Ephesians 4:17-24 | Pastor Jason Lancaster
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Do people really change?** You may be thinking, “I’m not so sure.” Do people really change? And I believe by God’s grace the answer would be yes, they do. A passage like this speaks to that. But often when you come to a passage like this, you may hear preachers like me bash you over the head and say things like, “Just change already.” I’m not going to do that this morning. I believe there’s a lot of grace here, and I’d like to pray in line with that grace for this passage.
Prayer
Lord, I just want to be able to preach this morning and say what You want me to say, and trust that what You want to say to Your people is from Your Word—speaking of me first, changing me, changing us, changing the people sitting next to us. Lord, change us to be more and more like Jesus, no matter what it takes. In Your name we pray, amen.
My desire for me is my desire for you: to think God’s thoughts after Him—to have our minds so enraptured with God’s thoughts that it impacts our lifestyle. Because your lifestyle is not controlled first by your lifestyle; it’s controlled by what’s going on in your brain and in your heart. I’m asking God to change the way I think so I think more like Him. And I’m asking the same for you.
I’ve learned a new phrase recently from my children. I learn lots of stuff when you still have kids at home. The newest phrase I’ve heard is rage bait. I love that terminology—rage bait—like you say something to get someone else mad. And this is what happens online: lots of rage bait. People say something, post something, it makes you mad, you engage with it, and then the rage starts to spread. Then we have a whole nation of people who enjoy recreational bitterness. Anybody? You just enjoy it.
The reason you enjoy recreational bitterness is because the algorithms and the companies know that. They’ve created this rage bait in such a way that you will engage with it and your blood pressure will rise. Can you believe that? Someone who knows technology better than all of us has an algorithm out there that somehow is farming your mind. That’s crazy. They’re trying to get to you and craft the way that you think. They’re farming your mind. That’s crazy to think.
The apostle Paul is going to say this morning that that kind of way of living and thinking is futile. It’s empty, and it goes absolutely nowhere. His truth speaks to all of us, because that is supposed to be the way we *used* to live and *used* to think—but no more.
Let’s see what he has to say in Ephesians chapter 4, starting in verse 17:
So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind.
Most of the people in this congregation at the time were Gentile converts. They were not raised Jewish; they were Gentile converts. This is the life they’ve come out of. And in this one sentence, he says: don’t go back.
One of the ways I’ve heard it phrased is: you must no longer walk as the Americans do. Don’t do like everybody else and what they do in America. And I think that works, because Gentiles, Americans—all of us—are corrupt sinners in need of salvation. The reality is the gospel doesn’t just save you from hell and the wrath of God. The gospel also saves you from you—and the futility of your mind.
Look again at verse 17. It says specifically: no longer as the Gentiles walk in the futility of their mind. When God is rejected and you’re not a believer, what Paul is saying specifically here is that your thoughts are not thinking in line with the way of the truth.
Romans 1:21 says:
For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their reasonings, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
To push even further, we would say a life lived outside of God is a life of insanity—not an insanity that’s going to put you in an insane asylum, but an insanity that helps you blend in with the rest of the Americans. Because when you’re living in this insanity where you know that God exists and yet you’re not following Him, then you’re thinking along the ways of this world. And that’s called futility—a futile mind.
I wrote a whole book on this. It’s called A Trivial Life, and the tagline is Escaping the Default Mode of the Human Heart. No one has to tell any human ever to engage in trivial things, right? No one has to teach my kids to sin. They got it. No one has to teach you to sin. You got it. It’s the default. When we’re born, our default is toward sin. It’s a default toward a futile mind. And that’s of course why rage bait works—because the algorithms and the people know that’s what’s inside of you. That’s your default. So you participate in it, and they got you, because that’s a futile mind.
So basically, what we’re doing so far: Paul is describing the way the world works. Look at verse 18:
Being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart.
Underline some words here: darkened, excluded, ignorant. So they’re making moral decisions in the dark.
I just want to tell you what the Bible says: unbelief is not intellectual. Unbelief is moral.
I was listening to a podcast recently about an expert on Blaise Pascal, who makes this whole argument from the 17th century. He was a mathematician, and he’s saying that those who don’t believe—it’s not an intellectual issue, no matter how much they want to make it an intellectual issue. It is a moral issue. And he says this: if anybody wants God, God gives them enough light to have Him. And if anybody does not want God, then there’s going to be enough darkness for them not to have Him as well.
The argument is: the evidence is not the problem. It’s the wanting. The wanting is the problem. Men are afraid to want God, and so they pull away, because they realize that if they have God, guess what? They are no longer in charge. So the lock is not on the head; it’s on the heart. It’s not like, “I can’t intellectually fathom it and figure it out.” The argument is: no—it’s on the heart.
So what we’re arguing is that it’s not an innocent ignorance. Romans 1 says they knew God, but they did not honor God. And it’s been famously said that a young atheist has to be very careful what he reads so he can protect his ignorance.
We don’t call it protecting your ignorance anymore. We call it curating your feed—or setting your life up so you’re only seeing things and living things that affirm what you’re doing. It’s almost like a construction project of your life where you are the contractor—you’re engineering your life to be just the way you want it to be. That’s the ways of the world right now. If I’m looking online, I have everything fed to me that I want to affirm. Or if I go out and live the life I want to live, I’m going to make sure I construct it where I am at the center. And if I have to follow the Lord, that is a different master than me. I want none of it. So I may chalk it up to an intellectual problem when all along it’s just a moral problem.
Let’s continue. Verse 19:
> And they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.
He’s once again describing the world—the Gentiles, the Americans. It says they’re callous: no pain, no grief in disobeying God. They’ve handed themselves over to sensuality—a variety of sexual sins. We could say the callousness in our culture is that people no longer blush. We used to be there, but no one has to look you in the face anymore. They can just do whatever they want.
We are a culture that is not ashamed of our sin. In fact, we love our sins so much we throw parades for them. There’s just no shame. That’s the culture we’re living in—the Americans, the Gentiles. That’s where we’re at. There is no shame, but callousness.
Look again at verse 19. It says they’re greedy to practice every kind of impurity. They want more and more—not just of stuff, but more and more of their perversion, more and more of their sin, more and more of their life without God. They want themselves front and center.
Let me give you a prominent example. I’m not just trying to harp on this, but think of our culture. For whatever reason, in the demonic state of our culture, it likes to kill babies. That’s a reality. That’s what happens. And so if that baby’s going to mess up my life, then my life takes priority over that baby. I’m going to cut that baby off. That baby’s going to die, and so I’m going to abort it. That’s part of the culture. And it permeates all areas.
If my mom and dad are too old and they’re going to bother me in my life and the way I want to scale my life, then I’m just going to stick them in a home and I’ll see them once or twice a year. You see how this goes. And if my marriage is not going so well, well, I can just cut that off. I can just abort it. I can be out of that. If I don’t want to think about death, I can just set that aside. Do you realize that? If you don’t want to think about death, you can just keep yourself busy all the time. But guess what? Death’s still going to come for you. Oh well—but you keep yourself busy.
Do you see the culture we live in? It’s a culture of “do what I want to do.” If I don’t like it, I can abort it. Do what I want to do; if I don’t like it, I can distract myself. That’s the world we live in. That’s the reality of sin. You know this, right? It’s the way the Americans live. We’re really good at it. And that’s the way that you used to live.
But then you got saved—not all of you, but hopefully most of you. You got saved, and then something started to
