Pastor John will be preaching this morning from the Book of Ephesians, Chapter 4,

verses 22 through 24. I invite you to follow as I read.

Put off your old nature which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds,

and put on the new nature created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

I mentioned two weeks ago that this series which is coming from Ephsians 417 through 520, was sparked by the feeling that several of us on the staff and I think also many of you have felt

namely that we need to take some of the grand things we believe in and our faith in general and apply it to some of the nitty-gritty ordinary affairs of life.

That's what this text does, and last week we began with verses 17 to 21, and we talked about how

Paul for the third time in this letter lays bare the moral misery and corruption of our hearts apart from saving grace.

And I want to review that for you very briefly.

He said that there are six layers of corruption. First, in verse 18, the root problem is hardness of heart.

Second, also in verse 18, the hardness of heart against God causes a great darkening

of the understanding.

Third, the result of this darkness is a gross ignorance of reality.

And I qualified that by saying, yes, there can be a long string of degrees

after your name and you can know 10,000 facts that nobody else perhaps knows.

And yet not know in unbelief how those facts relate to God and his purposes in the world

and therefore be ignorant of the meaning of those facts.

And who cares about facts if you don't know why they're there or what they mean

without the knowledge that Christ gives through faith in God, we're like men who spend their time building beautiful terraced flower and rock gardens in the new subdivision and planting

wonderful trees that have been growing for 15 years and then watching the bulldozers come

through and just level it and mash it because we never looked at the plan and put it in all the wrong places.

If you don't know why you're doing what you're doing,

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