you.
This won't really matter."
And even a church, even a nation, can get caught in a mass hallucination.
And what we have to say is what God is promising us is there is something better, a renewed life in the Spirit, and telling us the path to walk is the one which is actually going to be blessed so that we actually fulfill the image of God in us.
And it doesn't come by walking the way of the rest of the world.
If there's no difference in our path, there is something radically wrong.
That is futility, but it is not what He intends for us.
In the beauty of the Spirit is the horsepower of heaven to lift us above dirt expectations and to believe in the God who sent His Son, that He intends your good and has given you the path.
Follow it.
And God will lift you above this world to the most fulfilling life you can live on this earth till He comes and heaven is even more real, the heaven you've already begun to live now.