Thank you so much for that reading. I do hope that you’ve got the text with you. Perhaps you’ve got your bible with you, if not permission to get your phone out. Should we pray as we come to God’s word, lord our God, I pray that you would open the eyes of our hearts, that we might see wonderful things in your law and come to love you and serve you more. Amen. Well, it is a happy new year, isn’t it? It feels strange to me that this is the new year. The first Sunday of the new year. But it is. Happy epiphany, everyone. I know. Everyone’s probably enjoying epiphany, aren’t they? Everyone knew it was epiphany, didn’t they? Got your epiphany cake ready? I don’t know what an epiphany cake is. If there is such a thing, please let me know and I’ll pass it on to my wife. Anyway, we might have resolutions at this time of year. We do, don’t we? And a quick scan of the magazine racks shows us that resolution time is a time to be monetized. Women’s health magazine tells you get fit 28 days. So if you ever spent more than 28 days, go down, get yourself down to co op, get yourself women’s health. You’ll be fit in 28 days. Great promises, other things. Psychologies magazine. Discover your mantra. If you don’t know what your mantra is, maybe that should be your New Year’s resolution. Home building and renovating magazine will help you build a healthy home. Can’t ask fairer than that. There’s all sorts of great things in magazines to help us with resolutions, to really sort our lives out. And in this text in Ephesians, Paul is really talking to us about being renewed, being new, I guess, sorting our lives out in some ways. But what he doesn’t offer us tonight, what he doesn’t give us, is 28 days to a karmer more spiritual, you. That’s not what Paul gives us. Unfortunately, life is just a little bit too complicated for that. But what he does give us is an insight, an understanding of just the dynamics of spiritual life. How does spiritual life work? What happens after I get saved? How do you make progress? Do I make progress? All of these sorts of questions, he’s going to raise these and he’s going to talk to us about them. And it’s really important, right from the off, that we understand the difference between two things. And they both have nice big words attached to them, as so many things do. Justification and sanctification. Justification is what we tend to think of as being saved. That’s when God says, because of Jesus, I see you as just, okay. It’s our declared righteousness where God says, even though you’re not all that, I’m going to count you like you are. I’m going to count you as if you’re perfect, even though you’re not. That’s justification. It’s a great thing. It doesn’t belong to us, belongs to Christ. It’s like we’re putting on someone else’s clothes. We put on his justification. Despite what we are, God declares us righteous. Sanctification mustn’t be confused with that. Sanctification means growing in righteousness. So in other words, this is when we become more godly, we become more like Christ. Not just that we’ve been declared righteous because of who he is, but we actually become righteous ourselves. We actually do good. That’s sanctification. And we grow in this. We mustn’t confuse it. We mustn’t confuse it. Think of it like this. If you’re watching a football team, and I’m sorry, the only football team I can ever think of, who the players are, involves, like, David Beckham. Emerick Cantonar so if you’re too old for that, if you’re too young for that, sorry. Because that’s pretty old, isn’t it, that team, then, I don’t know, maybe watch the David Beckham biopic on Netflix and you’ll soon be caught up. But anyway, there was this moment where David Beckham scores a goal from the halfway line. He kicks it, okay? And I supported Manu at the time. Don’t judge me. But there I was, we’ve won. Which is obviously a bit of a ridiculous thing to say, isn’t it? I actually did nothing. I was just eating crisps, watching David Beckham kick the thing, but he scored it. I’m like, we’ve won. We’ve won. This is what justification is. Like, jesus takes it all on the cross and we’re like, we’ve won. I’m great. I’m not really. I’m just eating crisps on the sofa. But yes, he did it. He’s my champion. Sanctification is when you’re like, oh, David Beckham was so good. I really want to try and score a goal from halfway. So you go out and then you go and have a kick around until you get a little bit better. A little bit better, a little bit better. Just because you think it’s so great. Justification and sanctification, don’t confuse those two things. Paul is talking about sanctification in here. See the beginning of ephesians in chapters one to three. He’s talked all about what God has done for us. In Ephesians one, he starts right back from before the creation of the world. He says, actually, before the whole of time, before even time was created, let alone you, before you’d done anything, I decided to save you. In Jesus, I elected you. I chose you before you even existed, before even the world existed. And he goes on talking about how wonderful this is for three chapters. And then in chapters four to six, he turns around and says, okay, well, that’s great. You’ve been saved. Now what we’re going to talk about life as a Christian, life after being saved, what comes next? That’s kind of how Paul goes, well, let’s look at the first bit, verses 17 to 19. Paul talks about actually what life was like before we knew Jesus. And he says, life with Jesus is no longer a life of ignorance. Whereas actually before him it was, before him it was. He says, verse 17, if you’re there with me, he says this, I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live, as the gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. In the futility of their thinking. Now, you might be thinking, okay, I’m not sure. Futility is quite a dense sort of a phrase, isn’t it? Futility of thinking. Thinking that’s futile. Something being futile means it’s pointless. It will never get to the end. It just seems like you’re spinning your wheels. You’re never sort of getting to the place you’re going to. You might think of the beginning of ecclesiastes where Solomon says, meaningless, meaningless. Everything is meaningless. Or futility. Futility. Everything is futile because it seems like you just do stuff. You do stuff and you’re never getting anywhere. He says, well, before Jesus, actually, that’s what all thinking is like. All thinking is futile. It never reaches its goal. Why? Verse 18. They’re darkened in their understanding. Before we knew Christ, we were darkened in our understanding, separated from the life of God. The idea is this, that actually, without knowing, no, we had no ability to really understand things as they really were. We couldn’t see reality as it was. It could stare us in the face, but we just couldn’t see it. Our understanding was, know if you block out Jesus and you try to understand the world without him, it’s a little bit like saying, okay, what we’re going to do is we’re going to ignore gravity. We’re just going to say, that’s not a thing. Right? We’ll bracket that out. That’s not an answer. I’m going to drop this book and we’ll try and make explanations for why it falls on the floor. Okay? Doesn’t matter how clever you are, your answer is going to be wrong, isn’t it? You can’t just bracket out gravity and then be like, let’s explain everything without it. I mean, I might come up with invisible fairies are pulling my book to the floor, but if I bracket out a portion of reality, I’m never going to understand it how it is, am I? He says, well, actually, look, when you are without Christ in the world, you’re trying to understand life and you’re trying to understand everything without Jesus. It doesn’t make sense because you bracketed out the most important thing. You may as well get a pair of shears from the shop and try and cut your hair with it. It’s a perfectly good tool, but it’s just not the thing for the job. You can’t understand it. Life doesn’t make sense without Christ. And it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because in verse 18, he says, he talks about ignorance, and he talks about hardening of hearts. It’s not actually that without Christ, we were all just knowingly doing this. There was an element of ignorance. We just didn’t know because the sense wasn’t there. Our mind wasn’t able to see things as they really were. My family actually loves watching the bake off. Does anyone like watching Bake off here? They love that. Christmas Bake off was a step too far for me. I did say, it’s just so boring, Eliana. Boring for you, daddy. But anyway, some people love it. Love it. They make their cakes, don’t they? They do their bakes and they explain it really nicely and they say, oh, yes, I’m going to make such and such. And you think, oh, goodness, okay. And you can see some things about how successful the bake was, can’t you? You see? Okay, great. I see you have done twelve shoe buns that are of equal size. Well done, well done. But then Paul eats it and says something like, I’m not eating that. And it’s raw. And you’re not really sure what he means. I don’t know. He could say, it’s too sweet. I don’t understand what that means, really. I mean, when you’re eating a cake, it’s sweet, isn’t it? So I’m never quite sure what that comment means. If someone can explain after. But you don’t really know what it tastes like. There’s no possible way, is there, for you really to do it. And yet we sit on our safest passing judgement. Yes, yes. That was a really rubbish bake. I’m disappointed in them. You haven’t tasted it, have absolutely no idea what it tastes like, do you? You’re making a decision based on something you just don’t know because you haven’t tasted it. Doesn’t matter how much time we spend explaining what a cake is like, until you bite into it, you don’t really know anything about it, do you? Same thing with Jesus. You can wax lyrical all you like, being as clever as you like, but until you know Jesus, you don’t know him. You don’t know him. There’s like, a new sense we get when we’re saved and our minds are no longer darkened. And what this means for us is that the christian life is really a total change. It’s a new kind of understanding. We understand the world in a whole new way. It’s not just like a better level. It’s not like, oh, I’m just going to be a slightly more moral person, actually. With Christ, everything is different. It’s different in kind. And it also means that Jesus is at the foundation of everything. He’s not something that goes on top. He’s not the icing on the cake. Since we were thinking about cakes, he doesn’t just go on the top, he goes at the bottom. He’s the foundation of it. And so we need to ask God to open our eyes if we don’t know him, because actually, no amount of talking and reasoning really makes any difference, does it? No amount of explaining what a cake is like can let me taste it. So we need to meet Christ. And this is really where Paul goes on. In verse 20, we see that he moves to his next section and he starts to talk about what it was like when you met Jesus. It’s knowing him. Verse 20. 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. Look at that phrase with me. You heard about Christ? You heard of him. It says, verse 21. You heard of him. It’s a funny thing, actually, because it doesn’t really quite say that. The translators have wrestled with this verse, and they’ve come out with this because it makes a lot more sense, really. What Paul just says is, you’ve heard Christ. I mean, that’s not a totally random thing to say. If you hear someone moving downstairs and it turns out to be your dog ripping up your new toys, you say, I heard the dog. That’s great. But the Ephesians have heard Christ. Well, what does that mean? Because they never met Christ. So the translators think, well, I don’t really understand what that means, but this is what Paul says. He’s actually saying, you heard Christ. And that’s really significant because what it means is that when the gospel was preached to them, it wasn’t just a bunch of words that hit their hardened understanding. When the Gospel was preached to them, they actually met Jesus. The preaching of the gospel is an actual encounter with the living Lord Jesus. You heard Christ, he said, and that hearing and actually meeting the real person was just when someone was proclaiming the gospel. So you met him. And that’s important because the encounter is important. You see, the counter is important because the encounter softens the heart. It’s like tasting the cake. You suddenly know Jesus and he makes sense because you encounter him not just hearing stuff about him, but meeting him. Now, this is important because for Jesus to be the foundation means that being pro christian values without Jesus doesn’t really make any sense. Yeah, christian values are good, but without Christ, they don’t really make sense. They don’t make sense because they lose their aim. It’s still futile. We need Jesus. We need Jesus. And when we encounter Jesus, everything changes. It’s like a light turns on. That’s why the Bible so often know my eyes have been opened or I’ve seen the light, this sort of thing. Why Paul has scales fall from his eyes when he meets Jesus on the Damascus road. It used to be the case that cigarettes were healthy. I mean, obviously not in reality, but it used to be thought that way, didn’t it? If you smoke more, it’s going to be great for you because you keep coughing up all the bad stuff. So just smoke some more. Oh, you’re not coughing up enough. Okay, have a few more cigarettes, you’ll cough up all of that bad stuff. In fact, to such an extent that, I don’t know if you know this, but the cigarettes, camel cigarettes used to have a strap line. More doctors smoke camels than any other cigarettes. What a great line. I mean, it could still be true, to be fair, but what a ridiculous thing it seems to us now. But people just didn’t know, did they? You smoke away, get rid of that bad stuff. But of course, as soon as someone says, actually, it’s making the bad stuff like, oh, oops, it’s a bit awkward. Spent loads of money. It’s been really bad for me. Okay, we better stop because there’s been a total change, hasn’t there? Some new information has come that’s changed everything. That’s what it’s like meeting Christ. You’re going along in life thinking it’s perfectly fine, but essentially smoking a cigarette to cough up the bad stuff. You meet Jesus and the whole of life turns around, and it’s like, oh, yeah, this changes everything. I get that we’re going to put off the old self, and it’s only the truth that makes us stop, isn’t it? It’s only the truth that makes us stop. But when our minds are darkened, they’re not set on Christ. They’re not. So we want to encounter him and know the truth. Well, the final thing is that he turns to talk about growing in grace, and we won’t go through. This is from verse 25. You see that he’s moving into a new thought where he says, therefore. It’s always a great marker, isn’t it? Therefore. Therefore. Given that there was a time when our minds were darkened, when we didn’t know the truth, we couldn’t see reality as it really was. Now you’ve had an encounter with Christ, you know, the risen Lord Jesus, therefore, I’m going to give you all of these things, a bunch of commands, therefore. And he does this, doesn’t he? Gives loads of commands. He says, verse 26, in your anger, do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you’re still angry. Do not give the devil a foothold, et cetera, et cetera. He gives a bunch of commands to us, again, not to make us right with Jesus, not our justification. That’s already happened. That’s already happened. You’re not even listening to these words. If we don’t know Jesus, but given you now know him, here are the commands. And you see, we need these commands to teach us, because actually there was ignorance. We saw that at the beginning. He talks about ignorance and hardness of heart, that actually, lots of the time things are done wrong just through not knowing. People do all sorts of stuff, all sorts of time, and they just don’t know. Just like the person smoking the cigarettes who’s killing themselves before they knew. But actually, now you know Christ, let me tell you how it’s going to be to live, how it’s right to live and it’s best. And so he teaches and he exhorts, and we get all of these commands. But again, I don’t know if I said this is not justification. You’re already right with God, right? This is the growth in grace in Christ. And there’s really something really important that I want to draw out from all of these commands. And it’s this, that there is a struggle in the christian life. There is a struggle. There’s a wrestling in the christian life. If it were the case that Jesus came and everything was just immediately sorted, you were never going to wrestle with sin again. You were immediately perfect in yourself. There’d be no need for commands, would they? We don’t write a bunch of commands for things we’re never going to do. You don’t see that. It’s even hard to imagine an example of a command you might give for something you never do. But we do need these, because life is a struggle, because putting off the old self is a battle. We see this in verse 27 where he says, do not give the devil a foothold. Don’t give Satan a foothold. Well, he wouldn’t say that, would he? If Satan wasn’t going to get a know, if there was no chance of that, you wouldn’t just say it out of. If Satan wants us to keep our old self, he wants us to keep our old habits and our old lives. He absolutely loves it. So he baits the hook and he says, oh, you know, that bit of the old self was really good, wasn’t it? That stuff in church about being all nice. They’re just killjoys. You’re really going to enjoy this little bit of sin. Go for it. That is the struggle in life where Satan tries to get that foothold, but he’s not to get it. Why? Because it’s not really great. Sin is deceitful. Sin is like someone coming to you and saying, here’s this arsenic flavour cake. It’s delicious. I really suggest you try know. It’s not a good idea, is it? But that’s what sin is like, right, go on, give it a go. It’s really not good. All of this. Verse 30, so that we don’t grieve the Holy Spirit, with whom you are sealed for the day of redemption. The Holy Spirit has sealed us. That means he’s put his stamp on. Know you’re going to be there at the pearly gates. That’s kind of what’s going on. That doesn’t depend on all of this stuff. But now that you know that sin is deceitful, now you know that sin is an arsenic flavoured cake, that it’s a cigarette, don’t eat it, don’t smoke it, because you’re going to be sealed for that day of redemption, because there’s a day coming when all things will be finally sorted, where that old self will finally be put off. Now, this might be od to us, because we tend to think of that as happening in the past, don’t we? Like that. It was finished at the cross and it was. Of course Jesus said it was finished, isn’t it. But what Paul’s talking about here is actually that there’s a wrestling. There’s a struggle all the way till the end, until Jesus comes back again. We should expect this struggle. This struggle is actually much more like the realistic quitting of smoking, isn’t it? Because it’s not as if you just find out the truth and go, yeah, okay, done. Put that away. Some people try. Some people don’t even bother. Some people try and try and try again. But this is just what life is like in sin. You try to put off the old self, it comes niggling back. Try to put it off again, and the devil gets a foothold. But there’s a struggle. Persevere, because it’s the good life. Following Christ is the good life. And so really, I want us to finish with two applications, really, that it could be that for some of us, it challenges us, that actually we tended to really just think, well, since I’m justified by Christ and he’s done everything for me, then I can just do whatever I wish. It doesn’t really matter. I said the prayer once, and that’s actually, paul says, no, that’s ridiculous, because the good life is following Christ. The good life is putting off the old self. Let’s live our best lives, he says. Maybe some of us need to take up that challenge. For others of us, we might be thinking, do you know what? I’ve come to church for so many years, and I’ve tried so hard to put off the old self. And how can it be that I’m still failing? How can it be that the old self still asserts himself, that Satan still gets a foothold after all of these years? It’s just trying. That might be you, and you’re sort of tempted to give up and think, maybe I’m not even a Christian. Who knows? But if that’s you, you should be encouraged by this text, because, actually that wrestling in itself shows that you do know Christ, because your mind isn’t darkened. And that struggle should be expected. And we struggle to the end knowing that we’ve been sealed by the Holy spirit for the day of redemption. So, brothers and sisters, I hope that this year we will struggle and we will strive for the good life with Christ. Let’s pray. Father, thank you so much for sending your son Jesus. Thank you that we are justified by his righteousness, that we don’t have to work our way up to you. But, Lord, we do pray that by your Holy Spirit we would be made Holy Lord, that we would put off all those things that are not good, that we might live the good life. We might live the best life and know that it is you that knows what that is. So work in us. We pray, encourage us if we’re struggling, challenges us if we’re complacent. In Jesus’ name, amen.