2024/9/29 Ephesians Series # 24 Live Differently: EPHESIANS

I feel the need to address the tone of Paul’s letters and thus the tone of my preaching through our texts the last few weeks. Paul has had a sense of urgency, of determination, maybe even of warning here in the latter part of Ephesians 4.
Often, within our culture, there’s a pressure on pastors to tone down the message and feed it to the gentle and unaware flock, not realizing there is a wolf, or even worse, the chief wolf or lion, waiting to devour them. These people don’t realize that the souls of people are at stake in the battle that is taking place. This is why Paul’s tone is never flippant and he often has urgency in his writing. He’s a watchman on the wall. He’s a messenger announcing our Father’s instruction to prevent his people from being devoured by a prowling lion looking for weak sheep or unsuspecting uninformed lambs.
Friends, we are in a war. And we are an army united under the command of Jesus Christ. And so I want to encourage you, as your pastor, and under-shepherd of our Great Shepherd, Jesus Christ, to be diligent. To understand that Paul has been telling us, for good reason, to renew our minds and to put away what we used to be so that we can become what we are meant to be. So, Paul’s tone is my tone. I don’t want to lessen the tone or urgency just because the message may be difficult to hear.
Paul is writing out of a love and passion for the church’s good. Ephesians is a letter written by Paul addressing some specific challenges for the church at Ephesus. And the same challenges apply to us. We will see this when we begin to work through the very personal applications of “putting on” in every day life.