NEW REALITIES
Ephesians 4:1-24
“As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.”
It is something that we seldom spend much time thinking about: when we become Christians there is a monumental shift in the reality that we acknowledge. God, the Creator of the Universe, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is now an acknowledged reality in our life. He is no longer someone we know nothing about, someone whom we respond to however we imagine him to be. He has revealed himself as the God of Israel, moral, upright, loving, compassionate and faithful. We now know and acknowledge his wrath over sin and his desire that we walk in his ways, to the extent that he sacrificed the Son in order that we might regain the capacity to do so, to be forgiven, redeemed and empowered by the Holy Spirit.
When we become Christians, we acknowledge these truths to be true and choose to realign our allegiances so that God, and all these truths about him, will have his proper place in our minds and hearts. To live a life worthy of the calling we have received is to imbue our life with these truths, both to submit to his moral standards as well as to receive his empowerment (the Holy Spirit) to do so, and in so doing, grow in godliness.
When we did not know this God, our reality was limited to the time we have on earth—death ends everything—and our mind is shaped by “survival of the fittest”. We can choose to embrace pleasure or power, or whatever pursuit attracts us, or we can choose to be fearful of death—we can choose to live however we deem to be the best choice—because the result is the same in the end: nothing. But now that we know Him, and we believe that our reality stretches not only to eternity but also to the heavens, we must “no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking … 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”. That has to begin by allowing this new reality to transform our mindset so that our life may be reshaped by our transformed mind.
How do we transform our mindset? We need to spend much time thinking over the truths that we have received and acknowledged and embraced. We have to replace old truths with these new truths and allow these new truths their proper place in our minds and hearts. And we have to start to make new choices in life in accordance with the new realities that we have embraced by faith.
“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.”