ENLIGHTENED AND RENEWED

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

So 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. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.

That, however, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in Him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. 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.

Ephesians 4:17-24

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

I remember the way it used to be, the way it was when I was living outside of Christ and for the world. Wrong was right and right was looked on as wrong. The encouragement was to live life to the fullest and to do whatever made you feel good, illegal or not. A person’s focus was to be fully on themselves and if another person was struggling, well, that was their problem.

During that time before Jesus, my life was about me carrying out my will and satisfying my desires. My worldly perspective led to futile thinking and a darkening of proper understanding as I leaned on my own. Out of an abundance of my own ignorance, I was separated from the life God expected me to live and my heart was hardened toward Him and others. This lost sensitivity allowed me to immerse myself in self centeredness, impurity, and greed. Maybe you can relate in your own life story.

But then everything changed when I decided to give my life to Christ. From that day forward, I dedicated myself to go to church and learn from the scriptures. I made time to learn the Bible and strived to be like Jesus more and more each day.

As I did this, I was convicted about the sinful way I once lived and saw where I needed to put off my former self so I could instead be transformed, “created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness”. I was enlightened and renewed to be a new creation in Christ Jesus with the old gone and the new leading me onto the path of eternal life (2 Corinthians 5:17).

As Paul was writing to the Ephesian Christians, he did so knowing that they were once Gentiles and separated from God and His Salvation. But God so loved everyone, whether Jew or Gentile, that He gave up His one and only Son Jesus as the last atoning sacrifice every needed. After Christ’s crucifixion on Calvary’s cross and His subsequent resurrection, God’s new covenant was established so that whosoever believed in His Son would not perish but have everlasting life (John 3:16). This was where the believers in Ephesus needed to be, not where they used to be.

Paul exhorts the Jesus followers of Ephesus to continue putting off their old self, trading it in for the enlightenment and renewal found in Jesus. As demanded earlier in this chapter, the Ephesian Christian church was to be united with all believers being “members of one body, the body of Christ.

One body centered on one God and one Savior, one Holy Spirit, one faith, one baptism, and one eternal hope.

The call, then and now, was for the church and its members to be what God expected them to be, like His Son Jesus in every way. God wanted the church and all Jesus believers to put Christ in their Christianity and that meant making the church through its people look in every way like the Savior they worshiped and were saved by.

In other words, the Christian church needed to show it was enlightened and renewed, transformed and changed in such a way that it would look like the polar opposite of the world. When anyone looks at the church, whether back in first century AD or today, they should Jesus in His fullest sense, the body a reflection of Him.

For when this happens, and only when this happens, the church and its members will be the kind of church that God desires, the church that He will bless.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it. Send any prayer requests to Gods4all@aol.com