Walk, Ephesians 4:17-24, Sermon by Peter Mead – Transcript

You can listen to the recording for this transcript on Spotify, or on CrossPreach.

So we are in this series. It’s a three-week series. We’ve called it Walk. Really simple little title. And I’ll tell you why we’ve chosen that title in a second, but it’s from the chapter 4 of Ephesians. So Ephesians, this letter that Paul wrote to this church in Ephesus. And he wrote to them with a letter to explain Christianity to them.

So he sent them this letter and it’s an amazing letter. We’re not going through the whole thing. We’re just looking at chapter 4 where he starts using this keyword walk – walk, walk, walk. In the first three chapters he’s really talking about the amazing goodness of God to save us, to bring us into the body of Christ, the church, this incredible salvation that is ours in Christ. And then the second-half of the book, walk becomes the keyword. He just says, OK, so walk in a manner worthy of the calling that you’ve received. And it’s kind of using the word in reference to life, the way you live your life, the kind of direction you take, the deliberate involvement that you have, the participation you have in life. Because Christianity is not just a truth to be believed, it’s a life to be lived.

And if you just read the first 3 chapters you could absolutely celebrate and, you know, just get really carried away with the goodness of God and His kindness toward us. But you could end up in sort of a passive type of a position because Christ has been raised from the dead and He’s seated in the heavenly places and we’ve been raised from our spiritual death and we are seated with Him. Ahh! All is good.

But then you get to chapter 4 and he says, right, so, walk. There’s a kind of an active engagement and involvement, a life for us to live.

So last week we started the chapter. We looked at the first 16 verses and in those verses the focus there really was on unity. It was about walking together so that we can grow together. Or, as I kind of modified it, walking together so that we grow up together. That when you come to faith in Christ, you start off like a little baby. We’ve got a couple of them here this afternoon. You start off like a little baby in Christ, but then there is growing to do spiritually. Just like all of us have had growing to do physically.

And so that idea of growing up together is that real focus of the first 16 verses. We need each other in order to be able to grow to maturity. Now we come to verse 17. And we’re just going to look at the next paragraph, from 17 through to 24. And if the first part was focused on unity, this part is focused on purity. So the first part last week was walking together in order to grow up together. This time Paul’s going to drill down a bit into the issue of holiness or purity and say that we are to walk differently. And by the end of the message, I’m going to throw the word together back in there.  We want to be walking differently together.

So let’s look at it and we’ll just add another kind of another piece to the puzzle of what is the church? What what is it that we’re a part of here?

So, from verse 17. Paul says this,

Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

So those last few words there tell us what it is that he’s aiming for, what it is that he thinks the church is supposed to be manifesting. And that is true righteousness and holiness. Now, as soon as you hear words like that, it’s very easy to just slip into the thinking, “ohh, right. This is one of those messages about us making a better effort to live a better life, you know, get our acts together, blah, blah, blah.” Right? Wrong.

What you’ll find as you go through the letter to the Ephesians, or, in fact, any of Paul’s letters, is that it’s really not about us making an effort to do better. In fact, I would be tempted to say – in fact, I’ll say it – that that is probably one of the biggest issues in the church across the world. It’s almost like sort of a, a cancer that has gripped the church right the way across the planet. The idea that we’re supposed to fix ourselves. That we’re supposed to kind of take the initiative and put things right and live a good life. Job done. That is not what the Bible teaches.

And so this paragraph that we’re looking at here is massively, massively important. The first one, we looked at last week, was full of practical things, and next week it’s going to be very practical. This one doesn’t feel particularly practical, but I don’t usually say this, but if, if this paragraph can get your attention, and if you can plant this paragraph into your heart, into your life, this one is a life changer. They all are, I know, but this one is so incredibly important. It’s like a foundation upon which you can really build your understanding and your life. And so, I really can’t oversell it. I want us to see the significance of what he says here.

Basically, what he’s going to do for the first 3 verses, is tell them the way everybody else lives. And he’s going to say “I don’t want you to live like that. I don’t want you to be like those people.” He uses the word Gentiles. You could use the word pagans. Basically, it means people that don’t know God. And he’s going to describe or assume a typical lifestyle. Now these were people in in Ephesus that knew what a typical lifestyle was in their culture. They knew the way people lived, and they knew that they were supposed to live differently.

He’s not saying that every person who doesn’t know God is just as evil as they can be. He’s not saying that. You know as well as I do that there are people all around us that sometimes put us to shame with the way that they live. With their integrity, or with their giving to charity, or whatever. It’s not that we’ve got a corner on good, you know, good behaviour, and the world around us is pure evil. That’s not what he’s saying. But what he is saying is that there is a typical lifestyle, a typical way of living that is evident out there, and they would recognize as being evident in their past.

OK, so he’s going to address that. And then he’s going to talk about what’s changed, what’s different now. So let’s look at it. First of all, starting in verses 17, 18, and 19.

This is where he says, look, I don’t want you to live – I don’t want you to walk – as the Gentiles do. Now, we’re not gonna go into all the details of what they were up to in those days and the kind of the mess of their culture – we’re not going to go into the mess of our culture. You know what’s going on. You know the way people live. You know how easy it is for us to be just like that.

But what he says is that he doesn’t want them to walk the way they walk. To live the way they live. But then he gives three statements. And these next three statements are kind of intriguing. He says, in the futility of their minds; darkened in their understanding; alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them.

Notice those are three phrases that relate to thinking. Thinking, understanding, ignorance. He’s describing the fact that people live life based on how they think about life. And what he’s saying about the world around is that there’s something kind of broken in the way people think. And this is really hard for us to grasp. This is really kind of like, “wow, really?” And let me tell you why. Because we were created to think very clearly. And we were created to think with God – with God in the picture, with God as our Father, with a relationship with Him, seeing things from His perspective – that’s what humanity was created for.

But right at the beginning, right at the start, in the book of Genesis, when Adam and Eve had that conversation (or Eve really) had that conversation with the serpent, and the serpent planted seeds of doubt in her mind, and corrupted the way humans think, we got messed up. The idea that you can be like God got a hold of their hearts, got a hold of their minds, and suddenly they took that fruit and they started thinking “I’m the centre of the universe, everything revolves around me,” which is not reality.

And so from the beginning of history, humans have lived with this idea that we really are the centre of the universe. Not just us, but me. I’m the centre of the universe, and you naturally think you are too.

And so we’ve got this kind of a unthought through commitment in our minds that I’m thinking clearly. I can think rationally. I can think well. I don’t know many people that really believe they don’t think well. We all think we think well. We think that what we think about something makes sense. We know we don’t know everything. You know, we can be humble, we admit that there’s people who know more than we do. But… what we know is enough to be able to think as clearly as we do, which is clear enough to live life, right? And that’s the way humans think.

And so the reality is kind of this twofold reality that that we don’t think as well as we think we think, but we think we think well enough to live life. OK, your head around that. If you thought you were clear before, now you’re confused, right? We think we think well enough. We all do. And we think that what we know is enough to live well. And, and Paul’s saying here, hang on a second, the reason that people live lives the way they live is because of their thinking – specifically the futility of their minds.

Futile. You know the word futile? It’s like pointless expenditure of energy. I don’t know if you’ve had any conversations with people where after a while you realise this is a little bit futile. No matter what I say, they’re not hearing it. No matter what logic is presented, they’re not following. Sometimes you come face to face with it and think “Oh my goodness.” Maybe sometimes we do it, and someone’s looking at us like, “Are you the stupidest person on Earth, I was very clear.” But that idea that the minds are futile. There’s all this energy going into thinking, but it’s not going anywhere. It’s not going anywhere good.

He goes on. He says they’re darkened in their understanding. You know, you got this sort of futility of mind; that makes me think of like a staggering drunk who’s just trying to find the way five meters down the road. That just seems very futile, whatever’s going on in that head. But then he talks about understanding, and you can think about the brightest, most intelligent professor in a university. But Paul says darkened in their understanding. Even the brightest and the best human brains, if God is removed, there’s a there’s a darkness to that. There’s an inability to even begin to see clearly.

And then he makes that explicit. He says alienated, separated from the life of God. So there’s an ignorance. That’s quite a harsh description, isn’t it, of humanity? That the reason we don’t live well is because no matter how good we think we are at thinking, we don’t live well because we don’t think well.

There’s a problem. And Paul saying that in reference to the people who don’t know God. But the truth is we’ve got to keep this in mind for ourselves as well, that even when you come to faith in Christ, even when you say, “Well, yeah, I belong to Him. And yes, I have the mind of Christ and I can think clearly,” actually, that kind of tendency to assume that we can understand everything we need to understand – that tendency comes with us, and there’s still more to learn. And so even as Christians, we still can be very much foggy in our minds.

I wonder if – just take this a slightly different direction – I wonder if maybe there’s a challenge for us specifically in relation to the subject of righteousness and holiness and purity, and maybe a challenge that’s different for the older generation than the younger generation. Let me put myself in the middle while I still can just about do that. So basically everyone older than me, I suspect that one of the challenges you have is when you look at the world around, you look at the way people are living and you get frustrated because it doesn’t make sense. Maybe because if you were raised a couple of generations ago with a good sort of Judaeo-Christian mindset where, you know, the policeman and the school teacher and the local vicar, everybody sort of had the same view of right and wrong. And there was this sort of Christian milieu in the culture, right? And you were part of that. And so everybody knew you should do this and shouldn’t do that. Now we live in a time where people don’t have those assumptions. And frankly, some of the things people do just seem mad.

I think for the older generation, the temptation is going to be to look at that, and to criticize it, and to long for the good old days when people lived as if they were Christians. You know, sign petitions, and put the pressure on, and tell people off on the streets. And there’s a tendency to sort of try to bring back just good behavior. Be careful with that. In the good old days, an awful lot of people lived upright and apparently godly lives, and went to lost eternities because they didn’t know Jesus. There’s nothing special about a culture that is nice. So it may be for some who are maybe a little bit older than me, that can be a real challenge. You look at this passage and you go, “Oh, OK, the reason people do things that seem so mad is because they’re not thinking straight, because of the futility and the darkened and the alienated,” all of these phrases that he’s using here.

Now, there’s another side to that. And let me just say to those of you who are younger than me, which is the vast majority, the danger that we have in the younger generation. It’s kind of different to that. The danger is that you come into the church, you become part of the church community, and you live amongst the church for years on end maybe, but you’re surrounded by a culture that thinks a certain way. And if you’re not careful, I think especially the younger generation, you can be thinking just like the world without even realizing it. The world has got a really strong agenda about certain issues, and lifestyle choices, and political opinions, and so on. And it’s very easy as a young person to just assume that certain things are right… when actually, the Bible may say they’re dead wrong.

You gotta evaluate the thinking both ways. We can’t just say, “Oh, that’s bad. People shouldn’t be like that. Fix the behaviour.” Neither can we say, “Well, everyone’s doing it, so it’s good.” The reality is we need some thought changing, some thought challenging.

But before we think this is all about how people think, let’s finish the sentence. Because Paul says that the Gentiles live the way they live, they walk the way they walk, because of the futility of their minds, because of the darkened understanding, because of the alienation from the life of God, the ignorance that’s in them. All of these mental things. But then he says another thing that explains all of that, and this often gets missed. And this is massively important. He says, “Due to their hardness of heart. Why do people live the way they live? It’s because of how they think. Why do people think the way they think? Because of their hearts. That’s massively important.

Ever since the beginning, ever since Adam and Eve fell for the lie, humans have believed this idea that I am independent and I can choose. I’m a free thinking, free choosing individual. Just watch me draw full of socks. I can do this. I can pick some socks. I picked some socks. Earlier I was, you know, not too proud of my choice. But I think they work. They’re, you know, they fit. At least they’re mine. Sometimes someone else’s socks are on and then it’s awkward, but they’re definitely my socks and they sort of match. Doesn’t matter. So I make choices about socks. I make choices about food. I make choices all day long. So look at me. I’m an independent thinking chooser. Well, that’s what the world likes to think.

But with the Bible says consistently is that you’re not as free as you think you are. You are not as free to make all these random decisions as you think you are. You’re not this independent God-like being. The reality is that you will always choose what you love. The reality is that your heart is the dictator that controls your thinking. And so you have all the freedom in the world, as long as it’s within the realm of things you love. But when it comes to choosing beyond that, it’s not going to happen. The heart is massively, massively important.

And so, what do we tend to think? We think that the problem humans have is lack of education, lack of opportunity, a lack of resource. If people could have good training, or if people could be put in the right circumstances, then they would make great choices. The Bible says consistently that the reality is that the heart of the human problem is the human heart. Way back in the Old Testament, Solomon, the wisest man that ever lived, said “Guard your heart.” Above all else, “Guard your heart, because from it flow the issues of life.” Jesus picks up the same idea. If you come to the Mark drama in a couple of weeks, you’ll see Jesus stood right in the middle, and at one point He’ll go round the room pointing at people. And there’ll be twelve people stood around the outside listing the things that spew out of the human heart. And in that setting, in that confrontation in Mark 7, he’s talking to the religious leaders, and they’re all fussing about what goes in and how it affects people, and if you eat this, you become unclean. And He says, no, what makes you unclean is what comes out of your heart. You can be in a in a cell with no stimulus, with no temptation, with nobody around you to lead you astray. And guess what comes out? Sin from your heart.

The heart of the human problem is the human heart. He talks about in Matthew where He says “Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.” James, Jesus’s half-brother, talks about it, how it’s the sinful desire within us that gives birth to sin and then death. All the Bible, all the way through, says the heart is the problem.

Now, if the heart is the problem, we’ve got a real problem, because how do you change your heart? If it was a brain thing, you could get educated and you could fix things. But if it’s a heart problem, we’re stuffed. We’ve got no hope in ourselves to fix ourselves, which is why the Bible never teaches us to get your act together, it’s your job to fix you. It’s not the way it works. At the heart of the human is a heart that is a rebellious heart, a heart that hates God and doesn’t want God to be God. The human heart wants to be God itself. We want to be on the throne of our own lives. We want to be the centre of our own universe. We want everyone around us to make our lives convenient. And out of that flows all of our thinking, and all of our doing, and all of our living, and all of our sinning.

Remember what I said, that your neighbour, just because they’re not a Christian, it doesn’t mean that they’re as evil as they can be. No, because there’s different ways to show this self-loving heart. One person can say, I’m just going to live completely—who cares about the world. And he describes it in the next verse, “Given over to sensuality.” They just say, “I don’t care what people think. I’m just going to do all these terrible things because it feels good for me. And that’s all I care about.” And on the other side, you can have a neighbour who’s an upstanding member of the community, who’s involved with the PTA and all the charity commissions, and the charity boards and all the things that they can get involved in. And they’re just good, good, good, good, good. Why? Well, maybe they like the respect that they receive and it feels good for them. You’ve got the, the, the drug of, you know, kind of powdery choice over here, and you’ve got the drug of respect in the community over here. But it’s a form of sensuality.

You see, the problem is the heart. And you don’t need to look at other people, you just look in the mirror and you realize I am capable of some incredibly hideous thoughts, things, and actions, and attitudes. And if it’s up to us to fix ourselves? We’ve got no hope.

But.

And in the middle of this sentence—this whole paragraph is one sentence for Paul—right in the middle he says, but something’s different. After all of this talk about the callous and sensual and impure hearts of the human beings, he says, “But that is not the way you learned Christ.” What he’s saying here is that, “but that’s different for you Christians.” Except the way he says it is really weird. He says “that’s not the way you learned Christ.”

Now learned is quite a common word. This was written in Greek and they were into learning and education. The Greeks loved their philosophy and so on. So you can imagine the verb to learn is a very common word in Greek writings. In fact, you can go back if you want to, I’ll let you do this in your own time, go back and read all of classical Greek literature, all of it. You know, Homer, all that stuff. You can read everything. You can go back through the entire Old Testament translated into Greek and read that. That’s a massive body of work. We’ve got tons of Greek material available. And if you were to do it, you would. Find the word learn or learned many, many thousands of times. But it’s always with a subject. You learn mathematics, you learn philosophy, you learn to play an instrument, you learn to bowl a cricket ball (Not so much in classic Greek). You learn a skill, or a knowledge, or a subject, but never do you learn a person. Except here.

This is the only place ever that we can find—(apparently, I’ve not done the chase, but I believe the people that tell me)—this is the only place where it says learned a person. How do you learn a person? Sounds very relational, doesn’t it? It sounds almost as if what we need in terms of the problem of our hearts, and our thinking, and our lives, what we need is wrapped up in a Person. And it is. It is the Person of Jesus Christ. Paul says, “but this is not how you learned Christ.”

More than that, he says in the next verse, “assuming that you’ve heard about Him, and we’re taught in Him, as the truth is in Jesus.” So you’ve learned Christ. You’ve heard Christ. Now it could be that he’s saying you’ve heard about Christ. As I preached Him to you, and as I proclaimed the message of the Gospel, you learned about Christ. But they’ve actually added the word “about.” Literally what he says there is that you’ve heard Christ. So you’ve learned Christ, you’ve heard Christ, and maybe what he means is that as the Gospel was preached, as the message was proclaimed, you heard the voice of Christ Himself calling you. And you’ve been taught in Him.

It’s all past tense, isn’t it? You’ve learned Him, you’ve heard Him, you’ve been taught in Him. In fact, he carries on, what is it that they’ve been taught? “To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, to be renewed in the spirit of your minds and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” This is super, super common kind of language. This is an illustration that speakers would use all the time: to put off something, and to put on something. Like a coat. You arrive at your friend’s house and you cast off your coat. Because you’ve arrived, you’re there, you’re planning to stay, You’re not dropping off something, you’re there for a meal. So you cast off your coat, right? And then you’re there and you put on a dinner jacket, not in my world, but you know, there’s this kind of exchange idea that you put off one article of clothing, one garment, to put on something else. Go to the swimming pool, you put off your jeans and you put on your swimsuit, right? There’s an off and an on. And it’s something that they would say all the time in relation to behaviour. Speakers would use this illustration. Put off that bad habit and put on this habit. Put off smoking—that’s bad for you—and put on jogging—that’s good for you. So, you know you’re no longer a smoker, you’re now a jogger. It’s that kind of idea.

But Paul’s not gonna allow us to fall into that kind of understanding, because he’s not saying that Christianity is about changing our behaviours. It’d be very easy at this point, wouldn’t it, to say so put off all the bad things you used to do and put on, you know, being nice and being kind and being generous and being patient and so on. But he doesn’t do that. He says put off your old self. Like the you that you were. Discard it. And then, put on your new self. That’s major.

That’s like what he says in Galatians 2, where he says, “I’ve been crucified with Christ.” So like when Christ died, I died. “I’ve been crucified with Christ and I no longer live.” The old Paul is gone. “But the life that I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” There’s an old life, and it’s gone. And there’s a new life that is ours, and Paul’s saying, that’s what you learned. You learned Christ. You were taught in Him to put off your old and to put on the new. It’s a past event.

If you’re a believer in Christ, that’s that decisive point at which you say, “OK, I quit. I quit living my way. I quit trusting myself. I quit trying to fix things in my own strength. And I admit: I need what only God can do. And I’m just turning my back on that. I’m giving that over. I’m dying to self in order to have the life that He gives me and to live for Him.”

Augustine, I think it was Augustine was a 4th, 5th century, significant figure back in the day. And as he was growing up, he had a real struggle, should we say? I mean, not just a struggle, but like a headlong plunge into the world of lust and sexuality. And then he kind of came to Christ and, and his life changed. And later on, there’s this account of a time when he was in a town away from home. And in the marketplace in this town, this former lover spotted him and she came up to him. And she was expecting him to be, shall we say, hands on. And he wasn’t, he was a little bit kind of, you know, distant and, and awkward maybe or kind, whatever. And she was a bit frustrated. And as he turned to walk away, she said to him, “Hey, Augustine, it is I!” Like a desperate plea: “Hey, it’s me!” And he said, “Yes, but it is not me. This is no longer the man you knew. I’m a new person now. I’m not there anymore.” That’s what Paul’s talking about here. He’s saying, “You know what? The transformation that we need can only be found in Christ. And the only way that we can have this life that He’s offering is to allow Him to transform us from the inside out. And it involves putting aside, and laying down, and giving up on all of the old version of me – with our thinking and our agendas, and aspirations, and ambitions – lay that down and take on the life that He wants to give you.

Now that’s past tense. But there’s one thing that’s present tense in this paragraph. There’s one thing that’s ongoing. He’s referring back to something that happened in the past, but right in the middle of it, between the putting off and the putting on, he says in verse 23, “be renewed in the spirit of your minds.” That’s present.

And so, this putting off and putting on is a onetime thing that happened. But now he’s saying ongoingly, “be renewed in the spirit of your minds.” Again here, he does not say fix your thinking. He doesn’t say train yourself or educate yourself. He says be renewed. It’s something that happens to us. God wants to change the way we think. Just like encountering Christ, and coming to know Him, and to love Him, to learn Christ, brings the transformation of our hearts, just so there’s an ongoing process of changing the way we think. And that’s something that God wants to do in us. And so, Paul says, “being renewed in the spirit of your minds.”

Walking differently.

It’s not as simple as become a Christian and then you’re perfect. We all know that because A we’ve met a Christian, or B, you might be a Christian and you know that it’s not as simple as become a Christian and all is well. No, you become a Christian and then you discover that you still struggle, you still have ways of thinking, you still have habits, you still have struggles and difficulties. Paul says, “Hey, remember who you are. And allow God to be changing the way you think.

And that’s where I think it’s so important that we see this is not just walking differently, but this is walking differently together. Because we need one another. It’s not overt in this passage, except for the fact that he’s talking to a group and he’s using plurals all the way through. But it’s not obvious until we get to the next paragraph that he’s talking about the community. But I want us to make it obvious because we need to see that. If we are going to be being renewed in the way that we think; If we’re going to grow in this relationship of having learned Christ, having our minds and our actions transformed, we need each other. And like we said last week, we need to be real with each other.

Just think about a typical week. You’ve got 168 hours. I don’t know how many of those you sleep for, maybe too many, maybe not enough depending on your age. But let’s say you sleep an average amount, you’ve still got over 100 waking hours in the week. 100 waking hours plus of messages of the way the world thinks. Of advertising of films, of music, of radio or friends of peers, of the conversation that’s going on as you’re getting your haircut (that can be interesting). And there’s all this ongoing noise all around. And you think that maybe an hour of church a week is going to counteract that? No way. You think that maybe an hour of church, plus an hour of youth group, or an hour of life group – “check me out, I’m sorted” – unlikely.

The reality is we need one another. We need one another to be in conversation about the real stuff of life. To be able to bring God’s word into our thinking. Maybe you’re chatting with a friend and they’re involved in something at work, or in their business, or whatever, and you go, “Oh, I don’t, I’m not sure that that’s really a good Christ like way of thinking about that situation.” And so you ask, “Can I ask a question?” “Hey, can I share a thought?” And you share that, and gradually there’s a changing that takes place. Something that everybody does that’s so normal in the workplace, and then somebody helps you to see that maybe it’s different now for us.

Or maybe you’re aware of someone and they’re just struggling. Struggling as a parent, struggling as a spouse, just struggling in, in some aspect of life, singleness, whatever. And they’re just, they’re way down by it. And maybe they need you to come along and to help them to see that there is hope, and that it’s worth pressing on, that they should keep trusting Jesus. Maybe you’re encouragement through a text, through a message, through a conversation, could be exactly what they need this week.

It’s a bringing of God’s Word into our conversations so that the spirit of our minds can be renewed.

Maybe we go really below the surface with someone and say, “Hey, how are you doing in your thought life? Because I know I struggle, maybe you do too. Let’s be vulnerable. Let’s be real with each other.” Let’s not sit here and live in coocoo land thinking that there’s nobody in this church that could possibly struggle with pornography. Or possibly struggle with a fantasy life in their minds. Let’s not be naive and think that nobody here is really in a difficult place, because the reality is that many are. And we need to be in each other’s lives so that we can support and encourage and bring God’s thinking into the mix so that we can be renewed in the spirit of our minds.

Paul wants the Ephesians to walk differently together. And that’s what we need. And that’s what we are as a community. We’re different. Not because we’re better, not because we’ve sorted everything out, not because we get everything right—no, we’re different because of who is in us. The Holy Spirit living within us, and transforming us moment by moment on the inside, is radically different than anything this world has to offer. But it’s a process. It starts at the heart level. It affects the way we think. And it should affect the way we live.

So let’s get into those conversations. Let’s be real with one another because it’s not something we can do alone. It’s not something we can journey through this life, trying our best, because then we’re back to self-effort again. What we need is the community to help shape our thinking in light of our loving of Christ – shape our thinking so that our behaviour is changed. It is about holiness. It is about purity. It is about the way we live. But it’s definitely not about us fixing ourselves.