Sermons

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The End of Self-help
August 17, 2003
Associate Pastor Steven Lympus
Sermon Series on Ephesians
Ephesians 4:17-5:2
Psalm 51, Isaiah 60, Psalm 139:13-18

We are in the middle of a series this summer on the book of Ephesians, Paul’s first-century letter to groups of Christians in Asia. We’re in that middle part of the letter that has to do with walking…Paul mentions the word walk 5 times in this section. Last week, Susan spoke about walking into maturity, in our calling and our community. Today we’ll talk about walking from our old lives into the new life.

But before I read the Scripture for today, I’d like for you to imagine for a moment the way you would like to be. And if you’re fairly satisfied with how you are right now, try to just think of one thing you might change if you could:

• Maybe it’s your body: taller, slimmer, or more muscular.
• Maybe it’s more of something: more confident, more funny, more attractive, or more mellow.
• Maybe it’s less of something: less sensitive, less predictable, less needy.
• Maybe it’s free of something: free from certain attitudes, certain people, temptations, or addictions.

Whatever it is, most of us seem to have a sense of how we’d like to be…the way we would fix, or make complete, or just slightly adjust our own selves. In our times the effort to do this has been termed “self-help” or “self-improvement.”

Or at least those are the titles of the large sections of books at stores like Barnes & Noble, where I went browsing last week. Here’s a few of the titles I found:

They ranged from the broad…

• How to Re-invent Yourself
• 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself and Change Your Life Forever

To the specific…

• Your Handwriting Can Change Your Life (on the back cover: “stick to that diet by changing the letter T ”)
• Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life: how to use Feng Shui to get love, money, respect, and happiness

Some were relational…

• Relationships for Dummies
• How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936 classic, on the back these promises: “6 ways to make people like you, 12 ways to win people to your way of thinking, 9 ways to change people without arousing resentment”)

Or if those don’t work, you can buy the much more direct

• Winning Through Intimidation

Many focused on particular road-blocks…

• The Anger Habit Workbook (which wouldn’t work for me, because workbooks usually make me more frustrated and angry!)

And many made grand promises…

• Empowerment: you can do, be, and have all things (from the best-selling author of “The Angels within Us”)
• Shortcuts to God: Finding Peace Quickly Through Practical Spirituality (on the back: “No doctrine. No dogma. No rituals required.”)

Most of the needs expressed by these titles are real and legitimate needs. The angry person seeking peace and the socially-awkward looking for connection and the sexually frustrated looking for relationship all express good and true desires for wholeness…for help for one’s self, for healing. As much as I chuckled as I skimmed over the titles, I have to admit that more than one book caught my eye and offered me in a moment what I have craved or lacked for years.

We don’t know everything we’d like to know about ourselves. We also don’t know everything we’d like to know about ancient Christians like the Ephesians, but we can assume that they wanted, as people do in any century, to be whole people. And we can assume they would have wondered – as much as we wonder today – why it is that we do certain things, or don’t do things the way we’d like, or lack this or that characteristic or quality.

And we can guess, or even hypothesize based on archeology and literature, that first-century Christians like the Ephesians had nearly as many options as Barnes & Noble does for “self-help.” The Ephesians themselves had different religions, diverse markets and commodities, vast wealth, and towering above the metropolitan city of Ephesus stood the renowned temple of the beloved Artemis (also known as Diana) – the Greek fertility goddess known throughout the ancient world for her powers of healing, restoration, and fulfillment of every desire and longing.

These Ephesians Paul wrote to were believers who knew they needed help, but like us, and like me at the bookstore, they lived among so many competing options offering wholeness, fulfillment, and healing. I want to read the passage bit-by-bit as we go along today…listen now to what Paul writes to these broken people seeking wholeness and healing in the first century:

Ephesians 4:17-19

First, Paul reminds the Ephesian Christians how they used to be before they came to know Christ: they lived apart from God, because over time they had learned to ignore God. And in this darkness, their hearts became hard and their skin became thick.

A hardened heart cannot love anymore. And thick, callused skin cannot feel. Walking in sin makes our hearts hard and our skin callused. We lose feeling, we lose sensation, we lose sensitivity. And having lost all sensitivity, Paul writes, they “gave themselves over to sensuality” (4:19), to the endless and frustrating pursuit of self-fulfillment.

When sin hardens our hearts and thickens our skin, we end up seeking more intense stimulation to get through to our feelings underneath all that hardness. The more desensitized we become – whether it’s to violence, flippant or caustic remarks, sexual images, chemical abuse, whatever – the more intensely we will seek sensuality, because the only way to penetrate through years of building up all this hardness is to increase the intensity of the stimulation. When we become desensitized in a given area of our lives, it takes more and more thrills to feel anything, and eventually we may even lose our self-control.

Paul reminds the Ephesians that they used to fulfill their needs by seeking harmful and selfish ends, to the point where they became alienated from God, becoming desensitized, and out of their minds. He warns them not to return to these old and destructive patterns…his message is to break with the past and don’t let it rule your life any longer! And so Paul presents to the Ephesians, and to us, another option…

Ephesians 4.20-24

Paul reminds them that they are changed people because they encountered Christ. They learned the truth about Jesus, they were taught who he is and that he died to set them free, and they heard Jesus call them out of destruction to a new way of life.

Paul writes that for anyone who has encountered Christ, this “old life” used to self-indulging and self-sufficiency needs to be taken off like an old tattered piece of clothing. This old self is destroying you, “corrupted.” This old self is a closed system that is constantly closing in on itself, moving toward chaos and destruction. There is no hope for the old self, the old way of living.

The promise is that when we encounter Christ, the old self is taken off and a new self is put on. But Paul’s not giving us commands here to take off the old and put on the new by ourselves, the words he chooses are statements of fact: When you encountered Christ, that old self was taken off and this new creation was put on. God did this – it’s already done.

It’s easy to read this and still be caught in the very subtle trap of trying to re-create yourself. That’s what the Self-Improvement section at Barnes & Noble offers you…self-help, do-it-yourself help. But this new self in Christ is different. It’s already made, already created and prepared, custom-designed for you by God long before you were ever born. It has been created, it’s already real. That’s why Paul uses the past tense.

But we don’t take off our destructive old self by ourselves, and put on the new self alone. Anyone who has dealt seriously with addiction will tell you this: it’s not a solo journey. C.S. Lewis pictured this so well in his book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I bet many of you have heard or read this story before. This is the story of a group of children and other travelers on a boat called the Dawn Treader, sailing through islands in a fantastical world. And one of the children is named Eustace, a bratty kid who hates being there, hates everybody on the trip, and is a genuine pain in the neck. At one island, Eustace accidentally is turned into a dragon, and for weeks he cannot figure out how to change back into a boy. When he has about given up, Aslan the Lion (the Son of the Emperor Beyond the Sea), shows up in the middle of the night to help Eunice, and Aslan leads Eustace to a pool. Eustace dips in the water and takes off the dragon skin, but there is another layer underneath. It happens again and again, and cannot take it all off. Then here’s what happens, as Eustace tells the story to Edmund…

See, only Aslan could take the old dragon skin off Eustace. No matter how hard Eustace tried to do it on his own, only Aslan could turn him into a boy again, dressing him in new clothes. It hurt some when Aslan took off the scaly dragon skin, but it was worth it.

And Eustace was a changed person after that. Like the song the Blues Band sang this morning: “He came into my life and made me whole.”

When you encountered Christ, Paul says, “You put off the old self…and put on the new self.” God did this miracle, you welcomed it into your life, you cooperated…God started it, you received it. But it doesn’t end there. Even though God has done this taking off of the old self and putting on the new self, we still need to choose daily to live into this reality.

Paul says in verse 23, “Be renewed in the spirit of your mind.” We cannot give birth to our new selves, we cannot re-create ourselves, but we can accept or deny God’s new creation of us on a daily basis. This is a continual, on-going personal renewal.

And this renewal is living as our selves, as our true selves, the ones created by God. The lie is that God made us to be the way in which we find ourselves. That we find ourselves in this state of sin and destruction, and that we are just wired this way. The world tells us that…this is how you are wired, either accept it or go to the Self-Improvement section and change it yourself. That’s a lie. We don’t have to either accept the sin in our life and learn to live with it, nor do we need to go and just fix it ourselves. Not according to this passage.

The truth is that we have a true self, a real identity created by the Holy God in his own image, and this new identity is not just far off in the distance somewhere, but it is a present, spiritual reality tied up in the life of Christ.

But this new self still seems so unattainable. Where and when can we see real change within us? And to what extent can we change from our old selves? I don’t know of a quick, easy answer to this question. I know we don’t become completely perfected in this life, and yet I believe in the promise that the Apostle John wrote, that one day, “when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3.2). And I know that in the darkest night of our struggles, in the absolute worst mess we can make of ourselves, we can appeal to the one who will one day change everything, to the one who sits on the throne and tells John in Revelation (21:5), “Behold, I am making all things new.” He may not be done yet, but God is alive and well at work in us!

This reality, that we can give up on our old selves, our old and destructive selves, and rely on Christ who will re-create everything, has to change things even now in the present time.

And in this passage, Paul suggests that we will see changes in our relationships. Now it’s time for the down-to-earth everyday living: because of this new identity that God has created for us, we can therefore…

Ephesians 4:25-32

We can experience change in re-created relationships. This is a call to live consistently with the new self that God has created for us. This is a call to match our actions with our identity – we long for this kind of congruency in our lives, our actions and choices lining up with who God designed us to be.

This isn’t about putting on a Christian show or changing appearances to look good; Paul is talking about being real:

• We can speak truth to each other now, because we are connected to each other (Zech8:16). No separation of our worlds anymore, no acting one way at church and another way at work or at home. It all has to match up.
• We can now be angry and not sin (Ps 4:4), to hate evil and injustice with a righteous anger and yet not lose our temper with others. It’s now possible to deal with anger honestly before it grows and festers into something more evil and destructive.

Living in the new identity Christ gives us means that we are all in the daily business of redeeming…and here there seems to be a remarkable continuity between the old life and the new life:

• The former thief now works hard with his hands, hands once used to steal are now used to share what he has with those in need.
• The former slanderer now edifies with the words of her mouth, a mouth once used to yell rotten words now blesses others.
• And then the ultimate transformation: the forgiven person now learns to forgive others.

Because how can we be truly grateful for God’s forgiveness, if we don’t forgive others? It’s a hard message to swallow: God has forgiven us, called us his own children, and marked us with the Holy Spirit. And so we cause God’s own Holy Spirit to grieve when we hurt each other with unholy words. We cannot simply “be forgiven” and stop at that. The very act of being forgiven requires an ongoing response of forgiving others.

And then Paul gives the ultimate exhortation…

Ephesians 5:1-2

“Be imitators of God.” Sounds almost pretentious. Sounds downright impossible. But what does a child do when she mimics her parents? She watches her mom or dad to see what they do, and then she tries it out herself. Whether it’s a phrase or an action or whatever, it’s not usually a perfect replica the first time around. But it gets closer and closer, and soon it might even become natural…possibly even, after many tries, it will become what we sometimes call “second-nature,” a part of her very identity.

Our new identity is to be God-imitators, God-watchers. Paul reminds us who we are in the church: a community of saved people, ransomed from death and destruction, called upon to imitate the lovingkindess of our saving Father. The forgiven people become the forgiving people…there is not a stronger imitation of the Father than to be a forgiver.

Becoming imitators of Jesus is not following a script; it is a transformation by which God, over time, changes our very nature. And as our lives marked by Christ spill out around us, our lives become a sacrifice of giving ourselves to others, with an aroma, Paul says, that is pleasing to our Father.

This passage in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is not a quick, simple answer to all that has gone wrong with us, or a chart to follow, or a technique to make it all right before tomorrow. But it is the end of self-help.

There was one book at Barnes & Noble was different than the rest. How to Think Like Einstein…it’s not that this book has it right; it’s that it comes so much closer. This book recognizes that real help for the lost self is in a person, not in ourselves. Granted it’s pointing the way to Einstein, but at least it’s saying that help is not in yourself, it’s in a person.

Someone once wrote that the New Testament doesn’t always give us directions, but we are always given a direction…and the direction is toward a person, the person of Jesus Christ.

Imagine, again, the way you’d like to be…is what you imagine more like Christ? And does it go deeper than appearances and a chart of actions, or lists (as Susan said last week) – is it to truly have a heart like his, to become more and more like him as you grow older?

Help for the self is found outside of ourselves, in a God who is other than us, and in His Son whose Spirit is willing to dwell inside of us. Help is in the one who can and will change us, and is changing us right now. I don’t know what exactly that process will look like along on the way for you or for me, but I know that he is at work in us now…as we speak, as we pray and worship, as we share Communion, as we live our daily lives. And I know that if he is at work in us, then we will become more like him, and that he will – beyond all of our doubts and fears, and beyond our wildest dreams – make us into his holy temple.

Lord Jesus, you are our only hope for real transformation… when we encountered you, you changed our lives forever, and only you can continue this work in us to become who we truly are in you. Help us each day to walk into the fullness of this new life with you, Jesus, our Lord and Savior, Amen.