4 Aspects of Emptiness to Warn You from Fruitlessness--1 - Drinking They Drank -1-4--2 - Seeing They Saw -5-16--3 - Perceiving They Perceived -17-28--4 - Receiving They Received -29-31-

Ephesians 4-17-24 deals with the conflict a Christian must deal with on a daily basis. In Christ you are a new creation but you still know how to sin just as well as you always have. If you belong to Christ, you know the battle. You understand God's plan for the church and our unity in Christ as we've been studying it in Ephesians 4-1-16. You want to be equipped for every good work. You want to be mature in Christ. You want to be encouraging and helpful to fellow believers. But you also know there is an ongoing struggle between what you know and want to do as a Christian, and how hard it is to consistently do it.--This paragraph in Ephesians majors on the old man and then tells how to get rid of him and put on the new man. This is the beginning of a contrast between what you were before you were saved in your daily life and what you should be in your daily life now.--1 - God's DON'T WALK Sign -17-19-- a - Futility of mind- b - Darkened in understanding- c - Excluded from the life of God- d - Ignorance- e - Hardness of heart- f - Having become callous- g - Given over to sensuality- h - For the practice of every kind of impurity- i - Greediness-2 - Get Rid Of Your Old Man -20-22-

The summary of the introduction to the Sermon on the Mount and the theme of the whole thing is---Matthew 5-20- For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.--What follows, from 5-21-48 is a series of examples which each illustrate what He means in verse 20. These illustrations all have the same formula. Jesus introduces them with You have heard the ancients were told . . . In each case, then, He refers back to statements in God's law which had become well-known quotations from the Law.--Jesus then shows that true righteousness involves more than mere outward observance such as what was practiced by the religious leaders of His day. He empha- sized the true inner spirit of each precept to offset the shallowness and abuses that were the rule of the day. Today we look at the subject of sexual sin. Are you an adulterer---1 - The Letter of the Law -27-28--2 - The Seriousness of Sin -29-30-

The Pharisees, along with their scholarly wing, the scribes, were the theological ultra-conservatives. Jesus declared that their nit-picking man-made rules completely missed the point of how to be righteous. The summary of the introduction to this sermon and the theme verse is---Matthew 5-20- For I say to you, that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.--1 - The issue of anger -21-22--2 - The implications of the law -23-26-

1 - The Faithfulness of the Imperfect-2 - The Faithfulness of the Perfect-3 - The Faithfulness of Those Being Perfected