Learning Christ

When I wrote this, I had just been urging you to walk worthy of your calling, to grow up into Christ the head. Now I press it further, and I do not soften it: "Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds" (Ephesians 4:17). Hear how I trace it downward, step by step — for sin is never only what the hands do. It begins in a darkened understanding, and moves to a heart grown hard, and hardness grows callous, past feeling, until a man gives himself over to whatever his appetite craves (Ephesians 4:18-19). That is the old road. You know its dead end.

But then I set against all of it one small, glorious contradiction: "But that is not the way you learned Christ!" (Ephesians 4:20). Mark the word — you did not merely learn about him, you learned him, you were taught in him, "as the truth is in Jesus" (Ephesians 4:21). He himself is the school and the lesson both. And what he teaches is not first a list of rules but a change of self.

See the three things I say happened, and are happening, in you. You were taught "to put off your old self" — to lay it aside like a filthy garment, that man you used to be, corrupted by desires that promise and lie (Ephesians 4:22). And "to be renewed in the spirit of your minds" — for the mind that was futile and dark is made new from within, not by your straining but by the Spirit's work (Ephesians 4:23). And "to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness" (Ephesians 4:24). Do you see whose image you now wear? You who once bore the marks of the old man are being remade to look like the God who made you.

So here is the shape of the whole Christian life, beloved: take off, be renewed, put on. This is not you climbing back to God by your own effort — you have already been raised with Christ and seated with him (Ephesians 2:6). It is you becoming, in your daily living, what you already are in him. Tomorrow, when the old desire rises with its familiar lie, do not merely resist it — strip it off, as a thing that no longer belongs to you, and clothe yourself in the new self Christ has given. That old man is not your master. You have learned Christ. Grace and peace to you.