Colleen and Nikki talk about Ephesians 4:17-24 where Paul teaches what it means to not walk as Gentiles, but to walk in Christ. Colleen talks about trying to help students at Gem State Academy without having the gospel to share with them. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Nikki: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: Today we continue our walk through Ephesians chapter 4 with a study of verses 17 to 24. Now, in verses 1 to 16, we saw that when Jesus ascended to the Father, He gave gifts to His people according to His own will and measure. And we saw that He gave the church leaders who are gifted to faithfully guard and articulate the apostolic gospel and to shepherd and build up the church to maturity in Christ. This week we’ll look at how Paul contrasts that growing knowledge of truth in believers with the increasing ignorance and deception in unbelievers. And we’ll also hear the call of our apostle to live lives that reflect who we are now in Christ. But before we get started, let me remind you that if you have any questions or comments for us, we’d love to hear from you. You can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can visit proclamationmagazine.com to see our online articles and to sign up for our weekly emails, with ministry news and links to new material. Don’t forget that you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and please consider leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Colleen –
Colleen: Yes?
Nikki: I have a question for you. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] Okay.
Nikki: As an Adventist, what did you think it meant to walk as the Gentiles walk? And then also – so I have two questions, actually. As a believer, are you able to think of any examples from your life in Adventism that actually reflect the biblical meaning of walking as the Gentiles walk?
Colleen: You know, I don’t think I ever thought about what it meant to “walk as the Gentiles walk” in Adventism. I think I would have thought “to walk as an unbeliever.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Just, you know, whatever that meant to me. But thinking about this, I have a kind of vivid memory that as I think through this passage, I think it summarizes a contrast that I see now that I didn’t understand then. I’ll just tell the example. I was in my mid-20s, and I was teaching at Gem State Academy in Idaho, and I was one of the youngest faculty members there. There were people there that were older than my parents and down to me. And we would have faculty meetings in the library. There would be over 20 of us sitting in a big circle discussing policy and discipline and whatever came up at the regular meetings. And I distinctly remember one day sitting there, and I don’t remember what the issue was. It was probably a disciplinary issue. But I remember sitting there and listening to somebody on this side of the circle explaining why they thought we needed to have some mercy and leniency on the kid, and then somebody over on this side of the room explaining from a completely different perspective why they didn’t think that was a good idea and we needed to do something much more harsh and protective of the group, and as I was listening to the discussion in the room, I remember thinking, “I have no way to know what’s right” –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – “because each person’s perspective makes sense,” and from the way that they were thinking, from the perspective from which they were looking, all of those ideas had logic behind them from their perspective. I remember distinctly sitting in that room and thinking, “I don’t have any idea how to make a decision about this case,” because I could see it from both perspectives. Now, looking back on that, I realize that was the way I lived my life as an Adventist because what I didn’t understand was that I was lacking the foundation of truth. It was ridiculous for those faculty members to even be having those conversations, thinking they were Christian, thinking they were upholding Christian standards, when every one of us had our feet planted firmly on a false gospel that didn’t define a finished atonement, that didn’t define the biblical Jesus, that didn’t take the word of God as an inerrant, immovable source of truth. We were making it up as we went, without a firm foundation beneath our feet, and I had no idea we were dealing up here on the surface instead of dealing with the foundation that was causing us to see everything wrongly. So now I look at this and I think, I was walking as a Gentile walked, because I didn’t know what was true, I didn’t know how to make an informed decision based on absolute truth because I didn’t know such a thing existed. The Bible was movable, just like Ellen White was.
Nikki: That’s so interesting, the way you described that. I think I would have said the same thing about walking as Gentiles, just unbelievers, just walking as an unbeliever.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: But the way you described that, sitting in that room, kind of just volleying back and forth, you know, which way is right –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – it takes me back to the last section of Ephesians that we studied, where we’re told that God gave the church these offices that teach the gospel and guard the gospel so that we won’t be tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, and Adventism has different expressions of whatever doctrine or pet doctrine they think they have, which, like you said, is not rooted in the true gospel.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: It’s not rooted in Scripture, so whichever end of the spectrum they fall on, it’s still elusive and confusing, and that articulates well, actually, my experience in Adventism because there wasn’t a moment where I ever felt confident about truth, you know. I believed that the God of the Bible was real and that He was the one true God. That was the only thing, I think, I understood well. I mean, I believed Jesus was the Son of God, but the Jesus in my head was not the Jesus described in Scripture. So, anyway, I was also confused, and I wouldn’t have thought to relate walking as the Gentiles to not knowing what was true because no one knew what was true, all churches were wrong; right? We all had something wrong. No one was really right, we were just the closest. So it was very normative to not know what was real.
Colleen: I remember thinking that I wanted to live my live as a teacher coming down on the side of love and compassion and understanding, and I did believe in discipline, I did believe in punishment for wrongdoing, but for me it was all about love, but I didn’t know what love was. I couldn’t have defined grace in a biblical way. I couldn’t have described mercy in a biblical way. As an Adventist, I understood grace as just some decision to overlook wrongdoing. No, the Bible describes grace as something God gives us because Jesus didn’t overlook what we did and took the payment for that. I didn’t understand any of those dynamics. So the love I was trying to extend was based on my own flawed past and flawed understanding, and it’s like, what would I want someone to do for me? Well, I am hardly a standard for humanity, because I’m a wounded, broken person, but I didn’t understand that at the time. So there was no hard rock of truth, no accurate way to assess a situation.
Nikki: We love them in and keep them in the fold that way. I can tell you, as a student who attended boarding school, I had teachers in my life that were special to me. When I had to leave that boarding school and go back to a very difficult situation, I did not take a core with me. They didn’t give me anything. I just lost the relationships, that’s all it was. And I want to say to people who think that if you just love people well, then you’re going to offer them the Lord. No, you’re not; no, you’re not. You have to offer them the truth. You have to offer them the gospel. And if you don’t know that and you want to love people well, well, you’d better figure out what the gospel is because that’s what the kids take when they leave.
Colleen: That’s exactly right. They don’t take us. I was thinking earlier about all those kids that I taught as an Adventist and how I tried to reframe Adventism to make it less horrific, less difficult, less oppressive, but to encourage them to stay loyal to it, to stay in it. And I realize I didn’t even know what I was talking about. I just wanted these kids not to feel despairing, and I didn’t have Jesus, the real Jesus, to offer them. And I do remember the day I sat in front of my computer shortly after we came out of Adventism. I was thinking about all that, and I just burst into tears and asked God to forgive me for endorsing Adventism to hundreds of kids and asked that He would redeem it in their lives because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was doing “the best I could,” but the best I could was not acting in truth, it was acting from my Gentile, ungrounded-in-truth, unborn-again perspective. Yes, I was well-meaning. No, I was not dealing in truth.
Nikki: It reminds me of the verse, “Everyone did what was right in their own eyes,” and that was kind of the best we could do in Adventism. How did we understand what was right? And that’s how the Gentiles live.
Colleen: I think that’s one reason why I still respond rather badly when people, Christian or not, look back with regret on things and say, “Well, I did the best I could.” I want to say, “Wait a minute. Let’s own what you know to have been wrong and call it a sin and ask God to forgive you. Repent of it.” You know, let’s not do the internal excuse, “Well, I did the best I could.” The “best I could” was flawed, and I’ve had to repent for all those “bests I could” that I did.
Nikki: And He’s brought some of your students back into your life, hasn’t He? [Laughter.]
Colleen: Yes, He has, and it’s been an amazing gift, a wonderful redemption. Well, Nikki, why don’t we read this passage that’s kind of given birth to this conversation? [Laughter.]
Nikki: Okay.
Colleen: Why don’t you read Ephesians 4:17-24 for us.
Nikki: Okay. “So I say this, and affirm in the Lord, that you are to no longer walk just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their minds, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves up to indecent behavior for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. But you did not learn Christ in this way, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, that, in reference to your former way of life, you are to rid yourselves of the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you are to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.”
Colleen: It’s interesting to me to see how often in this section Paul talks about the mind. The Gentiles walk in the futility of their minds. We’ve given ourselves as Gentiles over to callousness and sensuality, then saying we didn’t learn Christ this way. We as former Adventists put so much emphasis on the mind as Adventists that we thought everything spiritual resided in the mind, in the brain, in the neurons, but Paul is saying here that when we are born again, it does affect our intellectual life. That’s actually a very wonderful truth that would have made things so much easier for me back then when I was a teacher, if I had understood that there is a truth, a reality that underlies how I can think well. And Paul is talking about that here. And as I hear you read this passage, my overriding synopsis of this is, before I was born again my thinking was futile, even though I didn’t understand that it was, because I didn’t know how to analyze it or to assess things accurately, but now that I’m born again, I have the eternal, omniscient, omnipotent God indwelling me, and it informs how I think and how I know, and this is a marvelous thing that’s real, and it’s very hard to explain. We were talking about this earlier. How do you explain this to somebody who hasn’t been born again?
Nikki: Yeah, I don’t – I don’t know. I’ve never been able to figure that out. But it’s interesting that it says here halfway through, and I know we’ll get to it as we walk through this, but that we didn’t learn Christ in this way, if indeed you have heard Him –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – and have been taught in Him. It makes me think, “My sheep hear my voice.”
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And we are taught in Him. We didn’t learn Him by natural, logical thinking.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: Our natural thinking, as Paul describes – this is like Ephesians 2, you know, verses 1 and 3 – we were deceived by the prince of the power of the air. We were following this spirit at work in the sons of disobedience, and so our thinking was messed up. It was influenced by evil, like you said, even when we didn’t. And then we heard Him.
Colleen: Um-hmm. You know, it reminds me of our older son, Roy. He became born again when he was 17, and he really did change a lot. He is a very bright guy. He was always questioning. He was always filled with arguments and presuppositions and sometimes difficult to talk to, as teenagers sometimes are because they’re exploring so many ideas, but when he was 17, he became born again, and it was a noticeable difference to Richard and me. And I remember a few years later we were standing in the kitchen, and I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I remember very distinctly Roy leaning up against the counter with the sink behind him, and he said, “You know, when I was born again, my thinking cleared up.”
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: And I looked at him, and I said, “Roy, it did.” It was noticeable. Something about knowing Jesus clears up our ability to think, to evaluate, to reason, and to be logical even.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s an amazing thing.
Nikki: He shows us reality. He opens our eyes. This is why so many of us will say, “I’ve never seen that before.”
Colleen: [Laughter.] Yeah!
Nikki: “I know I’ve read this before, but I’ve never seen that before.” He really does lead us into truth, truth about Him and truth about His expectations and desires for us and the truth about the world around us. We’re able to look at things, and even if we don’t understand God’s sovereign purpose in them, we can look at them and say, “This is God’s sovereign purpose,” because the Bible tells me that He is in control of everything, and it guides us.
Colleen: It’s so true. So Paul takes us from verse 17, where he introduces the idea of the unbelievers walking in the futility of their minds, he expands on that and says that as unbelieving Gentiles we were darkened in our understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that’s in them, because of the hardness of their hearts. What does that remind you of, Nikki, just right up front?
Nikki: Romans chapter 1. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Yes! No kidding! I’d like us to read Romans 1:18-22 before we go on because it’s like Paul is talking about the same things. Do you mind reading that, Nikki?
Nikki: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 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 senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.”
Colleen: Isn’t that amazing? That’s what he’s essentially saying here in Ephesians, and I look back on those faculty meetings, and I realize that for the most part we were a bunch of fools sitting in a room without a clear understanding of how to discipline and care for those teenagers in our care, and there were some very wounded, hurting, needy teenagers, and I think a lot of them fell through the cracks because we didn’t have that wisdom from God to know how to deal with them.
Nikki: That’s really the important part, not having the wisdom from God, not having the gospel. I would have thought as an Adventist that suppressing the truth in unrighteousness would have looked a lot more like the pagans, walking around drinking, you know, doing whatever they wanted –
Colleen: Oh, yeah.
Nikki: – but this is suppressing the truth about God.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And that can happen in false religion. It can look really godly and really clean to suppress the truth about God.
Colleen: Um-hmm. The divine nature and the eternal power of God – my goodness. I realize how much as an Adventist I did suppress that. Even though I wanted to know Him, even though I wanted to serve Him, which I now understand was His call on my life. He was seeking me even then, He was calling me as His sheep, but I didn’t know Him yet. And I didn’t have any understanding of His eternal power. Oh, yes, I would have thought, He’s the Creator, but I didn’t understand that His eternal power was eternal power even over me. I didn’t understand that He had the power over me. I didn’t have the power over me. He is sovereign.
Nikki: We took pieces of what we understood and then crafted an idol that worshiped our own will.
Colleen: As an Adventist, I would have separated the definition of truth from the details of my life because I didn’t understand that truth informed even the details of my life. I was completely bifurcated in my thinking. So then we move to verse 19, where he continues this description of how the Gentiles walk in futility, and it says, “…having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.” You were talking to me about this verse before we started, Nikki. What were some of your thoughts about it?
Nikki: I thought it was interesting, as I was comparing this section of Scripture to Romans 1, that we see the tension in here of God’s sovereignty and our accountability before God because in verse 19, they are the ones who give themselves up to indecent behavior for the practice of every kind of impurity. But if you read on in Romans 1:24 we see, “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” And then in 26, “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions.” And again in 28, “Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.” So we have this tension, where they themselves have given themselves up to indecent behavior for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness, because of their callousness they’re responsible. They’ve given themselves over to this. And this is what they wanted. God gave them over to what they wanted.
Colleen: That’s so interesting. It’s like Pharaoh, how the Bible says about equal numbers of times that Pharaoh hardened his heart and God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. People do have to decide to believe or not to believe. God reveals Himself. People decide to believe or not to believe, and somehow God works in all of that and cements whatever it is that’s happening in that person. It’s a mystery we can’t explain, but we do – as people before we’re born again, we are presented with the truth about God, like the people in Romans 1, and we either choose to acknowledge Him as God and give thanks or we choose to suppress it.
Nikki: Um-hmm. Yeah, and what’s interesting to me is between the section of Ephesians chapter 4 and this chapter in Romans 1, you’re moving either toward God, toward the truth, growing in Christ as a born-again believer, or you are an unbeliever who is suppressing truth, and that’s not neutral ground, because as you suppress, you become – you spiral more and more into futility and into darkness and away from God, and He lets you – He lets you, and you’re given over to that, and it just goes from bad to worse, and we see that. We see that in our world around us. I would venture to guess that a lot of us sadly see that in our conversations with unbelievers who don’t want to hear from us.
Colleen: I agree with you. I think it’s interesting in 19 as well that Paul uses the word “callous,” they become callous, their hearts are calloused, and we all know what a callus is. It’s a thickening, a hardening, so that the nerves of something that gets repeated use on the skin cannot feel any longer, and the people who have become callous give themselves over to sensuality and every kind of impurity, with greediness for more. It’s almost as if they can’t feel normal feelings about reality, and feeling so stony and so dead inside, they crave some kind of adrenaline or some kind of sensual stimulation so that they feel alive. And instead of looking for life at the source of life, they look for life by looking farther and farther into their own dead, calloused hearts, “What can make me feel?” “What can give me some sense of being engaged?” “What can give me some sense of having control?”
Nikki: And don’t you think that that can also look like giving yourself over to false religion? “What kind of God can I live with?” Because I know most Adventists could never love a God who sends people to hell. I’ve heard that so many times. You figure out what you can live with, and then you appeal to what makes you feel good about yourself, “Oh, I am a vegan” or “I keep the Sabbath,” or “I’ve read all of Ellen White’s books,” or “I’m above Ellen White, and I don’t have to believe her.” Whatever version you come up with, you can look like a really clean, put-together Adventist or you can look like a lost addict on the street. Both of you aren’t knowing and feeling God. And I remember being so surprised after being born again, I was very surprised by the feelings I was given, if that makes sense.
Colleen: Yes, it makes all kinds of sense. I had the same experience. This is what makes this so hard to talk about. There’s objective reality, there’s objective truth: God is. Jesus did come, He did die, He did carry our sins to the cross, He did rise from death, and the tomb is empty. That’s all objective reality. But what He does when we trust Him, when we admit we’re sinners and trust Him, He gives us ourselves. That’s the thing that was so impacting to me for a long time after I became a Christian. I suddenly realized that I had myself for the first time. I had feelings, I had reactions, I could see more clearly. I wasn’t just a wooden peg in a hole trying to do the right thing because that’s what my religion had said, that false foundation on which I stood.
Nikki: I love how you put that, that He gave you yourself. You know, before we’re born again it seems like the human experience is to discover who we are, discover what is my place in this world? What is my purpose? Why was I born? All of those questions that span every culture: Who am I? And when we’re born again and we’re created new in Christ and we have the life of God in us, we are suddenly whole for the first time.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: You know, I noticed that back in 18, where he describes these unbelievers as being excluded from the life of God, and I don’t think that means excluded from the religious experience.
Colleen: Oh, no!
Nikki: I think it means the life of God that is in us, making our new hearts of flesh beat with love for Him.
Colleen: He puts that love in our hearts. That’s not something we generate. It’s not human love. In preparing for this podcast, it’s always hard for me to talk about these more vague, almost subjective analysis parts of Ephesians, where it describes the life of the believer, contrasting with the life of the unbeliever, especially since as an Adventist I thought I was a believer.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: I would never have called myself an unbeliever.
Nikki: No.
Colleen: I just didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But I found kind of a random quote from Ellen White that somehow sums up – I keep going back to my image of being that teacher in that library with the rest of my faculty members, sitting on a foundation we couldn’t see that was a false foundation, and this quote from Ellen White summarizes that to me. This was the worldview that drove every sense of morality. This is actually taken from a devotional called That I May Know Him, so this is a quote taken from another work. It’s from page 56 of That I May Know Him, and this is what Ellen says, “The work dearest to the heart of Christ is that of drawing souls to Him. Look at Jesus, the majesty of heaven. What do you behold in His life history? His divinity, clothed with humanity, a whole life of continual humility, the doing of one act of condescension after another, a line of continual descent from the heavenly courts to a world all seared and marred with the curse and in a world unworthy of His presence, descending lower and still lower, taking the form of a servant, to be despised and rejected of men, obliged to flee from place to place to save His life, and at last betrayed, rejected, crucified. Then, as sinners for whom Jesus suffered more than the power of mortal man can portray, shall we refuse to humble our proud will? Study day and night the character of Christ. It was His tender compassion, His inexpressible, unparalleled love for your soul that led Him to endure all the shame, the revilings, the abuse, the misapprehensions of earth.” What’s wrong with that, Nikki? Is any one thing in there false?
Nikki: Well, there are no indicatives, Colleen.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: We’re to focus on the victimhood of Jesus and then be willing to function from that. That’s the indicative. He was victimized, now you need to go and do these things. And so much of her writing is like that. Even in her letters to her children. One of the letters that just did it for me as I was leaving was when she wrote her son and said, “I had a dream last night that you were burning in the lake of fire,” and then she encourages him to be good and to behave and tells him, “God does not love naughty children.” And I’m like, does this woman – I mean, does she know how to motivate anyone in any way other than fear? And it’s interesting that as an Adventist I thought we had a corner on the love of God, we didn’t use fear. So much of what she writes is fearful and manipulative, and there’s no cross, there’s no redemption, there’s no atonement. There’s no security.
Colleen: There is no sacrifice. There is no blood of Jesus shed for us. It’s exactly what you said, Nikki. There’s no indicative. We are not saved, in Ellen’s worldview. We have to try to be saved, and she manipulates us with guilt. We are to feel guilty for what Jesus suffered instead of grateful. God asks us to acknowledge our sin. We are supposed to feel guilty as sinners, but when we see that, we repent, and we see that Jesus paid the price for that. Once we accept His finished work on our behalf, He gives us life, and we no longer have to feel guilty for our past. We are eternally His adopted children, and He leads us to grow in Him, to recognize the sin in the flesh that we continue to submit to Him, but we don’t try to gain His favor because we feel guilty for causing Him to suffer. He chose to do this, and I realize this feeling of constantly looking at myself, constant introspection into how I need to be better, to make it worth it to Jesus that He suffered like He did, no! I can’t make anything up to Jesus. He did what He did as a sovereign act of grace for us, and the thing that we can do in response is to believe and to trust.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: We have no guilt going forward. We have only His life and the submission to His word, which is true and eternal and gives us a completely different foundation to sit on. We can deal with people with actual solutions instead of with casting about for the most expedient way to go to keep our reputation looking intact.
Nikki: I think that that’s part of what makes this conversation with other people so difficult for me too. You talked about kind of the subjective realities of being born again and trying to explain that to people. I can’t tell you how many times I have tried and I have seen other formers online try to explain to people, we obey Him because we love Him.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: We obey Him from that place of celebrating the good news, the victory that happened, and they like to throw the verse at you, “If you love me, obey my commandments.”
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: It’s really hard to cut between their words and show them the flaw in their thinking and to help them see that the real motivation for obeying Christ is love for Him and not “I’m trying to convince myself I love Him” or “I’m trying to prove that I love Him” or “I’m trying to, you know, behave like I love Him” –
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: – “until I love Him.”
Colleen: I know!
Nikki: I don’t even know how to try to articulate this. It’s why it’s so frustrating, and you know, even sometimes when I speak with people who have been believers their whole life, as far back as they can remember, it’s hard to have these conversations because being saved as an adult and having a lot of history living as an unborn-again false believer and then becoming born again, there really is this internal shift that is subjective, but at the same time, Scripture is what gave me the words to understand it.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I feel like I experienced it before I knew what I was experiencing, and then I would listen to Pastor Gary preach. I remember him preaching a sermon at Trinity Church in Redlands where he talked about what does it look like when you’re born again? And he just listed off all these changes that I was walking through at the time, and it’s right there in Scripture how things change. So it does feel subjective, and it’s hard to combat her quotes because to so many people that sounds so beautiful.
Colleen: I know.
Nikki: It’s such a compassionate picture of Christ’s humility, but it’s a false motivation.
Colleen: It’s not describing Jesus’ suffering from an accurate viewpoint. He didn’t come down to demonstrate His willingness to suffer for us. He came down to save us. He came as a man to die. He didn’t come as a victim. He didn’t come to manipulate us through guilt. He came to save us so we would love Him and could be adopted by His Father. It’s the difference between seeing God as the ultimate value in the universe and seeing myself as the ultimate value in the universe. The Adventist perspective had it all about me, “Oh, He came to show me how much I was worth to Him.” Well, obviously, we were worth a lot to Him, but that wasn’t the point. He came for God’s glory. Jesus died for the glory of God, and as we’ve already read in Ephesians, what He is doing in us as born-again believers and members of His Body is showing the universe and all creation the unparalleled wisdom of God. It’s not about “Look what He’s done to me.” It’s “Look who God is.” And when you see that as the indicative, that Jesus did this, it’s once and done, we trust Him, we are born again, God be glorified, it changes everything!
Nikki: Yes, it does. You know what? That makes me think of Sharon Lee’s story. She was saved during a sermon where a pastor was reading from Revelation where it says, “Who is worthy to open the scroll,” and the only one who was worthy was the Lamb of God, who came in and opened that scroll. And it’s like you said, in Adventism, oh, you’re worthy, He loves you, you know, or you’re worthy if you obey His commandments –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – whatever the message is, it’s some variation of trying to understand our worth. God is worthy, God alone is worthy, and when we understand that and when He gives us His life and He makes us new and He sets us apart as holy unto Himself, then we know our worth. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Yes. It’s true. [Laughter.] And our worth is only in Jesus.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Well, that is a wonderful lead-in to the second part of our passage, where Paul goes from describing and reminding us what it was like to walk as Gentiles, unbelieving Gentiles, to describing what it means to walk after we have heard Him and have been taught in Him. Nikki, you were commenting on verse 21 a little bit ago about the significance of how we are taught.
Nikki: Yeah, verse 20, “You did not learn Christ in this way, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus.” It makes me think about this description of those who don’t know God, who are futile in their thinking, and they’re just grasping after whatever they want to grasp after, we didn’t learn Christ that way. We didn’t just bump into Him in our efforts to find Him. We heard Him; we heard Him. He called our name, and we heard, and we followed, and we heard the gospel, and we believed. In Ephesians 1:13 and 14, when you heard the word of truth and believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit. In Ephesians 2, while we were dead in our sin, He brought us to life. And then further in Ephesians 2, He created us new in Him, and now we’re in Him, and the promise of the New Covenant is that no longer do we have to have someone say, “Know God,” because He Himself will teach us. And so we heard Him and we have been taught in Him –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – because truth is in Him, and we are in Him. And that changes everything.
Colleen: He goes on in verse 22, “…that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit,” and 23, “and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind.” It’s interesting that this is not talking about the process of being saved. He’s talking to people who are already born again, and he’s saying in reference to your former self – that’s our unborn-again self – but now as believers we – present tense – lay aside the old self. We still live in these bodies of flesh. And you were reminding me earlier, Nikki, about Romans 7:21. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Nikki: Yeah. It makes me think of what Paul said there. He said, “I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good.” And if you haven’t studied Romans 7, you want to go back and read the fuller context. He’s struggling with wanting to do the right thing and not doing the right thing, and he feels trapped by that. And he says, “Who’s going to rescue me from this? Thanks be to God.” And then we move into that beautiful chapter of Romans 8 –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – and what Christ did for us and that there is no more condemnation, but there is this very real struggle with sin, and what grabbed me about verse 22 was the fact that it says that the old self is being corrupted –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – in accordance with the lusts of deceit.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: That deception is after us, it’s after the church, it’s after believers, and it just takes me back to the beginning of this chapter, where we are held together in truth by sound doctrine, by the apostles’ teaching, by the gospel. That’s what protects us from the deception. And so we go back to that. You know, in my own life, I have – a part of my process of growing in maturity in Christ has been allowing the word of God to scrub away the lies that were in me from childhood. I had some rough experiences in childhood, and I had some lies in my head, and I really appreciate the fact that Paul used the words, “the lusts of deception,” because it’s a luring, it’s a pulling, it’s constant –
Colleen: Yes, it is.
Nikki: – trying to pull you down away from the truth of God, and so we cast aside – it makes me think of Hebrews 12:1 and 2a, we cast aside every hindrance, everything that prevents us from running well. This is the life after; this isn’t so we’re saved. Part of this is truly casting aside this deception that is distracting and calling us away from the truth of God –
Colleen: That’s so true.
Nikki: – and anchoring ourselves in that sound doctrine.
Colleen: I have times when I react in old ways that I brought from my childhood that are not appropriate for what’s actually happening in front of me. I have to remember that God’s word is the only thing that I have that is actually true and real and infallible. My head is not. So even when I perceive what really may be a terrible problem right in front of me or, you know, even when I experience something that is disrespectful or rude or unkind, my automatic responses in my head are not absolute truth. I may not even be evaluating the situation according to absolute truth, but it looks real because I’m living in it. Just like you said, Nikki, I have old patterns of deceit and rationalization in my head, and when those things come to life, because life is hard, it can cause me to compromise in my head. It can cause me to rationalize, and if I let my perceived feelings of depression or resentment or anger or whatever go unchecked, without submitting it to what God’s word says to do in situations like this, I can get so I’m not even able to define moral or truth anymore. I’m defining by my internal reality instead of by the external reality of God’s word. Because the Lord is applying His word to my life, I have a way to move forward, even if it’s just one step at a time. And His word shows me that I can submit each moment to Him at the moment something’s going wrong, and He will guide my steps. He may not just yank me out of my welter of feelings, but He will show me how to proceed so I don’t spiral into self-destruction. It’s really interesting to me, just this last week it’s like I saw 1 Corinthians 10:13 for the first time. It’s a verse we all know; right?
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: This is it: “No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able,” and notice it says “tempted,” it doesn’t say “suffer.” He does let us suffer.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But He does not allow us to be tempted beyond what you are able, “but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it.” Now, what I noticed for the first time last week is that God is aware of the temptation. He oversees the fact that we are tempted. Hebrews 12 even confirms this, that He disciplines those He loves. But He does not allow us to be tempted beyond more than we are able. That means that each person – He knows each person, and the temptations each person has will look different.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: He superintends what is allowed to come to us, but with the temptation He provides the way of escape, and it’s so interesting because the article in that is a definite article “the way of escape.” It’s not the indefinite article “a way of escape,” so that if we are His and we are faced with a temptation, the way of escape for us is also clear. And for me as a Christian, that way of escape is often rooted in an actual passage of Scripture. Sometimes it’s just rooted in remembering that God is my Father and instead of reacting to whatever is happening and creating more chaos, I can submit to Him and say, “Father, I don’t know what to do. Please take care of me.” But it’s so amazing. With the temptation He provides the way of escape. And I see that being implicit in what Paul is saying here in Ephesians.
Nikki: That’s really incredible. It reminds me of what Kaspars said last year at the FAF Conference, where he said that God gives the demand, but He also gives the supply.
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: So we have the command, flee temptation, but then we also have the assurance that He will give the way of escape. And what you’ve just described here, it’s a perfect explanation of how we answer Ephesians 4:17, “You are to no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their minds.” We don’t grasp at, “Okay, someone hurt me, someone offended me, someone disrespected me, now I’ve got to figure out how to deal with this.” We’re not left in our own minds to figure out how to respond. God tells us how to respond in His word, and He gives us the supply to do so.
Colleen: And being born again means His Spirit is in us. We’re not left as orphans, we’re not left to ourselves. He is there with us as we’re being tempted and as we are accepting the way of escape from Him. Well, Paul ends this passage by saying that as we’re being renewed in the spirit of our mind, we’re to “put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.” Would you talk a bit about that, Nikki?
Nikki: Well, it’s interesting. Actually, I’m just seeing this right now as you read that, “Put on the new self, which has been created.” That goes back to you saying that God gives you yourself.
Colleen: It does.
Nikki: He gives us – He created our new self. And now we live in accordance with that reality. We don’t go back to those old habits. We put on the new self. And Scripture tells us how to do that.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: One of the verses that comes to mind is Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” As we spend our time in Scripture – Jesus Himself said, “If you’re my disciples, you’ll abide in my words,” and He prayed in the high priestly prayer in John 17, “Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth.” And as we spend that time in Scripture, we learn what it is to put on the new self, to live in accordance with our identity in Christ, and we learn what it is to put off what was true about us. But I could have never come to that, Colleen, without the word of God.
Colleen: I couldn’t have either.
Nikki: This is not independent of Scripture. We have to be in that.
Colleen: There’s something about Scripture – well, it says of itself in Hebrews 4:12 that it’s living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing between joint and marrow, soul and spirit, revealing the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Isn’t that fascinating? Scripture doesn’t just tell us things. It’s not just a rulebook. It is something that reveals to ourselves the truth about us and who Jesus is, what He has done, who our Father is, what the Spirit does in us as God Himself indwells us when we believe. There is something about being born again and knowing that our foundation is found in this living and active word that changes all of life, and when I think about being in that circle of teachers at Gem State Academy with an invisible foundation of Ellen White under our feet telling us to contemplate and feel guilty and to mourn over how much I caused Jesus to suffer and, by all means, to make my life worth it to Him, how upside down that was. No wonder so many people went through those schools and came out feeling no more alive than when they went in. We couldn’t help them without the gospel, and I just mourn sometimes when I think about the students that I taught who didn’t know Jesus and who probably don’t now. But He redeems this.
Nikki: He does redeem it, and you know, sometimes we grieve over the people we know who aren’t saved, and then we have the honor of watching them come to life. And other times we entrust God with the ones who seem impossible to ever listen to the gospel, and know that just because they’re not saved yet doesn’t mean they won’t be.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: You know, truth was just so elusive in Adventism, and that’s why I think people tailor it to their own desires, because it’s so impossible to get at, but we’re told in the Scriptures, we’re told – Paul tells us in Colossians – I think of it as the sister letter to Ephesians –
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: – because I know he was in prison when he wrote it, and he tells us there too that the new self is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the one who created it.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: God is giving us absolute truth. There is absolute truth, and for those who are in Adventism, confused by it, or who are leaving and not sure what truth is, I just want to say there is absolute truth. There is an anchor and a hope that you can put your life on, and it will hold you together through anything you face.
Colleen: If you haven’t found that anchor, we encourage you to look at Jesus. Read Ephesians and see what He has done. He has taken your sins to the cross, not to make you feel guilty, not to show you how much He’s willing to suffer. He has come for the glory of God. He has become sin for us. He has become a curse for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. Acknowledge to Him that you are a sinner who cannot save yourself or overcome your own sin, and accept the payment that He gave by shedding His blood on the cross, and let Him bring you to life. He will show you how to put off the old man and to walk in the new. It’s something He does in you as His life is in you.
Nikki: If you have any questions or comments for us, we’d love to hear from you. Write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Don’t forget to visit proclamationmagazine.com if you haven’t signed up for our weekly emails yet. And don’t forget that you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and please consider leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts. And join us again next time as we continue our walk through the letter to the Ephesians.
Colleen: We’ll see you then.
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