Paul has said a lot in this chapter about the character of Christian maturity and what it means to be spiritually mature in Christ. Now he turns to the practical side. It’s a turn he began in 4:1, but he had a little more to say before completing the turn here. His focus from here on is on the work of Christian maturity: what does it look like to live out what God is making you to be? It’s a common transition in Paul’s letters, what scholars call the turn from the indicative to the imperative—from telling you what is true to telling you what to do as a consequence.
He begins with the negative example: don’t be like the Gentiles. He means, of course, those Gentiles who are not disciples of Jesus, as his concern is to show the character of those who live in opposition to God. The diagnosis he presents is the same one he presents in Romans 1: their thinking is futile. From that parallel and from other scriptural texts, we know the reason for that futility is their idolatry. We’ve talked about this before, that idolatry produces spiritual blindness and deafness because idols are blind and deaf and we become like what we worship. As a consequence, the understanding of unbelievers is darkened—they can’t perceive the world accurately and thus are unable to comprehend it correctly.
The consequences of that roll down inexorably. Their darkened understanding leaves them spiritually ignorant, but Paul is clear that their ignorance is willful: they deliberately refuse to accept the truth, they deliberately refuse to accept conviction of sin, and therefore they are ignorant because they have chosen to be. We’ll come back to that in a moment. We also need to note that because of their willful ignorance and the idolatrous darkness of their understanding, they are alienated from the life of God. Their hearts are set on false views of life and false views of death, and so they’re chasing will-o’the-wisps down all the wrong roads. They’re doubtless passionately committed to the idea that what they are seeking and pursuing is life to them, as people always are in every age, but they’re wrong. The fact that they’re wrong—ignorant of the truth, darkened in their understanding, futile in their thinking—can be clearly seen in the way they live their lives. Efforts to live morally apart from God will ultimately collapse.
Now, I know atheists generally don’t like when Christians say that. I know they’ll point to unbelievers who live highly moral lives (and to churchgoers who are spiritual brutes), and they’re not wrong. Efforts to live morally apart from God don’t immediately collapse. Ultimately, however, they will, for one simple reason: those who live in opposition to God can choose to live moral lives on generally Christian terms, but nothing in their worldview requires them to do so. If you’re consciously not a believer in Jesus, you may be trying to prove your life is more moral than most Christians, but why? If you don’t believe in God, why are you trying to act as if you do? A couple weeks ago, I mentioned the most honest atheist in human history, the German nihilist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche; Nietzsche would look at that and ask, if you’ve renounced slave religion, why are you still living as a slave?
Going on, Paul tells us those who live in opposition to God have willfully chosen ignorance and darkness because their hearts have become like stone. Interestingly, the cognate noun of this word referred to a light, porous stone rather like pumice, something absolutely hard and inflexible with little structural integrity. I don’t know if that was intentional, but I think it’s worth thinking about. In any case, their hearts have calcified and their consciences have grown calloused—or, to pull the image Paul uses in 1 Timothy 4, have been seared. They’ve lost all moral sensitivity; they no longer have the ability to feel pained by their behavior. Their repeated deliberate rejection of the prompting of the Holy Spirit has left them unable any longer to feel that prompting—and indeed, to some degree, to feel anything at all.
As a result, Paul says, they have given themselves over to unrestrained, undisciplined sensual desires—the ESV has “sensuality” here, but that’s too weak. The NRSV’s “licentiousness” is better, while New Testament scholar F. F. Bruce favors “debauchery” or “wantonness.” Now, note: in the section of Romans 1 which Paul is condensing and summarizing here, he says God gave them over to the lusts of their heart. Here, he says they gave themselves over. Both these things are true, as they are in Exodus where both Pharaoh and God are said to harden Pharaoh’s heart. Note the description: they are greedy to practice every kind of impurity. Greed might actually be intended as a third vice in the list, as Bruce argues, but I doubt it makes much difference. Either way, the picture in these verses is clear: people are ruled by their desires to the point that if they see something they want, they take it without any sense of shame or guilt, any concern or respect for anyone else, or even any self-respect.
Against that, Paul says sharply, “This is not how you learned Christ!” Note that: he doesn’t say you learned about Christ; that’s a necessary part of the picture, as Paul acknowledges in verse 21, but only part. The key is Christ himself. The point is actually knowing Christ, and that as one whom he loves and has saved. What you were taught in him in this context can be summed up with the command, “Change your clothes!” First, put off the old self. Because we are in Christ, we’re no longer who we used to be. You’ve been given a new heart and a new spirit: at the core, you are different. But the old self lingers. Debauchery, impurity, and greed are your former manner of life, they’re the sins in which you once walked, but they’re not supposed to be that anymore. The problem is, that’s the way your feet are accustomed to going, and those are the clothes you’re used to wearing. If you let yourself run on autopilot, that’s the self you’re going to put on, and that’s the way you’re going to walk. Just talking a good game about Jesus isn’t enough; you need to take off those old rags and walk the talk.
Once we’ve taken off the old clothes, the old self, we need to put on the new self. To do that, we have to train ourselves not to put the old self back on. That’s why Paul says—pulling from Romans again, this time 12:1-2—“Be renewed in the spirit of your minds.” We’re being renewed from the inside out; what we say and do proceeds from what we think and feel. The imperative is a little tricky, though: it’s not “renew yourselves,” it’s “be renewed.” It’s a little as if you were to command me, “Be taller.” What am I supposed to do about that? But if we can’t directly do what we’re commanded, there are two ways we can cooperate with it. One is training ourselves to notice thoughts which belong to the old self, and then when we do, to challenge them with the truth of who we are in Jesus. The other is to recognize that what we put in our minds feeds our thoughts. You may have heard the image that there are two dogs inside each of us, a white dog and a black dog, and whichever dog we feed is the one which grows; if we want to be renewed in our minds, it helps if we feed the right dog.
We do this so we can train ourselves to put on the new self, wearing on the outside what’s already true in the deepest part of us. The call of God on our lives has made us his saints in being; now we learn to practice that in living. God has made us holy, set apart from the world for himself; the goal for us is to live as holy people who show in the way we live the likeness of God. The doing of this is ultimately God’s, for it’s the power of Jesus at work in our lives by his Spirit. We draw near to God and his life, we seek and strive to live in his life in this world, and he makes that happen by his power. The more we look to Jesus, the more deeply and truly we come to know him, the more we become like him.
Of course, Paul knows he needs to be more specific than that, so he lays out four replacement policies. One, replace falsehood with truth. If Christ is the Truth, then we who are his people should be people of truth, both within the body and without. For one thing, speaking truth is necessary for us to keep covenant with one another. God’s commands in Zechariah 8:16-17 are on point here: “These are the things you shall do: Speak the truth to one another; render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace; do not devise evil in your hearts against one another, and love no false oath, for all these things I hate, declares the Lord.” If we’re united in Christ, we’re part of one another, and we owe each other truth. As for the world, to be faithful witnesses to the one who is Truth, we need to have a reputation for truth, meaning both honesty and faithfulness to keep our word.
Two, replace worldly anger with holy anger—which, be it noted, includes abandoning any idea that we get to decide for ourselves if our anger is holy. It also means recognizing, on the one hand, that anger isn’t necessarily sinful—this is about replacing, not suppressing—and on the other, that no matter how justified our anger might be, even if we are angry at the right things toward the right people, as Aristotle begins his definition of meekness, we must also be angry in the right way, at the right time, and for the right length of time. Failure to control our anger is sin, regardless of any other consideration.
Holy anger is meek; the point of meekness is anger in harness so it’s directed toward setting things right. Anger is supposed to be energy to do justice for others, not to demand for myself the justice I think I’m owed. In personal relationships, it’s also a warning light indicating a need to reconcile with someone. Sometimes reconciliation is impossible or unsafe, and we’ll come back to that in a moment. Whether it’s possible or not, safe or not, however, what we must not do is hold our anger and nurse it. If we do that, it curdles into bitterness, which multiplies the damage to us and gives the Enemy a beachhead in our souls.
If we honestly cannot reconcile with someone—if it’s unsafe, as with someone who has abused us; or impossible, as with someone who has died, or who refuses to repent of or even acknowledge any wrongdoing on their part—we need to give the anger to God and forgive them, probably multiple times. Note that forgiveness is necessary for us even when it’s no good for them. Forgiving does not mean forgetting; “forgive and forget” is not biblical. Remember, anger is energy for justice; forgiveness means releasing our claim to determine what justice is due those who have hurt us, and our demand that the justice we have determined must be executed on our terms and our schedule. Put another way, forgiveness is relinquishing the work of justice to our just and holy God—to whom it really belongs anyway.
If nothing applies to make reconciliation impossible or unsafe, then we must seek honest reconciliation as soon as possible. Note I said honest reconciliation. This is not about denying our anger, or playing down the hurt that was done to us, or making excuses for the other person. Honest reconciliation begins, on the other person’s end, with humble, sincere, and serious confession and repentance of their sin against us, and it requires the willingness to be convicted of and repent of sin they have not yet recognized. On ours, it begins with acknowledging the hurt we’ve suffered, naming it as clearly and specifically as we can, honestly expressing our anger, and then owning that anger. Where it gets hard is that it doesn’t mean expressing that anger to beat up the other person with it, it means—as we said above—expressing it in order to release it and then give it to God in forgiveness. The bottom line with our anger and our own need to forgive is that we must let God be the determiner of justice and the keeper of retribution.
Three, replace theft with honest work. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of generosity; therefore we are to live by trust in his generosity toward us and in that same Spirit toward others. The goal for us should not be to accumulate whatever we desire by whatever means we can contrive. Rather, if we’re walking in step with the Spirit, we will seek work that’s worth doing in its own right, that produces honorable results and the ability to be generous to those in need.
Four, the longest of these and probably the one most needed in our current cultural moment, replace corrupt speech with speech that builds others up. This world’s speech is corrupt in multiple ways. We probably think first, and correctly, of vulgarity and profanity—which, as an aside, are actually two different things; vulgarity is biological foul language, while profanity is theological bad language. The best example of the contrast here is in the musical version of Les Misérables—it’s in the novel, too, but significantly sharper and clearer in the musical—between the two chief villains: Monsieur Thénardier is vulgar (as is his wife), while Inspector Javert is profane. Not that Javert realizes it, of course; whatever else might be said of them, the Thénardiers have Javert beat for self-knowledge. That’s why they survive and he kills himself.
In any case, when we consider the corruptness of worldly speech, there’s much more to be said. It’s characterized by bitterness, insults, and slander—also known as political advertising. It’s driven by unrestrained anger and shaped by malice. It’s destructive, and often delights and takes pride in being so. And while it can be quiet, subtle, and poisonous, it’s more often loud and domineering, striving to silence all competing voices through sheer brute force.
By contrast, the words of Christ are words of grace. They’re not necessarily words that make people happy, of course; Jesus wasn’t exactly prone to tell people what they wanted to hear. Correction, challenge, and rebuke are sometimes necessary even though they’re often unwanted. They may cause pain, yes, but causing pain isn’t always a bad thing. A switchblade in the hands of a thug and a scalpel in the hands of a surgeon can both draw blood and both cause pain, but the former is an instrument of destruction and death, the latter is an instrument of life and healing. The metal is functionally the same between them and the physical actions may be similar, but the will and purpose behind them is completely different. What matters is that our words are spoken in love to bring healing, not with the intent to cause harm.
If we would test our words, then, we have a few criteria to go by. Speech that reflects Christ is intended to build people up, to strengthen and encourage them, and to provoke them to move toward Jesus. As the writer of Hebrews says in 10:24, we’re called to poke one another with a sharp stick toward love and good deeds. As well, our words should reveal and reflect forgiveness in our hearts for the wrongs others have done to us. This isn’t an easy thing, and I’m not saying we should get there instantly, or that we should expect to. I recently backed a Kickstarter for a remake of one of my all-time favorite computer games, Under a Killing Moon—think a hardboiled detective like Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade in a post-WWW III San Francisco. In the game’s opening cinematic, a character tells the protagonist, Tex Murphy, “You turned me in [fifteen years ago] and got me suspended and humiliated me in front of my peers—you sold me out! But that’s all in the past. See, I quit hating you for that weeks ago.” That’s how forgiveness goes sometimes. But even slowly, it does go, as long as we keep bringing ourselves back to the key recognition that we need grace just as much as anyone.
Verse 30 gives us Paul’s bottom line: you’ve been saved because of the Holy Spirit’s work in you, so don’t grieve the Holy Spirit. In particular, don’t grieve the Spirit by saying or doing anything that damages the unity of the body of Christ. The Spirit of God is at work building us up as individuals and as a body, and that should be reflected in how we speak and act toward one another. This doesn’t mean uniformity among us, that we’re all supposed to be the same; that’s only ever achieved artificially. It doesn’t mean no disagreements or even no conflict, and it doesn’t mean we never sin against each other. Rather, it means even where we disagree most deeply and passionately, our disagreements should be marked with love and grace and humility, and should be secondary to our commitment to one another, and that we should deal with our sin in that same spirit of love and grace and humility. If we truly lived together that way in the midst of a culture which turns every molehill into a mountain to die on, imagine what a witness that would be.
Photo: Bernard Spragg. Public domain.