154 - How We Should Not Live [A]

How We Should Not Live
Ephesians 4:17–19
Ephesians Lesson #154
June 19, 2022
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer

“Father, we are so thankful that we can come together today and we can focus upon Your Word and continue our study in Ephesians and to uncover some of the great and tremendous truths, the teaching, the instruction, the revelation of information here that gives us the ability to properly understand and analyze ourselves, properly understand and analyze what is going on in the world around us. And to recognize that with our salvation we have become new creatures in Christ with a new destiny, a new spiritual ability, and with a new responsibility as we have been appointed ambassadors to this world to represent You. And that we have been given this high position, this high calling, and we are to walk in respect and with respect towards that high calling.

“We pray as we go through the remainder of this chapter in the coming months that You help us to understand how this fits together and understand how we are to live and grow and think, that You might be glorified. We pray this in Christ’s name, amen.”

Slide 3

Open your Bibles with me to Ephesians. We’re in Ephesians 4:17 this morning, and we’re going to look at these first three verses. But I want to put this back into context for us just a little bit.

We started in Ephesians, and in Ephesians 1:3 Paul sets forth a statement to remind us and to introduce his reminders of what God has already done for us, starting in eternity past.

In Ephesians 1:3 he says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.”

Every spiritual blessing! He can’t possibly enumerate those and go through them. He just hits kind of the high points.

I remember years ago, and you do, too, some you may not remember the ultimate source, but Lewis Sperry Chafer did a summary of the things that God provided for every believer at the instant of salvation. I think he had 33 things that he listed.

There were some others that came along, and it became 34 things, and 36 things, and 38 things, and 40 things. And then there were others who came along and said, “Well, some of these things that are done are categorized, like the ministries of the Holy Spirit, and there are six subcategories, but those should be independent and those should not be all clustered in one group.” So they would end up with 100, 120, 125, and it sort of became a contest generated from hubris to see who could find the most.

That is why you have never heard me specify this in all the years that I have taught this. We can’t even come close to enumerating them. EVERY spiritual blessing, not just 32, 33, 38, 120, 120, 500, or a thousand. We have been given every spiritual blessing.

So as we go through Ephesians 1–3, this is what the Apostle Paul is focusing on. He’s talking about things that occurred in relation to the eternal plan of God in Ephesians 1. But also he relates that to each Person in the Trinity.

Then when he gets down to Ephesians 1:15, he starts talking about his prayer for these Ephesian believers. He says in Ephesians 1:16, that he “doesn’t cease giving thanks and making mention of you in my prayers,” which is a common way that Paul introduces his prayers.

What is he praying for? Ephesians 1:17, “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom—this is really talking about the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who gives wisdom—and revelation in the knowledge of Him.”

The way it’s translated in most English texts, “spirit of” would relate to both of those nouns. You would not have a “spirit of revelation.” We are not getting a spirit of revelation, are we? Revelations ceased. So, you have to understand those genitives in a way that doesn’t end you up in doctrinal heresy. It is the “Spirit who produces wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.”

In Ephesians 1:18 he said, “the eyes of your understanding—understanding being a key word in the passage we’re looking at this morning—has been enlightened—that happened that salvation—for the purpose that we may know what is the hope—that’s looking forward to the future or confident expectation of the ultimate goal—of His calling.”

Now that’s important because when we start Ephesians 4 the command that is given to us is “to walk worthy of the calling with which you have been called.”

Now to understand what that calling is that Paul introduced back in Ephesians 1:18, it relates to what God is working in us. The question that may come up is how did this begin?

Ephesians 2 goes back to explain that, and it begins by talking about the fact that we were born physically alive but spiritually dead. Ephesians 2:1, “And you He made alive …” That’s in italics in your English because it has to be picked up from Ephesians 1:5 because it’s one of those long, truncated, complex sentences that Paul uses, and he doesn’t get to the main verb for five verses.

Literally it would be, “You who were dead in trespasses and sins.” Now there’s a real problem, I pointed out when we studied that, and that is that there are those that come along and say that spiritual death means absolute and total inability to comprehend anything about God or to respond even in terms of a positive volition where you just say, “I want to know who God is.”

You just can’t do that if you’re spiritually dead, because dead people can’t hear, dead people can’t see, dead people can’t talk, dead people certainly can’t think. That system is known as Augustinianism or Calvinism.

That’s important because, I think it was Thursday night, I alluded to the fact that we have a problem in our world today, and that is that when you work for anybody, or you go to school anywhere, you are facing certain philosophical frameworks, philosophical frameworks of administration, of whatever it is that your company or business is doing, how they do business, sales techniques, all of those things are all influenced by presuppositional ideas on the nature of human beings.

You only have two views. One view is that people are basically good, and the other view is that people are not, they’re evil. And evil doesn’t mean that they’re as bad as they can be. Total depravity doesn’t mean that they’re as bad as they can be; it means that every aspect of our nature is corrupt and fallen.

We can still do relatively good things. Jesus said to His disciples one time—and remember these guys are all saved except for one of them, “You being evil—now that’s how you really accumulate a good group of loyal followers, isn’t it? Reminding them that they’re really evil—You being evil know how to give good gifts to your children.”

That is a profound statement because it recognizes that the biblical concept of evil doesn’t mean you’re as morally reprobate and perverse as you can be. There’s a good side to evil as well as a wicked side to evil. The good side to evil does relatively good things. It’s generous with the money. It helps people out. It can be kind and loving and have a great and wonderful personality. I’m not describing Satan. I’m describing a lot of human beings, but it fits Satan also.

Evil has both of these sides because evil is rooted in the rejection of God as the Creator of the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, and the worship of someone or something else in His place.

When you go back and read through the Old Testament again and again and again and again and again and again, you read that so-and-so became king and did evil in the sight of the Lord. And what did they do? They kept the people in idolatry. So, the root is idolatry, a rejection of God and replacing Him with something else.

So, being dead is viewed by some, and it’s a much more fatalistic, deterministic system, that they just can’t do anything. So first of all, what God has to do is He has to make you alive and then you can believe. He regenerates first and faith comes after work. But it’s a distorted view of the nature of sin and spiritual death, because as we will see in our passage this morning, that spiritual death is defined contextually as being alienated from the life of God—not being completely incapable of doing anything. So it’s that spiritual separation from God, as Paul defines it in Ephesians 4:17–18.

He starts off talking about our condition. And he’s addressing this to these Ephesian believers. He says, “You were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked.” This is a key verb that we have coming up.

What we saw back in Ephesians 1:18 is that we need to know what is the hope of our calling. Ephesians 4:1 says that we are to walk. So all these ideas in Ephesians 1–3 are now being developed and expanded in Ephesians 4.

These were the sins (Ephesians 2:2) “in which you once walked—this was your lifestyle. Walking is a metaphor for your lifestyle: How you think, how you talk, how you act. That’s your walk,—according to the course of this world.”

So now we get three definitions of how their walk prior to salvation was. It was “according to the course of this world.” The world has a plan of action—a way of thinking, a way of living, a way of acting—and a plan of goals and direction.

Here he uses the word KOSMOS for world. But as we’ll see, and I’ll bring this up again later, in Romans 12:2, as I’ve been pointing out several times recently, it says that we are not to be conformed to the spirit, to the way of thinking of the world around us.

That’s what Paul is talking about here. You once walked according to the course of this world. When we get to Ephesians 4:17 he is going to say, “Don’t walk like the Gentiles, like you used to walk.” So there are these parallels that are coming along here.

He says it’s not only “according to the course of this world—the cosmic system, the way human beings apart from God do things,—but it’s according to the prince of the power of the air—that’s a title for Satan.”

We’re doing Satan’s bidding. It’s not just human viewpoint. Human viewpoint is really Satan’s viewpoint. The way of the world is not just human viewpoint. It’s not just a pagan viewpoint. It is Satan’s viewpoint. And it’s living, thinking, acting on the same basic principles of Satan’s rebellion against God.

So it’s “according to the course of the world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience.” That means that it is characterized by disobedience and rejection of God’s authority.

Then in Ephesians 2:3 Paul says, “among whom—that is, we all were in the same thing. We being Jews and Gentiles—we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh—fulfilling the desires of the flesh—and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.”

Isn’t this a complementary picture of human beings! If you want to ask the question, which all of you have asked at least once or twice a day for the last, I don’t know, at least the last two years, maybe three years, maybe 10 years if you’re astute to what’s going on culturally for probably about 25 or 30 years, what is going on in this world? Why are they doing this?

They are doing this because they’re walking according to the course of the world. They are walking according to the course of the prince of the power of the air and the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience. They are fulfilling the lusts of their flesh, the desires of the flesh in the mind, and they are by nature children of wrath. Of course, they act like that! And we’re surprised!

They’re just living out their fallen nature and living on the basis of their sin nature, which excludes God and anything related to divine viewpoint. And there’s gotten to be so many of them and they can communicate with each other so much on social media that now this rebelliousness towards God, which has been there all along, is now out of the closet and we see it. They have strength in numbers on social media and other things, so that they can bully and browbeat the conservatives and the Christians.

The focus of Ephesians 2:1–10 is on our salvation.

Ephesians 2:4, “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,”

Ephesians 2:5, “even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together—“us” are Jew and Gentile—with Christ (by grace you have been saved),

Ephesians 2:6, “and raised us up together—He raised Jew and Gentile together—and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,”

Ephesians 2:7, “for the purpose that we’re going to be trophies of His grace on display for the ages to come—that’s my paraphrase of verse 7.”

Then he explains it in Ephesians 2:8–10, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we—we Jew and Gentile together now in this body of Christ, which he really hasn’t developed, but he’s introducing it here—are His craftsmanship …”

Now that word “we” means what? (Answer) It’s focusing on the Church, the body of Christ. That’s what we see all the way through here. I emphasize this again and again and again. This is a corporate focus here. Not only we as individuals, although that’s not false to think that it applies to each of us, but he’s talking about that God is doing something distinctive in history in the body of Christ. It’s the Church universal. That is His workmanship, His craftsmanship that He is building.

Notice how Ephesians 2:10 ends that opening section related to the beginning of that work in terms of redemption—making us alive together, raising us together, and seating us together, the Church is made alive together, raised up together, and seated together at the right hand of the Father. It is the Church that is this work of art that God the Holy Spirit under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Head, is conducting.

Now let’s get to the end of the next little section and go down to Ephesians 2:19 where it says, “Now, therefore, you—that is, you all Jew and Gentile together—are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.”

That’s talking about the Jews who were the first ones chronologically to be saved after Pentecost, because it’s not talking about Old Testament here. A lot of people can read that into it, but all of these are the ones who (Ephesians 2:20), “having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.”

Old Testament saints are not in view here. They’re not built on the foundation of New Testament apostles and prophets. If it were “prophets and apostles,” in that chronological order, prophets would then be Old Testament prophets, and apostles would be New Testament apostles. But it’s in reverse order. It’s apostles first and prophets second, showing that he’s talking about Church Age gifts there. “Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone,” He’s not the chief cornerstone of anything in the Old Testament.

This is showing the distinctiveness of this “whole building,” Ephesians 2:21, “being fitted together, grows into the holy temple of the Lord,”

Ephesians 2:22, “in whom you also are being built together—Jew and Gentile—for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”

This is magnificent! This is who we are. This is that calling that we are appointed to, as I pointed out, in terms of the false concept of individual selection for salvation back in Ephesians 1.

In Ephesians 3 he talks about the fact that this was never revealed before in the Old Testament. It was never understood. In Ephesians 3:5 Paul says, “in other ages—it—was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to His holy apostles and prophets.”

Notice the order again. It’s now revealed. This wasn’t in the Old Testament at all. So this is talking about this whole new entity that is being built. This was previously unrevealed and it is called a mystery doctrine.

Then he comes to this closing prayer at the end of Ephesians 3, and he prays (Ephesians 3:16–19), “that God would grant them—Jew and Gentile together,—according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that is our experiential spiritual growth—with the result … that you may be filled with all the fullness of God—that is the character of God being transformed.”

Then he closes with that wonderful benediction, Ephesians 2:20, “Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us.”

Now he shifts gears.

In Ephesians 4:1 he says, “I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you …” So he’s giving them a command expressed as an infinitive.

The other night I was talking about the fact that there were over 500 or 600 imperatives in the New Testament, and that may seem like a low number. That’s because there are lots of other ways to express a command. You can express it like this with an infinitive. You can express it with participles. So there’s probably 1,500 or 2,000 commands in the New Testament.

People come along and say, “Well, that’s legalism to say we have to do something!” I say, “No, it’s just God setting forth this is how those who are in My family behave.” It doesn’t have anything to do with getting in the family. But if you’re going to function and operate and live within the family, you have to have certain guidelines. This is our protocol for living the Christian life.

So he goes on to say, “to walk worthy of the calling.”

We saw this as this high position that we have been appointed to. We’ve been appointed as ambassadors for Christ. We have been appointed to be representatives of Him on this earth, and we have been appointed to go out and to proclaim the gospel and to develop students of the Word.

So Ephesians 4 begins with this command “to walk worthy of the calling with which you are called.” And that walk is then described in Ephesians 4:2–6.

It involves walking by means of humility, gentleness, patience, long-suffering, putting up with one another in love, and being diligent to keep or maintain the unity of the Spirit—that unity was there at the very beginning. We’re one in Christ. Then he lists these seven unifying factors.

Then there’s a divergent starting in Ephesians 4:7, “But to each one of us grace was given.”

Now Ephesians 4:7–16, we spent six or seven months on, are verses that focus our attention on how He trains, how He provides for those who are appointed to this high position. This is how they are going to receive their training to be able to walk according to that high position.

If you go out and get a job, you go to a new school, you get involved in some new hobby, you always have to go through some kind of basic training and orientation and other things that prepare you to do whatever it is that you’re going to be doing.

And so what God did to prepare us was we’re each given spiritual gifts. Christ has appointed these four gifts, but only two are functional through most of the Church Age. And the purpose is so that we’re no longer children, we’re no longer acting like babies. But that we are to grow to spiritual maturity, and we all play a role in that process.

So that pretty much summarizes what Paul’s been saying up to this point.

Slide 3

One reason I did that was when you get to Ephesians 4:17 Paul says, “This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind.”

We see that there is a “therefore” there, which is a conclusion, but he repeats a walking command, which takes us back to Ephesians 4:1. What happens is starting in Ephesians 4:7 he went down a little bit of a rabbit trail.

Now I know you say, “Paul on a rabbit trail? Say it isn’t so.” This is typical of Paul. Before he goes to his next point, he wants to make sure you thoroughly understand what the foundation is for that next point. And the foundation is that Christ is equipping us to do this work of ministry. And now we’re going to get into the standards starting in Ephesians 4:17 of how that lifestyle should look.

Remember, walking, lifestyle, all this relates to how we think, “As a man thinketh in his soul, so is he.” He starts with a transformation of thought.

It’s interesting that when Christ was condemning the Pharisees in Matthew 23, this is just before He goes into the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24. He has entered into Jerusalem the day before, and for two days He’s going through all this testing and evaluation, criticism, and antagonism from the religious leaders as part of the evaluation process of the Lamb of God to show that He is worthy as the Lamb of God. He is without spot or blemish. Then He ends with the seven or—if you take the Majority Text—eight woes or statements of condemnation upon the Pharisees.

So in Matthew 23:25 He says, “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence.”

It’s interesting that the translator of Luke, same word in the Greek in both passages, translates it “greed.” But you get the idea. It’s somebody who’s in it for the money, whether he is getting it honestly or dishonestly.

“Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but the inside isn’t touched.” See legalism is just dealing with the superficialities.

Recently, I read a survey, and the point was that most Americans at least four or five times a year would read their Bible. Now it’s down to about 78% or something like that, it’s dropped about 10 points in the last 25 years, but it’s still pretty high.

Yea, but that’s superficial. Even unbelievers will read their Bible, because they’re in a denomination that doesn’t teach the gospel or anything, but they’ll pick it up and read it. That doesn’t mean anything. Satan probably double checks translations all the time to see how he can get away with deceiving people.

Reading the Bible isn’t a barometer of anything in terms of the culture because the Pharisees had it memorized. But Christ condemned them because it didn’t transform them on the inside. Transformation starts on the inside and then goes to the outside.

In Matthew 23:26 Jesus says, “Blind Pharisee—notice that word ‘blind.’ We will come back to that in a minute,—first cleanse the inside of the cup and dish, that the outside of them may be clean also.”

So this is the problem with superficiality and the problem with legalism.

So when we come to this particular passage here, Paul is saying that there should be a contrast between the way “you Ephesian Gentiles”—a majority of them, probably 60%, 70%, or 80% were Gentiles, but the Jews made up a significant minority, and that’s the emphasis on “Jew and Gentile together.” But what Paul is saying here is that you are to no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk. That phrase “as the rest of the Gentiles” indicates that that’s what they used to do. And of course, I just pointed out in Ephesians 2:1 that’s exactly what they did.

Now they’re saved. Now they’re regenerate. Now they have a high calling. So they’re to live differently. But it’s not just living externally, it is not just cleaning up your language and cleaning up a few overt things, it has to start with the inside, a transformation of one’s thinking.

“You’re not supposed to walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk.” And notice, that’s where Paul goes is on thinking. He doesn’t talk here about their externals. He talks about their thoughts, their thought world. “Thought world” isn’t just about individual thoughts. It’s not just the content of thinking.

In other words, it’s not the pornographic thinking of the fertility religions that were popular in all the Greco-Roman world, lustful thoughts. It’s not just individual thoughts. It’s how you think. It’s the structure of your thinking. There has to be a worldview transformation, a worldview transformation from that which is the characteristic pagan worldview.

In America it’s sort of an eclectic view. It’s a combination of secularism, postmodernism, and a little bit of mysticism and existentialism thrown in there. It is just this hodgepodge because we’re basically pragmatists, and we’re just going to pick up whatever seems to work for us today. Tomorrow it may be different, but I can do that because I’m God. We’ve totally bought into Satan’s lie that you can be God.

So Paul is saying that there is a difference. It’s not just an external difference. It’s primarily an internal difference of how you think. It’s not according to the futility of the thinking that is characteristic of how pagans—non-Christians—think.

What do we have in this world? You have Marxism as a key element in modern contemporary thinking. In some places it’s more heavy-handed, like in China and in a Russia. You have Islam, one of the most perverse idolatrous religions.

I think Allah is just another name for Satan. It is satanic worship because they oppose everything that God is for. They hate God’s people, the Jews. They even change things, so that the big deal is not Abraham and his son Isaac, but Abraham and Ishmael. And in the end times what happens is the Islamic Messiah will return in order to annihilate all the Jews and Christians.

So Allah cannot be the same God that is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God of Jesus and the New Testament. So it has to be some other deity. And Deuteronomy makes it clear that these idols of the world that are worshiped are in fact energized by demons. So it makes perfect sense that Allah is just another name for Satan.

Then he goes on to explain in Ephesians 4:18, “having their understanding darkened …”

Notice how all of these phrases stack up with one another and think in terms of the answer to your question, “What in the world is going on today? It’s like the world has gone crazy!”

Well, the world is functioning in the futility of their mind. Their understanding is darkened. They are alienated from the life of God. Why? Because of the ignorance that is in them. It’s a spiritual problem. And as a result of their spiritual death, it is a content problem of what they think and a methodological problem of how they think.

I can’t tell you how many people come to me and say, “Can you explain to me how as a leftist you can hold this position and this position and that position?” No I can’t, because your question presupposes a rational answer and their position is fundamentally irrational, so you can’t explain it. There are a lot of pagan conservatives, too, so I want to give equal opportunity to them.

Their understanding is darkened. They are alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.

Now this is an important passage which we have to deal with because the word there isn’t blindness. Calvinists will use this like the statement about being spiritually dead and therefore totally unable. They’ll use this—you’re blind; therefore, you can’t see anything. We have to understand that, and hopefully, I’ll get at least a little bit of that done. But actually that’s based on a mistranslation of the passage.

The word in the Greek there means stubbornness. Now that’s a big difference between being spiritually blind and spiritually stubborn. Stubborn involves volition, and it’s very clear that volition is involved, that they are freely rejecting and resisting the revelation that God has given them.

Then he goes on to say in Ephesians 4:19, “who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness—this is the outworking of their thinking or the overt sins,—to work all uncleanness with greediness.”

In Colossians 3 Paul says greed is idolatry.

Slide 4

So, the new command is the flipside of the command of Ephesians 4:1. There we are to walk worthy of the calling, the high calling with which we have been called. And now we are no longer to walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk.

Slide 5

Then it’s all described in these various phrases I’ve just gone over.

Slide 6

But it seems like this phrase is the ultimate in the description, so we will understand that that is the stubbornness of heart.

Slide 7

It starts off that Gentiles walk in the futility of their thinking. Why is there thinking futile? Futile means it’s empty, it’s foolish, it’s worthless. The next statement is it’s because their understanding is darkened.

Now this is such a significant passage that if you were to be involved in some kind of counseling ministry with people, you have to understand the dynamics here of the sin nature and how all this relates, because every one of us have these problems because of our sin nature. Their thinking becomes foolish and empty because their understanding is darkened.

Well, how did their understanding get darkened? Why is it darkened? It’s because they are alienated from God. That’s the next statement in Ephesians 4:18. It’s a stairstep.

Why are they alienated from God? It’s because of the ignorance within them.

Why are they ignorant? It’s because of the blindness or the stubbornness of their heart.

Slide 8

The Greek word is POROSIS, which mean stubbornness.

Slide 9

So Paul is saying, “This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk …”

Slide 10

When he says this, he’s using a near demonstrative, and he is focusing on the statement that you should no longer walk as the Gentiles walk.

Slide 11

This is just another way of expressing what’s in Romans 12:2, “And do not be pressed into the mold—that’s how I’ve translated it. It’s the idea of being conformed—of the thinking of the world.—The spirit of the age is the German word ‘zeitgeist,’ the ghost of the times literally,—but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Slide 12

What’s interesting is the Greek word used for “mind” there is the Greek word NOUS. It’s the same word used in the phrase “futility of the mind” in Ephesians 4:17, that the unbeliever’s thinking is futile. The way he thinks, his thought structures, his logic chain, all of those things are shaped by the sin nature. That’s what’s so hard about the Christian life is you don’t have to just learn to exchange 25 ideas that were wrong for 25 ideas that aren’t wrong.

An illustration I haven’t used in a while, you’re tired of the way things are in your house and you want to call the interior designer to come in and fix things. That’s how most people view the Christian life is the Holy Spirit is this interior decorator that’s going to come in and paint the walls a different color, put in some new sinks and a new refrigerator, get some new drapes and blinds, and some new carpet and everything is going to be fixed up, and it’s going to look good.

But the Holy Spirit shows up and has a bulldozer. He wants to take the house down to the foundation and destroy it because it’s all built on wrong categories of thinking.

Most Christians say, “Wait! I really don’t want that. I’m really happy with about 80% of my life. I just want to have a little better stuff going on in the other 20% of my life.”

Slide 13

But God is going to show up, and He says there has to be a complete overhaul of your thinking because it’s all grounded, ultimately, on these futile presuppositions.

Slide 14

The Greek word is this word MATAIOTES, which means futility, absurdity. Now think about that. No longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk in the absurdity of their mind.

Now does that clarify a lot of things you’ve heard on the news over the last 10 or 15 years? From God’s viewpoint, it’s absurdity. All this transgender talk, all this gender confusion, all of this sexual perversion, all of the political posturing on things that have nothing to do with either the Constitution or the Bible.

We just look at each other and say, “We don’t understand it!” Well, that’s because they’re operating on their sin nature. It’s the emptiness and the futility of their thinking.

Now I will come back to this next time because we’re out of time here, but we’re going to get back into it next time and look at this issue of blindness. Even though it’s not blindness, the translation of this as blindness shaped the thinking of certain theological systems that makes blindness a constitutional problem and a constitutional defect when in fact it isn’t. And we can demonstrate that from Scripture.

Closing Prayer

“Father, we thank You for this opportunity to look at these things to see how well You’ve structured Your Word and to recognize that what You expect of us is not just cleaning up a dozen or two facets of our life, but there needs to be an overhaul. We need to no longer think like Gentiles think, think according to their categories, think according to their logic chain, think according to their value system. There needs to be a radical transformation. We only get that from Your Word.

“We thank You for Your Word because it is in the light of Your Word that we see light, and it’s only through the light of Your Word that we can avoid the darkness.

“Father, we pray for those who may be listening, may be hearing for the first time, may be questioning how do I get saved, and the answer is very simple in the Scripture. Christ came as the Light of the world to illuminate us to the truth that we’re sinners, and that we need a solution to sin, and He provided that solution by dying on the Cross and paying the penalty for sin, and raising from the dead to show that He conquered death and the sin penalty.

“All that is necessary is for us to trust in Him, to believe in Him, for as many received Him or believed Him, to them He gave the power to be called the children of God. We trust in Christ. We’re confident in Him. And He then is the One who works to do any transformation.

“It’s not a moral reformation. It is a spiritual transformation done after we’re saved, not because we’re saved or in order to get saved or in order to prove we’re saved.

“Father, we pray that You would help us to understand these things, and that for those who are not saved that God the Holy Spirit would make the gospel very clear. And we pray this in Christ’s name, amen.”