Ordinary Means · An Ephesians Study · No. 8
Paul has a favorite image for the Christian life, and it is surprisingly mundane: getting dressed. You have two garments, he says — an old self and a new self — and the Christian's daily work is to take off the one and put on the other.
He sets it up with a contrast. The unbelieving mind, left to itself, is futile — the word is mataiotēs, the "vanity of vanities" of Ecclesiastes. Darkened, alienated, hardened, and drifting, given time, toward callousness. But that is not the way you learned Christ. Notice the phrase: not learned about Christ, but learned Christ Himself. The believer has not merely picked up information about a religion; he has come to know a Person, as the truth is in Jesus. And a person who knows Christ no longer thinks the way he used to — which means he cannot keep walking the way he used to either.
So: put off the old self, which belongs to your former manner of life, and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Two things to catch. First, the new self is not a renovated old self. It is a new creation — the image of God, lost in Adam, being remade in Christ. You are not patching the old garment; you are given a new one. Second — and this is the part we tend to miss — this is not a one-time costume change.
Paul means it as a daily rhythm. Luther caught this exactly in the Small Catechism, explaining what Baptism signifies: that the old Adam in us should by daily contrition and repentance be drowned and die… and a new man daily emerge and arise. Daily. Not once at conversion and then finished. Every single day the old self goes back under, and every single day the new self rises. The Christian life is not one dramatic transformation you look back on; it is a quiet, repeated, ordinary practice — dying and rising before God, this morning and the next and the next.
And then Paul shows what the new garment looks like on an ordinary day. Notice the pattern in his examples: it is never merely stop the bad thing. It is always stop X, and instead do Y. Stop lying and speak the truth — because we are members one of another, and to deceive a fellow Christian is the right hand deceiving the left. Be angry, even — Paul does not forbid it; some things should anger us — but do not sin, and do not let the sun go down on it, because anger kept overnight becomes bitterness, bitterness kept for years becomes a person, and a slow-cooking grudge is the devil's favorite door. Stop stealing and work honestly with your hands — and here is the turn — so that he may have something to share with anyone in need; the new self earns not just to keep but to give, which is the whole Lutheran doctrine of vocation in a single verse. Let no rotten word out of your mouth — sapros logos, a word that decays — but only words that build up and give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit who sealed you for the day of redemption; your sin is not just a slip — it pains the Person living in you.
And then the whole list comes to rest on one ground. Put away bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, slander, malice, Paul says — and instead:
Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
— Ephesians 4:32
There is the engine. You do not forgive because the other person earned it (often they did not), or because it is socially convenient (often it is not). You forgive because God in Christ forgave you. Grace ran from the cross to you; it cannot stop there. Where you find you genuinely cannot forgive, it is usually a sign that something has gone dim in your grasp of how much you yourself have been forgiven. The new self forgives because the new self has been forgiven first.
Next time Paul raises the bar even higher: not just put on the new self but be imitators of God. We were darkness; now we are light — so walk as children of light. And he closes with one of the most beautiful pictures of the Church at worship in all his letters: a people filled with the Spirit, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, giving thanks always. Read Ephesians 5:1–21 before then.
Lord God, who called us out of the futility of our old minds to learn Christ Himself: by Your Spirit, drown the old self in us daily and raise the new self, created in Your likeness in true righteousness and holiness. Teach us to speak truth, to settle our anger before dark, to work with honest hands so that we have something to give, and to season our speech with grace. Make us kind, tenderhearted, and forgiving — as You in Christ have forgiven us. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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