Passage: Ephesians 4:25-32
By now, it should be clear to us that it matters greatly to God how we live. Our lives before and after trusting Christ should be radically different. After all, we have moved from death to live because of the grace of God, and you can’t get much more different than that. In this morning’s text, Paul begins to get very personal and quite specific when it comes to how the truths of the gospel should touch and transform our lives. What he is doing is applying Ephesians 4:22-24 (putting off, renewing our minds, and putting on) to a variety of common life experiences and situations. To borrow from the imagery I used in last week’s sermon, Paul is showing us how to avoid the “wagon ruts” of past patterns and habits of thinking, speaking, and acting, and to replace them with new and better “ruts.”