What is, what is up, President? My name is Keith. I'm lead pastor here and it's good to be with you guys.
When I got married, one of the things that I think was surprising to me.
One of the things I was unprepared for in marriage was choosing movies and being able to understand how that went
and kind of the process by which you chose a movie as a married man.
And so I thought that naturally that my wife would like good movies, like that I thought that that was just going to be
a thing that she would have as a part of her personhood.
And so immediately I began to realize that the kind of movies that we liked were far different.
And so she had movies like that had independent in their title or in their phrase of what the,
and I was like independent, what does that, what does that mean? It's like independent movies are like making your own clothes.
Like it's really cool, but it doesn't actually help the whole process, right?
That's just my view on independent movies. Maybe you love them. I struggle.
I thought someone said no to that and so you decided to make it anyway.
And so that's kind of how that went.
And you know, the idea of if there's not a body count, you know, in the movies, I was like, I don't know if that's good.
You know, I don't know if that's a helpful thing for my life.
But we would choose movies and oftentimes I would come home with movies that she wouldn't approve of.
And we kind of would, I would try to do that, like let's choose a movie.
And I remember one time I brought home a movie that she didn't approve of.
And anyway, at the end of this movie, the movie was the Shawshank Redemption.
And basically we had this deal that we made with each other that we could choose movies that we would each like.
But then the other one would have to, based upon how outside of our desire that movie was,
there was a amount of movies that was required to replace that, right?
And so at the end of Shawshank Redemption, you know, I'm kind of weepy.
I'm kind of tearing she leans over and says, that's two rom-coms.
Okay, Keith, that's like, are you kidding me? You know, when I got real pastoral, I was like, I don't know if they're good for your heart.
You know, I think they bring them into places and set up to expectation for humans and males that, you know, that are unreasonable.
And she said, we just watch a movie with people shanking each other and dropping F-bombs.
I think two romantic comedies are in order.
And so Matthew McConaughey, the next two weekends when it came to our house, and that's how that went.
That movie, though, the Shawshank Redemption, for me, if you've ever seen that movie, it's a powerful, powerful movie in terms of what it communicates
and what's going on in the movie.
If you don't know, the guy named Andy is a banker and he is falsely accused and convicted to serve out his life for murder in the Shawshank prison.
And as he gets there, the movie is about really unpacking what happens in prison and prison life and what happens in this context.
When he gets into prison, he begins to become an outcast and begins to understand what it is like to live prison life.
And as he begins to do that, he makes friends with some of the people.
And there's some people that we begin to meet there in the story of Andy and what happens for him getting put in prison.
And as these people begin to be a part of the story, it's a fairly interesting understanding of who these people are.
How did they get here?
One of the people that we meet is a guy named Red.
And Red is played by Morgan Freeman.
And he is a guy who admittedly committed murder and has spent most of his adult life there in prison.
We begin to meet all these people.
Some people come in and out.
Things happen.
The mantra is going back to, are they going to get out of prison? What is this going to look like for them?
One of the guys that we meet though in this movie is a guy named Brooks.
And Brooks, by the time that Andy shows up in there, is very old.
And he is one of these guys that seems very gentle.
And we see him feeding the birds in the prison over and over.
And this is just kind of what Brooks does in the movie.
And finally we get to the scene where Brooks is released from prison.
He served out his time and he is released.
And so Brooks then enters, goes from prison to this halfway house and begins to re-enter society,
begins to re-enter this world as a free man.
And what we begin to see is that rapidly the way that Brooks interacts with the free world is causing him a significant amount of stress.
He doesn't know how this works.
As someone who has spent his entire life in prison, being free is not something he was prepared for.
And what we begin to see is the only thing that really allows him to have peace is continuing to feed the birds.
And so he kind of lives an audience's life around feeding the birds.
But ultimately in his freedom and his walking outside of the prison and his living out there, it becomes too much.
And one of the scenes we see Brooks climb up on a chair, wrap a rope around something on the ceiling,
and ultimately stand, put that on his neck, kick over the chair, and he hangs himself.
And it's a really dark moment in this film.
It's a dark moment because it begins to speak of something that is profound about what it is for humans.
The reality is that in a moment you can free someone from prison, but it can take a lifetime to free prison from the man.
When we begin to think about what this means and understand that this is a guy who survived prison but didn't survive being free.
And our text today as we begin to dig into this, when we begin to analyze and understand the question,
that is a really profound question about what it actually means for someone to be a Christian.
What does it actually mean for someone to live out what it looks like to walk with Christ?
How does that work actually? How does that change the way that you live?
What is different about you when you meet Jesus?
Is it just about answering the question, where are you going?
Is it just a little hope while you're alive?
And this is what this text pushes us into.
It's saying, what is actually different? What changes?
How is it that when we begin to see the difference between leaving inside and outside,
that we can actually say, what is it that begins to change from the inside out in our life?
Because there's the reality. When you come to Jesus, it takes a moment to get you out of sin,
but it can take a lifetime to get the sin out of you.
What does that look like? How do we begin to walk in this?
And we're going to get into this text.
And I want us to press into this and begin to understand what it has to say to us.
Because I think if you believe this, if you understand this, this will completely change your life.
This is something that will orient you in a completely different way.
And this is one of the most powerful things in my life that has allowed me to say,
what does it actually mean to walk with Christ and to be a Christ follower?
It says this in verse 17. We're going to be in Ephesians.
We've been walking through this book of Ephesians. We're in chapter 4, verse 17.
We'll go through verse 24, as you saw up on the screen.
But here's where we start. It says this.
Now I say this and I testify in the Lord. He's kind of pressing us into this text.
He's saying, this is what I want you to get.
I want to really make sure that this pops up on your screen.
That I'm kind of pulling this out in a really significant way. That you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do.
That you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking.
And so in this, this is again an amazing idea for us.
Because what he begins to paint is this reality that if you have decided,
when you have decided to follow Christ, it actually changed the way that you live.
That you must no longer live as the Gentiles do.
And I don't want us to get that word Gentiles and kind of mess us up into this.
Basically he's saying this is a way to categorize someone who does not think the way that Christ thinks about things.
So that does not have a pathway of godly thinking.
That the way that they think is not the way that God thinks.
And so this is, we can insert modern America into this.
That you must no longer, I said that you must no longer live as most modern Americans do.
This is the same thing he's trying to communicate to them.
A classification of thinking in this way.
And this is profound for us because when we begin to understand it says, it's like this.
It's like talking to Brooks and said, here's the thing, when you decided to be free,
when you were freed from this, it makes no longer, it makes no sense to act like you're still in prison.
If you've been freed from the bondage of prison, it makes no sense to continue to do this.
So he's walked through three chapters of saying, here's who you are, here's your identity.
What is normal, what is something that makes logical sense is that you begin to live that out.
And so he's saying, I insist on it.
I insist that the truth that you have in your heart begins to be the truth that incorporates into your behavior.
This is what is the normal thing. And then he gives us something that's really profound in this.
This is the big idea.
In the futility of their thinking.
In the futility of their thinking.
So he ties this thing together and said, the way that you think, the way that you act,
the way that your life plays itself out is directly tied back to the way that you think,
the way that you process, the equation that you use for your world.
We call it world view. We call this what is made logical in your world.
And so it says this, that the way that you think, the way that you live is directly tied to the way that you think.
And so he's saying, don't live as the Gentiles do.
Don't live as these people who live outside of the thinking of God does.
That doesn't make sense in the way that you live.
And for us, this is really profound.
If that idea of futility, he really presses us into this.
And I don't want to throw a definition up and begin to help us to understand what is he saying here.
The definition of futility is this.
It is pointlessness.
It says it is uselessness.
This is the dictionary in this.
It is serving no useful purpose.
It is completely ineffective.
This gets us, this is a text that is incredibly helpful for us and incredibly offensive to us at the same point.
Because he's not pulling any punches.
He's saying, when you think outside of the way that God thinks, it is absolutely useless.
It is pointless. It doesn't work.
This is the car that doesn't start.
You know, this is the hole in your rain boot.
This is your computer with Microsoft Vista, right?
This is Mike Tyson at a spelling bee.
This is, it's MySpace.
And by saying MySpace, I'm not saying that Facebook is at the gospel.
So just to clarify this.
These are things, it just doesn't work, right?
It is a malfunction of the mind.
It is something that is not taken and understood.
It doesn't fit.
He's saying this, that what you think is getting to where you want it to be, it never gets you there.
There's futility. There's a uselessness.
There's a pointlessness in this thinking.
And I hope this lands really hard for us today.
I hope that this says, oh my goodness, I've got to hear this.
Because if this is really the case, then everything needs to change, then there's some significant things in the way that I do my life.
I need to have a gut check when it comes to what this verse means, when it comes to what this looks like.
So here's the thing.
It says, their thoughts don't reach the right conclusions.
That somehow in the process of lining out the equation, there's something that doesn't make sense,
that they end up in a place that isn't right, even though they think that they're using the correct logic.
They're darkened. Their whole way of thinking isn't right.
It's useless.
It's pointless.
And then he begins to describe how this works.
And this next verse is one of the clearest understandings of what it means to think in terms of processing life as a follower of Christ, that there isn't a Bible.
And it says this in verse 18.
It says, 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.
I mean, that is not pulling any punches, right?
He said, here's the reality that they're darkened in their understanding.
Have you ever walked into a place?
Have you ever walked into a room from the light to the dark?
And all of a sudden that transition created confusion for you.
He said, here's the thing.
It's like we're walking around and we don't know what's going on that we're trying to get through life and that somehow our understanding of what ultimately gets us to joy satisfaction, worthwhile significance, all of those things that we're groping in the darkness for those things without a clear understanding.
It is darkened in their understanding that they don't understand how it is that they ultimately achieve satisfaction.
They ultimately know which way is up and which way is down.
If you've ever been in, if you've bumped around, fallen down, you feel like a fool.
And I think that that's the plight that we're in, that we're all trying to grasp around and we're trying to figure out which way is up.
It says, this is what happens.
And they are separated from the life of God.
They're pulled apart from the intent of God.
God doesn't intend for us to live in darkness, to walk in darkness.
This is because of the ignorance that is in them, that there is something in there that they don't understand.
That they have not put the connection together, that the equation that says, if I do this, I will get this.
If I concentrate on putting this into my life, I'll get satisfaction.
I'll get joy.
I'll get something that is lasting.
It says they don't understand, and this is not ignorance in a way that hopefully is something that is offensive to us.
But they're without knowledge, onosis, no understanding of this.
That they think that this is right.
The train of logic makes sense to them.
But here's the thing.
It's based upon something that is very much deep in our hearts.
And this is the hardening of our hearts.
And so when we begin to think about all these things together, here's the reality.
It starts with the hardening of our hearts.
And it starts with this reality that for us, we have an option.
Is God going to be God?
Is he going to sit upon the throne of our life?
Are we going to have the control of that?
Are we going to be saying, I have these desires and the height of all of my activity is going to fulfill my desires?
That I'm going to have a preoccupation with the self-fulfillment of these desires.
And we'll see a little bit later that he calls these deceitful desires.
But we're going to maximize our effort.
And Roman says this, we understand that something's bigger than us.
We understand that there's something greater than us.
But simply the reality is that we don't want anything to be bigger than us.
Because that means that we have to submit to something.
And we don't want to submit to something.
We want to be God.
We want to have everything the way that we want it.
And so what happens is there's a hardening of our hearts.
That hardening of the hearts screws up the equation.
And it leads us back into this.
And so you kind of see the phases of this.
We begin to see the hardening of their hearts that leads to the ignorance,
the messed up of the equation that is happening there.
And that ultimately separates us from the way that God wants and darkens our understanding.
And so there's a perpetuating cycle of this thing that our hardness of the hearts ultimately leads to a darkened understanding.
That darkened understanding says that we don't really understand that something is wrong.
And so we see this in a cyclical fashion over and over people stuck in darkness,
not understanding how they achieve ultimate satisfaction, all the ultimate joy, hope,
all the things that we're looking for because of this pathway.
And Paul is brilliant in unpacking this and helping us to understand it all starts
with some sort of a pathway that we're thinking.
And it affects ultimately the way that we walk in our lives.
So when we begin to think about this, one of the things it reminded me of was,
back in 1999, a group of really smart people did something really dumb.
They got together, NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
if you'd like that acronym, basically put together this mission to Mars.
And they said the Mars climate orbiter.
And they got together and they put all the things that were ready to go in this.
And I'll read you a little bit about what happened in this thing.
So after a 286 day journey, almost three quarters of a year out that they launched this
and it's arriving at Mars, the probe fired its engines on September 23rd to push itself into orbit.
So it's supposed to orbit around Mars.
This thing was going to orbit around Mars so they could send some sort of a probe to Mars
and begin to understand what was going on so that you could sign up to be a part of the people
that would launch to Mars and never come back.
I don't know if you've heard about that.
So anyway, that is something that began with this project.
The engine fired, but the spacecraft came within 60 kilometers of the planet
and that was 100 kilometers too close.
What happened is it was beneath the level at which they could function properly and the mission ultimately failed.
What happened is the probe plowed through the atmosphere, went all the way out and is now orbiting the Sun.
It's supposed to orbit Mars, ended up around the Sun, right?
Smart people.
So what happened is that NASA lost $125 million in this orbiter because Lockheed Martin engineers and their team
used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system.
Smart people.
And what happened was those units mismatched.
So there's a phrase for this, right?
Rocket scientists, right?
I'm not a rocket scientist and we think that means really smart people.
It is not about being really smart.
You are really smart.
This whole campus is filled with really smart people.
But this whole campus is filled with people who are using the wrong units to begin this process.
They're using great logic, but the equation ends up wrong.
And it could go a little bit like this.
I don't want to use the metric system.
I don't want to because I think the random English method is better, right?
So I'll use English units.
I'll enter this into this known equation, right?
We put this and say this is just the way it should go.
What happens is this changes the trajectory.
And I think that we have a picture of this trajectory.
So here you go, right?
It's going to change the trajectory here.
And the orbiter, instead of orbiting Mars, now ends up orbiting the Sun.
And what happens is that people who launch then can't figure out what went wrong.
These are those four steps that 2,000 years ago Paul says this is how this messes up the equation.
That somehow we begin in the wrong place.
We use rational logic to make sense, but we end up in the wrong place doing the wrong thing.
And then it says it took them a month to figure out, oh, we should have used metric.
That would have been helpful. And there's people in our lives.
Here's a thing that we don't realize that we've even had a place.
It says they're darkened in their understanding.
And so the cycle perpetuates itself over and over and over.
And we're not intentionally trying to do something apart.
We're just using the wrong equation.
We're just using something that ultimately doesn't help us.
That somehow we've been fooled.
Somehow there was no awareness that we started off on the wrong foot with the wrong units.
To help test our awareness, I'd like to introduce an awareness test to us.
So here you can look on the screen. You can check out.
This is what an awareness test could look like for helping us understand what's actually going on.
It seems so easy to see, but that's the whole point that you're looking for the wrong thing.
That we're looking at this in the wrong way.
And over and over the equation, what we begin to say is this is what I need to look for.
This is what it needs to see. It's messed up.
Ultimately what happens is this.
Paul is brilliant when he begins to say, there's a lot of things in life that we can look for.
We can try to say, I can try to love people really well.
I can try to live towards things like forgiveness.
Good things can be there and I can try to have equations that seem to work in life.
And there's a lot of people that can seemingly pass through life and have all the right equations.
And sometimes we don't even see this.
Sometimes it's very subtle for us to see people who are living wrong equations.
People who are living life outside of the way that God has to think that we see futility in thinking.
And what Paul does is he pulls this out in a couple of different ways.
And he says there's a couple of different things that help reveal how the equation is messed up.
And he says it's lust and greed.
It's lust and greed.
It says this in verse 19.
It says they have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.
So our different translations can kind of say these and do two different things.
But what we begin to see is that sometimes we can fool ourselves.
Sometimes we can seem like we're great people, moral people, stuff like that.
But ultimately, when it comes to two things, we can't fool ourselves very long into understanding
if we're living out the equation of Christ or the equation of this world.
And one of those things is this rally of this creating callous.
And our hearts are created to be sensitive, not callous.
But what happens is when we begin to get into a cycle outside of the way that we are to think,
what happens is that puts us into this callousness cycle that we need more of whatever it is that we think will fulfill us.
And we begin to add that.
And the more we add to it, the more callous we become.
And so he says there's two things that are inward that kind of reveal themselves outwardly.
One is sex.
And so when sensuality, when sex is engaged outside of a covenant relationship of selfless love,
it becomes objectified.
So sex becomes objectified outside of that.
And what happens is objectified sex creates callousness in the hearts and the minds of those who engage in it.
So when we pull sex outside of its intended place, it becomes objectified.
Objectified sex creates callousness because this is not the equation that God has called you and I to live in.
And so it looks like this.
So in a sexual relationship that is outside of a covenant marriage of selfless love,
what happens is that there's an increasing need that sex becomes objectified.
Objectified sex becomes boring sex that we're not sensitive to that.
We've created a callous around that.
And so what is needed is a progression of more exciting things, more extreme things in terms of our sexual relationship.
And so what we begin to see is this is the pathway of what we see in our modern sexual culture,
which is perverse, which is bizarre, which is all of these things that we need to add to sex because somehow we've become callous.
And the more we add to it, the more rapidly we become callous to this.
So our sexual relationships need to go further, need to have more extremity to it, need to have perversion to it.
And this is the thing that we see in the porn pathway.
What we begin to see is when we take the sensuality in sex outside of covenant relationship of something that is selfless,
there's a progression that happens in porn where something that was exciting becomes boring and there needs to be a progression
where we say, I need more, I need more, I need more, I need more.
This is the logic that ultimately that we're seeing from Paul and saying we have a callousness that happens in our life,
that I need more, that this is not enough, that we're not sensitive, that we don't have an equation that keeps our heart sensitive,
but begins to put calluses on this.
The same thing when it happens with money.
We see that statistics say that if we only have 30% more money, that people would say, if I just had 30% more than I have right now,
then that would be enough, that I would be happy with that.
And in that, we see the overwhelming amount of people that are dissatisfied with where they're at.
And they say, I need more, I need more, I need more, and credit card debt is the great revealer of what is happening internally.
That people say, if I could just get a little bit more, that we as the most wealthy country in the history of the world
are not wealthy enough, that there's still more out there, that we've created callousness to our contentment
and we need more and more and more and more.
This is what is happening over and over and over for us.
It is crazy and yet it is rationalized.
A group of highly actualized people in America are thinking this, are understanding this, that we have porn addicts and materialists all over this
that are not dumb people, they're rational people, but the equation started in the wrong place.
And ultimately what it requires from us is to go back to the very beginning of this book and say, what does this look like for us to have an identity in Christ?
Because we can never have the right understanding of sex until we understand our identity in Christ.
We can never have a right understanding of money until we understand our identity in Christ.
All of that leads us to being able to say, this is rightly understood, this is the logic of God.
This is the equation that He has put us in.
And this is this beauty, hopefully, that begins to clarify what Christ has done for us and begin to set our sights on something else.
And this is what else our sights are set on that says this in verse 20.
All of that is the way that we are thinking, but you, but that is not the way of life that you learned in verse 21.
When you heard about Christ and were taught in Him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus.
This is in another translation is it says this is not the way that you learned Christ. This is not the way that you learned Christ.
And as we begin to think through this and as we begin to understand this, this is a profound understanding.
You do not come to this way of thinking intuitively.
Someone had to tell you, someone had to teach you, you didn't just wake up and say, my equation is wrong.
You might have experienced the effect of that, but we're stuck in the darkness of our understanding.
And that requires us, this is the way we talk about talking to your friends about Jesus.
This is what we talk about sharing who God is with other people, because you didn't come to it intuitively.
You didn't wake up one day and say, my equation started wrong units.
I understand now somehow you were taught, you were told.
And this is what we're about. This is what we are trying to communicate to those around us.
It doesn't happen by accident. It happens by intention.
Our campus, when we begin to see God move, it's because we're intentional.
It's because we begin to say wrong equations everywhere wrong equations, you're darkened in your understanding.
And it's my role and me loving you is helping you to understand you started with the wrong equation.
You're always going to end up at the wrong solution, the wrong answer because you started in the wrong equation.
And so some of you have heard this before, some of you are here and you've never heard this.
And I would say to you, get into a village. The person who talks a lot is probably the village leader.
Go to them and say, I'm using the wrong equation and it's not working.
I need to learn Jesus. There's many people, maybe you've been hanging around.
And many of you, maybe you've come to our gatherings, maybe even our small groups, but you're not actively learning Christ.
You're not actively trying to change the way you think. You're kind of stuck.
And you've had the culture embed the equation in your life. And it's not been something that reveals who Jesus is.
And you're hanging around, but you're not actively saying, how do I change the way I think?
How do I ultimately change the way that this actually makes sense in my life?
Our discipleship process and by discipleship, we need me mean just helping people to learn how to follow Christ is simply this.
It's people that gather together and say, I used to think this way.
And this is what's not working and beginning to learn Christ and beginning to believe something new.
And we're speaking into each other's lives because here's the thing as we'll see in just a minute that we have these deceitful desires.
We have these desires that get us nowhere. They're cul-de-sacs.
And we keep pressing into them thinking that they're going to satisfy, but they never do.
And so we need people speaking into our lives.
We need people that are surrounded or surrounded by helping us to say, that's the wrong equation.
You're always going to end up at the wrong answer if you continue that way.
That is true love for each other, being able to do that. And that's what we're about as we begin this discipleship process.
And ultimately it says that the truth is in Jesus.
That anything that's not connected to Jesus is not ultimately connected to truth in suffering, in marriage, in dating, in sexuality, in finances, in whatever.
The truth about anything and everything is found in Jesus.
And while we might have general revelation and we might have inspiration from common grace and we can learn a lot of things,
ultimately it's all connected back to the way that we see the world through the work and the person of Jesus Christ.
And is that weaving itself into your life? Is that what it's looking like?
For us, let me give you just a few hints.
This is from a guy named Tim Keller who's a pastor in New York.
And it's really helpful to see kind of walking through the changes in the equation and how that begins to look as we begin to think about pride.
Here's like the pride equation and what this might look like.
It says this, have I looked down on anyone?
Have I been too stung by criticism?
Have I felt snubbed and ignored?
So as we deal with what this looks like, here's the equation where we're beginning to ask the question,
here's the godly equation, here's what this looks like.
It says this.
It says, consider the free grace of Jesus until I sense a decreasing disdain.
Since I am a sinner too and I increase decreasing pain over criticism,
since I should not value human approval over God's love.
And light of his grace, I can let go of the need to keep up a good image.
It's too great a burden and is now unnecessary.
I can reflect on the free grace until I experience grateful, restful joy.
When it comes to the courage equation, we can ask the question this,
have I avoided people or tasks that I know that I should face?
Have I been anxious and worried?
Have I failed to be circumspect or have been rash and impulsive?
And the godly equation says this, consider the free grace of Jesus
until there is no cowardly avoidance of hard things.
Since Jesus faced evil for me and no anxious or rash behavior since Jesus' death
proves that God cares and will watch over me.
It takes pride to be anxious and I recognize that I'm not wise enough to know how my life should go.
I reflect on the free grace until I experience calm, thoughtfulness, and strategic boldness.
That's what that looks like.
Beginning to see how those equations begin to shift.
Let's keep going just a little bit more.
Self-centered equations.
Have I spoken or thought unkindly of anyone?
Am I justifying myself by caricaturing someone else in my mind?
Have I been impatient and irritable?
Have I been self-absorbed and indifferent or inattentive to people?
The godly equation is this.
Consider the free grace of Jesus until there is no coldness or unkindness
as I think of the sacrificial love of Jesus for me.
No impatience as I think of his patience with me
and no indifference as I think about how God is infinitely attentive to me.
I reflect on the free grace until I show the warmth and affection.
So when we begin to think about motivation, it looks like this.
Am I doing what I do for God's glory and the good of others?
Or am I being driven by fears or need for approval, love of comfort and ease,
need for control, hunger for acclaim and power, or the fear of other people?
Am I looking at anyone with envy?
Am I giving in to even the first motions of lust or gluttony?
Am I spending my time on urgent things rather than important things
because of these inordinate desires?
Here's the godly equation.
Consider how the free grace of Jesus provides me with what I'm looking for
in these and other things.
Pray, oh Lord Jesus, make me happy enough in you to avoid sin
and wise enough in you to avoid danger that I might always do what is right in your sight.
In your name I pray, amen.
It's when we begin to integrate a new logic, a new equation,
is when we begin to understand what does this look like,
that we begin to integrate the gospel into the very fabric of our lives.
The main problem is Christians who have not thought out the deep implications of the gospel.
Martin Luther says it this way,
the truth of the gospel is the principle article of all Christian doctrine.
Most necessary is it that we know this article well, teach it to others,
and beat it into their heads continually.
I love that quote because over and over for us being able to say,
there's a different way of thinking.
How do we understand how this works?
And ultimately this is what it says in verse 22.
It says, put off your old desires which belong to your former manner of life
and is corrupt through deceitful desires.
Again, these things that we think are going to satisfy,
but they deceive us and be renewed in the spirit of your minds
and the way that you think and the way that you process in the equation of your world
and put on the new self created after the likeness of God
in true righteousness and holiness.
See, there's these insane statements that we hear all the time
that say follow your desires.
But to God that sounds like follow those deceitful things in your life
that are ultimately not going to survive,
ultimately not going to provide satisfaction in your life.
The question is not how do I follow my desires?
How do I not follow my heart?
But how do I align my heart?
How do I instead of asking what I want, ask what he wants
and begin to say, what is it that you want out of my life?
How's the equation that you have for my life?
What does that look like?
And when we begin to put on this kind of thinking,
we begin to go from useless minded to joyful minded
to something that God intended in our life.
That when we begin to be people who stop following our hearts,
that stop reading books that are based on useless equations,
that we stop listening to the equation challenged friends that we have around us,
that we stop lacking deep convictions,
that we get fuzzy on right and wrong,
we stop embracing paradoxes because we don't want to reconcile
what it means to actually have truth in our worldview.
When we stop getting uncomfortable when the church talks about sex or money,
when we begin to process things and we see things as absolute and not relative,
as we begin to be guided more than just
whether something right and wrong is based upon how much I have to sacrifice for it,
that we begin to see that the gospel is indeed offensive sometimes.
In these moments, we begin to realize that maybe that's the right equation,
that we have put on the mind of Christ,
that we have put on a new way of thinking,
and we've abandoned our old way, our old equations in this.
In the Shawshank Redemption,
the whole movie, it seems like the main character is Andy.
Wrongly accused, put into prison, creates a way to escape and get into freedom.
But then at the end, what happens,
as we begin to see Red, who's narrated the entire film,
is actually the main character.
And over and over, we see him getting put up for parole.
And then finally, there comes a day where he's released from prison.
Red is released from prison.
He goes and he ends up being in the same room in the same halfway house as Brooks was,
working the same job that Brooks did.
And for a while, we see some of the same things.
We see the struggles.
We see him learning how to be free.
But then something happens.
And what happens is we realize that the whole time,
the difference between Red and Brooks,
is that Red had someone who was a friend
who was constantly telling him what it was like to be free,
constantly helping him to understand
that the context of the equation of prison was not the only equation.
And at some point, it made sense.
At some point, it clicked.
Red goes to the place that Andy tells him to on a whim.
He gets what Andy told him to get from underneath the tree.
And in the last scene of the movie,
what we see is Red barefoot walking on the beach
with just his coat in his hand,
walking towards Andy,
ocean in the background.
And we see the difference.
This is a man who had understood what freedom was all about.
You can take the man out of the prison in a moment,
but the great freedom is taking the prison out of the man.
Jesus came to this earth,
sit by his Heavenly Father,
lived this life perfectly,
sacrificed for you and I,
the death sentence that we got,
he served and gave his life.
And it's like we're sitting in a jail cell,
and the warden has opened up the door and said,
you're free to go.
And for some of you,
you need for the first time to walk out of the jail cell,
to say I'm all in.
I want to follow Christ for the first time.
I've never stepped out of the prison,
never stepped out of my former way of life.
I've been hanging around Christian,
I've been hanging around Resonate,
but I want to go all in.
Some of you, you're a little bit like Brooks.
You've made that step,
but you haven't ultimately been walking in freedom.
There's some deceitful desires that you've latched onto.
And the idea that there's something more
has not really connected into your life,
and you still think this is what I'm after.
And the challenge from this text is for us to say,
what does it ultimately look like
to live as a follower of Christ
in a way that is inherently different
as people who are walking in their freedom,
in their new way of life,
and this is the challenge to us.
As we process this,
I want you to ask the question,
how am I thinking?
Am I allowing the logic and the equation of God
to permeate my life?
Am I distancing myself from deceitful desires?
Am I living in my new self?
There's a part of me today that's like Brooks.
I've been set free, but I'm not walking in freedom.
And I want to give us an opportunity
to let the Holy Spirit work in this place.
And if for you today, this is the first time
the jail cell is open, but you've never walked out,
there's going to be people in the back
that you can pray with.
Or maybe today you are here and you say,
I just want to know more.
You can check that on the connection card
and say, I want to know more about who Jesus is.
Maybe you're here tonight and you say,
I need someone to help me.
I need just prayer for this deceitful desire
that has just latched onto my heart.
As we sing, as we engage in the beautiful act of communion,
I want to invite you to go to the back
and you can pray with somebody.
And they'll walk you through what it looks like
to have some freedom in Christ.
Let me pray for us.
And as the band come up, continue in this act of worship.
God, I ask that today you would really press into
the depth of who we are, God,
and what makes us think the way that we do.
Lord, I pray that we would repent and believe, Lord,
that we would say, this is the way that I used to think
and I don't want to live that any longer.
I want to be someone who walks out,
not in the perpetuating prison,
the thoughts that come with that,
but, Lord, in true freedom.
So I ask today, Lord, that you would just reveal
deceitful desires, God,
that you would reveal people who are living in their old ways,
Lord, but haven't allowed you to permeate every single bit.
She would help us understand what is the new equation,
the equation of freedom, the equation of life.
Press into our hearts, press into our lives.
In your holy name. Amen.
