Ephesians 4:17-24 | Pastor Jason Lancaster---Do people really change?** You may be thinking, “I’m not so sure.” Do people really change? And I believe by God’s grace the answer would be yes, they do. A passage like this speaks to that. But often when you come to a passage like this, you may hear preachers like me bash you over the head and say things like, “Just change already.” I’m not going to do that this morning. I believe there’s a lot of grace here, and I’d like to pray in line with that grace for this passage.PrayerLord, I just want to be able to preach this morning and say what You want me to say, and trust that what You want to say to Your people is from Your Word—speaking of me first, changing me, changing us, changing the people sitting next to us. Lord, change us to be more and more like Jesus, no matter what it takes. In Your name we pray, amen.My desire for me is my desire for you: to think God’s thoughts after Him—to have our minds so enraptured with God’s thoughts that it impacts our lifestyle. Because your lifestyle is not controlled first by your lifestyle; it’s controlled by what’s going on in your brain and in your heart. I’m asking God to change the way I think so I think more like Him. And I’m asking the same for you.I’ve learned a new phrase recently from my children. I learn lots of stuff when you still have kids at home. The newest phrase I’ve heard is rage bait. I love that terminology—rage bait—like you say something to get someone else mad. And this is what happens online: lots of rage bait. People say something, post something, it makes you mad, you engage with it, and then the rage starts to spread. Then we have a whole nation of people who enjoy recreational bitterness. Anybody? You just enjoy it.The reason you enjoy recreational bitterness is because the algorithms and the companies know that. They’ve created this rage bait in such a way that you will engage with it and your blood pressure will rise. Can you believe that? Someone who knows technology better than all of us has an algorithm out there that somehow is farming your mind. That’s crazy. They’re trying to get to you and craft the way that you think. They’re farming your mind. That’s crazy to think.The apostle Paul is going to say this morning that that kind of way of living and thinking is futile. It’s empty, and it goes absolutely nowhere. His truth speaks to all of us, because that is supposed to be the way we *used* to live and *used* to think—but no more.Let’s see what he has to say in Ephesians chapter 4, starting in verse 17:So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind.Most of the people in this congregation at the time were Gentile converts. They were not raised Jewish; they were Gentile converts. This is the life they’ve come out of. And in this one sentence, he says: don’t go back.One of the ways I’ve heard it phrased is: you must no longer walk as the Americans do. Don’t do like everybody else and what they do in America. And I think that works, because Gentiles, Americans—all of us—are corrupt sinners in need of salvation. The reality is the gospel doesn’t just save you from hell and the wrath of God. The gospel also saves you from you—and the futility of your mind.Look again at verse 17. It says specifically: no longer as the Gentiles walk in the futility of their mind. When God is rejected and you’re not a believer, what Paul is saying specifically here is that your thoughts are not thinking in line with the way of the truth.Romans 1:21 says:For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their reasonings, and their foolish hearts were darkened.To push even further, we would say a life lived outside of God is a life of insanity—not an insanity that’s going to put you in an insane asylum, but an insanity that helps you blend in with the rest of the Americans. Because when you’re living in this insanity where you know that God exists and yet you’re not following Him, then you’re thinking along the ways of this world. And that’s called futility—a futile mind.I wrote a whole book on this. It’s called A Trivial Life, and the tagline is Escaping the Default Mode of the Human Heart. No one has to tell any human ever to engage in trivial things, right? No one has to teach my kids to sin. They got it. No one has to teach you to sin. You got it. It’s the default. When we’re born, our default is toward sin. It’s a default toward a futile mind. And that’s of course why rage bait works—because the algorithms and the people know that’s what’s inside of you. That’s your default. So you participate in it, and they got you, because that’s a futile mind.So basically, what we’re doing so far: Paul is describing the way the world works. Look at verse 18:Being ...
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