Our passage in this segment, Eph 4.17 - 5.2, overlaps the chapter division because that's where Paul's paragraph break really is. (He didn't write in chapters and verses, of course - he just wrote ... the way you and I do. Others introduced the chapter and verse divisions much later, simply for ease of reference.)
A better title than "Mimics of God" would have been "The Old Man and the New", for Paul's overall theme in this section is the two natures. Verses 17-24 tell us what he means by "the old man", and 4.25 - 5.2 describe "the new man". We shall look at them each in turn.
But I'd like us to look at his phrase "imitators (or mimics) of God" in 5.1 first, because it will help us get a grasp of what he means by the old man and the new. By those phrases he means our disposition ... the whole framework of attitudes that makes you the person you are:
the way you think: your mind-set ... what you have a mind to;
the way you feel: the emotional core that motivates you;
the way you go: the goals you pursue, the priorities you have.
His use of the phrase 'mimics of God' is the best way to get a feel for this.
He urges us to imitate God the way children do their elders.
You know how they do. The poet Wordsworth observed that children frequently behave "as if their whole vocation were endless imitation". I read of a teacher once who was puzzled to know why her class of 40 small children always swayed their bodies from side to side with a curious kind of rhythm whenever she had them sing together ... until she realised one day, with something of a shock, that that was how she always sang herself! They had "picked up" from her that that was the way to sing.
Children mimic their elders. You can see scolding mothers and arrogant fathers faithfully reflected in their children's play. You can see gracious hostesses and kindly fathers, too, faithfully reproduced in the behaviour of their offspring, especially in their 'play behaviour'. You hear the same phrases, you see the same facial expressions, you observe the same 'bodylanguage' in them that you hear and see in their parents. (You'd be surprised how much your child's teacher knows about you without your child having "told any tales"!)
What's happening when children do this is something quite profound. They're not just "aping" their parents, like actors; they're actually reproducing their parents' attitudes. It isn't superficial: it goes quite deep. Our children express our feelings about things as their own, real feelings. They "catch" and reproduce our very attitudes; they imbibe our way of thinking and feeling and willing. Over the whole range of their personality, they reproduce us, and develop "in our image". And this happens simply because they live with us ... because it's us they're exposed to every day. They act out in their play with one another what they experience in their life with us.
Now this is precisely what Paul says is to happen with us believers.
We're to "catch" and reproduce the very attitudes of Christ; we're to imbibe His way of thinking and feeling and willing.
Over the whole range of our personality we're to reproduce Him, and develop "in his image". And this is to happen simply in virtue of our being constantly with Him ... because we expose ourselves to Him every day.
"As children delight to mimic their parents", says Paul, "you do the same. Mimic your Father, God. Act out in your relations with one another what you experience in your life with God".
And what Paul is especially concerned we should reflect is the kindness, the tender-heartedness, the forgiving nature we experience in our fellowship with God. Christ's marvellous way of so devoting Himself to God as to serve the interests of those God loves is to rub off on us, too.
That's where he lays the emphasis, though he also spotlights other qualities like truthfulness, self-control, generosity and righteousness.
This ... 'imitation of Christ", through continual exposure to Him, is what Paul means by "putting on Christ", "putting on the new man, which is being fashioned in God's likeness in true righteousness and holiness", and which is daily "renewed in knowledge (as he says in Colossians 3.10) after the image of its Creator".
What it boils down to is something really very simple: you become like those you live with.
Live with God, then! ... live with Christ: you'll grow to be like Him: you'll imbibe His attitudes, you'll soon be thinking and feeling and willing the way He does.
You do this of course by making full use of what theologians call "the means of grace" - that is to say, the avenues, the means by which He feeds His Spirit and His grace into our lives: making time regularly to listen to Him as He speaks in the Scriptures, having daily conversation with Him in prayer, and enjoying the "family time" we have with Him together around the Table and the open Bible in congregational worship (Paul refers to that specifically in 5.19-20 - "addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart, always and in everything giving thanks in the Name of our Lord, Jesus Christ, to the Father"). We must arrange our lives so we give ourselves this daily exposure to the living Christ, and the living Father Who comes to us in Him. That way, we keep on "putting on Christ", we "put on the new man" - for Christ Himself is the "new man".
Some of you, I'm sure, will question whether I'm expounding adequately the doctrine of the "two natures" in the believer. I'm well aware of that.
You want me to say that in every believer there are two quite separate and distinct "selves": one is our "old man" which we were born with, and the other is the "new man" which we're born again with ... and we're to "crucify the old man", and "put on the new man". The old self is corrupt and doomed to die, and the new self is wholly righteous and immortal.
But I have a real difficulty in understanding the Scriptures that way.
I am not two people - I am one person, me. If you insist that there are two wholly separate and distinct selves in the believer, the old man and the new man, I have a question: "Which of the two is forgiven, the old man or the new?"
If the two natures are to be understood as organised selves within us, then either the old man is forgiven, or the new man is forgiven. But the old man is to be crucified, not forgiven and reconciled; and the new man, if he's holy with the holiness of Christ, doesn't need to be forgiven!" We press the language of Scripture too far when we understand it that way, and turn ourselves into spiritual schizophrenics.
Not the old man in me is forgiven, nor is the new man in me forgiven: I am forgiven - I, myself ... the one me, for there is only one of me; and the question I face every day is the sort of me I am becoming. I am to be identified with Christ in His death to sin and His aliveness to God; I am to put off the mind-set the spirit of the world built into me before I awakened to God in Christ, and I am to put on the mind-set the Spirit of Christ will grow in me as I "abide in Christ".
You don't choose between the two, between being "the old man" and "being the new man" by producing some sort of split personality; you simply yield yourself to the world, or to Christ.
Paul repeatedly says so in Romans 6: we are not to yield our members to sin, we are to yield ourselves to God.
Self-effort is not the way, but self-yieldedness.
Both the spirit of the world and the Spirit of Christ are active, vigorous forces with a life of their own, a will of their own; and they will bring forth their own fruit in us according to whichever of them we're yielded to. Yield yourself in heart and mind to the Spirit of God, and He will pursue His gracious work of growing Christ-likeness in your heart and life. He will - because He is perpetually being sent forth from the heart of God to bring to fulfilment the good pleasure of God in our lives.
But if we are not yielded to Him, the spirit of the world will subtly take us over, and bring forth its fruits in our lives.
Paul says that the "new man is created after the likeness of God in righteousness and holiness and is continually being renewed after the image of its Creator (Present tense - continuing action).
God does the creating and the renewing, not we.
The yielding is our part: the working is His.
Tell God that you are ready and willing for Him to accomplish His own perfect work in your heart - and see if He does not begin, graciously and faithfully, to do it.
We haven't left ourselves much time to look in detail at the old man and the new. But it seems to me the better thing is to try and get an overall grasp of a passage, and then the details make their own kind of sense. If you look only at the detail, you miss the forest for staring too close up at the trees!
In the barest fashion, then, let's look at these two dispositions, the old man and the new.
The old man, the mind of the flesh (they mean the same thing) is characterised by:
As you look out on the life of our society, how energetic it is in all its pursuits - but life fails to "deliver the goods" people so avidly pursue. For all our frantic pursuit of the "good life", we are a nation of beer-drinkers and pill-pushers, to shield us from the pain of our disillusionment.
... in the area of understanding.
This is not the same as to say there is no knowledge or learning in the world - there is. But there is no light in the learning. A programme like David Attenburgh's "Life on Earth" is full of learning ... so much learning - but there's no light of God in it. None of this learning has opened a curtain on God as the creator of it all so the learning leads to worship ... to the praise of its Creator which fulfils the creature.
How full of "alienation" our life in society is - between parents and child, between husband and wife, between employer and worker, between government and people, between nation and nation.
All this alienation is rooted in people's alienation from God. There is no centre to everybody's life. We're all of us "our own man" ... and then complain that there's no friendliness, or dependable goodwill left in the world!
Some time ago the Festival of Light mounted a campaign to promote the Ten Commandments, because so many Australians simply don't know what they are. We are ignorant of even the first things God has told us. We haven't learned even the ABC of living.
The word means to "petrify". The appalling curse sin lays on us is that our indulgence of it robs us of the power to feel the shame of it - so we do dreadful things cheerfully! Doesn't it strike us as being horrendous that groups of all sorts explode car-bombs in shopping centres and airport lounges, and then proudly claim responsibility for it!
The growth of pornography, the increase in the sexual abuse of children, the incidence of incest in our society (25%!) is galloping forward like a runaway horse.
There is a moral pollution in our society more harmful by far than the pollution of our atmosphere and the ecology by exhaust fumes, insecticides, chemical discharges and fallout from disasters like the one at Chernobyl. Men and women are lured by the promise of pleasure and enjoyment into perversions that render their lives empty, frustrated and entirely meaningless.
All this constitutes the old man.
This is what its mentality is like. "There is a way that seems right to a man, and its end is death."
The mind of Christ, the New Man is characterised by:
Notice why truth-speaking is important: it is because we are members one of another in the Body of Christ. Our physical bodies function properly only when our senses and our nerves send true messages to the brain ... that the poker, for example, is red-hot and will burn you, not that it's cold and harmless. If then we are bound together into one body, the body can only function as we speak truth to each other.
Mind you, this has to be understood in relation to v.29: "Let only such talk come out of your mouth as is edifying ... as will build up good fellowship around Christ at its centre, that is ... and which is wholesome and spreads grace about."
There is a sort of truth-speaking that is cruel, and will tear apart, not build up, the Body of Christ ... "tale-bearing". It can be a form of truth-speaking, but it doesn't build good fellowship or nourish grace in others ... neither in the person we tell it to, nor in the person we tell it of.
"Never go to bed angry" is how J. B. Phillips translated this verse! Heal your quarrels quickly.
Uncontrolled anger - losing you temper - opens the door wide to the devil.
Note the reason: "so that you may have wherewith to give!"
So to work that you make an honest living and are not a burden to others is not the Christian work ethic. Even that is sub-christian. The only motive that makes work Christian is that you thereby 'have wherewith to give!
We admire those who are sensitive to the feelings of others. The New Man is sensitive to God's feelings!
This is the virtue which like a golden chain binds all the rest into a beautiful harmony.
I love the story that's told of the ageing
Apostle John when he was living out his last days in Ephesus.
Every Lord's day the young men used to carry him in to the place of
worship, and then when it was over carry him back to his home. And of
course, out of deference to his age and his apostleship, he was
always asked if he had any word from God to bring to the worshipping
congregation. Every time, the message he uttered was the same: he
would raise himself up a little on his couch, and say, "Little
children, love one another."
They tired of it after a while. One day one of the young men was bold
to ask him, "Father John, why don't you speak of something else
beside love for a change?"
And his answer was, "Because, young man, there is nothing
else."
This material is
copyright; it may not be published, quoted or reproduced without
permission, nor may it be preached without acknowledgment!