Love the Lord with Understanding

FROM: JULY 17 @ 23, 2018

TOPIC: "Love the Lord with Understanding" Ephesians 4:17–23

In Matthew 22:37 Jesus says: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." The mind, our intellectual nature. And it says in Jeremiah 17:10 "I, Jehovah, who examines the mind..." God is the only one who can search your mind; He knows everything about your mind. What you’re plotting, what you want, what you seek in your actions, what is indeed in you; it is not what the mouth speaks. Let's be honest!

I. We must love the Lord with understanding.

A. Paul says it with the authority of the Lord (Vs.17 "So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord...")

1. The mind likes vanity more (Vs. 17).

2. All traces of past life must be removed (Vs. 22).

3. The past life is a cloak full of mud.

4. We must wear the virtues and excellences of the Lord Jesus Christ (Vs. 24).

5. The Ephesian brothers would no longer be like the other Gentiles; now they were Christians (Vs. 17).

6. You are no longer impious! You are a Christian!

7. The world lives in degradation, in dishonor, in disgrace.

8. The Gentiles, the unconverted walk aimlessly.

a. They walk in the "vanity" of life. What fills them is pride, appearance.

b. The impious walks empty, without fruits.

c. They may have different types of activities, but no progress.

d. They chase bubbles and shadows, but neglect "the great realities of life."

9. (Vs.18) Blindness, one lives with a blindfold in a world of fiction.

a. The understanding is darkened.

b. Understanding = is to learn, understand, reason, make decisions and form a determined idea of "reality."

c. Tenebrous = in darkness, obscure.

d. They had a natural inability (spiritual) to comprehend the "spiritual truths," and then, because of their rejection of the knowledge of the true God, suffered from blindness as a judgment of the Lord.

10. (Vs. 19) They lost all sensitivity. A certain Moule translates it thus: "Having overcome the pain." How expressive! When one denies their consciousness, the first time there is a feeling of pain; there is an audible protest. But if you insist on silencing that voice, finally the voice becomes less clear and strong; the protest of conscience drowns, the pain is less keen, "until finally it is possible to overcome the pain."

a. Sensitivity gives you pain when something is wrong.

b. For such reason, if you lose that sensitivity, then you become miserable.

c. They gave themselves to all kinds of impurity, such that they were never satisfied.

d. Sin created in them a huge appetite for more and more. Clean yourself and your own!

11. (Vs. 20) How different from all this was the Christ whom the Ephesians had come to know and love!

a. Jesus is the personification of purity and chastity.

b. He knew no sin; he did not sin; there was no sin in Him.

12. (Vs. 21) "Surely you heard of him and were taught in him..."

a. It is not casting doubt on "conversion."

b. It is that all those who have heard Christ and have been taught by Him have "come to know Him as the essence of holiness and piety."

c. "Surely you heard" = means to have heard of Him with the hearing of faith; to have accepted him as Lord and Savior.

d. The expression "taught in Him" refers to the instruction that the Ephesians received by walking in "communion" with Him after they had been converted.

e. He is the truth incarnated (John 14:6).

13. (Vs. 22) In the school of Christ we learn that in the time of conversion we divest ourselves:

a. Of our old man who is tainted according to the deceitful desires.

b. The old man is what we were before conversion, when we were the son of Adam.

c. The result of giving in to the deceptions of pleasure is frustrating.

d. Remove the old man from you, a believer, for your old man was crucified and buried with Christ.

e. In practice, the believer should consider him "dead"; once and for all, the old man dead.

14. (Vs. 23) Another lesson we must learn at the feet of Christ is that we are being "renewed in the spirit of the mind."

a. This is "a total change in the way of thinking."

b. A change from mental impurity to holiness.

c. The Spirit of God influences the "mental processes" to lead to reasoning from God's perspective, "not from the perspective of the unconverted." Amen.