How to Change (Part 1)

Overview

Now we’re looking at this passage. Starting in verse 17, we said last week from here on Paul is explaining what he had called us to do in verses 14, 15, and 16, and that is to grow up into the likeness of Christ, to grow up into his character, to become like him in the way in which we are, to develop his power and his insight, his might and his wisdom, his love and his joy. Become like him.

Now starting in verse 17, what’s happening is Paul is explaining how we can go about growing into that. So he’s being very, very specific. What we actually have in verses 17–24 is a remarkably detailed explanation by Paul then on how to change. How to change! We’ll take tonight, and next week we’ll be looking at it too.

How to change. This is a rather momentous subject. When you stop and think about it, all education, the entire educational system, all the counselors, all the social workers, all the urban planners, most of the sociologists, the government officials, what are they out to do? Do you realize a tremendous number of people spend all of their time, their job, their profession, getting people to change? Those of you who are in those professions realize we need to know how people change, because we really don’t know. Very, very important.

Paul actually lays it out. In verses 17–19 (we looked at this the last couple of weeks), Paul actually gives us first a remarkable analysis of where we have come from. We’re talking about how to grow into the likeness of Christ, but in 17, 18, and 19, he gives us a little psychology actually of unbelief. A psychology: How people’s minds and hearts and lives work apart from Jesus Christ. There we saw one of the things he mentioned was our lives apart from Christ are marked by futility or vanity. We talked about that last week.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger has a couple of great words for it. He calls it angst. German words are wonderful, aren’t they? They explode. Or another one is geworfenheit, my favorite word. Angst means anxiety. Geworfenheit means thrownness, a sense we’re not making any progress, a sense that ultimately we’re not getting anywhere. We’re not accomplishing anything. That’s what Heidegger says. People who know themselves and who know reality feel that way, and that’s what Paul is saying.

Paul is saying the mark of our lives apart from Christ is a sense of doing an awful lot of work and doing an awful lot of things and not getting anywhere, not accomplishing anything. Also, he says this leads to, “Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.” Paul says this means eventually we get to see we are given over to things. Given over. There are things we say, “Well, maybe the futility I experience will not be so bad if I do this,” and we find they become addictions. We talked about this last week. We’re given over to things. There are certain things we have to do.