(avg. read time: 8–15 mins.)
One of the most common questions we Christians ask is “What is God’s will for my life?” At least in my experience, the vast majority of times that question is asked, it is directed towards God’s will for a specific individual in that individual’s specific circumstances. What should be my profession? What is my gift? Should I join this church? Should I apply for this job? Should I take this job? Should I move to this place? Should I marry this person? Should I remain single? These questions and many others are the most common sub-questions of that larger question seeking God’s will for a person’s life. Questions of this kind are certainly legitimate, but if we focus only on them when we seek God’s will for our lives, we will miss God’s larger purpose. After all, God’s will for our individual lives is only a part of his will for the Church, Christ’s body, as a whole. More important than seeking God’s will for our specific circumstances is seeking God’s will for us all, his purpose that is binding on all of us. In this passage of Eph 4:17–24, Paul describes that general will of God in terms of putting on the new self, which is in accord with God. This is the purpose we were made to fulfill; this is the role that we were born to play. There is so much we could get into with this particular theme, but for the sake of simplicity, I want to focus on three aspects of this new self: it is communal, it is defined by newness of life, and it embodies authentic Godlikeness.
First, the new self is communal, but what kind of communal is it? As humans, we are necessarily defined in relation to our environment, our context, positively or negatively. As bodily creatures, we interact with and participate in the world around us. But in our contexts, there are contrary forces pulling us this way or that. This is why one of the ever-present challenges for God’s covenant people throughout history has been the conflict between assimilation with a world in rebellion against God and allegiance to the God who is the Creator, Judge, and Redeemer, the God who transcends our world. But this conflict is a corruption of God’s good purpose in making us communal creatures, creatures who need each other, who flourish in fellowship with each other, who seek to receive and give love. We were made for each other. It is because the world is in a fallen state that we must be more intentional in living into the kind of community that God wills (united by allegiance to him) and not simply exist in conformity with where we happen to be (mere assimilation).
Paul shows us as much when he tells his audience—who live in one of the largest cities in the ancient world full of hundreds of thousands of gentiles—to no longer live as the gentiles do. This congregation is mostly gentile and so he is saying, “Do not live like you used to live.” This way of life is described as foolish, willful ignorance, a life that leads to exclusion from the life of God because it is not open to God’s life-giving gift. Instead, it is characterized by a callousness that leads to “insolence” in practicing “impurity” and “covetousness.” These three nouns are ways of describing the reality of sin. Sin is insolence because it inherently challenges that God is God by living in denial and defiance of God’s will. This is why in Paul’s own day some Jews described idolatry as the root sin, which the first two of the Ten Commandments address. Sin is also impurity because it separates us from the holy God, driving a wedge between us and the one who makes us whole. In the Judaism of Paul’s day, one of the—if not the—primary ways of describing faithfulness to God over against sinfulness is in the contrast of purity and impurity. Finally, sin is covetousness or greediness because of how it places one’s own desires above the will of God. Some Jews in Paul’s day actually identified covetousness as the root sin, being the last and (so they say) summarizing sin identified in the Ten Commandments and the sin they identified in the actions of Adam and Eve. As sin disrupts our relationship with God, it also disrupts our relationships with each other, as disordered relationships lead to disintegration and destruction.
What Paul says in vv. 17–19 is the flip side of what he has been saying throughout this chapter. We are to be defined not by the environment in which we exist, but by the God who is our Father, Head, and life-giving Spirit, and by our relationship with God’s people. Unlike the world in which his audience lived and the world in which we live, he calls for us to be humble, gentle, patient in bearing with one another in love, and to be unified, all to contribute to the bond of peace or shalom, that state of wholeness that is the way things are supposed to be. Cornelius Plantinga defines it as “a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights.”1 Paul also describes this state of affairs through the “gifts” that are the spoils of Christ’s victory. Remember that the cross has both a vertical and a horizontal dimension. As Christ reconciles us to God, he also reconciles us to one another. The ways he has gifted us have purpose for one another and not for ourselves alone, so that we all may grow in unity, recognition of the Son of God, becoming more complete, and attaining a more mature stature in Christ. This is why here Paul does not describe characteristics or qualities as gifts, as he does in some other texts. Rather, he describes people as gifts to the Church: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, and so on. We are ourselves gifts to each other from God for the purpose of building each other up. God made us for each other.
But we are each other’s gifts only because we have received the gift of Christ from God, as Paul reminds us in v. 7. As God’s gift, Christ is not a means to an end; he is the end. The inheritance that God gives us is Christ himself, not simply what he can do for us. Christ is the one who defines the larger reality that we are a part of when we are a part of the Church. That is why Paul often describes us as being “in Christ.” At multiple points in this letter, he reminds us that the Church is the body of Christ. The Church cannot live without being in union with Christ. It is only in him that we attain our proper communal selves of being fitted together and held together by every part’s contribution directed by the head who is Christ.
Second, as should be abundantly clear from all that I have just said, the new self is the newness of life. Paul opens this chapter with talking about habits of mind and habits of behavior that embody the unity that the Spirit brings: humility, gentleness, patience in bearing with each other in love, and upholding union. Such habits as we have already seen renew and revive relationships, and they can give life to new relationships. These habits that belong to the new self are so life-giving because they are how God acts towards us. Most importantly, they embody how God has acted in Christ. We remind ourselves of this and our reception of it in baptism.
When we are baptized, we signify our identification with Jesus and the gospel story about him. As Jesus died for our sins, so we die to our sins in repentance and declaring our allegiance in faith to God in Christ by the Holy Spirit. As he was buried, so we are submerged in the waters. As he was resurrected, so we are raised to walk in the newness of life in anticipation of our own literal resurrection in the future. This new life is not a clean slate that we can do whatever we want with, because it is his life, his will that we are to embody. How can we do that? Paul says elsewhere in Rom 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds, so that you may discern the will of God.” In the same way he says here in v. 23 to be renewed in the Spirit of your minds, which is to say that it is the Spirit who provides us with such renewal. We need a renewal of our minds and Paul shows us here what both sides of such a renewal look like.
First, that which inhibits growth has to be cleared away. The way Paul describes what inhibits in this context is translated in a variety of ways. My preferred translation is “fraudulent lusts.” The essence of sinful lust is that it entraps our minds with desire, usually for a person but it can also be a thing. Lust defrauds us by telling us that we will be satisfied once we have whatever the object of lust is. (And I do mean “object,” because lust objectifies.) This idea is fraudulent because lust is never satisfied by being indulged. And so when our minds are led astray by lusts, our growth is stunted as we waste energy in vain pursuits of shallow satisfaction. Hence, it leads to ruin. We are told that this is part of what defined the old way of life, and it is not this way we are to follow anymore. Rather, we learn to follow a new way to that which nourishes us, renews us, and gives us life.
Second, to that end, we must learn Christ. Now if you paused when you read that phrase the first time, thinking that it sounded odd, you would be correct. As far as I can tell—and I searched through hundreds and hundreds of Greek texts—this is the first time in Greek literature that still survives when a person is the object of the verb μανθἀνω “I learn” without any preposition in between. As in English, so in Greek the expectation would be that you would learn “from” someone, learn “about” someone, or whatever other prepositional phrase you might think of. In fact, v. 21 describes listening “to” him and being taught “by” him. But in v. 20 Paul simply, stubbornly describes the new life as one of learning Christ, like one might learn Spanish, math, or history.
What does it mean to learn Christ? Paul explains smaller parts of it in v. 21 in terms of listening to him and being taught by him, showing that we are willing learners—in other words, disciples—of him. But it is more than that still. It means to learn who Christ is, what Christ does, Christ’s very life so that our new self may be like him. By such learning there is endless potential for growth because we are learning God the Son, as well as God the Father and God the Holy Spirit by virtue of learning the Son. As the revelation of God’s will in person, if we wish to find God’s general will, we must learn Christ around whom Scripture and the Church are organized. Learning Christ involves both learning Scripture—the story by which we can understand him—and learning within the Church, his body. It is the Spirit who works through each of these means to sanctify us by forming us into the likeness of Christ. All of this is essential to learning Christ because it is essential to the formation of the new self.
Learning Christ is also essential to the third aspect of the new self: embodying authentic Godlikeness. To become like Christ is to become like God, as Paul describes the new self in v. 24. It is a new self that has been created in righteousness—to live rightly in accord with God’s will—and holiness of the truth, being made whole and like our holy God. We are told to strip off that which accords with the old self and to put on the new self that is in accord with God.
Scholars have long debated where exactly Paul gets this imagery from. Obviously, the idea of taking off an old self and putting on a new self like clothing must have meant something to his audience, even if—as is often the case with Paul’s letters—they may have found some aspect of the idea difficult to understand. I’m most convinced by the idea that Paul derived this imagery from the theater. Ancient Greek plays often involved a fairly expansive cast of characters without the budget of a similarly expansive cast of actors. Actors would often need to portray multiple characters. How would they do this? They would take off one costume and put on another, and they would remove one mask that signified one persona and put on another. Of course, this practice was not simply restricted to the ancient Greek theater. You might have seen such a thing happen in a play you can see in a theater today. Or, more likely, you have seen it happen in movies. Eddie Murphy is especially well known for doing this kind of thing, especially if you’ve seen some of his older comedies like The Nutty Professor or Coming to America. He played four characters in Coming to America and seven characters in The Nutty Professor. How did you know he switched between characters? You knew because he changed his costume and his appearance, as well as his voice, and he threw himself into acting like a new character. In the same way, we are to throw ourselves into this new role. But here’s the key about this new role: it was literally the role we were born to play.
If you will remember back in Gen 1, when God created humans, he described them as creatures made in the image and likeness of God. The new self fulfills precisely that function of bearing the image and likeness of God, both resembling God and properly representing him in how we live. The new self that we have by virtue of being in Christ is like God, as God created us to be. In that sense, it is literally the role we were born or made to play. We are to study for this role like a great actor studies for a role and embodies the character they play.
Now of course where that analogy breaks down is the fact that we are told to put on the new self and never to take it off. Actors may inhabit their roles, but they only do so temporarily. Eventually, the mask must go back in the box with the others. But we are never told to put on a Sunday self or to take it off when it is time to put a Monday self on for the rest of the week. The fact that actors could so seemingly easily switch out of their roles and go about their business in a completely different fashion led to people being distrustful of actors. In fact, the term “hypocrite” comes from a Greek technical term for actors. Unlike one of the more expansive definitions used today, a hypocrite was not so much someone who did not act perfectly consistent with their beliefs—otherwise known as being an imperfect human—but someone who put on a performance, a counterfeit aimed to manipulate and deceive. The new self is not something we can pretend to be; it is a role we must inhabit with everything that we are, since it is the role we were born to play. In our baptism, we show ourselves giving our whole selves, our whole lives to this role, to this gospel story. We live into the new self because that gospel story is true, because there is substance to it. That gospel story defines our lives in a way that a story performed over the course of a couple hours never can.
In these ways we see how putting on the new self is essential to learning and fulfilling God’s general will for our lives. First, this new self is formed in community with the resources that God gives our community that is the body of Christ. We all learn how to embody this role and follow God’s general will from this script, which tells us the larger story that we have been brought into. And we all learn in relationship with each other through conversation, praying, Bible study, working together in ministry, and so on. All of our more specific callings and all of our more specific questions about our specific lives are only part of the larger purposes God has for us all as a community of believers. Second, this new self is formed in imitation of Christ to walk in the new life provided by him. If we want to know how to live this life, we need to look to him, to live the life that we have been baptized into. In the words of Ephesians, we must learn Christ. Finally, this new self embodies authentic Godlikeness, meaning that it is what God created us to be. It is the role we were born to play. We learn it best by throwing ourselves into it in a community of others throwing themselves into it, learning from those who have been throwing themselves into it, and learning from the one who created us to be it.
Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 10.