What Master Are you Serving - Ephesians part 3 - Bill Shiley

We have got to be careful that, first and foremost, we are teaching people to evaluate their lives by what Master you're serving. When you buy this, when you do that, when you do this with your free time, are you building God's kingdom? Are you following Jesus' way of living? Or are you listening to yourself and your appetites? Are you listening to the crowd out there that is following and under the bondage and dominion of their Master Satan that they've chosen?

Well, good morning and welcome here.

I want to begin this morning by thinking about what is life, from the life of a plant to the life of an animal, the life of bacteria, those little organisms that evolutionists say are simple single-celled organisms but really are as complex as an industrial park in themselves with their own power source, to the life of humans.

What is life? I don't mean like the meaning of our time here on Earth, but this thing that goes on. What is it?

One thing that life is, is life gives and it makes more of itself. Life creates community and companionship. Some of these probably will take on more meaning as we look at the opposite of it. Life is just who God is, and so it's everything that He has created is life, and it produces.

Paul describes God this way in Acts 17 when he's explaining the unknown God. He says, "In Him we live and move and live out our lives." It's something that's hard to say what it is because it's just what we're programmed to expect. We're programmed to love it and to value it and to pursue it at all costs.

Just try holding your breath sometime, and you'll find that out, that it's built into our DNA to live.

The scientists have a hard time defining what life is. And the best thing they can do is say, "Well, these are the kinds of things that life does." And here's a list of them from the Encyclopedia Britannica. So life is defined as any system capable of performing functions such as, so it's a system. It's a group of different parts working together that can eat. It can take in energy, it can metabolize it, or it can produce, it can convert that energy into something useful and into a different form. So we can drink a glass of milk, and then we can build something out of wood or such like.

Getting rid of waste products, breathing. So all life takes in air. The operation of respiration is part of what is vital. A plant that doesn't have air dies. A human, an animal that doesn't have air dies.

They move. They act. They do things. They grow. They become bigger and bigger and bigger, and they reproduce. They subdivide off or beget offspring. And they respond to external stimuli. This is one that is really important to me as we go further in the message this morning when we read about this concept of being alive to God. We respond to His stimuli versus being alive to sin and dying to sin, where we don't respond anymore to that stimuli, and instead we respond to God's.

Spoiler alert.

On the other hand, there's death. And what is death? It's the opposite of life. It's when life ends. In the Screwtape letters, C.S. Lewis makes the character Screwtape, the senior demon there who is educating the younger one, to describe Satan's goal as to devour everything until there is nothing that can say, "I," except from within him.

And that's sort of what death does, whether it's death as an abstract force and reality in our lives, the Grim Reaper, so to speak, or whether it's predators or the baking sun or diseases. It devours. It saps out from everything else until there's nothing left there. It consumes. You go to a desert place, and the ground, which is supposed to give life, is totally shrunken and cracked. There's nothing left there.

Even the plants, the cactuses have big needles on them to keep you away from them. And the critters that are out there, like scorpions and spiders and snakes, and they're all things that are taking everything they can.

It stops movement and growth, the movement and growth into something more beautiful and more productive. It stops that, and it reverses it. It sucks it out of it until everything ceases. It's pulled down to the level that it itself is.

Death creates emptiness and loneliness. Life produces more and builds community, especially as we think of God creating and begetting humans in that way, and a family growing, a family of humans to participate in ruling the universe, or at least planet Earth.

Death does the opposite. It destroys that community and less and less and less until there's nothing left. Death can only be known by being the opposite of the way that we are created because that's exactly what it is. It's when everything that God built is not done and the opposite is done. It creates this thing we call death. Hebrews chapter 2 quotes from Psalm 19, and it tells us a little bit about the way we were created to be, what human life originally was.

He says, he's quoting again from Psalm 19, "One, David testified in a certain place," which is Psalm 19, "saying, 'What is man that you are mindful of him, or the Son of Man that you take care of him? You have made him,'" here we go, "'a little lower than the angels,'" not way lower, but a little lower than the angels, "'and have crowned him with glory and honor and set him over the works of your hands. You have put all things in subjection under his feet.'" And that's the way we were created as humans. We were not vulnerable to anything. We weren't vulnerable to the spirit realm. We weren't vulnerable to each other. We weren't vulnerable to the animals.

We weren't vulnerable to the elements. The problem is, as the Hebrew writer, which is probably Paul, notices next, he says, "For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him.

But now we do not yet see all things put under him." And that's the world we live in, where on our home planet, the place in the universe that we describe as being ideally designed to support life, we have to take special classes to learn how to survive out in it without the resources that have been built by civilizations.

We're vulnerable to each other. Healthy relationships is something we have to work at. And naturally, we hurt each other and destroy each other and steal from each other and beat each other up verbally and physically. And we're vulnerable to the spirit realm.

We live in an age where we're having to watch. We're having to think about that there's this other realm out there that's influencing us and wants to take us into captivity and to crush what God created in us. The world we live in is not the world that God created.

A man named Jean-François Millet, I love listening to French, and I'm not real good at imitating it, drew this picture. He liked to draw or paint paintings about the peasants. He was a Frenchman. And the name of this picture is something like "La Home ou La Hoe," which is just the homey or the man, the person, if you know Spanish at all, "le hombre," something like that, the man with the hoe.

He lived around the, or he painted this painting sometime between 1960 and 19, sorry, 1860, 1862, which is right when the Civil War was starting up. A man named Edwin Markham saw this painting, and he lived in the, or the, well, we'll get to that in a second. He lived in the end of the 1800s and in the early 1900s, right at this time when the Industrial Revolution is happening, and there's all this progress, supposedly. But there's this other problem that the working class is getting terribly oppressed by the tycoons of the railroad and the steel industry and the oil industry and the coal industry and all these things. And he looked at this picture, and he saw here, he interpreted it as a socialist protest about the peasants' plight, the plight of the poor people who are just working.

Some of these people in the progressive era there, the early 1900s, the whole family, down to eight-year-olds, was working like 16, 18-hour days. Like you didn't have time to hardly sleep at night just so that they didn't lose their shack. Literally, if you look at some of the pictures, just slapped together, falling down tin shacks. This is in America. These are in progressive cities like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and New York.

So he's living in that time frame, and he looks at this picture, and he sees a man who personifies this oppression of the poor by the working and the wealthy class. And he writes a poem about this, and it was given at a New Year's Eve party in 1898.

And he compared the dehumanized worker with the way he was created and expressed in Psalm 19. So he plays on this picture that Psalm 19 describes of someone who is beholding the heavens and thinking about, "Wow, how insignificant he is," but how God made him, God made man to have dominion and to be just a little lower than the angels and to have dominion over the beast. And he compares that to this character who personifies the downtrodden and oppressed worker of the ages. And I think there's a lot of parallels in this for us.

So he wrote and said, "Bowed by the weight of centuries, he leans upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, the emptiness of ages in his face and on his back, the burden of the world. Who made him dead to rapture and despair, a thing that grieves not and that never hopes, stalled and stunned, a brother to the ox? Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back his brow? Whose breath blew out the light within his brain?

Is this the thing the Lord God made and gave to have dominion over sea and land, to trace the stars and search the heavens for power, to feel the passion of eternity? Is this the dream he dreamed who shaped the suns and marked their ways upon the ancient deep, down all the stretch of hell to its last gulf? There is no shape more terrible than this, more tongued with censure of the world's blind greed, more filled with signs and portents for the soul, more fraught with menace to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim, slave of the wheel of labor? What to him are Plato and the swing of Pleiades, which is a constellation? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, the rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape, the suffering ages look. Time's tragedy is in the aching stoop. Through this dread shape, humanity betrayed, plundered, profaned, and disinherited cries protest to the powers that made the world, a protest that is also a prophecy.

O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands, is this the handiwork you give to God, this monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched? How will you ever straighten up this shape, touch it again with immortality, give back the upward looking and the light, rebuild in it the music and the dream, make right the immemorable infamies, perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands, how will the future reckon with this man? How answer his brute question in that hour when whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores? How will it be with kingdoms and with kings, with those who shaped him to the thing he is, when this dumb terror shall rise to judge the world after the silence of the centuries?

And that's a question that we do well to look at ourselves and to look at the world around us, especially as we feel the pressures and ask ourselves, "Is this the thing God made? Did God really make us to be like this?"

I'm in the middle of a revolution of that myself with just my physical health. I looked at my folds of fat and my exhaustion and my rotating around wanting to sleep. And I said, "This is not the way God made me to be."

And looking at, I'm 40 years old and looking at, if I live to be 80, I get 40 more years of looking at living to this. I would rather die, especially if the trajectory keeps going downhill. And I realized there's things I can do about this. It doesn't have to be this way.

And so I reached out for some help, and it's been a good journey, but that's just made me think about this thing. It's not about having to be a stunning figure, but I want my body to be something that facilitates a tool, a weapon to be able to carry out the life that God wants me to carry out rather than a ball and chain.

It's not the way God made me to be. Now, if there was nothing I could do and I had some incurable illness, that would be another issue. But as we look at ourselves and we look at the way we relate, we look at what drives us in life and what excites us and what we're chasing after, to ask ourselves, "Is this the thing God made?" And as we look at the way society behaves, ask ourselves, "Is this the thing God made?" Ask as we look at ourselves as a church and churches as a whole, "Is this what God made? Is this what he dreamed when he made mankind? And is this what Christ dreamed when he came and gave his life?

Am I bearing and creating and having dominion in his image? Is this the thing God made?"

And just for your reference, this is an American soldier on your left, and the picture on your right is the city of Dresden in Germany, which was bombed by the Allies who were professing Christians. To aggressively, purposefully, they firebombed it. They bombed it so intensively that it created like a tornado effect and just like a blast furnace in it.

Is this the thing God made? Did God make people, did God make a woman to have to paint herself and hang things on herself and do all kinds of things or take them off and display her body in order to feel beautiful? Is that how she displays God's image?

Is this the thing God made? And I couldn't really find an appropriate way to put a picture up here about this, but did God make men to be bound to and consumed by pursuing their lust, especially with pornography and things like that, and wasting their time and their power? And it is, it's just a thing, lust, whether it's pornography or whether it's just looking at people. But it's something that binds you, and it consumes your mind, and it just takes up a big part of your disk drive, your mental capacities, and twists the way you look at people.

Is that the thing God made? Is this the thing God made? Did God make men to use their strength and their leadership and their prowess and their courage to brawl and to fight and to argue and to be at war with each other?

Did God make people to argue and fight? Is this the thing God made? Did God make people to be consumed and busy and stressed out and just running around trying to build their kingdom, their financial empire? In order to understand what is life and what is death, we really need to listen to God because the problem is, like Proverbs says, there's a way that seems right to a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. And we never understand totally what is life and what leads to death until it's too late. And then we realize, you know, this was right.

So just looking at just the book of Ephesians, the last three chapters, if you remember, tells us how to go about walking out and being part of this mystery that God has planned to demonstrate his wisdom and to bring everything into one in Christ. Here's some of the things that he describes and says, "This is the way to death. Don't do this. Instead, follow the way to life." Division, this is a big thing that the whole New Testament talks about, is division and strife, whether it's between parents and siblings, whether it's between husbands and wives, or whether it's between brothers and sisters in Christ, or between churches.

It's death.

Being tossed to and fro by man's ideas about how to live life and being, "Oh, well, I should do this. Oh, I need to do that." And insecure and always chasing something. Immorality, lust, we already talked about that a little bit.

Pursuing a desire that consumes us and it begins to drive our life rather than being able to enjoy other people for the way God has made them. Lying against ourselves by lying to others. He says that, "Don't do this. You're part of each other. You're shooting yourself in the foot." Anger.

The songwriter says, "Love will put out the baleful fire of anger." It's like a fire that just burns everything and leaves ashes. And instead, in the ashes of anger, will plant a tree of peace. Love will. Stealing, which is fueled by covetousness. When we're not content with what we have, we think, "Oh, I got to have that, and I got to have this, and I got to have the next thing."

And then we steal them, whether it's somebody's reputation or whether it's time or whether it's possessions. Bitterness, holding grudges, holding yourself in a prison because of what someone else has done to you in life or what you've missed out on in life. Clamor, racket and strife and just being disorderly. Gossip, cutting other people down by things that we say. Foolish talking, talking that makes light of something that's good or tears down an appreciation, tears down wisdom about life or that's just polluted with filthiness. Intoxication, whether it's liquor or whether it's funny video clips or whatever it is, but just being intoxicated, having our mind consumed and controlled by a substance or an emotion.

Selfish, unloving husbands, disrespectful, domineering wives, talks about that in Ephesians 5. We don't need to look very far to see how much death those kinds of things bring into our world. Disobedient children, children who don't respect their parents and don't value and follow the guidance that's given them. Fathers who relate to their children in a way that discourages them and makes them resent, tempts them to be resentful.

Overbearing masters, unfaithful servants.

This is death.

The reason I'm bringing this up is because Paul starts Ephesians chapter 2 with a compliment. He says, "And you, he, God, made alive because you used to be dead." And remember that that you is plural. It applies singularly, but it's also plural. He's saying to the Ephesians, "The way you used to live in this city before I came and preached the gospel to you and you chose to follow Jesus, you as individuals were dead and you as a group were dead. The things you were doing, the way you were treating each other was destroying everything good and beautiful. Despite of your temples and your theaters and all the things that the colonnade with all of the heroes lined up all the way out to the harbor, all those things shouting at you from the city, it's all death.

It's a zombie show."

And so he goes on, "And you, he, made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all conducted ourselves in the lust of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath, just as the others.

But God, who is rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved and raised us up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come, he might show the exceeding riches of his grace and his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

For by grace, you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them."

Just a little review. Remember, Paul's purpose for writing was so that they would understand his knowledge in the mystery of Christ, that they would have this apocalypse, this eye opener, this bingo or whatever moment of, "Aha, I realize," and enlightening.

And that mystery was that now, under the principalities and powers in heavenly places, might be made known by the church the manifold wisdom of God, so that we, the church, would demonstrate to everybody God's goodness in his manifold wisdom, his wisdom in every branch, you could say.

And that he would do that by gathering together in one all things in Christ.

So just summarizing it again, his purpose was that they would have an apocalypse, an eye opener, and understand God's secret purpose, which is to create a group of people who would demonstrate the wisdom of God to all beings, and they would do that by bringing everything back together in Jesus, following him. And then the last part of the book goes on and says, "Then once you understand this, this is how to go about being part of that, participating in with loving obedience."

Starting out, chapter 2 is the word "and." And "and" is a conjunction, and it's a linking word. It links back to something else. So you can't start talking about this properly without understanding what's before it. And this, when I realized the connection between chapter 1 and chapter 2, this whole thing just really became a lot more exciting and meaningful to me.

If we go back to the first part of or the last part of chapter 1, in verse 15, he has this prayer for their eye opener, their apocalypse. And he says, "Therefore, I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers." And here's his prayer, "That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, would give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him." So God would help them to get a hold of this. They would know Christ and what he was about. And particularly, "That the eyes of your understanding may be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope of his calling."

So what the purpose is, what does God want to turn you into? What is he wanting to do with you by calling you out of darkness?

That they would know the hope of his calling, the expectation he was calling them to, and what is the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, how rich of a gift that God was giving them by joining this group of people who were called out. And then the third one is that they would know what is the exceeding greatness of his power towards those who believe, this tremendous potential and ability to carry out his dream, his secret purpose in those who believe, the same kind of power that he worked in Christ when he rose Christ from the dead.

So you catching this? So Christ died and the power that God had that raised Christ from the dead, and listen to what he says, "And seated him at the right hand of the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in that which is to come. And he has put all things under his feet and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all." And there's so much we could talk about in there, but I want to point this out. Look at what he's doing.

So we have Jesus who lowered himself and became the servant and suffered death. And through that, through allowing God's power to live in him through his life, if you want to hear more about that, go back and listen to the message I talked about, I preached last Easter on reclaiming the resurrection, that the reason that death could not hold Christ was because he had always kept the Lord before his face. And so Jesus, because he always honored his Father, death had no dominion over him, and God's power raised him from the dead and put him back up where humans were created to be, where he's not vulnerable to anything anymore. And everything is all things are under his feet.

He has dominion over everything and is now the king, the one who is going to, with that power, take back over planet Earth from the imposter Satan. And so he says this about Jesus and how God raised him up as the first true human, made him back the way that God created him. And then he says, "And you, he has made alive." So this whole thing about being a Christian isn't so much about having some guilt for your sins taken away, but that we actually repeat the story of Jesus. That's what baptism and communion are about, is we are identifying with the story of Jesus, that we die to ourself and we allow God's power to live in us so that we also are raised and walk in a newness of life.

So you, he has made alive because you used to be dead in trespasses and sins. Sins and trespasses makes us dead, whether you've been baptized, whether you've said a prayer, whether you've walked down the aisle or whatever you've done. If you're still living the way of death, you're dead.

And if you're alive, then you're not living the way of death.

He says, "You once walked according to the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the ruler of the supernatural realm, the spirit that now works in the sons of disobedient." So we have become bondservants to the one that we obey. Romans 6, we'll look at that a little later, goes through that whole concept very clearly, that who you yield yourself servants to obey, his servants you are, and you reap wages from that.

And the evil and corruption in the world is worse than just people gone bad.

Because when we choose to obey Satan and do our own thing, we come under his dominion. And so as we look at the things that happen in the world and that horrible creature that the poet spoke about earlier, whether you're looking at the effects of immorality or the effects of pursuit of wealth or the strife among people, the horrible results in the world because of that, there's a sinister supernatural engineering to those things that's beyond humans. We actually become worse than just if we would have gone bad on ourselves.

And it's incredibly important to understand this that we are choosing a master and giving ourselves to a higher power that then has dominion over us. I'm going to read Romans chapter 6 quickly here because it goes over this and just lays it out so well. What should we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not. How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus, were baptized into his death? So there again, we have this thing of baptism is an associating with dying.

We're no longer responsive to the old master. When he says, "Do this," we don't listen anymore, just like a dead dog.

Therefore, we were buried with him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been united together in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall be in the likeness of his resurrection. So there again is that concept. And I go to baptisms and I hear these words, and sometimes they're kind of rattled off as part of a liturgy because the bishop has six more to do yet. And it pains my heart because these are so precious that as we die to ourselves, that we also can partake of that same life that Jesus had that made him live above sin and death, that we also can walk in a new life.

Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, so the person that was following sin, that listened when that boss spoke and was under his power and deserved wages from him, was crucified with him that the body of sin might be done away, that we should no longer be slaves of sin, for he who has died has been freed from sin.

When you die, you no longer are under the boss. Now, if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over him, for the death that he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life that he lives, he lives to God. Likewise, you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This is the choice that we always have as we are initially brought out of our old life and into the new life. We have this choice then, instead of living like we're still alive and listening to the old boss sin, we have the choice to instead, with the same zeal and the same energy and the same attentiveness, to listen to the new master, Christ.

For the death that he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life that he lives, he lives to God. Likewise, you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body. This is again about dominion, about us obeying something and then it having authority and power over us.

And if we do that, if we let sin, if we obey sin, then we're giving it dominion in our life again. Do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey it in its lusts. And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead and your members, the parts of your body, as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under the law, but under grace. And that's speaking of the Mosaic law there, and instead of pursuing those commandments, to pursuing the life and the heart change that Jesus taught us in his commandments.

But God be thanked that though you were the servants of sin, yet you have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which you were delivered. And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. That word slaves has a bad connotation in our world because particularly the African-American slavery of the British and Americans.

This is a little more the idea of an indentured servant, especially someone who owes their life to somebody. So an indentured servant, for example, when people were fleeing the war and the poverty in the old world and coming over to the new world, many times they didn't have the money to buy their passage over here. So they would indenture themselves. They would basically do is sell themselves to somebody. That person would pay their voyage over here, and then they would owe that person seven years of labor. And that person owned them, basically, and they did their will. It's a little more that kind of idea of not an abusive type of slavery, but a master who owns us and who we serve out of a heart of gratitude because of what he has done for us.

We become slaves of righteousness. He owns us, and we're glad to be in that situation. I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh, for just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness and of lawlessness, leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness.

For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. What fruit did you have then in the things which you have in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the ends of those things is death. But now, having been set free from sin and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness and the end everlasting life.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. So when we serve sin, what do we get paid? Death. That's the end of it. And yet God offers us the gift of being set free from that master and in turn, yielding ourselves as servants to him. And the result is real life. One of the big and awful tragedies of modern Christianity is that the changes and the commandments and everything, the problem has all been pushed off to the judgment day.

And that's the problem is all what happens on the judgment day, whether or not you have sin on your books and we got to get that forgiven somehow. And eternal life is something that happens once we die. And Jesus and the apostles didn't teach that. They taught it as something that happens now, a change that happens now. And Jesus comes and says, "I am the way to real life. And if you will follow me, I will give you that." And it's a quality of life. Eternal is something that doesn't have boundaries. It doesn't start and stop.

It's simply what is real. What is real never has to be terminated. And so the way I like to think about eternal life is living real life. So when I was younger, we used to play house sometimes, and I was always the dad because I didn't have any brothers until Toby was born. He's nine years younger than me. So I got to be the dad.

And there's privileges that come with being the dad. You can kind of tell other people what to do, and you can whatever resources you have at your fingertips, they're yours. If you've got food around that you're allowed to eat, you can eat as much of it, and you can tell others when they can and can't eat. But the problem is with playing house is that eventually the real dad comes home, and then the show's all over.

And then you got to go do chores and do this and that. And I like that picture of this, that when we follow ourselves and we follow sin, we're creating something that doesn't really exist. It's not real. And there's going to come a time often in this life, but if not, at the judgment day, when the real dad's going to show up and say, "It's all over. That doesn't work. And now I'm going to have to put you back where you really belong."

And when we live real life, we live in a way that when dad comes home, nothing has to change. And we're actually honored, and we're blessed because we've been living as humble children. And so God gives us that gift of choosing to yield ourselves as a servant to righteousness again, as he's canceled the debt that we owe to the old master. And we have that privilege of living in a way that never has to be called into question, never has to stop.

And of course, that is going to affect what happens when we do die. So we used to follow the course of this world, the prince of the power of the air. We served this master, Satan, who tells us, "Do what you want to do," and that's the way to live real life. And interesting to me that Paul switches here between you and we. And he says, "Among whom also we all once conducted ourselves." So he starts including them with himself, that we all used to live this way.

We followed the course of this world. We all conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. And we're by nature the children of wrath, just as others. I want to talk a little bit about this concept of the world.

The world is the people who are following their own lusts and because of that are under the dominion of Satan. They are serving sin. And the world is not so much out there as it is in here. And this is a mistake that I think as plain people we've made too many times, is we think that if we want to protect ourselves from the world, we've got to get away from what's at Walmart.

And the problem is we don't recognize that I have the same thing in myself that is what is making all of what's happening out there. And unless I change what's driving me in my life, the master I'm serving from the intents of my heart, we're going to have big problems. It may look a little different, but it's going to be the same thing. And so while I'm very much for brotherhood agreements and things like that to define things, we have got to be careful that first and foremost, we are teaching people to evaluate their lives by what master you're serving. When you buy this, when you do that, when you do this with your free time, are you building God's kingdom?

Are you following Jesus' way of living? Or are you listening to yourself and your appetites? Are you listening to the crowd out there that is following and under the bondage and dominion of their master, Satan, that they've chosen?

This is later on in Ephesians. He says, "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 minds." So he's describing this state and this way of living.

Having their understanding darkened, being alienated, so like they're completely an alien when they come to earth, which people like to dream about and whether or not they exist or not is not mine to say right now. But an alien who comes to earth, this is all strange to him, right?

He's like, "What in the world? Why are you?" He's got his own way of living. Or an alien from another country even comes to a country and it's new and it's weird and, "Oh, you all do that way." It's like, "Why in the world do you?" And that's where we are when we follow ourselves. That's what the world is, and is people who have not had their minds changed to think and to agree with and follow Jesus' way.

Their understanding is darkened. They're aliens from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them because of their blindness of their heart. Our sight has been blinded by our own appetites and by what we've listened to from Satan and from others following him.

Who being past feelings, so they've become apathetic. This is death, right? Life feels and is sensitive and can experience. It's aware of what's going on and can relate to it. Their past feeling, they've given themselves over to lewdness, which is just following lust and acting it out in often not quite all out ways, to work all uncleanness with greediness. And so it's leading up to this thing to not just being dirty people, but doing it just crazily. 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, that you put on the new man, which was created according to God in true righteousness and holiness.

So again, he's calling us to go back to the way we were created. And this is something that starts by changing the way we think and by a choice to put off, to not listen to, to avoid, to starve to death, excuse me, the old man, and instead to feed the new man, the new person created in Christ that's listening to God and giving him authority in our lives.

Galatians 5:16 through 26. I say then, "Walk in the spirit and you will not fulfill the lust of the flesh, for the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. And these are contrary to one another so that you do not do the things that you wish. But if you are led by the spirit, you are not under the law.

Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like." So or anything that's close to that fits in that category. "Of which I tell you beforehand, just as I told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. And those who are Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the spirit, let us also walk in the spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another and envying one another." So again, here is laid out very clearly this idea that we have a choice to make, and we need to choose to follow God and what his spirit says and give that authority in our life rather than our flesh and the others, the world and Satan.

John talks about the world. We know that whoever is born of God does not sin, but he who has been born of God keeps himself, and the wicked one does not touch him. We know that we are of God and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one. So here he says, "The person born of God does not sin." The King James says, "Does not commit sin." The idea there is an ongoing practice of something.

So that's not their way of living. They are not serving sin. But he keeps himself. He watches and is careful. And that produces a safety from the evil power out there that wants to have dominion in our lives.

And the whole world is under the sway of the wicked one. Most of the people out there are listening to Satan. They are serving him and allowing him to have dominion over them and to drive their lives. Later on, "I have written to you, fathers, because you have known him who is from the beginning. I have written to you, young men, because you are strong and the word of God abides in you and you have overcome the wicked one. So do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life is not of the Father but is of the world.

And the world is passing away and the lust of it. But he who does the will of God abides forever." And this is something we really need to drill ourselves into as we look at what goes on. And we need to tell ourselves the truth about it. When we're tempted with things, when we feel pressure from our peers or from society, we need to tell ourselves the truth about that that is the way to death. It doesn't work that way. But when we do what God says and we humble ourselves and we serve and we live and we dress humbly and we forgive and love our enemies and all those kinds of things, whether it's the enemies in another country or whether it's the enemy beside us, that that is the way to real life.