Demonstrating God's Incredible Wisdom - Becoming Part of each-other in the Same Body - Part 9 Ch 4c

All right, so the message this morning, again, is another in the series on Ephesians. We're in chapter four, so we're going to continue to learn what the Apostle Paul has to tell us about the change that Jesus wants to make in us and what it is that he wants to do with us.

A little bit of review first. It's always good to get ourselves back in the mood and in the context of what Paul has been talking about. The book purpose is to open our eyes to God's open secret purpose. It was a thing that God had going and was planning out and getting everything arranged for, kind of like if you think of the Allies with D-Day, and they were planning and testing out things. They had this big, ginormous invasion planned, and the Germans kind of had like, they thought maybe something they found out, but they had no idea what was coming. And then the day came and there was, I forget what it was, 30,000 ships out there in the ocean.

How many, Andre? Where's Pierre? You know. But anyways, that's God has been planning and getting everything lined up for this, and now it's here for the last 2,000 years since Jesus came. The invasion is here, and sin is able to be pushed out of the world, and true human life can be restored. So the book is trying to open our eyes to how amazing this is, what God has been, the secret purpose God has been building up and now is open for us to participate in. That purpose is to demonstrate his manifold, in other words, branching into just every area, his manifold wisdom to every being through us, his church, by reuniting everything together in following King Jesus.

That's God's purpose for us. And so the book is kind of divided into two parts. The first part, the first three chapters deal with more of understanding this mission, this secret operation that God has been preparing and has now launched to rescue humanity and the world. And then the second part, then chapters four through six, is teaching us how to live so that we can be part of this reclaiming or rescuing operation.

Chapter two, in the end of chapter two, he says, "God has raised us from death and bondage to the powers." Let me restate it, say that better. He has raised us from death and bondage to the powers in order that we can live heaven's way with Jesus. He's raised us up from being dead in trespasses and sins, the children of wrath like everyone else, and has raised us up to live Jesus' way.

He has broken down the barrier of the law of Moses that created a barrier between the Jews and the Gentiles for both, really. Neither of them was able to live the way God really wanted them to be and has brought together a new human family following Jesus.

And when we follow Jesus, then together we become a temple of God's presence. That's how chapter two closes. So there's two pictures that are being used here in the book of Ephesians to picture God's goal, what God wants there to be existing in the world. One is a body.

And we talked a couple of weeks ago or a month or so ago about how God has designed it that we're all different, but when we all work together, there can be a living presence of Jesus walking around in the world for people to experience and be changed by. The other is a temple.

This is an artist's rendering of the Temple of Artemis, or in the book of Acts, she is called Diana of the Ephesians. That was so great. And this is a building that's to display. It's a visual icon of her greatness in their eyes. And when you go there, you would find out all about her, and you would see a picture of her or an image of her, and you would be able to experience and participate in activity and carrying out her pleasure in the world.

This is probably a little bit of a vague idea for us, how a temple becoming a temple, because we don't have so much temples to a God or a deity. So I want to warm our minds up to this concept a little bit with some temples that we do have around us that we're familiar with. Does anybody recognize this?

Dan. Yeah, that's the Biltmore, right? Yeah, that's the Biltmore.

Yeah. So I can't tell you, I've not been there. Has anybody else been to the Biltmore Mansion? Thought the Blacks have been. Yeah, I've never been there. But when you go there, you see it's built for him to display his opulent wealth and his dreams and the kind of things he liked. And when you go there, you will find out his story and what he has done and see pictures of him and find out the kind of things that his money is still probably doing in the world.

Here's another temple. Does anybody who is still in school know what this building is?

Give you a clue. It's on one of your coins on the back. It's turned a little bit, so it doesn't look like usual. It's in Washington, DC.

This is the Lincoln Memorial. So when you go to the Lincoln Memorial, as you're driving into Washington, DC, you begin to see the Washington Monument, of course, sticks it up, and then you begin to see these things looming above the trees. There's the Capitol Dome and different buildings, and this is one as you come up to the Potomac River. All of a sudden, you see this thing kind of looms up on the other side of the river there. It's a very tall building, and it is in honor of Abraham Lincoln.

And when you go inside, there are these humongous pillars. They're like 65 feet. It makes you feel kind of small. You walk up these long stairs. You go up, and then it goes flat, and then you go up some more, and it goes flat, and then go up some more, and it goes flat, and then you walk in past these pillars that are like this big around. And you walk in there, and your voice echoes. It kind of makes you feel kind of solemn. And up in front of you, there's this big throne there with Abraham Lincoln on it. And on the walls are some of his speeches that tell about the things he cared about and what he did for the country.

Behind him, there is an inscription there above his head, and it reads, "In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever." So this building is to be something that helps people remember who Abraham Lincoln was and what he did, what an important part he played in the story of the nation of the United States of America.

And the building is built in ways. I don't remember what all it is, but there's names, there's dates, there's the number of the columns. All those things speak about the country that Abraham Lincoln invested deeply in. It's a temple to help people to remember, and people go there and experience this person that lived. This is another temple that was familiar to me when I lived in Southern Kentucky. Does anybody know what this is?

Good. This is the Corvette Museum. It's on Interstate 65 in Bowling Green. As you're driving along, you see this looks like somebody dropped an ice cream cone upside down, broke it off, and then stuck another one inside or something. It's a weird building, but it's where the Corvette factory is, where they're made, these amazing cars that just bless people's lives and bring an end to world hunger and broken families.

Pardon the sarcasm. But when you go there and you get to see these magnificent cars and wonder at them, and there's stories about them, and they show you the first ones and all the people who have won great honors with the Corvette.

And here's one that's in Pittsburgh. This is the Pittsburgh Steelers home stadium, the Hines Field, and I forget it has another fancy name now. When you come across the bridge through the tunnel coming into Pittsburgh from the west, there it is out in front of you, and it's where people gather to celebrate football. As we are speaking, in Las Vegas, the Super Bowl is going on, and millions, if not more, people from all over the United States and probably all over the world are watching from inside that stadium and from their homes on television, watching football, American football, and all these heroes, these heroic men who can take that ball from one end of the field to the other against all odds faster than anyone else.

We need more. But it's a temple. It's a big thing. It represents this, and people see it and think, "Wow." I'm from Tennessee, so when you drive through Nashville, you see the Titans stadium down there, and it's a representation of how great the Titans are because they're a team that has risen so high in the NFL. Anyways, so much for all that. Here's another one from Nashville. This is the Country Music Hall of Fame.

And this is another piece of the Nashville skyline. And that's the building where you go to experience country music. It stands as a visual of how amazing, what an artistic flair country music has given our society. And now you go in there and you meet all the heroes, and you learn their stories. You learn how they became great in country music. And you run into people there that can make you great in country music if that's what you want to be.

So it starts thinking about us being a temple to God and not a physical building, but when people encounter us as a group, do we stand out and people see that and say, "Wow, that's what God made people to be like.

God must be really smart and really good." And when they come among us, do they learn the stories of people who have become champions and heroes in bringing God's kingdom to pass? Do they meet people who are going to help them to join in and become a hero for God's kingdom?

A temple. Really, this whole idea of temples, as you look at skylines, city skylines, often you look at it, you see buildings that are temples. What kind of things do you usually see in a city skyline? What kind of buildings are there? What kind of names do they have on them?

Pardon? Banks. Okay, banks, money, money institutions. What else?

Sports? Big businesses, right? Things like that. Those are the gods of this world, and people build these big buildings to impress people with how great. Another one from Nashville is Bell South Tower. That's a big phone company down there.

This is the Pittsburgh skyline. This is the Columbus skyline from last Saturday night. I'll leave that for you to think about what all happened there.

The city of Ephesus was very familiar with this thing of buildings, temples, buildings, structures that were an icon, a visual icon of the power and the glory and the majesty of whether it was a certain ruler or Greek culture or a god. Right here is the, this is an artist's representation. Right in the middle, you see the amphitheater that the story in Acts took place where they all piled in there and yelled for two hours, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians." And I think up here is supposed to be a replica of the Temple of Diana.

And there's many other ones there. There's the Colossus of Domitian, I believe, standing there 65 feet tall with his arm like this. As you sail in the harbor, you see that standing up on the hill there to show everybody how powerful of an emperor he was.

Again, the artist's representation of the Temple of Diana or Artemis, which was one of the eight wonders of the world. I'm going to skip through. There were lots of these kinds of places. This is probably originally what it looked like. Here's what it looks like now. But Ephesus was very familiar with this idea of buildings and things like that to demonstrate the grandeur and the greatness of something where you would go to experience that and to become involved in that greatness itself.

So we have these two pictures that God is telling us that he wants us to become a body, a physical presence of Jesus that people can actually still experience him, both in his friendship and his kindness, the relationship, and also in his wisdom, in the integrity of his character and his teaching that changes us.

So body and a temple. So the storyline of the book keeps going in chapter four. It says God has given us gifts, given gifts to humanity in the form of a variety of gifts and a variety of people. And when we respect these diverse gifts and blend them together in the things he lists off there at the beginning of the chapter, lowliness and meekness and long suffering, bearing one another in love, endeavoring or striving, sweating until we fall over in a faint to keep unity, to keep ourselves bound to each other.

Then we can become a living bodily presence of Jesus, a temple where people learn about God and encounter him and become part of his revolution. This is really important to understand why then he begins to give us commandments, do's and don'ts about our lives. Because it's not just about that God doesn't like certain things or that if you do, you'll get in trouble, and if you don't, you'll get out of trouble, or that you'll get to go to heaven and live in la-la land for the rest of your life. It's because there's something that God has created each one of us, each one of you, because he wants you to join him in rescuing this broken world.

And so these are instructions how to become part of that awesome privilege.

The result of this, if we follow these directions here of relating to each other in a way so that we become bound together and we work together to be this temple, to be this body of Christ, the result is that in the world, we will grow to him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, we follow the head, and we become joined and knit together by what each person is contributing, bound together by love.

When everyone, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, so when everyone works together and does his part to make the body successful, then there is growth to building up so that there is a body of Christ that Christ can be seen and experienced in this world.

That's the result of us following those kinds of things. When each does his part, and I think that's the theme that we want to think of, is how am I doing my part? Am I doing what is going to make this temple stay up and become more glorious? Or am I doing things that's going to make the temple fall apart? Am I doing things that's going to make the body grow more complete and larger and be more able to do what it needs to do? Or am I going to do something that makes it crippled?

There is bonding and mature stability. There is a full-grown representation of Jesus, and there's a continual expansion of Christ-like love in the world. So let's read the passage again. We're going to back up to verse 11 and read through the passage and then go on from that point.

And he himself, that's Jesus, when he ascended on high and led the captive, gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and to the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, that we should no longer be children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting.

But speaking the truth in love may grow up in all things unto him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body joined and knit together by that which every joint supplies according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying or the building up of itself in love.

This I say therefore and testify in the Lord that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart, who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness to work all uncleanness with greediness.

But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard him and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus, that you put off concerning your former conduct the old man, which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man, which was created according to God in true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, putting away lying, let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your wrath. Neither give place to the devil. Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with his hands what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need.

Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you are sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice.

And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.

So backing up to where we left off last time, verse 17, this I say therefore and testify in the Lord that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk. There's a very important word in that verse that we need to look at first before we understand the rest of the verse. What is that word?

Therefore. Therefore, remember always those words. They're not in there because they like to speak like William Shakespeare or something, but they're there because they're connecting you to something, and often something that's bigger or more important or something that you can't understand the rest without it. And he's saying because God wants to make out of us a temple, a living body of Christ, if we will follow his directions and work together and each do our part so that it can be successful. Because of that, therefore, he says, "I say therefore and testify in the Lord, I'm telling you, I think he's saying from my experience because Jesus has taught me this and I understand how important this is, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk."

So that's what we want to talk about next. This idea of walking doesn't so much mean going like this, but it's your lifestyle, the way you live, talk, just everything about how you go about it. In today's world, it might be kind of like the vibe you put off. I don't know, but it's just the whole thing of who you are and how you live.

And so don't have a lifestyle like the Gentiles have.

So first, we want to talk a little bit about this idea of the Gentiles. We talked about this before, but it's important to connect this because he says some nasty things here, and it's to give us a picture of what's wrong in the world and what we are doing when we do the kind of things that we're tended naturally to do that the rest of the world does.

So there's this important principle in scripture. It was talked about this morning in Sunday school that to whom you yield yourself servants to obey, his servants you are. Whether you yield yourself a servant to righteousness and therefore get paid life, or whether you yield yourself as a servant to sin and you reap death. And that's why humans all reap death is because we have served sin and therefore it owns us.

And that's why Jesus didn't stay in the grave because he never served sin, so it didn't own him. And so he submitted himself. He played along with it for a little bit. He let him handcuff him and walk him into jail so that he could let everybody else loose.

But that's an important principle because what happened in the beginning and what each of us have chosen to do is we listened to somebody else and we served self. We did what we wanted to do. That's what happened in the Garden of Eden there. Adam and Eve were the first humans, and they decided, "I'm not going to listen to God. I'm going to do my own thing." And Satan encouraged him and gave him some ideas there what to do. And because of that, they reap death. The bottom picture there is a drawing of Adam and Eve weeping over Abel's dead body. And you see Cain in the background running from the presence of the Lord, trying to hide.

That's what happens. That's the law. As we go through the story then, later on in the story, there's these fallen angels that come in the world, and they have children with human women. And there's these giants in the land that these demons teach the people all kinds of wickedness and debauchery. And it gets to the point there in Genesis 6 that the earth is just full of violence and bloodshed, and the thoughts and intentions, the creativity of people's heart is just evil all the time. And so God was grieved, and he wipes the earth clean in a flood to try to at least kind of stall that. And then at the Tower of Babel, God divides the nations.

In Psalm, I took that off of there. No, it's the end of Deuteronomy. And I can't tell you off the top. I think it's Deuteronomy 14 where it says this that it recounts, and Moses says, "Just ask anybody." We all know this, that when God divided the nations, he let the nations follow these demons, these fallen angels. He let them rule over them, and he took Jacob and said, "This one, because of Abraham's faithfulness and the faithfulness of Isaac and the faithfulness of Jacob," he said, "Maybe these people, I'll focus on these people, and I'll try to do everything I can to preserve them so I can bring the Messiah through them."

And so the other nations lived under the rule and followed these fallen angels, these demons. Let's see if things turn out right here.

Yeah. So after the flood, humanity again demonstrated their deliberate will to not be ruled by God. God divided up the ungodly humans, giving the powers, the sons of God or fallen angels, that they had been serving jurisdictions over them. And we call these nations the Gentiles. This is the concept that we need to read this in, that there's the Jews who were descendants of Abraham and followed Abraham's faithfulness, and God worked closely with them. And then there's the other people, all the rest of the people who were being taught and ruled by these wicked fallen angels.

And then I'm just going to run through this quickly. We know the story how God chose Abraham. God reached out to Abraham, and then later through Moses gave the commandments, the law to protect them, to separate themselves so they wouldn't become corrupted, and to try to purify their minds and their lives.

These are just some images, some stories from the Bible. Help us get this picture of what happened when people, the Gentiles, followed these fallen gods. On your left here is Balaam trying to curse the tribes of Israel for the Moabites. And then he led them to have the Moabite wives to come in and destroy the families of the Israelites with tempting the men to immorality. And I'm sure there were moments of pleasure, but it made terrible trouble among them. God gave them a plague to try to help them realize this. And in the end, it's awful that Phinehas had to go in there and kill the man and the woman at Baal Peor there. These are awful stories, the trouble that it made in Israel as these nations under the false gods tried to suck them back into that corruption.

We have at the top, there is a representation of the prophets of Baal there on Mount Carmel, cutting themselves and crying out to their God to try to get him to be strong for them. And the far right there is offering up their children to the god Molech and burning them, making them the Old Testament talks about making their children a pass through the fire. So these are kind of high points or kind of thumbnail representations of the awfulness that went on in everyday life, destroying their children, destroying their families, destroying their lives by following these gods, these fallen angels that had dominion over all the rest of the people. And that group of people is what they called the Gentiles.

That's what made somebody a Gentile originally. So he says, "Don't walk anymore like the rest of the Gentiles walk." But when we don't follow Jesus, we are serving those false gods, those fallen angels, and we are putting ourselves back in that world of things.

Notice that he says the rest of the Gentiles because these are people in Ephesus. So most of them are probably not Jews. We know there's a few Jews there because Timothy's mother was a Jew. Timothy was from Ephesus. But most of these people were not Jews by nature. They had not grown up. Their family history was not learning about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and faithfulness to God and obeying God's law.

So God has changed them. And so he's saying, "Don't go back to that. Remember what happened, what you became when you followed that stuff." It's important, I think, for us, for me to remember that, that when we follow self, when we do our own thing, we are putting ourselves under a fallen, corrupted, twisted power.

We give them authority and ownership in our lives. So don't walk anymore like the rest of the Gentiles walk. How do they walk? In the futility of their mind. Well, futile means having no result or effect, useless, concerned with unimportant matters. John Chrysostom takes a lot of time to talk about this, how all the things that they do, they don't last. And so they're just wasting their time because in the end, it's all going to burn up. They're going to die. They're not taking any of it with them. It actually brings destruction. The pleasure, the enjoyment is very short, and then they have to pay for it.

It doesn't accomplish with them. Even the pleasure that they do have just leaves them hungry for more, and they have to go get some more, and then that's not enough. And so we'll read about some of that later, what happens there.

Here's a few. The King James says, "Vanity of their mind." Somebody who's vain is concerned about things and about them. There's no point to it. It doesn't really matter or it's fake.

The book of Ecclesiastes talks about vanity and talks about being smoke or a vapor. It's just, it's there for a little while and then nothing. And that's what when we follow self and we get sucked into that lifestyle of the Gentiles, the people who are serving themselves and putting themselves under the power of the fallen angels, it's what they're putting their life into is of no avail. It actually racks up judgment for them, not lasting or accomplishing no purpose. So the Gentiles have no way of accomplishing what they want. They can't get it. The things they want, security and value and peace, they have no way of achieving it.

C.S. Lewis says this in the screwtape letters, "An ever-increasing craving for an ever-diminishing pleasure." So you have more desire for it, but it gives you less is the formula. That's what Satan wants in the things he calls us to do. To get a man's soul and give him nothing in return, that is what really gladdens the devil's heart.

On the other hand, this is from the song, "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken," which ironically is not ironically, but it's interesting that it is written by John Newton, who lived a life of just insane commitment to the pleasures of drink and immorality and pursuing money as a slave trader and wrote the song, "Amazing Grace." He says this, "Saviour, if of Zion's city," so this temple of people who are living heaven's way, "if I'm a member of that, if of Zion's city, I by grace a member am, let the world deride and pity. I will glory in thy name. Fading is the worldling's pleasures. All is boasted, pomp, and show. Solid joys and lasting treasures.

None but Zion's children know.

The way of the wicked is like darkness. They do not know at what they stumble. They are walking in futility of their mind. The way they think and stuff doesn't get done what they want. It doesn't last. And they have their understanding darkened. They don't know where they're going. They run into stuff and they're trying to fix it, and they just keep making more problems, digging the hole deeper for themselves.

Whose minds the God of this age has blinded." So that's this idea again that when we do our own thing, instead of listening to Jesus and following him, we put ourselves under a greater power that then influences us and blinds our minds so that the light of the glory of Christ, the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the one who came to live and show us God's way, doesn't sink in, doesn't get through to them.

The windows are too clouded.

This is what Jesus was saying about people who wouldn't receive his teaching. "The hearts of this people have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing. Their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their heart and hear with their ears, lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, and I should heal them."

They've dumbed themselves down. They said, "No, I don't want to hear that. Don't leave me alone." "Huh? Like I can't see that. That wouldn't make any sense." And they don't want light. Here's a few synonym terms. Dumbed down, being kept in the dark. I actually asked ChatGPT to spit out some colloquialisms for this, and they weren't super helpful. So artificial intelligence is still artificial. But one of them was a bind is a bat in a barn or a coon in a swamp at night or like. Anyways, the no intelligence. We're not thinking straight. We can't make decisions and stuff clearly. They're clueless. They have brain fog. They can't think straight. They're missing information.

Blind is a bat. Subhuman. So we're at the level of animals rather than humans who can appreciate beauty and cleanness and all those kinds of things.

It's the opposite of what Satan promised in the garden. In the garden, he said, "Now, if you need to go figure life out for yourself, then your eyes will be open. You'll be enlightened, and you'll be like gods, and you'll know what's really going on." It's the opposite of that, actually.

It's more though than just a lack of information. They have an appetite for the evil and the twisted. It's a darkening in the sense that it's corrupted from within. Now we start to want and like things that are bad because we've closed our minds off to light shining in. The imagination and creativity it conjures up is dark, perverted things. And that starts in small ways.

Having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God. Well, we don't hear just a lot about aliens anymore. There's kind of two contexts. We talk about aliens. We talk about people who are here and are not supposed to be. Like right now, it's a big issue is people from Mexico that are here and they're illegal aliens.

And the science fiction world of people from other planets and the imaginations about life there. I enjoy the cartoon Strange Planet. How many of you have seen this before? Good, good. It's kind of like what he's doing is he's kind of chuckling at the way humans do things, looking at it from an outside perspective. So it's like these aliens are coming here, trying to figure out why humans do the things they do. And it's like, it doesn't make sense. So here is a guy who was out and got a tan up there in the upper left. "Whoa, Alex, you look damaged." That's what actually is happening when we say, "Oh, wow, you got a nice tan."

Like your skin got damaged by the sun. We say, "It looks nice." And then he says, "I was exposed to the nearest star." We don't think about that. We think of it as the sun. It's different, but it's not. We got scalded by being too close to a star or being out there too much. And now he's jealous. Like, does that make any sense? Like one guy gets burned and the other guy says, he says, "Oh, wow." Then he says, "I feel more attractive because of this." Right? And he says, "Oh, yes, you look much better because you got damaged by the star." And then he says, "Oh, I wish I would get damaged by a star."

It shows up how I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but how he's an alien. He doesn't understand the values we as a human have and how probably maybe we think that because you're actually more healthy when you're out in the sun and get a little bit of, not sunburn, but get some color and things like that. I don't know why all we have, but it doesn't make any sense to them because they aren't from here. They're from somewhere else and they have different values and a life and all that. It doesn't make any sense.

So when we follow our own thinking and we get sucked into being under the powers of the world, God's way doesn't make any sense. His life, the way Jesus lives, love your enemies and forgive. It's like, "What? How? If everybody did that, it would be nice."

We don't have enough time. I like this one. This was very appropriate for today because this is kind of a making a satire on the Super Bowl, watching professional sports. If you want to enjoy it later, I can send some of these out. We'll leave that for now. But they're aliens from the life of God.

Doesn't make any sense. And it's more than just that. They distance themselves by familiarizing themselves with something that's not fit. They like that. And so what we do, human life is weird. It's strange. It's irrational. It's distasteful. It's repulsive.

They have no rights of participation then. It doesn't belong to them. Someone who's not part of this country, someone who's not part of your family, doesn't have the rights and the privileges and the protection that someone who belongs there does. So we don't no longer receive the protection and the guidance, the correction of God. It doesn't belong to people who put themselves outside of that.

So that's where the words come from where Jesus says, "I never knew you. Depart from me. You're lawbreakers."

They're alienated. I skipped the part here. They're alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that's in them, because of the blindness of their hearts. Again, this idea that they're closed, they're dark, and they can't see, they can't understand. They have limited information. Actually, their information has been twisted.

The common English Bible says they are disconnected from God's life because of their ignorance and their closed hearts.

God's way, righteousness is undesirable because their minds have been blocked by Satan's lies and the short duration of sin's intoxication. When we choose to do evil, then there's reciprocal causality. So your heart, you desire something evil, you do it, but then that then changes your appetites.

Like people who originally, they can't stand black coffee, but then they start drinking it. And then something that some of you are laughing because you look at it the other way, but then something that originally they're like, "Yuck." Then they're like, "Hey, actually this isn't too bad." You acquire a taste for it. There's different things like that. I'm not saying about coffee. I'm just trying to wake some people up. But this is what happens with sin then.

Our desires cause us to do things and we need to guard that. But then when you do things, when you don't put that bridge and say, "I have a desire, but I'm going to control that and crucify that and work on the desire changing," you keep tasting the thing and it increases your desire for it and you become polluted.

Don't walk like the Gentiles do.

So they resent God's way. They become past feeling. One illustration of that is your hands. And probably as men tend to have more than ladies do, and it's a good thing that they don't have calluses because children wouldn't appreciate that very much. But when you use something a lot and it rubs it, your hands can feel and it hurts.

And that's a good thing because your hand is starting to get torn up. But if you keep on doing it, then it puts up a defense towards it and it gets hard. And we call those calluses. And you can cut them with a knife and things like that. And it doesn't bleed and you don't even feel it. You become callused. And that's what happens when we resist. When we go to places, we do things that are wrong and our conscience pricks us, but then we just keep doing it anyways. Then we harden ourselves.

We desensitize ourself, I think, is a good way to say that. And that's a really important thing to be careful of because it's so easy to do to desensitize ourselves. Where things that originally were like, "Whoa," then it doesn't feel that bad anymore.

Probably a lot could be said about that. I'll leave that. But that's something we really need to guard in our exposure to sin that we don't become desensitized. We don't become callous to it either by participating in ourselves or by not grieving it and trying to separate ourselves from it.

The Gentiles give themselves to it and then they become desensitized. They don't think it's anything bad. They're just used to it. It's normal. They don't understand the death that they're walking in. And then they can't enjoy the good and the pure because their senses have been dulled by the addictive taste for the polluted.

And so they can't be satisfied. They've been desensitized because they're not following God's way to experience joy and peace and pleasure in life. It's become a god to them, a thing to be sought after and pursued on their own way. And so they aren't being satisfied anymore. So they give themselves over to this crazy pursuit of whatever it is. Ludeness especially refers to a perversion of sexual appetite and publicizing things that should be private and special. And so they've lost their value. And so they make jokes and they use terms about body parts and behaviors that should be a good thing, but it should be private. And they just throw it around in front of everybody because it lost its meaning to them because they don't follow God's directions about that.

They don't use things the way God intended with self-control. So the only way they can enjoy them is to gulp them down raw and wish for something more because it doesn't satisfy them. So they have to go deeper and deeper into perversions. This is particularly true of sexuality because it's one of the most beautiful things God made. And so it becomes also one of the worst things when it's perverted.

So they give themselves over to ludeness to work all uncleanness with greediness. They reject the proper use of what God has created. So they have to come up with new perversions to satisfy their bottomless appetite. And that's very true in the world that we live. But it starts in small ways. It starts in very small ways of giving ourselves to do what we want to do. And it's a downward spiral. Notice, I don't know if you noticed the title at the top of the page has changed. Instead of saying the Gentiles, it says the walking dead. We talked about this back when we talked about chapter two of falling away that is death. And I thought about putting zombies up there, but that would be jarring for the younger audience.

But in our world today, there's this idea of people who are their dead rotting bodies and they walk around and they consume and terrorize real life. And that's what we become when we follow that. The storyline here that he's giving about the Gentiles, he's trying to help us to realize how awful it is when we give ourselves to those kinds of things.

But then he switches the subject and talks about Jesus. He says, "But you haven't learned this from Jesus, that kind of life. If indeed you have heard him and have been taught by him as the truth is in Jesus, that you put off concerning your former conversation, the old man, which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man, which was created according to God in true righteousness and holiness."

So we want to walk through this part here, "But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed or for real, you have heard him and have been taught by him." So Jesus came to free us from our beastly ignorance and darkness and cannibalism, eating each other, eating ourselves, and to teach us the true way to life. So the truth being in Jesus is more than just facts. Yes, Jesus was born of a virgin and he was God and he lived a sinless life, died on the cross. Those are all true. But truth is much more than that.

I think I'm getting off of my order of slides here, so I'm going to move on here. The question is, have we listened to him? Have we been taught by Jesus to live a different way of life, to desire different things? Are we exercising ourselves in his way?

If so, we should be learning a completely different way of life than the one that was described previously by the Gentiles.

So this idea of, as the truth is in Jesus, truth is simply what is real. If you tell a lie, you say something that's not real. If you tell the truth, you say what really is. And Jesus came and lived the way humans were really made to live.

The way Jesus lived never had to be corrected, never had to be stopped. The way we as humans tend to live has to be stopped. We call that judgment day. And God says, "That's over. You can't keep doing that. You can't be part of my eternal kingdom if you're going to be that way." So Jesus came to be the true, the real human. He came to live the way that we were really meant to live.

Because it's real, it never ends or has to be changed or ended. So Jesus is showing us the real way to live life. It's a way that it's not futile. It actually accomplishes something and it's enduring at last. It continues to give rewards and to be worth something in the long run.

So have we been taught, have we allowed him to teach us the real way to life? That way to life is that you put off concerning your former conduct. There's work for us to do. Lots of people don't like to hear about this kind of thing, that there's works involved in salvation. But it's very clear that we have the responsibility to pull out and to tear up and to tear down things in our life that are not Jesus' way. That's the old way that used to serve self and was stuck under the power of sin, reaping the wages of death.