New Life: Ephesians 4:17–32

No relationship survives on Old Self Ways so we need Christ to thrive in New Self ways.

• If there is no greater option than Jesus, then our lives can reflect that reality.

When we live old self ways we create small and callous worlds to live in

Ephesians 4:17–19 ESV

Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

• To live in the old self is like trying to get somewhere by taking a cul-de sac. you watch people go up in one direction trying to get somewhere with selfishness or hardness of heart. Greed that leads to callousness.

No relationship thrives on selfishness and greed

• The old self exists for one reason: to make you the center of every story. Now to be honest, most of our lives we are either trying to or fighting the urge to make ourselves the center of every story.

• The old self, as Paul talks about it with a hardness of heart, will always choose self over anything else.

• As the old self alienates from God and from others, it gives itself up to anything that can inflate it’s own self importance:

• The old self is simply a self trying to survive on it’s own without any other forms of life around it

the old self only comes off through trust in Jesus

Ephesians 4:19–22 ESV

They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires,

• Christ has given Himself for us to be in relationship with Him and others in new ways. He gave His life through the cross for us to experience and know salvation and through that new life.

• We have been freed because we are deeply loved in Christ so that we can follow Him and be a part of His kingdom life. And that life and developed in the relationships we have with one another.

New life in Christ impacts everything about us.

Ephesians 4:23–24 ESV

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.

• To put on the new self means to put on Christ. We take up after Him, look like Him in our relationships and actions (righteousness and holiness). That in our lives and in our relationships we act in such a way that people are reminded of Christ.

We are free to be in community

• Paul gives a litany of examples of what it means to live out good relationships. Whether being intentional and not out of control with anger, or working so that you can share with others. To speak for building up not for corruption.

• You may not be able to take off the old self but Christ can. Christ went to the cross to remove your old self. Christ went to the cross to give us a new self.

We are free to forgive one another.

Ephesians 4:31–32 ESV

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

• What would it look like for a church to commit to this. Through Christ we would put away wrath and anger and clamor (we are a culture thriving on clamor) and slander. And in so doing we would commit to being kind and tenderhearted.

• And we see this passage end with forgiveness. And forgiveness is how we not only understand new self ways but how we act on it.

• Hannah Arendt states: “forgiveness is the only way to reverse the flow of history.”

• We need new ways forward. And it won’t be through old self ways. No foundation has ever lasted on greed and selfishness.