Welcome to today's encouragement from our daily bread. My name is Amy Boucher Pie, and I called our reading today True Change. Raised in a turbulent home in South London, Claude started selling marijuana at 15 and heroin when he was 25.

Needing a cover for his activities, he became a mentor to young people.

Soon he became intrigued by his manager, a believer in Jesus, and wanted to know more.

After attending a course exploring the Christian faith,

he dared Christ to come into his life.

I felt such a welcoming presence, he said.

People saw a change in me instantly.

I was the happiest drug dealer in the world.

Jesus didn't stop there. When Claude weighed up a bag of cocaine the next day,

he thought, this is madness. I'm poisoning people. He realized he must stop selling drugs and get a job.

With the help of the Holy Spirit, he turned off his phones and never went back. This kind of change is what the

Apostle Paul referenced in Ephesians chapter 4 when he wrote to the church at Ephesus. Calling the people

not to live separated from God, he urged them to put off your old self, which is being corrupted

by its deceitful desires, and instead to put on the

new self created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. The verb form Paul used

implies that we're to put on the new self regularly. As with Claude, the Holy Spirit delights to help us to live out of our new selves

and become more like Jesus.

Today's Our Daily Bread Devotional Scripture reading is from Ephesians chapter 4, verses 17 through 24.

So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking.

They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.

Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed. That, however, is not the way of life

you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in Him in accordance with the truth that is in

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