Our Beliefs : Sermons : Sermon Archive - 2006 : August 20, 2006

Theme: God Has Plans for You -- To Be His New Creation

Church year occasion: Pentecost 11

If the Apostle Paul were alive on earth today, I think he would be a Nascar fan. Paul loved picturing a Christian's life as a race with heaven as the finish line. This morning I want you to think of life as a Nascar race. There you are at the starting line noticing who you're racing against. You know how the cars in Nascar are plastered with all kinds of advertisements? Same thing in this race. To your left you see a car with UNGODLY SEX written all over it -- every kind of sexual sin imaginable is written on that car. Also on your left you see a car with EARTHLY WEALTH smeared everywhere. To your right more cars, one with ILLEGAL DRUGS, another with DRUNKENNESS, another with SELFISHNESS written on them -- and there are hundreds more. Even from the starting line, you can see the finish line way off in the distance, and you can even make out the words written in big letters across the finish line -- HAPPINESS. Then the gun goes off and you're in the race of your life.

Isn't that everyone's goal in life -- happiness? There's just one question: Since only one car can win, which car will it be? The apostle Paul knows with absolute certainty which car will win, so let's see what Paul has to tell us from Ephesians 4, where we again see that God has plans for you. This time from our study of Ephesians we see that God Has Plans for You -- To Be a New Creation -- not to live like sinful man, but to live as God's holy child.

Paul says, "I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do." Paul wasn't telling the Ephesians not to be Gentiles, because many of them were Gentiles, or non-Jews, even as we are. But he is telling them not to live any longer like those Gentiles who don't know and thus have rejected Christ as their Savior.

Paul doesn't want us to live like sinful man, first of all in the way they think. He describes their way of thinking in a number of very picturesque ways. First he says, "You must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking." In other words, the way they live their lives shows that their thinking is meaningless. Paul is calling unbelievers airheads. They aren't stupid or unintelligent, but they don't have any sense to their thinking, no aim to it. Solomon said the same thing when he wrote the book of Ecclesiastes. He described an unbeliever's life as "Meaningless! Meaningless! ... Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless." (Ecclesiastes 1:2) Later he compares a life without God to chasing after the wind. Have you ever tried that? If you haven't, don't start -- it's impossible. So is the unbeliever's life. It is aimless, without purpose. What does God say about that race that you are in with all those other cars of UNGODLY SEX, EARTHLY WEALTH, DRUNKENNESS, SELFISHNESS and all the others? They think they are on the road to happiness, but they won't find happiness in that way. Extramarital sexual relations might seem like the way to happiness; divorce might seem like it leads there, too. It always seems greener on the other side of the fence -- until you get to other side of the fence! Get rid of this dead-beat husband or wife and have fun with someone else. But that won't get you happiness. Oh, for a time it will, like pulling honey out of a bee hive, but eventually you'll get stung -- if not in this life, certainly in the one to come if that person doesn't repent of that sin.

Then Paul lists off more characteristics of an unbeliever's life -- "They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God." An unbeliever thinks he is seeking and finding happiness, but his life is darkness. Instead of finding real happiness, which is only available with God, the unbeliever has separated himself from God. Why? Paul says, "Because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts." They have hardened their hearts against God. Much like hardening of a person's arteries won't let blood through that only surgery can correct, so sinful man, the unbeliever, has hardened his heart so that God's truth can't get through. They have a terrible, deadly condition, and they won't let the Great Physician operate on them.

Paul tells us what the inevitable result of this kind of life without God is: "Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more." As usual, Paul doesn't mince words. He tells it like it is. The way that unbelievers think leads to the way they act. They lose all sensitivity to what is right. They become callused. Their conscience once knew basic right from wrong, but after living in that kind of lifestyle for so long, they now don't even realize it is wrong. It is just like when you use a garden tool for the first time in the spring. The first time you use it, you get blisters. They are painful. But as you continue to ignore that pain, your hands develop calluses -- the skin becomes hard. Eventually, if you use that tool long enough, you won't feel any more pain. Same thing in life -- if you persist in an ungodly lifestyle, at first you might realize it is wrong, but eventually, after doing it time after time after time, you get desensitized. Eventually, you don't even think it's wrong. Your conscience no longer works because you've turned a deaf ear to it too often. Eventually, you can harden your heart against God himself. This sinful lifestyle shows. Once you taste these kinds of ungodly thoughts, you think that they are better than living like a Christian. "Why can't I have some fun like the rest of the world?" you might start thinking. "I see all my friends living the way they want to and they seem happy. Why can't I do the same?"

Why can't you do those things? You can. But if that is the focus of your life and it rules you, you shouldn't consider yourself a Christian. Instead of living like sinful man, like an unbeliever, Paul encourages and even commands you to live as God's holy child.

Paul says, "You, however, did not come to know Christ that way. Surely you heard of him and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus." Unbelievers who are living it up in this world by chasing after wealth or ungodly sex or waiting all week working so they can get paid and blow half of it in a bar on Friday and Saturday, they are really not on the way to the finish line of happiness at all. But you are different. Why? Because of the car you're in. Your car has, FAITH IN JESUS written all over it, for everyone to see. You know that you have committed many if not all of those sins that are plastered on those other cars in one form or another. You also know that God hates those sins and will, in fact, must punish those sins and the sinners who committed them for an eternity in hell. There's no hope for us when we stand before a just and holy God as sinners.

But that "truth in Jesus" tells us something marvelous -- that Jesus Christ saved us through faith. He took us from our sinful life that had no meaning and was headed away from God and he turned us around, he converted us to faith, he picked us up and placed us in the car that has FAITH IN JESUS written all over it, for everyone to see. Paul says it this way: "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 the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness." God took off your filthy rags of sin, the old self, which is corrupt, vile, unclean, full of sin, like a stinking, rotting corpse, and God has taken it off of you like taking off old, stinking, foul clothes. Then he replaced it with the robe of his own Son's righteousness. You are now a Christian. You know what holiness and righteousness is all about because that is what you are -- righteous and holy. You didn't do anything to be that way -- God did it all for you when Jesus lived for you to earn your robe of righteousness, then died on the cross in your place and in the place of every sinner and so paid for every foul-smelling, rotting garment of sin, by having his Heavenly Father look on him as if he had committed every digesting sin the world has ever known and ever will know. When he brought you to faith, which for many of you was in baptism, he took off that old garment, that old self, and gave you his own robe of perfection with which you can stand before the almighty, righteous God who hates sin and lift up your head with confidence saying, "You have redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won me from all sin and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver, but with your Son's holy precious blood and his innocent sufferings and death."

But be careful. Even though our sinful nature is defeated and drowned, it comes back to haunt us and tempt us back to an ungodly lifestyle every day. Look at your own pet sins. Have you become so comfortable with that sin -- whether it's greed or pride or envy or selfishness -- that you have become apathetic to God's Word? Do you not even see it as sin any longer because you've tried to justify it in your own mind? "One more little sin won't hurt." Then you've jumped into another car in the race, or you are about to. The devil will constantly be riding up to your car and tempt you to jump into one of his cars, whether it's a car you've jumped into before or a completely new one. He'll say things like, "Come on. You know you're not having any fun living like a Christian. Come with me and find out what having fun is all about. Everyone else is doing it. No one will get hurt." That's when you need to remember God's plan for you and the work he's already put into that plan to make you a new creation. After mowing the lawn and weeding the garden and working up a sweat, and after taking a good shower, would you put those old, stinking clothes back on? Of course not! So after being clothed in the robe of Christ's own righteousness, why would you want to put on the deeds of darkness any longer? The truth is, not everyone is doing it (just look at your fellow Christians) and someone always gets hurt when sin rules a person's life. Instead, every single day, we look back to our baptisms and remember what God did for us there in drowning our sins in Jesus' blood, and then we through daily sorrow and repentance over our sins drown the old man that will always be a part of us in this life, and say to the devil, "No, Jesus is my Savior and my Lord."

But can you be really happy living that way? Is it a fun, enjoyable life living as a Christian? You bet it is! Forgiveness is yours! Eternal life is yours! Joy in serving God is yours also! That is where true happiness and God's blessings lie -- in living out God's plan for you as his new creation. Are you ready? The race this week is about to start. Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines. Amen.