Call to Worship January 9 2022
Ephesians 4:17
“I would remind you that the particular matter here is, that as Christians, we are entirely new men and women, that regeneration is the profoundest change in the world, and that therefore we must always keep this in the forefront of our minds. A Christian is not just a man who has decided to be a little bit more moral than he was, or who has decided to join a church, or who has decided this or that, whatever it may be. What makes a man a Christian is that he has been born again, he has been given a new nature, he is a new creation, he is altogether different from what he was before…
The walk, as used in Scripture, means the whole of a man’s life, inward and outward. We must remember that our walk is not confined to the outward, it involves the inward also. This is important and I shall be stressing it later, because, according to this whole argument, what determines the outward is the inward. A man is as he thinks, and his walk in life tells you what he is thinking, because his walk is an expression of his philosophy…
What then are we no longer to do? What are we to refrain from? The Apostle here tells us how the Gentiles, the other Gentiles, still walk, and he puts it in the tremendous phrase, ‘in the vanity of their mind’. This is the phrase that introduces the terrible description which the Apostle gives here of the life of the unregenerate, the life of the pagan world at that time. It is, I say, a tremendous and a terrible description. We cannot read it without being reminded immediately of what Paul said at the beginning of the second chapter [vs. 1-3]…Is he then just repeating himself? No, he is not. There is a sense, of course, in which he is, but there is a marked difference between what he says at the beginning of the second chapter and what he says here. And the difference is this. In the second chapter he is giving an objective description of the life of the unregenerate Gentiles, the life of the pagan world. Here he gives an inward or psychological analysis of it…
So as we read his words, we are not simply looking at pagan society in Ephesus nearly two thousand years ago; we are also looking at London today, Paris, New York, any one of them; here is modern life, here is the modern world. These things do not change. They are eternal principles. And therefore, if we are really concerned about the life of society and about the world, the first thing we must do is to understand the Apostle’s teaching. We evangelicals are constantly being charged with not being practical. Ah, they say, there you are, you spend your time in discussing the Scriptures and talking to one another; but as for the great world outside, you do nothing about it. What I am emphasising here, therefore, is that we can do nothing until we begin to understand the teaching of Scripture. It is this alone that enables one to do anything about it. And all organisations that do not start from this, not only are failing and have failed, but must inevitably fail. That is the tragedy about purely moral societies. They have existed now, some of them, for nearly a hundred years, and yet in spite of their activities the position goes from bad to worse. Why? Because they have forgotten these apostolic principles…
In this Epistle the Apostle shows us the origin of the evil kind of life that he describes. Before he describes the life in detail he shows us why it is that anybody should ever live such a life. Or in other words, what the Apostle is asserting here is that you cannot have morality without godliness.
And the last half century has proved that to the very hilt. If we go back a hundred years and more we find that the great emphasis was upon godliness, and that the morality came out of the godliness. But then a generation came which said in effect, Morality is very good and it is most essential for the country, but of course we do not want this godliness any longer; we no longer believe in the supernatural, we do not believe in miracles, we do not believe that Christ is the Son of God—He was no more than a great moral teacher—and so, of course, we must shed all this godly part of it. And they did so. They thought they could preserve the morality without the godliness. But you see what has happened. Though you have got education and everything you can provide, if there is not godliness at the back of it your morality will collapse.”
David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Darkness and Light: An Exposition of Ephesians 4:17–5:17 (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1982), 25-31.