Go to the School of Christ

[0:00] Our reading this morning is from Ephesians chapter 4, verse 17. 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.

[0:40] 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.

[0:54] Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor. For we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin.

[1:07] Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.

[1:19] Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

[1:34] Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

[1:47] And this is God's word. We are in a series on Ephesians. And in the first half of the book of Ephesians, the author, Paul, he's answering the question, who is the church?

[1:59] Who are we together? Lots of different answers. One word today, redeemed. He says we're redeemed, we're forgiven. And then in the back half of Ephesians, the letter 4 to 6, he then turns to say, now what does the church do in the light of that?

[2:18] So therefore, now go and be who God has made you in Christ Jesus. Put on the clothing that God has given you in Jesus. So we've seen already, when you become a Christian, you have the life of God in you, the Holy Spirit.

[2:33] And Paul turns and says, now go and live like it. The main, if there's one main thing we've said so far in the series, in this back half, we've said that Paul's teaching us, seek spiritual maturity.

[2:46] So when you become a Christian, you start off as a spiritual baby. You're an infant. And that's good. It's good to be an infant when it's time to be an infant. But this letter is saying, don't stay there.

[2:59] There's a call to grow in the back half of this letter. And another way to say that, and this is really just the center of what our text today is all about, is we're thinking about change. How to change.

[3:11] How to have real change in your life. Lasting change. Enduring change. And no matter where you come from today, no matter what religious background, philosophical background, cultural background, anything like that, every single one of us wants to change.

[3:28] We all know we want to be better than we are. We all know that there's a gap in our lives between the people we want to be and the people we actually are. Paul, he brings up here bitterness as an example in verse 31.

[3:42] And we can all think today, no matter what you believe in, I want to be better when it comes to bitterness. I want to be a person who encourages people, not discourages people.

[3:55] I want, if you're a Christian, you can say, I know I want to pray without ceasing and want to want to pray without ceasing. We know that we want to change. And we can say it like this.

[4:08] We want to be changed. We want to arrive at what change would look like in our lives. But we really, really, really do not want the process of change, the conflict, and the pain that has to be there to actually get to the changed person that we're reading about here.

[4:25] We want to finish the race and be at the finish line. We do not want the huffing and puffing that comes with running the 800 meter, you know. We want to arrive at St. Columbus.

[4:37] We don't want the hill, right? We want to already be there, but the difficulty is that it's not automatic. So when you become a Christian, it's very possible to stay a spiritual infant.

[4:51] And it's not automatic to grow. Growth requires conflict, pursuit, pain, work, a race that you have to endure. And so here in this chapter, back in chapter 4, verse 1, he said, Walk in a manner worthy of the calling of redemption.

[5:08] You've got everything in Christ. Now walk like it. Live like it. And if you look at our passage, chapter 4, verse 17, he says, Now you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do.

[5:20] So he started the chapter by saying, walk, live a certain way like you're redeemed. Now he's giving you the negative side. That means don't walk like the Gentiles do. And I'll get into what that means in just a moment.

[5:34] But here the word walk in the Hebrew mind, the Old Testament, and then now in the New Testament mind, walk means that your outer life is putting on display the reality of what's going on inside.

[5:46] So walk in a manner worthy of the calling, meaning let your outer life actually look like the truth of your spiritual life, your inner life. So if you've been redeemed, your outer life needs to match the reality of what God has said about you, your inner life.

[6:00] It's a call to change. I heard somebody this week say something very cliche, but I think probably pretty true, and that's life is 90% attitude, 10% circumstance.

[6:14] All right? In Pauline theology terms, life is 90% inner life, your spiritual life on the inside, 10% what's actually going on in your life on the outside.

[6:25] And so we can look and say, I want to put away bitterness because bitterness is zapping my joy. 90% what's going on in the heart, right? How can we do it? How can we live the redeemed life?

[6:38] How can we change? Let me give you three principles here. How do I get the attitude of Jesus himself into my heart? Three things Paul tells you to do, three principles.

[6:48] Number one, real change begins with deciding to become a Christian. Real change begins by conversion, deciding to follow Jesus, deciding to actually become a Christian.

[7:02] And so in our passage, Paul, from verse 17 to 19, he is showing us how deep the problem really runs in us, how deep the disease goes into our souls here.

[7:16] It's hard. This is not an easy text. It's hard to admit the truth of what he writes about here. And he's talking here about how big our need to change really is. And so in verse 17, you can see that he says, don't walk any longer as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds.

[7:33] So when he says, don't walk, don't live like a Gentile, he's not primarily here talking about ethnicity. We know that because he's talking to Gentiles.

[7:45] So he's not saying, Gentile, don't be Gentile. He's not talking about ethnicity. What's he saying? His word for Gentile is a word for allowing the normal patterns of the culture around you to dictate your world and life view, to dictate your worldview and the way you live.

[8:03] So Gentile here means for him pagan, which is not a pejorative term. It's just a term that describes anyone in the ancient world and even today who's not willing yet to follow the true God and is chasing after all the other little gods in life.

[8:18] That's what Gentile means. So it's to be wrapped up in something like idolatry. We call idolatry in the Bible. And here in verse 17 and 18, just notice how he describes it.

[8:29] He uses the term, mind is darkened. Your understanding is clouded. He says the Gentile mind, worshiping anything else but the true God is ignorance.

[8:42] That's the word he used. Now, you see, he uses all these cognition terms, these mental terms. And then right after that, he says it all happens because of a hard heart.

[8:54] Now, this is what Paul is saying. In our modern world, we think of people as bifurcated between heads and hearts. There are thinkers and there are feelers.

[9:06] And Paul is picking up on what the Old Testament says about the human being. And he says, look, it is your heart that thinks and it is your mind that feels. In other words, there is no gap in the way God made us.

[9:21] There can't be a gap. There shouldn't be a gap. Your affections, what you love determines your logic. What you love affects your mind and how you think about the world around you.

[9:34] That's what he's talking about. And so he's saying to us that when we refuse, when we're born into this world as sinners, we refuse to believe in God. And that's a heart posture. And that heart posture produces thoughts, logic that says, well, God doesn't exist.

[9:50] He's saying the condition of your heart is what produces the way you think about God. He's saying the heart is far more important. Your loves are far more important than the way you think. It's not an issue of the mind but of the heart.

[10:02] And so in verse 17, here's the so what. He says, that means that the way we're all born into this world, our hearts are angry at God.

[10:13] We're conditioned against God. We don't want to be saved by God. We don't want God at all. And so we go and create religion of all kinds. We worship all sorts of stuff. He talks about greed, love of money.

[10:25] He talks about the love of sex. He talks about the love of even in that ancient day, the temple of Artemis going and worshiping gods of all kinds. Right? This is our natural condition. And he says that means futility, verse 17.

[10:40] So what is this word futility? It's like if you've read the Old Testament at all, the book of Ecclesiastes, this word for vapor or emptiness in the book of Ecclesiastes. And he's saying life apart from the true God, a hard heart against the true God, which is our natural condition as human beings, is a life apart from God and therefore futile.

[11:02] So to put it in more modern terminology, he's saying that when you don't yet see the reality of the true God who made you and who loves you and who wants to save you, you're living a life that ultimately is going to end in emptiness or is temporary.

[11:17] So think about it. I know it's a big claim. It's a hard claim. It's a heavy claim. But think about it. He's saying if you live a life and trying to pump your life with meaning and you look to relationships for that, love, you could have the absolute best marriage.

[11:33] But it's going to end. And one of you is going to have to bury the other. And we know that breakups happen all the time and they're miserable. Right?

[11:43] And you could make your life primarily about not relationship but your career and your successes and becoming the best possible achiever you could be.

[11:54] But you know that that's going to end. It's not going to last. And he's saying the life apart from the true God is futility. It ends up empty, meaningless. It doesn't last. In other words, he's saying that you need to see the reality of the true God in order to have lasting hope beyond the mere temporary in this life.

[12:12] And so that means, thirdly, in this first point, he's telling us first. First principle. Here it is. Real change begins with a decision.

[12:24] It begins with a decision. It begins with the decision, I want to follow Christ. I want to believe in the true God. I want to have my mind changed, my heart changed from the inside out. So let me show you just one little thing in verse 21 and 22.

[12:37] He uses some really specific language. He says in verse 21, assuming that you've heard about him. Now, there are lots of good translations.

[12:49] And this is a very good translation. But one thing the translators have done is they've added some words all throughout this passage. And one of the words they added was, you've heard about him.

[13:00] But the original Greek text actually says, you heard him. And then if you move on from there, it says in verse 22, put off your old self. Now it's time.

[13:11] Put off your old self. Be changed. But the original Greek text actually says, having put off your old self. And then having put on the new self. And then be renewed.

[13:22] All right? So why does that matter? Why does that grammar matter? And the reason it matters is because it's saying that to become a Christian is about something that happens to you.

[13:34] Having had your old self put off. He's saying that becoming a Christian is like taking off, having somebody take dirty, nasty clothes off of you and putting brand new clothing on you.

[13:46] He's saying in the first instance, it's about not just hearing about Christ, but hearing Christ. He's saying that you know that you're becoming a Christian or you have become a Christian when you can say, I heard the voice of Jesus say, come unto me and rest.

[14:02] And all the time in a city like ours, in a church like ours, where we have lots of people, maybe even today coming, exploring Christianity. I'll talk.

[14:12] I've been able to have coffee with some of you. And we talk about saying, you know, I didn't used to believe in God at all. Now I'm starting to believe in God. But I just don't know what to do next.

[14:25] And one of the things Paul says is, look, what's happening to you is the Holy Spirit's working in your life. You are having these things done to you. And at the same time, Paul says here, so be renewed, meaning make a decision.

[14:41] Say, I believe, Lord, help my unbelief. Take a step. Say, I don't understand all the questions. There's so much I don't know, but I will take a step and say, I believe, Lord, help my unbelief.

[14:53] So Paul is telling us here, the first step, the first principle in real change means become a Christian. Make a decision. And you know that in that, the Holy Spirit is at work in your life.

[15:06] And at the same time, in the horizontal, you are taking a step of faith towards Christ. You are taking a step to follow Jesus. What does that look like? It looks like resting.

[15:17] Resting in Jesus' substitutionary sacrifice for you on the cross. Martin Lloyd-Jones put it really well. I can't improve upon this. Martin Lloyd-Jones used to say that when he would meet with somebody, he would talk to them about Jesus, about the gospel, about becoming a Christian.

[15:35] And this is what he writes in his book on spiritual depression. He said, to make it quite practical, I have a very simple test. After I've explained the way of Christ to somebody, I say, now, are you ready to say you're a Christian?

[15:50] And they hesitate. And they say, and then I say, what's the matter? Why are you hesitating? And so often people say, I just don't feel like I'm good enough yet.

[16:01] I don't think I'm ready to say I'm a Christian. I'm just not good enough. And he says, he writes, here's the problem. They are still thinking, maybe you're today still thinking in terms of yourself.

[16:15] And it's a thought process, he writes, where you think, I have to do it. And it sounds very modest to say, well, I just don't think I'm good enough. But it's a very denial of the Christian faith.

[16:26] The very essence of the Christian faith is to say, he is good enough. He is good enough. And I rest in him.

[16:38] As long as you go on thinking about yourself like that and you say, I'm not good enough. Oh, I'm not good enough. You're denying God. You're denying the gospel. You're denying the very essence of the faith.

[16:49] And you will never ultimately be happy. You have not yet changed. Not from the inside out. But you think you're better at times. Look, you'll be, this is what will happen. You'll waffle. You'll be better at times.

[17:00] You'll be worse at times. Your faith will be okay on Sundays. But on Mondays, your faith will go back down to 40%. Right? And if you're resting in yourself and not in him, you've not yet seen what it means to decide to follow Jesus.

[17:14] How can I put it plainly? He writes, it doesn't matter if you have, he says, it does not matter if you have almost entered into the depths of hell itself. It does not matter if you are guilty of murder as well as every other vile sin.

[17:28] It does not matter from the standpoint of being justified before God. Not at all. You are more hopeless than you can ever imagine. And you are more loved than you can ever know.

[17:40] And real change starts with saying, I have decided to follow Jesus. No turning back. Second principle. That was our longest one. Second principle. When you become a Christian, then, when you've become a Christian, when you've decided to follow Jesus, change requires being honest about the struggle with your sin, the struggle with who you still are, how deep the disease goes.

[18:05] Now, that's really the heartbeat of what Paul's talking about here. So, in verse 20, he's been talking about the Gentile lifestyle, chasing after every little god in this life.

[18:16] And he says, but that is not how you learned Christ. And why does he say something like that? If you jump down to verses 25 to 32, we won't look at this in any detail.

[18:27] But he has this long list of sins and then how to live a redeemed life positively. And you can just scan your eyes across it and see. He talks about the life that you lived before, the life that the Ephesians lived before.

[18:41] He says it's full of telling lies, stealing, raging anger, discouraging people, discouraging words, slander, bitterness, and violence.

[18:53] And he said, that was your life, but that is not how you learned Christ. Now, why is he saying this to them? If they are Christians, and if he said, that was you before, but that's not you today, why is he saying it?

[19:08] Why is he repeating the list? Why? It's scary. It's comforting. He's repeating the list because he's acknowledging the fact that these Ephesian Christians are still doing all this stuff.

[19:21] They're still walking through this list. And some of them were thieves. That was their day job before they came to Jesus. And they're still stealing.

[19:31] And he's saying, look, what he's acknowledging is what we call the justification-sanctification gap. And the justification-sanctification gap says that you can, it is very true, Christian friends in the room, God can look at you and say, redeemed, forgiven, loved from before the foundation of the earth, mercy upon mercy, and you can stay a baby Christian still stuck in the same sin patterns for a long, long time that you had before you became a Christian.

[20:06] So justification, God's pronouncement over you that you're forgiven forever. Remember, sanctification is calling to change and to grow in the light of that, to be redeemed. And he's calling us and saying, let's be honest about the gap and the reality of our struggle between the two to actually become who we really are in Christ.

[20:25] Think about marriage. You can come here and you can get married. And on the day of your wedding, somebody, the minister, officiates your wedding and they say, I now pronounce you husband and wife.

[20:38] And in that moment, you are married. Legally, you have a status, a standing before God. And men, you're legally married. And that does not necessarily mean that you go and grow into a great, great marriage, right?

[20:53] You can be justified and yet not growing in sanctification. You can be married and not having a wonderful marriage because you're not growing into that relationship. And in the same way, he's talking here about that reality, that gap.

[21:06] And he uses this word in verse 19 to talk about life before Christ and even life after Christ, the word callous. And in the Greek text, it's this word poros, which means a bony, a formation of a bone that isn't supposed to be there.

[21:28] So I think medical people in the room, we call these bone spurs. Yeah, I think. I'm getting no heads, so I assume that's probably wrong. But bone spurs, that's the word he uses for callous.

[21:41] And he's saying even as a Christian, you can get a bone spur on your heart, a callousness, where when you decide to give in to temptation over and over again, instead of resist it, over time, the spurs start to grow and you can stop feeling guilt.

[22:02] You can stop feeling shame in your life. You can stop feeling affection for Jesus. Have you ever been there? You don't have affection. And he's saying even as a Christian, there's a callousness that can grow in our lives over and over again.

[22:17] And that is why Martin Luther called it being a justified sinner. He put those two in the Reformation. We're justified yet struggling. Sinners moving forward.

[22:28] Let me just give you one example, one other example. Paul lists bitterness at the end of the passage as one way that the Ephesians were struggling. Bitter before they came to faith, bitter with somebody in their lives after they came to faith.

[22:42] What is bitterness? Bitter, bitterness is the lie, the lie in the bottom of our hearts that says, I have the right to be perpetually offended. And we can get there over time through callousness.

[22:56] So sometimes in life we have somebody do something terrible to us and we don't forgive them. And that becomes a harder and harder and harder heart over time.

[23:09] And then we become embittered people where we live in a situation where we have the right to always be offended and angry and upset with everything that goes wrong in life. And you can be a Christian and be bitter and have a neighbor who's not a Christian, who's not bitter, and they seem to have more outward joy than you do.

[23:28] And it's because bitterness is zapping your soul and sucking away your joy from life, right? And he's saying you've got to look at the justification-sanctification gap in your life and be honest about it.

[23:40] Just give you, finish this point and say at the very end of this passage, verses 31 and 32, you can see he just gives you a little snapshot on the difference between the dark life and the life that's full of light.

[23:52] Here's the life that's struggling and still walking in a bit of darkness. Bitterness, wrath, verse 31. Bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor. Clamor is shouting.

[24:06] So clamor is when you are in a fight with somebody and you come to a place of screaming. That's the word clamor. Slander. And then put all that away. Verse 32. Here's the life that's being changed.

[24:18] Kindness, soft, tender heart, forgiving one another as you've been forgiven in Christ. He says there's the difference. Here's the good news.

[24:30] The good news in the midst of all this. Your forgiveness is not conditioned by your growth. Your growth, your ability to beat malice and slander and clamor is not the condition and the ground upon which you could be forgiven.

[24:51] Christ comes into your life and redeems you and forgives you as far as the east is from the west and says, now go and be changed. Religion says be changed. Get past all this mess.

[25:01] Stop stealing. And maybe God will love you. The gospel says God loves you more than you can ever know. So now go and be changed.

[25:14] It's good news. It's beautiful news. And go and be changed. Go and live the redeemed life. Look at the justification, sanctification gap in your life and assess it and ask, where have I not grown in my life?

[25:26] How do you get started on that? C.S. Lewis puts it like this. He says in Mere Christianity, we fallen humans are not simply imperfect creatures who need improvement.

[25:38] We are rebels who must lay down our arms. The process of surrender is what Christians call repentance. So how can you get started on this today?

[25:50] Repentance. And this is how he describes it. Now repentance is not fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie.

[26:01] It means unlearning all the self-conceit, all the pride, all the self-will that we have been training ourselves up in for years. It means killing a part of yourself.

[26:14] Undergoing a kind of death in order to come out the other side resurrected. So let me finish with this. Let me give you four very quick practical things that Paul, I think, at least implies of how change can really happen for you today, this week, how you can take a step.

[26:33] Number one, in verse 20 and 21, he says, You've learned Christ. You've heard Christ. You were taught Christ. You'll hear in that all three school verbs.

[26:46] Going to school. School terminology. You heard him from the teacher. You learned him in the classroom. You were taught him. It was modeled for you. He's saying, he's giving us these school metaphors and saying you've got to live the Christian life if you want to grow.

[27:01] You've got to go to the school of Jesus. You've got to go to the school of Christ and be a student. There's a, let me say it like this. He says, this is not the way you were taught Christ.

[27:15] There's a difference in being taught something and told something. Right? So you can be told. You might become a Christian. You might be a new Christian. And you're told, go and pray. Go and read your Bible.

[27:26] But there's a big difference between being told to go do it from here every week and then being taught to do it. And you know the difference. The difference is modeling.

[27:37] The difference is apprenticeship. The difference is walking closely with somebody hand in hand. And in first order here, he's saying you've got to come to the school of Christ and let Christ, your Savior, Redeemer, be your model and teacher.

[27:51] But he's also saying, remember, this is not the way you were taught Christ. Meaning remember how I, Paul, modeled Christianity for you and how to live, how to grow, how to get past and beat some of these sins we've been looking at.

[28:05] And so here's the first thing. We all need somebody in our lives that is a little further along in the faith that will walk alongside us very closely and disciple us into how to walk the Christian life.

[28:20] So no matter how mature you are in the room, no matter if you're ordained in the room, me, all of us, we need somebody that's more mature in the faith in our lives, walking alongside us and modeling for us and helping us and praying with us and showing us, learning Christ as we imitate them.

[28:39] Do you have that person? It's nearly impossible for a church, we're not a huge church, but even a church our size, to practically make that happen for everybody.

[28:51] And instead, it's got to be something that every Christian in the room pursues and seeks after. Number two, very quickly, lasting formation also, secondly, requires then pursuit, effort, but most importantly, sitting at the feet of the Master, abiding in Christ.

[29:10] So let me say it like this. Paul says, this is not the way you learn Christ. You heard him, you were taught him. And I think one of the things he's telling us here is to really, really grow, you've got to abide in his presence.

[29:27] What I mean by that is some other writers have called it practicing the presence of God, which is a strange way to put it. But it's saying that you've got to sit, take a minute, take 10 minutes, take five minutes every day, and meditate in prayer on Jesus.

[29:45] And sit with him. And read a bit about him. And then go to him. And just rest in who he is and how much he loves you. Abiding in his presence every single day.

[29:57] You've got to sit with him in prayer is what Paul, I think, is telling us to do here. And doing that, that abiding presence is pulling up the weeds of the heart all the time.

[30:09] Thirdly, enduring formation. Real change in your life requires denying your broken desires. Okay, so we've got this list in verses 25 to 32. He says, before you were a Christian, Ephesians, you were stealing.

[30:24] You were constantly lying, slandering, gossip, discouraging people. People would get angry at you. You would respond even in violence, wrath sometimes. You would clamor. You would scream at people.

[30:36] And there's a world of theology here about who we are and what God can do in your life. And all the ways Paul talks about how the Spirit can change you. But every child in kids' church today could come up with us and read that list and know that sometimes you've just got to run away from your sin.

[30:59] You've just got to run away from temptation. You know, what does Paul do? He says, look, some of you in the congregation, you were thieves, professional thieves in Ephesus before. Don't steal anymore.

[31:10] That's what he says. You were constantly lying. And he says, just fight, fight, fight to put it away. Sometimes you've just got to run from the temptation, the sins that are coming back up and over and over again.

[31:24] And when you do, you find new levels of victory all the time. And when you don't, you find new levels of callousness. So you can never stay where you are.

[31:34] You have to go in one of the two directions. He's saying sometimes you've just got to run away from the temptation that keeps coming up in your life. And then lastly, much more importantly than that, this all depends at the end of the day.

[31:47] Spiritual formation, real change, lasting change in your life depends on a change of motivation. I heard this, saw this in another writer this week. But they were writing about this in the light of Christian spiritual change.

[32:01] They talked about the way that if you're a parent in the room or if you've spent a lot of time helping in kids' church or anywhere else in your life, camp, you know that when you're around kids, when you're around children, a lot of times you are, you're concerned about their formation.

[32:18] You want them to change, right? And maybe the ways that we talk about change to our kids so often is really down to a couple things. One is we say, stop stealing.

[32:30] Stop lying all the time. Stop doing this or that. Why? And they say, why? And you say, because one day you're going to go to jail, right? In other words, consequences is one of the reasons we say is the motivation to change.

[32:44] There will be consequences. The other reason we often give our kids is because we say, we are not a family that does that. We are not, you are not going to be an adult, a person one day that lives this kind of a life.

[32:58] And so we've got to put an end to this right now. Now, those are not totally wrong yet. But when we do it like that, what we're saying is it's all about your reputation management.

[33:12] It's all about you at the end of the day. What is everybody going to think about you one day? What if you end up in the worst possible circumstance one day? And the reason that that often doesn't work is because it can't last.

[33:25] You see, motivation, reputation management as a motivation or consequence management as a motivation will never last for us. Because what happens when nobody is around to see, when there are going to be no consequences, on the one hand, there's going to be no bad circumstances coming from this action.

[33:46] When you're all by yourself and there's nobody else around, that motivation does not work, right? You still go back to the things you desire and the things that you want over and over again. The same thing can happen in the Christian life when we say the motivation is all about me and what everybody else thinks about me.

[34:02] And I've become a Christian. Now I've got to be a good Christian. I want everybody to know I'm a good Christian. And if you're thinking like that, you're turning it all back to yourself. And it will never last.

[34:13] It will never work. It will never last. And instead what will happen is you'll look at the justification, sanctification gap in your life and you will get upset, angry, maybe even self-hatred.

[34:26] Because you'll say, I am not, why am I still fighting with this? I should be better. I should be different. I shouldn't still struggle with this. And you'll start to hate yourself for it.

[34:38] And then what will you do? You'll start to say, I must not be a Christian. And you'll lose all assurance. Paul's telling us here, the only motivation that really works for deep change is to say, when I'm facing the temptation to steal, lie, clamor, slander, discourage, gossip, the glory of God is at stake in this moment.

[35:01] That's the motivation that actually can work. Is to say, Jesus Christ, honor and glory. Me upholding him as savior, redeemer.

[35:12] That's what's at stake here. It's not about my reputation. It's not about my glory. It's not about me getting out of bad consequences. The only thing that can last for you, real motivation, is when you say the glory of God is what I care about.

[35:26] Our prayer as we pray now is, Lord, make your glory the food that we want to eat, the drink that we want to drink.

[35:37] Make it our great motivation. Let us pray. Father, we pray now that we would care far more about your glory when we face temptation than what people think about us and what we think about ourselves even.

[35:52] And that we would rest in the redeemer's love. Lord, I pray for weak and weary Christians today that are struggling to grow. And I pray that you would set your love upon them right now in this hymn, He Will Hold Me Fast.

[36:05] Tell them that promise, Lord. Tell me that promise, all of us. I pray, Holy Spirit, in this song, you would come and meet with folks who are wrestling with Christianity. And that you would show them that the gospel is that you've loved them way before.

[36:20] And not at all, not at all in any way. It is improve yourself if you're going to get your love, O God. So we pray that the Holy Spirit will work in these ways now. We pray it in Christ's name. Amen.