Off with the Old, On with the New, Part 2

So it is basic then to salvation that it is an overcoming transformation, that we die to the old and we rise to the new and we are risen with Christ to seek the things that are above. We are the possessors of a newness of life, the possessors of a new nature. We have the potential to live out a new man, a new lifestyle, a new walk.

It's been said, the same sun that melts the wax hardens the clay. And if you think about it, that's a great analogy for the power of God's Word. In some people, it melts their resistance to the gospel, makes them softer, more sensitive to sin.

But for those who resist God, the truth of Scripture actually hardens their hearts. So the question is, how do you make sure you're responding to God's Word in the right way? That you're receiving His instruction with joy and not resisting His will and letting yourself grow callous to His commands. John MacArthur examines that issue today on grace to you as he continues his look at the portrait of a new life.

That's the title of our series. And if you have your Bible, turn to the book of Ephesians and here is John. Ephesians chapter 4 and verses 17 to 24 will be our text.

I'm going to read it to you so it'll set it in your mind and you follow as I read and then we'll share concerning what it teaches. This I say therefore and testify in the Lord that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them because of the hardness of their heart, who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greediness. But ye have not so learned Christ, if so be that ye have heard Him and have been taught by Him as the truth is in Jesus, that ye put off concerning the former manner of life, the old man which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind and that ye put on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.

One of the most wonderful passages in all of the revelation of God is found in 1 John chapter 5 verses 4 and 5 and serves as a fitting comparison to our text. 1 John 5, 4 says, For whatever is born of God overcometh the world, and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world?

But he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God. To believe that Jesus is the Son of God and by such faith to be redeemed, to be saved, to be transformed means that you become an overcomer of the world. The word overcomer simply means victor.

It is the Greek word nikē. It means to conquer, to have victory, to be superior, to overcome. And one of the basic realities of salvation is that it transforms a loser into a winner. It transforms a victim into a victor. It makes us overcomers.

That by very definition. You remember the words of our Lord who said in John 16, 33, In this world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world. In other words, as we enter into Jesus Christ, we enter into His overcoming of the world. We rise above the system. We rise above the evil age. We rise above Satan as conquerors of the devil himself.

We rise above death as those who can cry with Paul, Oh death, where is thy sting? We rise above sin as we hear the echo of the words of Romans 6, Sin shall have no more dominion over you. We rise also above the world, the whole system of Satan as overcomers. And so as Christians we have risen above the evil age. We have risen above the system of Satan. Our citizenship is heavenly and we are consequently to live as heavenly citizens. We are to live as overcomers.

Paul even goes further than that and calls us not only nikē, but overcomers, but hūpernikē, hyper-overcomers, super-overcomers and your authorized version translates that word more than conquerors. So it is basic then to salvation that it is an overcoming transformation, that it lifts us out of the mundane, that we die to the old and we rise to the new and we are risen with Christ to seek the things that are above. We are the possessors of a newness of life, the possessors of a new nature. We have the potential to live out a new man, a new lifestyle, a new walk.

That's what Paul is after. Chapters 1 to 3 describe the newness in the inside and chapters 4 to 6 describe how that newness ought to work on the outside, what ought to happen as we live, the conduct, the pattern, the behavior, the way we operate in our lives. And by giving us a contrast, Paul really approaches this theme, the contrast in verses 17 to 24 between the old and the new, the old man or the old lifestyle and the new lifestyle, the old walk and the new walk. You'll notice in verse 17 he says, this I say therefore and testify in the Lord that ye henceforth walk, not as other Gentiles walk. Your lifestyle is to be different. As a Christian there are differences. You have been, according to chapter 2, created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God hath foreordained that you should walk in them. That's to be a difference from the old way, from the old walk, from the old man. God saved you unto newness of life. He saved you to be different, to be transformed if any man be in Christ. He is a new creation.

Old things have passed away, behold, all things have become new. In 1 John chapter 5 it tells us that we have overcome. On the contrary, in chapter 5 of 1 John in verse 19 it says, the whole world lies in the lap of the wicked one.

There's a big difference. The world as we know it is coddled by Satan. We have risen above to the very presence of God. We aren't like the Gentiles. Paul describes the heathen or the ethne here in 1 Thessalonians 4, 5 in this way. He says, the Gentiles who know not God.

We are not numbered among those who know not God. When we come to Jesus Christ, we're different. We are changed and our lifestyle is to match that new nature, that transformation.

Let me show you what he's saying. He describes an old way of life and a new way of life and says, this is the way you are to live in the new way of life. He compares an old man and a new man. Now the old man and the new man are not talking about your nature in this passage.

Some places in the Bible they can be broadened to include that, but here he's talking about your lifestyle, your old lifestyle as opposed to the new. There's to be a tremendous difference. Now remember this, the key to the difference is the way you think.

It's the way you think that makes the difference. The old lifestyle with a certain thinking process, the new one with a different thinking process. That's why verse 23 says that salvation demands that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind. There is a new thinking process demanded of a new creation. And the Lord actually begins that process in the transformation of salvation.

Now let's look back at the contrast again as we started to in our last study together. Verses 17 to 19 describe the old walk and the old man. Verses 20 to 24, the new walk and the new man. I want to review just briefly. Now you'll remember back in chapter 2, verses 1 to 3 that we are told that sinners walk according to the world, the flesh and the devil.

They function according to those three things. Now here we see an illustration of how that works out. You walk according to the world, the flesh and the devil, and this is what will happen. And he gives us four characteristics of pagan thinking and lifestyle.

Four things based upon wrong thinking. One is in verse 17. And this is the first characteristic of an unregenerate, unsaved person who doesn't know God.

First, at the end of verse 17, they walk in the emptiness of their mind. And the first characteristic is what I called self-centered emptiness. The unregenerate man resolves everything on the basis of his thinking, his mind. It is his mind that is ultimate.

It is what he thinks, what he acquiesces to, what he agrees with that makes the difference. The only problem is that he will follow his mind to emptiness because it is vanity, it is useless, it is aimless, it is pointless, and it is purposeless. Self-centered emptiness is characteristic of our age.

It is characteristic of an unregenerate man. He's going nowhere, full of sound and fury, but signifying absolutely nothing. If man operates on a mind that doesn't have God's thoughts and all he's got is his own thoughts, it's going nowhere. It's useless, it's empty, and it's vain. Second thing, where there is a useless, empty, and vain mind, there will be ignorance of the truth. And that's the second characteristic of a godless person in verse 18. Their understanding is darkened, they are alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that's in them and because of the hardness of their heart.

That word is hardness. In other words, when a person says, I will live and die on the basis of my own mind, I will be the master of my own fate, I will be the captain of my own soul, I will be the determiner of my own destiny, you can be sure he's going to live his whole life in ignorance because man doesn't have any answers. If he cuts himself off in verse 18 from the life of God, if he alienates himself from the life of God, he tears out any possibility of ever knowing the truth.

And so the second thing is a willful darkness. Spiritually, he is dead, incapable of knowing the truth. And we showed you last time, implied in this verse, is the terrifying thought that when a person makes a willful choice to base everything on his own mind, and he becomes his own god, and he turns his back on the true God, that after a certain point, God just lets him go. The Old Testament put it this way, God said, Ephraim is joined to idols, let him alone. Romans 1 says God gave them up.

He let them go. If a person chooses this, after a certain point, God lets them go. And so, to start out with a useless self-centered mind can only result in ignorance. And such ignorance as dives deeply into sin. And that leads to the third thing, shamelessness, shamelessness. Verse 19, who being past feeling.

You stop right there. Well listen, if you cut yourself off from the life of God, you will be past feeling any conviction. You will be past sensitivity to sin. You will lose sensation of regret. You will be beyond the reality of shame.

And then another thing results. When you're going to live by your own standard in your own mind, in the uselessness of your own mind, you cut yourself off from God, therefore you lose all moral sense, all moral balance, all sense of what's right and wrong, and you do that which is shameless, and the result is you wind up with the fourth characteristic, and that's a reprobate mind, a mind that ceases to function. You have literally seared your conscience. You have burned out your mind. You have torn out of your brain the standards that God has placed there. You have violated conscience to the place where conscience can no longer function. Being past feeling, it says, they have given themselves over unto lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greediness. Now that's human lifestyle.

Not very pretty, is it? Shameless thinking will destroy the mind. All right, now let's go back over it very quickly so you understand it. You start out with doing your thing your way. You think your own thoughts and determine your own destiny. You've cut yourself off from God. As a result, you're going to live in ignorance.

That's verse 18. Your heart's going to be blind. Your head's going to be blind. As a result of that blindness, you don't know any morality, and without a morality, you will become shameless and indecent, and you live in shamelessness and indecency long enough, and it burns out any thinking process you had left until you come to the place where you totally give yourself over to lasciviousness, and you work uncleanness with greediness. In other words, you can't get enough vileness in your life.

You can't dig up enough filth. Now let me look at this word lasciviousness with you for a minute. Lasciviousness is the word aselgeia. It's probably the ugliest word in the New Testament. It's a filthy, vile word, and it's used very often.

Here is the essence of aselgeia. It is the person in whose soul dwells so much sin under such total domination that he doesn't care what anybody says. He doesn't care what anybody thinks. He doesn't feel any shock.

He has no sense of decency and absolutely no sense of shame. Now this word rarely ever occurs alone. It usually occurs with other words.

In fact, let me give you an idea about that. Three times aselgeia is connected with drunkenness in Galatians 5, 19, 1 Peter 4, 3, and Romans 13, 13. In those three passages, it is connected with drunkenness. It is connected with a particular word komas.

Komos originally was sort of a harmless word. It referred to a band of friends who accompanied a victor in the games on his way home, sort of like his pals, his buddies. But as time went on and they were going on their way home, they were laughing and cheering and celebrating the victory. They began to drink and it became ribald and it became carousing and reveling and wildness and it degenerated into some kind of sheer self-indulgent in a public fashion. It literally means brawling in drunkenness. In the aselgeia, the person who is lascivious is one whose sheer self-indulgence knows no public restriction.

He doesn't restrain himself at all in regard to people. It's connected with that kind of ribald drunkenness. Secondly, four times this word is connected with adultery or lust and sexual sin. In Mark 7, 22, 2 Corinthians 12, 21, Galatians 5, 19, and 2 Peter 2, 18, it is connected with sex sin. And in each case, it has reference to a person who has no more shame than an animal in gratifying his sexual desire.

That's where aselgeia fits. It is the kind of lasciviousness that knows only its fulfillment, even if it's an animalistic thing. An aselgeia person has no more conscience about immorality and about sexual gratification than a dog. That's the word. So three times it's connected with ribald drunkenness. Four times it's connected with a degenerate kind of sexual lust that knows no difference than an animal.

And three times, here's the third time it's used, three times it is used with pleonexia and it's used with that here. Pleonexia is the word greediness in this verse. And three times it is used with such an uncontrollable lust that people don't even know the bounds of it. It's the kind of thing where if you don't give me what I want, I'll rape you to get it. It's that completely out of control greed. It's not some nice little isolated inner attitude. It is an evil, vile lusting for that which is wrong to the point where it's public, to the point where it has no more decency than an animal does and it has absolutely zero shame and it's so greedy it just wants to get itself fulfilled in such a manner that it is never able to be satisfied.

The madness of drunken sexual brawling indecency. That's the way the Gentiles live. And you know where it all comes from? You say, well, not everybody's gone that far.

Yes, but nobody in human society has any resources to restrain themselves from going that far. It is only by the grace of God that falls on the just and the unjust in general in society and the preserving influence of the Holy Spirit and the preserving influence of the church in the world that keeps anybody from not ending up at the pits at that level. Because that's where it all goes. You start out with a self-centered mind. Think your own thoughts. You cut yourself off from God which means you're ignorant. And in your ignorance you've got no morality and so you begin to live like an animal. And once you get into lust, lust is the most damning thing there is because it knows no limits and it has a decreasing sense of satisfaction. And that's the way it is. Shameless, vile, violent, illicit, ambitious, greedy lust.

This is the way the world is. In Romans 1 29, the word plaenexia, greediness, shows the sin of a godless world as they turn their backs on God to fill their desires. In Luke 12 15, the word plaenexia, greediness, is the sin of a person who evaluates life only in material terms.

He can't ever get enough goodies. In 1 Thessalonians 2 and 4, it describes a person who uses his greediness to take advantage of other people. It's the man who doesn't care what the woman is like after he gets done raping her.

He'll do it anyway. In Colossians chapter 3, plaenexia is identified with idolatry because it is greediness to worship an idol rather than the true God. And in passage after passage after passage, it's connected with sexual evil. It's the desire to have what is illicit. It's the desire to have what is forbidden. And it's the desire to have it so bad that you have no conscience, no decency, no sense of shock and you'll trample and destroy anything and anyone that gets in your way.

This is a mindless lifestyle. So how do people get to it? We've got them all in our society. There are lots of them. Believe me.

All over the place. And there's nothing to restrain anybody who's unregenerate from going that far. Nothing within themselves.

Nothing. And believe me, there are going to be more going to this limit than ever before. You read your Bible, evil men shall grow what? Worse and worse as we get closer to the time of the Lord's return. There are going to be more and more and more people like this, especially after the church is removed and the influence is taken away. And 2 Thessalonians, the one who hinders doesn't hinder anymore.

This thing is going to become an absolute inundation of human society, as if it isn't already. You see, how do people get like that? Verse 19, it says, Have given themselves over. They give themselves over to it. It is a matter of constant, willful choices. A choice made often enough becomes a habit. And a habit reaps a personality. And a personality reaps a character. And a character reaps a destiny. That's exactly what happens. It's a series of choices.

They have given themselves over. Reason is something you can't blame on anybody but yourself. You make repeated wrong choices. Choice makes a habit. And a habit makes a personality. And a personality makes a character. And a character determines a destiny.

Let me illustrate it to you. This is a book called The Criminal Personality, written by two Jewish researchers, Samuel Yockelson and Stanton Samenow. This is a result of 15 years of clinical study on criminals.

It's two volumes over a thousand pages. And what is most fascinating to me is that for years and years and years, criminality was based on environment. Criminality was a result of behavior induced by circumstances, the kind of place you lived or what your mother did to you or your father did to you.

But after all their research, this is what they say. Most interesting. The thesis of the book is that criminal behavior is a result of a warped thinking process. As a man, what? Thinketh in his heart. What?

So is he. In fact, in three sections of volume one, page 251 to 457, over 200 pages, three whole sections are devoted to, quote, the thinking errors of the criminal. Now listen. They say, quoting, abandoning the search for causation and deciding not to work with feelings, we probed the criminal pattern of thought, end quote. In other words, they said, let's find out how a criminal thinks, and that's what opened up the whole thing.

And this was their conclusion. It is remarkable, quote, the criminal often derives as great an impact from his activities during non-arrestable phases as he does from crime. The criminal's thinking patterns operate everywhere. They are not restricted to crime, end quote. In other words, from the beginning to the end of a criminal life personality, there is a thinking process that is out of whack. You know what that is? That's a reprobate mind.

That's just Romans 1, and they're just now discovering. It's a thinking issue. It's not environment. It's a reprobate mind. It's a mind that is no mind. Policemen have told me time and time again, you cannot predict what a criminal will do.

Why? Because the normal capacity of the mind doesn't work that way. In endeavoring to explain the criminal mind, which God would call a non-mind, a reprobate mind, the researchers say this, sociological explanations have been unsatisfactory. It isn't sociological, quoting them, the idea that a man becomes a criminal because he's corrupted by his environment has proved to be too weak an explanation. Now listen to this, a shocking statement. We have indicated, quote, that criminals come from a broad spectrum of homes, both disadvantaged and privileged, but in the same neighborhood, some are violators and most are not. Now listen, it is not the environment that turns a man into a criminal. It is a series of choices that he makes starting at a very early age. Right on. You want to hear something interesting?

They say in some cases you can begin to detect it at the age of three. Choices. Choices. Listen, the heart of a child is a rebel. You better get the rod and drive it out of him. Because if you don't, no question in my mind, Satan has selected out certain human beings in our society to begin early that thinking process that will bring them to the place of being the most reprobate of all society to drag the whole of society to hell.

You better deal with it. They went on to say, perhaps most important is that the material in this chapter has demonstrated that a criminal is not a victim of circumstances. He makes choices early in life regardless of his socioeconomic status, race, parents, child-rearing practices. Changing the environment does not change the man. It's a reprobate mind you're dealing with.

It's so fascinating to me that down the pike some people come up with the things God's been saying for centuries. Well the point of all of these people, I'm just trying to show you, is that a man becomes what he is. A woman becomes what she is by a series of processes of thinking, choices he makes. So you say, well how did that person ever get to be like that? He made a choice, then another choice to do the same thing again.

It became a habit, and it became personality, and it became a character, and it's a determined destiny. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur. Thanks for tuning in today. John has been our featured speaker for over five decades. He's also Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, and today's lesson is part of his current study on Grace to You, titled The Portrait of a New Life.

Now John, let's take up where we left off yesterday. You were talking about megachurches and some of the modern movements you see in the church. I love when you speak on that subject. So I was hoping I could get more of your thoughts on that.

Again, I have to just add a footnote. It amazes me how much contemporary megachurch preaching is designed to make people think about themselves, as opposed to Christ, as opposed to divine truth, as opposed to sound doctrine. Think about how you can be better, how you can be more satisfied, how you can be more fulfilled. And you're just chasing your own tail, because where is the power for that? You can tell me tricks to fool myself into thinking I'm better than I really am.

You can play games with my mind. But for me to chase transformation internally with myself is absolute folly. It's idiotic, because the power to be transformed comes from outside of me. And it isn't until I get outside of myself and communicate with the living God through his living Word that real change is going to come. And I say that to let you know that I want you to get a copy of the MacArthur Daily Bible.

You need to be reading the Bible every day. And this daily Bible divides up all of Scripture into 365 readings each day, a portion from the Old Testament, the New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs. And 25 percent discount on nearly all of our items, including the MacArthur Daily Bible, still available. Sale ends November 12th. So order the MacArthur Daily Bible today. It's a great Christmas gift, particularly in light of the New Year coming.

Right. And friend, if you are looking to read God's Word more consistently, this is the resource to turn to. To order the MacArthur Daily Bible at 25 percent off the regular price, contact us today. Just go to our website, gty.org, or call us at 800-55-GRACE. The MacArthur Daily Bible also includes notes by John that explain difficult passages, takes you deeper into those verses, and whets your appetite for studying God's Word. Again, you can purchase the MacArthur Daily Bible at a discounted price when you go to our website, gty.org, or call us at 800-55-GRACE. Also, our limited-time sale is the perfect time to stock up on Bible study resources for yourself and to encourage those you love. You can get popular books like One Faithful Life, None Other, and Remember and Return, as well as our flagship resource, the MacArthur Study Bible, each for 25 percent off the regular price. To order, call us toll-free at 800-55-GRACE, or shop online at gty.org. The sale ends this Friday, so place your order today when you visit gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, reminding you to watch Grace to You television this Sunday, check your local listings for Channel and Times, and be here tomorrow when John looks at what gives a life true meaning and purpose. Don't miss the next half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.