This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind…….(20) But you have not so learned Christ, (21) if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: (22) that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, (23) and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, (24) and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.

The letter to the Ephesians was written by the apostle Paul. Our verses today are a general call to holiness and lead to the specific duty to walk as a witness to Christ – we are to be, in deportment and our inward lives, the manifestation of Christian living. The faithful hear Christ – they receive with understanding and the heart that He is the Son of God; that He is eternal God. This knowledge is inconsistent with sin and doesn’t allow living as do the unbelieving Gentiles who live a futile life alienated from God. This hardness of the heart means being insensible to things divine and an ignorance of real knowledge of truth; it is moral deterioration and destruction leading to eternal death

Paul is teaching here that there is no distinction of cognitive and emotional faculties – that there can’t be one faculty saved and the other lost. The mind includes feelings. In faith, in knowledge of Christ, we receive the moral and spiritual excellence of truth. Truth and holiness are united – there can’t be one without the other. God reasons with us through the gospel – the truth of His word is not relative but absolute. We are God’s workmanship, originally created in God’s image; God is the pattern of the new man and in faith our hearts and minds have been changed.

In 2006, in Jerusalem, I had a bracelet made for a little girl who seemed to float when she ran – the engraving was from Hebrews 12 – “let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us”. This now young woman runs this weekend in the Olympic marathon and she has lived with grace and endurance. With God nothing is impossible.