Transformed Head-to-Toe
Well, we’re here again. What a blessing that we get to study God's word together! I wouldn’t want to spend my morning any other way.
So last week we looked at how the gospel unites us like patients in a hospital, this hospital being God's Church. And in this Church, we are all undergoing surgery from the master surgeon who is God. Our surgeries are when we surrender of our man-made, self-help strategies, and learn to trust that God will provide for our needs.
Today we’ll finish Chapter 4 and see how this transformation that Christ does involves all areas of our lives. Our hearts, emotions, thoughts, dreams, willpower, body and strength.
Did you notice in Chapter 4:17-19, the mention of all the ways that the Gentiles are corrupted? By the way, in this context Gentiles is just another word for those who don’t know anything about God. It’s not necessarily talking about non-Jews, but God-ignorant people. Let's look at those verses and see.
Verses 17-19: “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 (MIND), alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance (MIND) that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous (HEART) and have given themselves up (STRENGTH) to sensuality (APPETITES/DESIRES/HEART), greedy to practice (STRENGTH) every kind of impurity.”
Don’t you find it interesting that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And this section here shows how all those parts are corrupted without God?
I'm not going to give an anatomy of the soul lesson here, and different people through different ages have segmented the soul into different categories. I find it helpful to just use heart, mind, and strength as the parts of the soul. The point is: without God as our master, all parts of us fall into disrepair.
But because Christ has come and we have believed in him, we have a new self, or as Heidi Garside said, we have God’s DNA in us. All parts of us are transformed. Now, we know God does it; God will provide; and God loves me already.
There’s a phrase I’ve often heard. “Emotions make terrible masters.” I think it's true, but if the emotions aren’t the masters? What is? Our minds? Our sense of duty? Our willpower? No. All parts of the soul make terrible masters: heart, mind, and strength. God alone makes a good master. And when he is the master, all parts of us learn to function properly to glorify him.
I have to confess that I have let my mind be my master for the majority of my life. I thought logic and thinking things through was the best way to live. Using my mind was good, except that my own understanding became the ground upon which I firmly stood instead of the Lord’s understand, the Lord’s foresight, the Lord’s guidance. Trusting myself and my own mind led me to so many fears.
Trusting my own understanding kept me out of the Lord's surgery for years, kept me from being transformed and healed by him. I said, "I don't understand how this trusting in Jesus works. I don't get it. Tell me first how it all works and then I'll submit to the Lord."
Trusting my own understanding was also why getting stuck in my house with my kids and husband and a roomer who was renting from us brought me to my knees at the start of the pandemic. I couldn't get away from everyone long enough to think things through and figure out what to do next. And God set it up so clearly for me. He had clearly communicated to me the October before the pandemic that my mind was what was keeping me from fully trusting the Lord.
Our minds, hearts, and strengths are gifts from God, but if we don't trust him, they are what keeps us from submitting to him.
Doesn’t it seem like every Christian age has certain parts of the soul—the mind, the heart, or the strength—that it relies upon while being suspicious of other parts? In the medieval ages, the church was suspicious of using one’s own mind. I think after WWII, the Christian church really emphasized willpower and strength and duty. I think in the 60’s in reaction to what was going on, the church probably went through a time of being highly suspicious of the heart and feelings. Nowadays we see some churches who are totally enamored with the heart.
Ladies, the heart is not the source of our problems. Our broken relationship with God is, our rebellion against him is— or rather, it was.
Verses 20-24 says so perfectly: “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.”
I love how Paul states how every part of us—heart, mind, & strength—is now to function in this new life: To be renewed in our minds, and to put on the new self (ACTION/STRENGTH), And this new self wants what is righteous and holy in contrast to those deceitful desires (HEART).
I want to talk about these deceitful desires for a second.
Have you ever gone shopping with a seven-year-old girl and told her that she can pick out one thing. “Oh, can I get a mirror for my dolly. My dolly must have a mirror. My dolly doesn’t have a mirror and she needs one. Oh, what about a model dragon? I don't have one of those and it's just like the one in those shows. All my friends have little play dragons. I must have one. I will die if I can’t have one. Oh I want some gum, may I have some candy. I want that one. No. No. That other one.”
It’s easy to see how quickly a child changes her desires from one thing to the next to the next. Whatever is before her eyes at any given moment she is sure is exactly what she absolutely must have.
Aren’t we sometimes just like a seven-year-old child? We have been put here on this earth, and the Lord has told us that we can take one thing with us. Oh, I pray that the one thing we choose is Christ. He is in fact the only thing we can take with you. Nothing else can come.
The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. Who can understand it? We see so many beautiful things that God made, so many lovely scenarios that we think would work out well for our families, for our friends, and for our future. We see them before our eyes like candy in a candy shop and we think, “That! That is what my heart is yearning for! If I can only have that I will be happy.”
It seems like the first half of our lives we spend looking forward to that bit of life we haven’t quite lived yet. If I can just get married, just switch jobs, just get into a house, just get into a better house, just have some kids . . .
What about the second half of our lives? How about wondering if you should’ve done things differently, wondering if you've done enough.
Ladies, there is nothing in this world to fill that heart-ache but God. God knows what a mess we’ve made of our lives, and he is redeeming them anyways. Trust him and what he's doing, not what we've done or think we should've done. And by all means, don’t believe the heart’s deceitful desires: that if only x, y, and z happened, then I’d be content.
Haven’t we learned by studying the Bible that our circumstances don’t decide our satisfaction in life? We can have a peaceful family, a godly government, and good health, but be as dissatisfied as Ebenezer Scrooge. On the other hand, we can be dirt poor, separated from family, have poor health, and be shouting the praises of God.
Our good works don't determine our satisfaction with life. Our dependence upon Christ does. Don’t listen to the heart when it tells us otherwise. Our old heart, the heart that is part of the old self, is deceitful. Put on the new heart that knows that Christ is what it desires.
Verse 25 leaps off the page now. Doesn’t it? “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.” This echoes last weeks lesson where in verse 15, it said to speak truth to each other in love.
In this world where the devil and our culture and even our own hearts are liable to deceive us into thinking we want something other than God, it is so important to remind each other and ourselves of what we really want. I gave you a list of truths last week on your worksheet and I’m going to repeat them again in a different form.
1. When we deeply desire for other people to recognize or appreciate us, we are longing to be reminded that God love us no matter what we do.
2. When we go about trying to earn favor with people, we are yearning to remember that God favors us no matter how well we perform. Christ's perfect performance counts for us.
3. When we try to make other people listen to us and understand us, we are longing to feel God’s deep understanding of us.
4. When we hold back our time, energy, resources or love, we are longing to know God will provide enough for us.
5. When we can’t make a decision because we’re afraid of what might happen, we are longing to know that God already knows what we will decide and how this fits into his good plans.
6. When we always change the subject when difficult things come up, we are longing to know that God can take us through the difficult and uncomfortable.
7. When we rush in and force things to happen the way we want, we are longing to trust God’s power.
8. When we keep ourselves out of everything, we are longing to know that it’s okay to enter into the messy because that is where God is.
9. When we are impatient or annoyed with how long it takes people or circumstances to change, we are longing for God’s righteousness in his time.
Our old selves or as Paul sometimes calls it, the life of the flesh, is the self that says, you can meet your own needs by trying harder, performing better, doing more or staying uninvolved. Speaking truth one to another means reminding each other that we can't do it ourselves, but God can. God has done it. God is doing it. God will do it in the future too. When we remind each other, we are reminding ourselves too.
I think verse 29 parallels verse 25: “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.”
To redraw upon our analogy of the hospital last week. If Christians are in the hospital hallways awaiting the Lord’s surgery on our heart, minds, and strength, our words to each other need to cut through the deceitful desires and remind one another who the healer is. Don’t answer as the God-ignorant people of the world do with more self-help ideas. But answer in accordance with what Christians alone know: that God does it.
But here’s the tricky bit. We’re going to have a hard time telling the truth to other people if their emotions or false beliefs or actions feel like a threat to us. Have you ever had someone complain to you about their life or how terribly they’ve been treated or the difficulties of COVID? How do you react to this?
If we agree or feel the same, it’s easy to commiserate and complain too, and never speak a word of truth. And if we don’t agree or if their opinion feels like it threatens ours, what do we do? Get defensive, change the subject, try to argue with them...
I think verse 26-27 comes next for a reason: “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.” I think verses 31 parallels this. “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.”
Often times when we might tell the truth to someone, we can’t because we’re too blinded by our own anger or fear or anxiety. There’s this theory in psychology called “filter theory”, although I like to call it brain block. It states that the brain and nervous system are fitted with restrictive filters and barriers that prevent any new information from entering when there is a perceived threat. These filters only allow in what would help us survive in that threatening circumstance.
So for example, when I tell my children to stop playing their games and unload the dishwasher, they pitch a fit because I’m threatening their happiness and comfort. Up goes their brain block. And if I try to explain to them, how we need the dishes unloaded because I need to make dinner and there are too many dirty dishes to wash the vegetables, they cannot listen to me. So it’s better for me sometimes to say, go do it or a greater threat shall be made upon your happiness, and then they get it.
Or here’s another example: we go to the doctor’s office. They say there’s this growth on your skin. We feel afraid. We get brain block. We can’t properly listen to what the doctor says after that because our brain has gone into survival mode and it is blocking out extra information that would actually help us move forward.
I think brain block is in the Bible too, but it’s called hardness of heart. Our heart hardens when it perceives a threat. And like I said last week, God is a threat to our old selves. Only the Holy Spirit can break through that hardness, that brain block, and make these truths penetrate. Praise God, we have the Holy Spirit.
So let us remind each other that we don’t have to protect that old self anymore. We can speak truth to each other and we can hear truth from one another. By the way, when Paul says tell the truth, I don’t think he means correct people on COVID news or the proper way to baste a turkey. That’s not what he means when he says speak the truth to each other. I think Paul is talking about the truth of the gospel and our new life in Christ.
So what do we do with our anger, if it’s preventing us from telling our brothers or sisters the truth? First, remember anger is not the problem. After all, our emotions are a gift from God. Anger tells us something we value is under attack. That’s why Paul says, “Be angry and do not sin.”
I used to think that being angry and not sinning meant it’s okay to feel angry, but don’t act angry. You can feel the feelings, but don’t throw stuff or shout, cause throwing stuff and shouting isn’t nice. But then there’s Jesus who I’m pretty sure threw stuff and shouted when he cleared the temple.
I don’t think this "Be angry and do not sin" is about how we express anger. Different people express anger differently. Some people let it all out; they wear their emotions on their sleeves and when they’re angry everyone knows it. Others bottle it all up, and it simmers and bubbles inside of them and leaks out in sarcastic or bitter comments. Still others are so disconnected with their emotions that they don’t even know when they're angry.
The way in which we feel angry is not the point. I also don’t think it’s the duration. I don’t think think this “don’t let the sun go down on your anger” means we can be angry for one day, but when the night comes, it better be over. I think the sun going down has to do with how our anger ends. We feel angry; what do we do with it? Do we come up with our own strategy of protecting ourselves or do we go to the Lord with it.
Don’t let your anger lead to you carrying around your own figurative sword. Let me give examples of ways we arm ourselves when angry instead of speaking the truth.
- “Oh, I shouldn’t feel angry like this. I gotta stop it.” This is shaming yourself and using your own willpower to stop being angry.
- “I have every right to be angry! It’s their fault!” This is justifying yourself and blaming others.
- “Oh, this is uncomfortable. Let’s change the subject.” That's distracting yourself.
- “What is this strange feeling I am feeling. Hmmm I must analyze this later.” That's detaching from the feelings.
- “Oh, this person is threatening my beliefs, I can’t be friends with them.” That's running away in fear.
- “Oh, I need to calm this person down because their anger makes me feel unloved and afraid.” That's anxiety and a type of co-dependence.
James 1:2-4 says: Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
These situations that cause us to be angry or afraid are trials of sorts. Don’t shrug them off because they’re nothing like burning at the stake or being put in prison for the sake of Christ. God hasn’t asked us to be a martyr or go to prison for him yet. Today, he’s just given us people with “wrong” views or “threatening” views. That coupled with our anger can be the scalpel in God’s hands cutting us open in surgery to reveal where we can trust him more.
Do not bail out prematurely. Do not stop the operation. Do not fall back on modern psychology that will give you half a dozen excuses for why you are feeling the way you are: a bad upbringing, wrong grooves in our brain, societies' poor influence, unhealthy diet. It’s anything but your sin nature, anything but the old self.
Ladies, we don’t need an excuse for why our old selves are malfunctioning. We admit the old selves are no good and we know why it's okay. Christ died so we could also put to death that old self. And Christ rose from the dead so we also could have a new self.
Invite the Lord into the uncomfortable feelings. Persevere through the darkness. Let your anger or fear be God’s instrument for conviction, repentance, and growth, instead of the devil’s foothold for possession. I don’t mean demon possession, I mean an area where we're refusing to let God operate. Let God speak the truth to us in love so we can then speak it to ourselves and others.
I have found 3 questions helpful when working through anger or fear. WKST. What would I like to happen? What is being threatened here? And who is ultimately in charge of that?
The answering of these questions really requires the wisdom of the Lord. It’s not something we can do on our own because our old self wants to hide. The brain wants to block out the threatening information. And God is a threat to the old self.
Conviction and surrender are things we can only do with the Lord's wisdom when we recognize our need of him. The wisdom of the world tell us: we aren't needy, we can get things ourselves. The wisdom of this world says: be thieves.
Ephesians 4 VS 28 Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.
I realize in this context this verse is probably talking about actually stealing, and I admit I didn't do an in-depth study to find out if the people of Ephesus were kleptomaniacs or professional moochers. I do know that our deceitful desires cause us to take anything for ourselves that God wants to give us instead.
Or here's another way to think of it: when we're angry or afraid, we try to feel better, by just buying whatever we want. We have the money and it makes us feel temporarily good so we take it instead of calling upon the Lord. We steal!
The Lord has the gifts of peace and strength and unconditional love and righteousness held out to us and we don’t take it. We get some cheap fix instead. How grieved he must feel!
Have you ever known what someone needs, but they didn't want to listen to you. They preferred to do things the hard way for themselves? This happens all the time with kids. My 3-year-old has a fever and is feeling miserable, but he won’t take his medicine because he says its yucky. He’s suffering and I’m suffering with him because he won’t do what’s good for him.
It grieves the heart to watch someone continue in their pain when they could just take their medicine, go in for their surgeries. I think that’s where verse 30 fits into all this. “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.”
God has everything for us. To walk hand in hand with God is “to put on the new self,” which has God’s DNA, which “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”
It’s this taking off one thing and putting on another. Take off what you think your heart wants. Reveal underneath that raw desire for God. Then put on the truth. The truth being: God provides what we need. That person right in front of us who’s making us so angry, can’t provide what we want. Taking what we want for ourselves won’t provide what we need either. Only God and his medicine can.
Finally we come to verse 32: “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”
Why on earth would we have to be kind and tenderhearted and forgive one another? Because people are going to mistaken you for God. They are going to try to take from you what they can only get from God. People are going to be angry at you because you aren’t fulfilling their God-ache. They will speak ugly and false words, and those words don’t need to stick to us because our minds are so filled with God's truths about us.
Let’s let God change all parts of us so that we in turn can speak with a tender heart and forgive others no matter what they try to take from us.
Link to the audio of this lecture: (Audio)
Other Eph WOW Lectures: (Eph 4:1-16, Eph 5:1-20, Eph 5:21-6:9, Eph 6:10-24)
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