“Put on the New Self” (Ephesians
Introduction
On the 14th of
February of this year Dmitry Shestakov was arrested during his Sunday worship
services. He faces criminal charges of calling himself an evangelical pastor
and heading an illegal religious organization. He was not allowed any contact
with his lawyer, family or church members and only after two weeks was informed
of the charges against him. The church kept fasting and praying for their
pastor.
What struck me was that
one of the accusations against the pastor was that he was a drug addict. His
wife Marina acknowledged that her husband indeed used to be “in prison several times, and was a terrible
and awful man.” Since that time, more than 15 years ago, she said her
husband’s life had been transformed by his conversion and his Christian faith. She
said that she feared, “not for my own
sake or the children, but for my husband. Maybe they have begun to torture him,
to beat him, to use the gas mask on him. We know many stories when people just
disappear forever. Police in
Dmitry’s faith changed him
completely from drug pusher to pastor. It made him a completely different
person, so much so that even the prospect of prison and torture could not make
him deny who he was as a Christian and how that spilled over into his life.
Is that how our faith has
changed us? Has our conversion had such an impact on our lives that those
around us cannot but notice a drastic change of attitude and behaviour in us, see
a changed person who can not deny who they are despite adversity?
I am afraid that this type
of change is not optional for you or me, if you are a Christian. Even
non-Christians know that, and I quote “Any transition serious enough
to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in
your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.”
(Martha Beck)
Paul puts it like this: You were taught, with regard to your former
way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its
deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on
the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. (Ephesians
4:22-24).
This is about having a complete transformation, one
that spills over in all that we do. What does that mean?
1.’Two in One Action’: Putting On and
Off Is One Action
Paul says, ‘Put off the
old person’ and ‘put on the new person’ in one sentence. Putting off and on go
together, they are one action. We can’t just put off the old and leave it at
that. There is no in-between neutral position.
When we lived in
When you left the country,
you didn’t enter into the next country but into a stretch of land called ‘no
man’s land’, a couple hundred metres that were neither part of the one nor the
other country. You needed to show our passport again at the next border to be
allowed into the next country. You couldn’t and wouldn’t want to stay in the
‘no man’s land’.
Christ is our passport who gives us authority to put
off the old person. When we put off the old person, we enter no man’s land.
From a spiritual and
Christian standpoint there is nothing more dangerous than merely putting off
the old person, cleansing your house and leaving it empty. Luke (Luke 11:24 ff)
warns us that if we do that, if we try and change bad things but don’t put
anything positive in its place, we will end up worse off than before. Have you
ever done that? Have you ever put something off, a behaviour, a bad influence
but put nothing in its place?
We need to fill the void
with the new person, and again we do it through Christ. Once we have left the
territory of the old life, we need to enter into the territory of the new life,
a life under different authority or we are in ‘no man’s land’ and have no
protection.
Putting off the old and
putting on the new need to go together, they are one action. That is the
difference between a morality without God and Christianity. That type of morality
tells us what not to do. Christianity tells us what to put in its place.
2. ‘Once Only’ Action: We Are Made New
Before God Once
The way Paul phrases ‘putting
off’ and ‘putting on’ in Greek, the language of the day, suggests that it is a
once off action. The Christian puts off the old person once and puts on the new
person once. The picture is that we take off our old and stained clothes, throw
them out and replace them with brand new clothes. On a deeper level this
conveys the idea that we give up and renounce that old person, our old
personality, which was dominated by whatever we wanted and felt like. God no
longer views you and me as a person who is dominated by this world and by the
beliefs and attitudes of this world, but as a person in Christ, a holy person,
a person who sets herself apart from this world and belongs to God. So Paul
tells us, “You are a holy person before God. Reflect in your actions who you are.”
One theologian uses this
illustration: After the American Civil War and the liberation of the slaves in
the South, some of the slaves very naturally kept forgetting that they were now
free people, and they went on living and behaving exactly as if they were still
slaves. The same servile spirit and the same fear were still there. There was a
proclamation that stated that they were no longer slaves and that they were
completely free. The same man was still alive but the slave was gone forever.
But out of habit the person would go on living as if he were still a slave. We
are no longer slaves to the world. We need to live like it and be who we are.
There is a difficulty: It
seems that putting off the old and putting on the new only once is not enough,
because we struggle with putting off some of the old behaviours and the things
that belong to our old identity. Isn’t that true? What do you and I struggle to
let go? It could be a behaviour, an old habit, a sin, a grudge. We struggle with
letting go, we are not suddenly perfect and we are not expected to be.
In the early church when a
person became converted, they were baptised and made an official proclamation
in church. That was an obvious sign that the person was putting off the old and
putting on the new. The Ephesians had done that. So why does Paul remind them
again to put off the old and on the new? As time passed, the Ephesians began to
forget that they had changed their mind about certain things in their old life
and found them incompatible with their new life. They were new people in Christ
but they had drifted back into some old habits.
Are you and I like that?
Have we drifted back into some bad habits? Paul is saying that this is being
inconsistent. We are not expected to be perfect but we are expected to show in
the way we live that we are different to what we were before. As new people we
should not conform to the standards of our old territory, the standards of the
world. The standards of the world may tell us that ‘Everything is relative’, ‘When
it feels ok, do it.’ ‘Look after number one…yourself.’ ‘Don’t let anyone tell
you what to do.’ But God tells us ‘I am absolute. I am the one and only God’, ‘My
precepts are absolute, follow them and not your feelings.’, ‘Look after each
other. Love each other.’ What does that mean on a more practical level?
3. ‘Doing Action’: Putting Off and On is Active
Work
As Christians we have to reflect actively that we are
no longer the old person but a new person. Matthew Lloyd-Jones says quite unexpectedly
this in the matter; “Putting off the old
man is not something that is to be prayed about.”[1]
That doesn’t sound biblical. In the same letter (Eph
A pastor relates that he
was counselling a lady who came to him with a problem that had been crippling
her for twenty-two years. He says: “It
may sound trivial to others but it was spoiling her life. She had a phobia, a
terror of thunderstorms. She once had been in a terrible thunderstorm and
thought she was going to be killed, and had that fixed on her mind. And in the
end it had come to this, that if she were walking to her place of worship on a
Sunday morning and happened to see a black cloud, this fear would immediately
suggest a coming thunderstorm, and instead of going to church she would go home
because of her fear. The phobia had taken many forms: It had prevented her
doing many things she wanted to do, and it had created difficulties in the
family…. Well, now, I said, what have you been doing about it? She replied, ‘I
have done everything I can; I have talked to all sorts of people … I pray about
nothing else, I am always praying about
it.’”[2]
The pastor comments that many people say glibly that there is nothing to do but
to pray, and that some people feel that they can do nothing and pray to be
delivered from this thing, instead of throwing it off.
That is what the lady had
done. She had prayed for twenty-two years and yet the fear remained and was
increasing. She had prayed but not applied Paul’s teaching. Of course we should
pray about everything in our life, our life should be a life of prayer but
prayer must not be an excuse for not doing anything. Prayer needs to be the
basis for our action. Our action needs to be informed and empowered by prayer.
We pray but then think and apply the Biblical teaching to ourselves; we have to
put off the attitudes and the thinking of the old person ourselves.
Paul encourages us: “Put off falsehood” (
4. ‘Mind over Body’ Action: Changed
Behaviour is the Result of a Changed Mind
We sometimes forget who we
are. We have to remind ourselves that we belong to God. You and I have to
remind ourselves that the things we used to do and that were part of our old
life are no longer an adequate expression of our new life. One pastor
illustrates this point. He tells of a church member, a man in his early fifties
who used to be an alcoholic, fighter and wife-beater. He had a foul temper and
became mad under the influence of alcohol. He eventually came under the gospel
and was converted. But what he was most proud of was his moustache and its
length from tip to tip. Most fights eventuated because someone would challenge
him on the length of his moustache and that would start a quarrel. One day
after his conversion he came to church with his moustache shaved off. The
pastor was annoyed because he was sure that some busybody from his church had
told him to shave it off. He pressed the man to tell him what self-appointed
spiritual had requested him to get rid of his moustache. But the man said that
after he got up that morning and looked in the mirror and saw his moustache, he
thought to himself, “Them things don’t
belong to a Christian” and shaved it off. The man could neither read nor
write but he knew that the things that stood for his old life had no place in
his new life. We may hang on to things that are without harm in themselves,
like that moustache, but they have personal meaning for us and are in some way
connected to our old life. What are the things that remind you of your old
life? You and I are asked to let go of them.
Paul mentions some of the
things that we know do not belong to our new life, like stealing, lying, slander,
sexual immorality and if we are feeling too snug and safe, when we listen to
that list, let us listen again: Do not take anything that is not yours, the
little bottle of shampoo from the motel, the CD you burned, do not cheat on
your taxes, do not tell little white lies to escape an uncomfortable situation
or to put yourself in a better light, do not talk ill of anyone who is not
present, do not harbour resentment against anyone who hurt or annoyed you, do
not be involved in pornography.
Paul not only asks us to
put off the reminders of our old life but he says, ‘Have nothing to do with
them’ (Eph
John Piper said that the
challenge was not to pursue righteousness but to prefer righteousness. We must believe
with our whole heart that the new self is better than the old and that the new
life offers something much more valuable and worthy than the old. We will grow
tired of performing behaviours that are expected of us, but that we don’t
really believe in. That is why Paul talks about being ‘renewed in the spirit of
the mind.’ Part of being a Christian is to know why we live the Christian life.
Paul is not calling for an outward change of actions and habits but for an
inward change of the mind because he knows that when our mind is changed, the
actions will follow.
For years it was believed
that criminal behaviour solely stems from environmental factors such as where a
person lives or how he is treated by his parents. But then that view was
challenged by a series of studies and it was it was thought that criminal
behaviour results from warped thinking processes. Though the environment has an
impact on us, it is how we deal with it, the choices a person makes and what he
believes, that make him a criminal or not. What you and I believe and the
choices we make influence how we act and how we live your lives much more than
simply following rules imposed on us. Therefore, let us adjust our thinking.
Believe that this new life in Christ is much better than the old. Believe that
the old is gone and that we have a new identity, one that sets us apart from
the world.
Conclusion
Dmitry Shestakov
from our opening story, the criminal who turned into a pastor, was changed not
only in God’s eyes but also before the world. He did not just stop being a
criminal but put a new person in its place (‘two in one action’). He believed
that at his conversion he was made new in God’s eyes once and for all (‘once
only action’) and actively set out to reflect his new identity by changing his
profession (‘doing action’). He not only pursued to be new but preferred his
new life despite prison (‘mind over body action’).
We too may be assured that
God makes us new people when we turn our lives over to him. This is not simply
a small adjustment to our life and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis. So let
us remind ourselves who we are before God and the world, put off “Them things
that don’t belong to a Christian” and let’s not be shy to let others see who we
are.
Amen