This morning, we are going to do a deep dive into practical daily living. Paul knew that the Christians in Ephesus didn’t need religious platitudes. What they needed was a true relationship with the “One True God”.
We do too.
“ I have something from the Lord to tell you. I warn you: Don’t continue living like those who don’t believe. Their thoughts are worth nothing. 18 They have no understanding, and they know nothing because they refuse to listen. So they cannot have the life that God gives. 19 They have lost their feeling of shame and use their lives to do what is morally wrong. More and more they want to do all kinds of evil. 20 But that way of life is nothing like what you learned when you came to know Christ. 21 I know that you heard about him, and in him you were taught the truth. Yes, the truth is in Jesus. 22 You were taught to leave your old self. This means that you must stop living the evil way you lived before. That old self gets worse and worse, because people are fooled by the evil they want to do. 23 You must be made new in your hearts and in your thinking. 24 Be that new person who was made to be like God, truly good and pleasing to him.” Ephesians 4:17-24 CEV
Once we come to Christ our thinking and lifestyle needs to change. We give up trying to do things on our own, figuring everything out for ourselves. Our knowledge and skills are extremely limited when we put them up against God’s knowledge.
Our relationship with Christ gives us a whole new life.
“We are careful not to judge people by what they seem to be, though we once judged Christ in that way. Anyone who belongs to Christ is a new person. The past is forgotten, and everything is new. God has done it all! He sent Christ to make peace between himself and us, and he has given us the work of making peace between himself and others.” II Corinthians 5:16-18 CEV
Paul knew this transformation. He was a zealot. Die in the wool, true to the Jewish religion. He felt that anyone preaching Christ was the Son of God was teaching heresy and needed to be stopped. Saul, before his name was changed, secured arrest warrants and actively sought Christians to arrest and even kill.
When Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus Saul recognized his error and sin. He became one of the renown leaders of Christianity, traveling all over the known world with the message of the saving grace of Jesus Christ.
He had a new life. He was done with the old and he became the new person God designed him to be.
We all have a calling from God to accept that same transformation that Christ died to give us. We have been freely offered a new life in Christ.