Sunday, November 12,
2017
People watching: I used to do this
standing at the rail on the upper level of a big mall. I’d gaze down at the shoppers going in and
out of stores. A group of teenagers, is
laughing, carrying on, drawing the attention of mall security. Some folks with walking shoes have no
interest in any of the stores. They are
exercising - mall walkers. They dodge
these window shoppers and keep on walking.
A happy young couple lingers in front of the jewelry store. A mom pushing a stroller heads wearily toward
the food court.
A
football game is a good place to watch people.
So is the main street right downtown. There are always interesting
characters on Franklin Street. Maybe
your neighborhood is another place.
Maybe church is a good place to study people.
What
can we learn? Can we tell, by surveying
the crowd who is successful? Maybe, but
looks can be deceiving. Do we know who’s
happy and who is not? Perhaps, but a
generally happy individual might be going through an unusually bad day. What can discern when we watch people?
Can we, by people watching, know if someone is a
Christian or not? Are followers of Jesus
any different than anyone else? Should
they be? If the answer is no, what is the
point of being a Christian? Many might
respond that it is important to be a Christian if you want to go to Heaven when
you die. In my own reading the Bible, I
find that a blessed life after death is not the point of the story. It’s an outcome, but not the main idea. The main idea is that Jesus is Lord.
We are sinners and we need him – his death on the
cross for us and resurrection, also for us.
We need Jesus to remove our sin and when he does and when we receive his
grace, then we become his disciples. As
his disciples, we submit our lives to him.
He is Lord – master over every area of our lives. In Christ, we discover lasting joy and
unfailing hope. We respond to his grace
by worshiping God, loving one another, and telling of the Good News of life in
Christ to the people around us.
If your impression is that belonging to church,
attending Sunday morning worship, and declaring yourself a Christian is all
done to get your ticket punched to Heaven, I think you might be missing
something crucial and wonderful – a dynamic relationship with God right now. If
we don’t live submitted to Christ in life, we might not enjoy the afterlife,
even if we find ourselves in God’s presence.
If we ignore God here, we might not recognize Heaven if we get
there.
In the book of Ephesians, we are invited to
understand our life together as God’s church; life lived in the household of
God. Each one who claims to be a Christian
and to be a part of this church is a part of one family. We are each other’s brothers and sisters in
Christ. This means something. It’s not just a Sunday morning saying. This defines our lives. As we swim into the deeper waters of
Ephesians, what it means is delineated.
It is “this,” and it is not “that.”
A bipolar understanding of who we are is introduced
in verses 21-24. Imagine people-watching
with this question: what distinguishes the follower of Jesus from the person
who is not at all connected to God in Christ?
Hold that tension. Can we tell
who the Christians are apart from those who are not? We probably cannot make that call from the
upper level rail as look out over the shoppers at the mall. Christians and
non-Christians alike go to the frozen yogurt stand and the electronics store
and so on. However, in church, in our
neighborhoods, and in our homes, in those places where we talk with people in
intimate conversations, do we see a difference in the way followers of Jesus
speak and act? In the relationships in
our lives, can we tell the Christians from the non-Christians?
Along with this, envisioning your own life, can you
see the difference in yourself as you have grown in Christ? Can we, each one of us, mark our lives out as
timelines? We point to a period where we
say, ‘ah, there, I was clearly ignoring God,’ or, not ignoring, but, ‘I was
ignorant of God.’ Did not know God at
all! And then at another point in our
stories, we can point and say, ‘there’s the
change. I met God in Jesus Christ. After that, things were different.’ Can we do that – distinguish two sides of
ourselves, with Christ and apart from Christ?
Being with Christ doesn’t mean we become
perfect. Christians go through
divorces. Christians get addicted. Christians get arrested. But even in hard times, Christians are drawn
to our master, our Lord who loves us. Especially
in dark periods, we rely on God; we don’t turn away. The pain we experience may
come because we ignore the pull of the Holy Spirit and try to live on our wits,
our own power, and our own wisdom. Or,
the ability to endure and even thrive in the midst of disappointment and loss
is mostly likely directly tied to our unwavering commitment to Christ.
We read the latter half of Ephesians 4, the
beginning of Ephesians 5, and we see the world as comprised of people who are
in Christ and people who are not. We see
our own lives oriented toward the Savior, or turned away from Him.
It says, “[We] were taught to put away our former
way of life, our old self, corrupt, and deluded by lusts, and to be renewed in
the spirit of our minds, and to clothe ourselves with the new self, created
according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” –
Ephesians 4:22-24. We flow like streams,
leaving behind godless life and all that goes with it. As we move, we are cleansed, purified by God
at work in us. Residing in the household
of God, we begin to take on the likeness of God, clothed with the new
self. Clothed with the New Self?
What does this look like?
“Putting away falsehood, let all of us speak truth
to our neighbors,” the open of 4:25. See
this dichotomy and see it in the most normal places of life. Are we our true selves, and when we are our
true selves, do those around us see Christ.
Is the Lord seen in us because of how loving we are, how honest we are,
how much integrity is the mark of how we live?
Going back to the previous chapter and the earlier verses of chapter 4,
are our lives marked by gentleness and humility?
Verses 26-27, “Be angry, but do not sin; do not let
the sun go down on your anger and do not give room for the devil.” Yes, Jesus got angry and so too do his
disciples. We are furious at injustice,
at systemic racism, at debilitating poverty, and at divisive rhetoric. We are just plain mad when we see the church
break people with graceless judgment.
The church is for sinners.
Following our Savior’s example we are to open our doors and our hearts
to those around us who have been rejected by others and to those who find
themselves broken in their own sins. We
hate seeing those already broken stepped on heavily with judgment. We are fueled to show love.
But anger doesn’t get the last word. We feel it.
In words inherited from Jesus, we express it. And then we submit our
anger to Him. We live every moment of
life submitted to our master, our Lord, Jesus Christ. When our eyes stay on him and we live under
his rule, the devil has no voice. The
truth about Satan is He has very little power beyond what we give him. But, since we are prone to sin, all Satan
needs to do is tempt us and we do all the work for him. Whether by anger, by cowardice, by greed or
lust or gluttony, we give in to the temptations the enemy dangles, and we’ve
turned away from God.
It is “this,” we speak the truth, or it is “that,” we wallow in anger and follow our temptations instead
of submitting to the Lord.
Thieves, we see in verse 28, have a place in God’s
church. But they must stop
stealing. The transformation happens as
they move from thief to disciple as the Holy Spirit makes them new. They clothe themselves with the new self, the
one born again in Christ. The same could
be said of killers and liars. Forgiven,
they are disciples and former killers and liars. We can’t keep lying and cheating, abusing and
stealing, and at the same time clothe ourselves with the new self. There has to be break, a definitive step from
life without Christ to life in Christ.
Ephesians 4:29, “Let no evil talk come out of your
mouths.” Instead speak words that give
grace. Grace is hard to give because it
means we don’t it hold against people when they wrong us or hurt us or lie
about us. In response to evil inflicted
upon us, we give love and forgiveness.
If the sun goes down on our anger, we’d just as soon return a punch with
a punch. No, Jesus says, my way is
different. Verses 31-32, “Put away from
you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with
all malice;” get rid of all of it.
Instead, “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another.”
Putting on the new self is “this,” as we
separate from “that,” the way of revenge,
the way of power, the way of my gain equals your defeat. In Christ, we build each other up, looking
out for the good of the other. And
remember, reaching back to chapter 3, before this change in us happens, God
goes to work in us: in each individual and in us as a church body. The Lord removes our sins and reshapes our
minds and our hearts so that we see the world differently than we did before we
began following Jesus. Our new vision
causes new ways of thinking and acting.
Chapter five describes the new self, “this;” “Be imitators of God … and live in
love as Christ has loved us” (5:1).
And then “that,”
the old way we’ve left behind. Ephesians
5:3, “Fornication and impurity of any kind, or greed, must not even be
mentioned among you. … Entirely out of place is obscene and vulgar talk; … Be
sure that no fornicator or impure person, or one who is greedy … has any
inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and of God” (5:3-5). Many of us were fornicators, were impure,
were greedy, and were mouthy. But we
have turned from that life to this life, life in Christ. The Holy Spirit reached out to us and we
responded with gratitude and a new way of seeing and being.
That’s life in the household of God – the
church. How we experience the world has
changed because, clothed with the new self, we understand everything in life in
terms of who we are in Christ.
Ephesians 5:8, “For once [we] were darkness, but
now in the Lord, we are light. [So], we
live as children of light – for the fruit of the light is found in all that is
good and right and true” (5:8-9).
Similarly, 1 John 1:5, “God is light and in him
there is no darkness. … If we walk in the light as he himself is in the light,
we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from
all sin” (1 John 1:5b, 7).
Maybe all this talk of new self and old self, of
turning to God and away from sin, seems too churchy, too Sunday-morning, too
removed from the places of real life.
Maybe Bible-talk doesn’t gain much traction in the places where you
spend your time. If you’re feeling that,
a sense that this is all nice and fluff but unrelated to everyday life, I
suggest this. Imagine yourself carrying
the Holy Spirit with you into the most profane, unreligious, unspiritual places
you go. See the Holy Spirit there and
see the Spirit there with you. Do that this week. Take God with you when you go to those places
you would never expect to see God.
The other people there might not look at you and
immediately see Christ. But you will
know that God is there and your willingness to submit to that knowledge in that
place will position you to be a witness.
At that point, God is working, working in you because you are clothing
yourself with the new self, the person who is born again and lives in Christ.
Use this response time to help you be clothed in
the new self as your prepare to follow God in the places of your daily
life.
AMEN
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