The sinful nature isn’t born one day when you make a bad choice. You have it by birth. It shows itself differently in different people. For one man it might be pornography. For another anger, or anxiety, or materialism, or gossip, or something that only you can describe. You don’t like it and so you fight against it. You take great effort in suppressing it. You keep ourselves busy with other things. You try and do good things instead. You make promises to God if he’ll help you. But then you fall again. And again. You hate yourself for it and yet you find yourself weak to change.

There is hope. And the fact that you wrestle with it at all is a bright spot in the darkness. By the time we get to chapter 4 in Ephesians Paul has explained the wondrous work of God to bring dead people to life as part of a new society, the church. Now, he changes direction and begins to spell out what life in the church looks like. Last week we saw how it is united and yet diverse so that it might grow to full maturity. This week we see that in the church there must not only be unity, but also purity. God is holy, therefore his children are called to be holy. That means that the sinful nature must be dealt with, and Paul doesn’t hold back in helping us to do just that.

Because God recreates us in righteousness and holiness, we must be renewed in our minds. He goes on to spell out what our lives ought to look like now that we are a new creation but first he explains how this renewal of our minds must take place. He directs us with two exhortations. The first shows us the futility of the mind of the sinful nature and the second shows us he renewing power of the new nature.

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