Choosing to Change
Our Old Testament reading for August 11, 2024
Deuteronomy 6:20-25 In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?” tell him “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Before our eyes the Lord sent miraculous signs and wonders-great and terrible-upon Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household. But He brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land that he promised on oath to our forefathers. The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we may always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today.
The New Testament reading
Ephesians 4:17-24 (verses 21-24) Surely you heard of Him and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on a new self; created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
Pastor Doug’s thoughts on these passages:
Choosing to Change
I can see my theology professor taking out his red pen and striking through the sermon title and writing Don’t you mean “Chosen to change”? To be consistent in my predestination thought as a good Presbyterian, he would have a point.
Certainly, in our Old Testament reading in Deuteronomy this morning, God pulls his people out of slavery in Egypt and gives His people new laws to guide their lives – these freed slaves must choose to put on a new self where their actions are guided by their obedience to God and a desire to form a new nation of equals guided by God’s Will. Think about how dramatic that change would have been – resting once every 7 days was a revolutionary idea for the former slaves – the Israelites had to shed their old self in order to obey God’s statutes.
In our reading in Ephesians, Paul emphasizes leaving behind the old self represented by the Gentiles hardness of heart and futile thinking they can earn salvation and becoming the new self – filled with the Holy Spirit and clothed in true righteousness and holiness. Ultimately Paul calls for a change inside not outward behaviors – that was the old covenant with the freed slaves and given 10 commandments and ultimately 613 laws to follow – to change their outward behavior. No the new covenant requires change from within.
Jesus Christ the spiritual son of God underwent a human birth so that we human beings could undergo a spiritual birth. You see, Christianity gives you the resources to change. Everyone I know says they need some change in their life, eat healthier, exercise more, keep in better touch with friends and family, make time for prayer and reading the Bible – and all those lofty goals can be difficult to achieve – that’s why top 10 lists of how to improve and self-help books are so popular.
But what does change mean to Christians? This Ephesians passage gives us some answers. First you have to make a decision, second it means you have to change from the inside transforming your thinking and third to become captivated by Jesus in your life. So no top 10 list needed, but 3 changes that feed into each other: make a decision to change from the inside out, transform your thinking and being captivated by Jesus.
Let's look first at making a decision: now obviously the key to this whole passage is verse 22 you were taught to put off your old self and verse 24 to put on the new self.
How does that happen? Paul says I tell you this #17 that you must no longer live as a Gentiles - he's writing to the Gentiles and of course they were living the way Gentiles do: he's describing in verses 17 to 19 the old pattern of life.
But this is the only life they have known – this is how Gentiles were raised.
We don't ask a fish to tell you about water or write a paper on water because the fish will say what's water? Most people who need to make this decisive change don't see the kind of life they're actually living until you get a little distance from that old life.
So, it says they had a darkened understanding and stresses the futility of their thinking. that word futility means their thinking is pointless you’ll never get what what you want. What Paul is saying is that these Christians had come to see that all though at the moment they didn't feel like their life was meaningless, when they looked back at it, they came to realize that they were separated from the life of God.
“Separated from the life of God” that's an interesting term. Lots of people say, well I'm a good person and I'm having a meaningful life I may not be religious but I believe in God of course. They believe in God but they don't have a personal connection with God - they are separated from the life of God.
At their very core, they don't really know if there is a God. And once you doubt God’s existence, everything that makes life meaningful is be taken away. If you're here by accident, when you die you'll be completely forgotten. Everything you've done will be forgotten and eventually everything that anybody's done will be forgotten.
Astronomers who study the stars tell us that one day our sun could go super nova and all of this earth would be consumed. Everything gone.
Tim Keller tells a story about a summer camp for college students he attended where a speaker gave him a new perspective on creation. That speaker said, if the distance between the earth and the sun 92,000,000 miles was just the thickness of this piece of paper, then the distance between our sun and the next nearest star would be a stack of paper 70 feet high. And the distance between here and the end of the Galaxy would be a stack of paper 310 miles high. Our Galaxy is just a speck of dust in the whole of the universe. But, if Hebrews 11 is right, and there is a God who created everything, and he holds all this together with the word of his power - isn’t that a God you want to keep on speed dial?
Then the speaker asked the campers, who are you really living your life for? What are you really living life for? Who calls the shots in your life? Then the speaker said “I want everybody to to walk outside and spend one hour asking yourself these questions in solitude - only silence, nobody gets to talk.” It was life changing that resulted in some big life choices.
Most of us have made big choices in our lives – like getting married. When you get married you're making these great promises that start the process of developing a lifetime of building that relationship. Marriage is a milestone event: before you're not married, now you are – and things will never be the same. You leave your old single self behind and clothe yourself with a new married self.
Each time I teach confirmation class I start our 8 month journey together with an icebreaker called 2 truths and a lie – Play it with me. Here were my 3 statements: 1) I used to play polo at Cornell’s indoor arena in upstate New York, 2) I haven’t taken my wedding ring off since Julie put it on my finger during our wedding ceremony and 3) I had my appendix removed while on a business trip to France by a surgeon who barely spoke English. What number would you guess was a lie? (The lie was # 3 – I still have my appendix. The other two are true.)
Our youngest son Austin works in a manufacturing environment where no jewelry is allowed so he had a ring with his wife’s initial tattooed on his ring finger. Growing up he had heard that I had chosen to never take my wedding ring off. For me and my son, Austin, getting married was our “new permanent self “ choice and it changed us from the inside out.
Paul says you are not just to put off your old behaviors and put on your new behaviors like you take off or put on a piece of clothing instead he speaks of virtues so they would say put off hate and put on love; put off laziness and put on diligence.
Putting on a new self is a choice to change from the inside out.
If you kept reading the next verses from today’s reading, verses 25 to 31 you'll see Paul does start talking about behaviors: don't lie, don't be resentful, work hard, care for the needy, don't steal - so he has a whole list of behaviors but he doesn’t want you to first put on a whole new self. Let me explain.
In every church there are people sitting beside of each other - both of them pray, both of them trying to follow God’s laws, trying to read their Bibles.
But they approach their faith with two utterly different motives: one person acts out of fear and pride: the fear that says if I don't do this right I'm gonna go to hell and the pride that says look , I'm the kind of person that comes to church and I read my Bible so I will be saved. Now the other person is somebody who's doing it strictly out of gratitude for free grace. Their spirit is different: there's a humility versus pride, the attitude toward other people is different. They can’t help but share the Good News that has changed their lives.
Understanding the gospel and free grace changes one radically: it's a set of truths that you take into your center and it changes the way you think about God, yourself and the world – the way you think about everything. It become your identity.
If you really understand the gospel and you really accept it and you believe it's incredible claims about what Jesus has done for you and who you are in him – then nothing that happens in this world can actually shake your identity - it makes all the difference to how you process everything: rejections, disappointments, criticism. Everything has changed.
The best way for you to really have yourself change from the inside out is to look at Jesus’ example. He was glorious and perfect - he was an equal with the father. He laid that perfect self aside and he took on a weak, suffering, vulnerable human nature and took on our weakness so that we could share His beauty and glory.
See it's not enough just to learn abstract principles -to think about the truth in some general way - that's not going to transform your mind and that's not what's going to change you from the inside out.
We must continually be captivated by what Jesus did for us – that is what holds us steadfast in the change we made from the inside out – to the new self we put on in His likeness.
And that is the Good News on this sabbath day of our lord and all God’s people said, AMEN