Among Them We Too All Formerly Lived In The Lusts Of The Flesh

And I am a long time ago member of Church of the Good Shepherd, which then became Clear Note Church in Bloomington, which then became Trinity Reformed in Bloomington. My wife and I, we went off to seminary about 15 years ago, and I was a pastor of a church down in Charleston, Mississippi for 12 years, and we have recently come back. to the frozen north to try to plant a church in Columbus, Indiana. And this morning, this week, not this morning, this week you can pray for us. We are hopefully closing on a house and we'll be moving onto the field as they say in Columbus sometime in the next month and then begin some small groups, some outreach things. And you can pray for us this last week. You can pray for me last week.

You didn't know me last week, but last week, you know, I'm a young man, right? And there are some things I haven't experienced yet, and I'm going through them right now. And now I'm going through the joy of home ownership for the first time and talking with banks. We lived in mansions that were provided by the church in the last 12 years. So we're going through our first home purchase. And this last week... I opened up a document sent to me by my realtor and was reading through some of the paperwork, and the numbers looked different than what I had expected. And, you know, some of you have gone through this, closing costs and all these other things. And I start, you know, not hyperventilating, but start getting a little bit anxious. And standing right next to me is a brother in the Lord, and he says, what's going on? I said, well, I...

I'm looking at this and it doesn't look like I thought. And he said, yeah, you should give a call to your realtor. But don't worry. Everything will be fine. I know that. Thank you very much. I know that. I know everything will be fine. A hundred years from now, I'll be with Greg. You know, I thought I know where he was going. And I know everything's going to be fine. But he's preaching to the preacher about anxiety. But in the meantime, before everything's fine, I'm a little nervous. And it wasn't 20 minutes later. I texted my loan officer, and we got things straightened out, and it was actually nothing wrong with the papers I was seeing. I was a math major in school, but sometimes I don't do math in the real world. And so I was just not putting the numbers together in a sensible way that probably everyone in this room from third grade on up, you can do subtraction and addition, and you know everything's fine. Why do I do that?

Why do I do that? Why do I just fly off? I always expect the worst. That's one of my sins. And you know you're no better than me. You may not do that about finances. You might not do that about anxiety. But you do it about something. There's something in your life that just dogs you and it just waits for the opportunity to just jump up and say, hey, sin is still here. Why is that? Wouldn't it be great if we could just lay it aside, do what the Bible says, and be free from everything? If you have your Bibles, open up to Ephesians chapter 2. And at the time I was going through that, I had already decided what I was going to preach about, preach from. But the Lord has a way through his providence of just layering on and layering on and layering on. Yeah, you need this lesson. You need this lesson.

Ephesians chapter 2, I'm going to read the first 10 verses. This is what the Apostle Paul says. This is the word of the Lord. And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God... being rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead and our transgressions made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved, and raised us up with him, and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the surpassing riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus, for by grace you have been saved through faith.

And that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. This is the word of the Lord. Ephesians is the go-to verse, the go-to scripture to find out about God's supremacy. in our salvation. It was God's plan that we be redeemed. It was God's doing that we be redeemed. God the Father had a plan. God the Son came to the earth to suffer and to die and to shed his blood for our forgiveness. And the Holy Spirit now lives and works in our hearts to apply what God has done for us. That's chapter one. Chapter two talks about our own experience of this.

what we were, what we used to be, and now what we are. But Paul is writing to the Ephesians with a specific purpose in mind, and we can see that as we look through the entire book. So chapter 2, verse 2, he says, I'm sorry, chapter 2, verse 2. You were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked. That's the first time in the book he says walk. But it's not the last time. Chapter 2, verse 10. He says, God has prepared good works so that we would walk in them. Chapter 4, verse 1. Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling which you have. He's talking about our walk. Chapter 4, verse 17.

He says, so this I say and affirm together with the Lord that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles walk. Also in the futility of their mind being darkened in their understanding. In chapter 4, verse 22. In reference to your former manner of life, lay aside the old self which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceits and you be renewed. Wait a minute. There's the word walk somewhere in there. And I apologize, it's just not there in my Bible because it probably was never there. I wrote it down wrong. He's walking. He's talking to us about our walk. Chapter 5, verse 1. Therefore, be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love just as Christ also loved you and gave himself up for us. Chapter 5, verse 6. Let no one deceive you with empty words for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. So don't...

Be like them. Don't participate with their deeds. You were formerly darkness, now you're light. He says in chapter 5, verse 15, he says, Therefore be careful how you walk, not as unwise men, but as wise. He's talking about behavior, behavior, behavior, behavior, right? Walk. How you walk is your behavior. All this lofty theological stuff, and it boils down to how you walk. He's writing to the Ephesian church. A bunch of Christians. Like Clear Note Indy. Letter to the Indianapolisians. Walk. Not like the world walks. Not like the Gentiles walk. Who are the Gentiles? Well, they're not Jews. And for the purpose of Paul here, they're not Christians either. The world. Don't walk the way the world walked. And so everything that he writes, he's writing.

For our correction and behavior. In other words, he's writing to people who are saved or they have made profession of faith. They've been baptized. They are participating in the means of grace. They're there every Sunday morning. They're oftentimes probably there at Sunday school. There are a lot of faces here that I did not see in Sunday school. I don't know why you weren't in Sunday school. But I would urge you. Every chance you take, suck in the words of God. Get them into you. If it has to be from John in Sunday school and then Dave in the worship service, every chance you get, you need it. We all of us need all the time the grace of God from the word of God as much as we can because we start out in this world with a great disadvantage. And what is it? How did you start out in the world?

Okay, you're an enemy. Well, okay, John, we'll do it like Sunday school. What else were you? Come on, some of you know other words for us. We were enemies of God. We were dead. Okay, you've read the scripture text for this morning. It doesn't get any worse than that, that you're dead. Except maybe that, yeah, you're an enemy too. Even while you're dead in sins and transgressions, you're walking. It's not just that you're completely passive, it's that you're completely passive in regards to anything good, and you're very active in all the things that are evil. That's the way you start. And so I can look at you and tell, you need to hear Paul's words, don't walk anymore like the Gentiles walk, because all of us started that way, are still prone to walk that way.

And all of us still need to hear about what God has done for us in Ephesians chapter 2. I needed this Wednesday, and I'm going to need it tomorrow, and I need it this morning. There's none of us that is immune because when you start out dead in your trespasses and sins, for the rest of your life you have memories, patterns of thinking, and the world is constantly hammering at you to think in those ways. We have our own beginning, dead in trespasses and sins, in which we formerly walked. And why did we walk that way? Because I wanted to. Well, partly. But when I was this age, you know, there's some younger folks here. When I was this age, I didn't really want to walk, and I didn't know how I was supposed to walk. And I remember looking up to adults who didn't do what Scripture said.

And it was kind of unsettling. I didn't know a lot of the Bible. But I knew when I opened it up and, you know, let your speech be seasoned with salt. Let everything that comes out of your mouth, that proceeds from your mouth. So I'm drawing on Sunday school. You weren't here in Sunday school, so I have to teach you Sunday school. Everything that comes out of your mouth, let it be for edification, for building up. And I would hear how the adults in my life were talking. And they weren't building other people up, right? Now, they weren't saying it directly to them. You know, we would have this thing where a parent would come home from work and vent about what happened at work, and the other parent would get on their side, whoa, that was, you shouldn't have done that. And so that's how I grew up hearing about how you talk about work. And so how do you think I'm tempted to talk about work today?

Now it was easy when I was the pastor and I was the only employee at work. There was nobody else to complain about. Now I'm in a factory and I have a boss and I have a boss over the boss and I have people around me who are doing the same things that I'm doing and I hear what they're saying and it's tempting to feed off of that and go back to old habits because I'm so accustomed to it. It's almost part of my DNA. It is part of my DNA. I used to be dead in my trespasses and sins, and I used to walk in them because that's what everybody else is doing. That's the course of the world. We can name it all kinds of things. Peer pressure, I think, is a light and trivial way of describing it. But it's the air we breathe. Turn on the television. It's the words from the television. Listen to the music. It's the lyrics from the music.

Or when I was in college, I listened to some music. I couldn't even understand the words, but I could understand the beat. I could understand what it meant when all you could hear was bass and rhythm and somebody screaming. That communicates to me. And it still communicates. It hearkens me back. And I have this weird nostalgia for death. Can anybody else relate to this? Hopefully not. But if not, then I'm confessing that I'm here, that I need to hear this. This is who I was, and so I'm not supposed to walk like this anymore. According to the prince of the power of the air. So it's not just what other people around me are doing. It's not just what we call peer pressure or anything. Even if I am homeschooled and kept within the safe confines of my own...

Even if I shepherd my children like him and just don't let them ever hear a negative word from outside my home, if I keep them in my house and don't let them see the course of the world, they'll be fine, won't they? No, they won't. Why won't they? Because the day they were born, they were dead in sin and transgression. The day they were born, they came into my home. My home is in the world. And I still have sins. I still have patterns of speech. I still have anxiety. Like this last week, my family and my wife leading the charge had to rebuke me for my anxiety, for my negativity, for my pessimism. It's part of my being. But they're exposed to it all the time. So when they grow up, guess what? They're going to have learned from the course of the world. I try to shield them from the world and I bring the world right to them.

Right? The course of the world. Why? Because no matter what happens out there, there is a spirit now working in the sons of disobedience. And from the day we're born, being dead in trespasses and sins, we're walking in our sin because everybody else is. There's all kinds of encouragement to do it. And there's also a supernatural power that is also conspiring to keep me there. Now, in my background, the way I grew up, the Reformed church, the intellectual, educated, we don't talk about demonic anything too much. And one of the reasons, and I think it's a pretty compelling reason, is there's enough problems that I bring to the equation with my fallenness and my own sin and my own love with wickedness. Why bother talking about the spiritual realm? You know, even if...

If there was no devil active right now, I am enough of an evil influence. But we also need to see he is. Satan is alive and they say well on the planet Earth. He is still roaming around seeking someone to devour. He's still active. He's still wily. He's still trying to pull us back to those old ways of thinking. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh. And did you notice, as you read, and it is up there, you were dead. You formerly walked. And now verse 3, among them, what does he say? Among them you too all formerly lived. What does he say? Among them you, among them we. Now who's the we?

If Paul is writing to the Gentile church in Ephesus, who is the we? It's the Jews. It's Paul and the church at Ephesus. We're all in the same boat together. You think about Paul's life. Paul is a covenant child, so to speak. Grew up in the synagogue. Grew up studying the word of God. Grew up with every advantage that a person could have in the world apart from Christ. And what advantage is that? Well, there's great advantage in every way, he says in another place. But at the same time, he's still dead. You're still dead in your trespasses and sins. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh. What kind of lust did Paul have? He went away to school to study under Gamaliel. He was like a monk in his devotion to scripture and to the word. What kinds of lusts in the flesh could he have? Well, I could preach a sermon on the lusts of the flesh. We could talk about pornography. And that's what we mean.

We could talk about in Bloomington now, we're undergoing a cataclysm that happens every fall. Students are returning. And all of a sudden, there's tens of thousands of people who have not been taught to dress modestly. And if I drive down 3rd Street at a certain time of day, it's not their fault that there's an occasion for sin, right? It's my fault if I stumble, if I stare, if I lust, if I give myself to that sin. But there are other lusts of our flesh too that prepare us maybe for that lust. There's also the lust to be comfortable, the lust of desire for things. I have a lust for money because that feels safe. If I have enough, everything is right with the world.

I remember being a student, and if I had a flat tire, if the car made a strange noise, my everything just tightened up and everything changed. Because I don't want that. I don't want to be deprived of the things that I need to live, namely money. And what I most want is to be in control, to be free of pain, to be free of want. I think that we've invented a freedom that really doesn't exist, a freedom from want. In America today, we have this political mantra that we hear. I am not called to be free from want. I'm called to live free of the lusts of the flesh, the desires that rage in my heart. A couple of weeks ago at work, I opened the refrigerator door, and somebody had gone and gotten, it looked like a six-pack of...

And as soon as I opened the refrigerator door at work and I saw it, my heart did this little disturbing, skip a beat, joyful pleasure thing because it looked like beer. It was iced tea. That taught me something about my heart, didn't it? I'm not a teetotaler, but you better watch it, Andy. There's a lust going on in your heart. that maybe you haven't been watching over. Among them we too all formerly lived, indulging the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. That's what you were, children of wrath. What does that mean? Well, that's a Hebraism. Children of just means what you're associated with. I'm a Halsey, and there are Halsey things, things that just go along with being a Halsey.

One of the things that goes along with being a Halsey is being very emotionally stunted, or not stunted, yeah, stunted. Not communicative about what's going on. My boss just rebuked me last week. This sermon is turning into a long confession. But he just, he rebuked me last, how are you doing, Andy? I'm doing fine. You're lying. He knows. No, I'm, you know, I was having some trouble with something at work and he was starting to wear at me. And he can see that. You're not supposed to lie, Andy. He's not a Christian, my boss, my immediate supervisor. He's not a Christian. You're lying. You're not supposed to lie. You're right, but it's not going to help you to know exactly what I'm thinking. Okay, and he laughs. That's part of what it means to be a Halsey, to be repressed a little bit emotionally, not bother people with what I'm thinking and feeling. Now, to call me a child of wrath communicates a whole other set of familial...

Child of wrath just means you're going to get what's coming to you. You deserve it. God is angry with you and with your sins every day. This is all that matters about you. Wrath is coming. That's what you were. Dead in trespasses and sins. Walking according to the course of the world. According to the prince of the power of the air. The spirit now working. This is all what we were in this entire sermon. I've been saying. showing you illustrations of why that's me. What's going on? Why does Paul bother to tell the Ephesians this? Why does this show up in our Bibles? Why do we still have Bible studies that talk about Ephesians 2? So that we can get to 7 and 8? So that we can get to, by grace you've been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves is a gift of God, not as a result of... Well, partly, yeah. Verse 4 is important. But God being rich in mercy.

Because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been, and raised us up with him, and seated us with him, Jesus, in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the surpassing. By grace you have been saved through faith in that not of yourselves, for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus. All this great stuff that God has done for us, and yet Monday is coming. Monday's coming and however much progress you've made, mom or dad's going to tell you to do something and you're going to find in yourself, I don't want to do that. Can't do that. Monday is coming and you're going to go to work and something's not going to go right and it's going to make you burn inside. Monday is coming and you're going to drive to work and you're going to see something that's going to trigger an old instinct.

And you're going to burn, either with anger at yourself. If it goes on long enough, you're not going to want to pray anymore. Because you go to pray and you think, if I go to pray to the Lord, I'm going to have to confess. I don't think I'm going to forsake it. I don't think that when I confess this sin afterwards, I'm going to go to bed, I'm going to be laying there awake, and I'm going to still want to indulge all that anxiety. And I'm not going to want to, but that's the way I am. Does anybody relate to this? When I confess that I'm not trusting God with my loved ones, with the spiritual state of my loved ones, I'm still the next day when I see where their eyes go, when I see how they're spending their time, when I see how they wrestle with the sicknesses or the whatever's going on in their lives, how they fight, everything, I'm not going to be able to let it go.

And we just turn into these anxious or lustful and we get trapped in these cycles and we feel like we're the guinea pig. And then there will be a day when, through the Holy Spirit, somehow there's a breakthrough and we finally find freedom and we think, at last, I spent a night without worrying. I spent a day without lusting. I went through a confrontation without fearing. I've got it. Yes, I have arrived. What's going to happen tomorrow? My hands are going to go limp and I'm going to fail. Why? Because I've forgotten that I only ever make any progress by the grace of the Lord. Not of yourselves. It is the gift of God. In other words, when I succeed in the spiritual, realm, when I succeed spiritually, when I overcome temptation, I look back and I say, I have overcome. Glory be to Andy. And that's not right. In the ages to come, why did he do all of this for us? In the ages to come, he might show the surpassing riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

The only way I ever get help from the Lord is because he is showing himself off. When John was teaching us in Sunday school about the folly of grumbling that we sometimes do against each other, it brought to mind one of my favorite failures in my own life. When I was in Campus Crusade, I was at a winter conference. And, you know, in Campus Crusades, the college ministry, they have all these cool guys that... look like me, and they come up and they exhort the students, and they just look buff and tough, and the men are men, and I guess the women are women, but the women would always talk to the women separately. But when you come together for thousands of college students converge, you're going to look up there and you're going to see a man that you want to be just like, and he's going to be great, he's going to be awesome, he's going to be all testosterone and Holy Spirit mixed together, and it's just going to be wonderful, spiritual.

giant, a spiritual Goliath. Of course, Goliath was wicked. And sometimes that's true of the speakers at those events. But I remember one time a pastor mounted the pulpit and he went up there and as he was getting up, he was just introduced and he walked up there and he looked like an old man, older man at the time. Actually, now I realize he's my age at the time. And you could, just like me, you could see through his hair to his scalp. His glasses were not the cool, trendy glasses. They were glasses like my dad wore. And I just thought, man, you have all these college students. And you get a guy like, this is evil that I'm thinking. You get a guy like this to stand up and talk to. All these college students and you get John Piper. If you know who John Piper is.

You know that for the next hour and a half, it was like being born again, again, preaching the word and lifting up Christ. And at the end of the time, I wasn't thinking about John Piper, I was thinking about Christ. Because that is his gift and his calling is to lift up and honor Christ and to show the surpassing riches of the grace of Christ in saving people who hate Christ. Hated Christ who were born and dead in their sins and transgressions and calling people to see that what Jesus is about is showing the riches of his grace and kindness toward people who do not deserve any of it. So that we might do the good works God prepared beforehand so that we'd walk in them. For his glory, to show his grace, to show his mercy.

Part of my preaching this, and I didn't mean to preach the whole book of Ephesians, but I almost wanted to, was to show that all of the failure, all of the struggle, all of the anxiety, all of the things that we wrestle with and that frustrate us about our progress in the Lord, all of the sins, the things that we want to do that we don't want to do, but we keep doing, you know, the Roman 7, which is being preached in Bloomington this Sunday, and I wanted to be there to hear that, but that's the glory of podcasting. All of that conflict that happens and Paul opens up so well in Romans 7. All of that has a reason. As John Calvin said, we're all factories of idols and we'll be that to our dying day. But so that God can continue to show us his kindness as he delivers us, as he sanctifies us. So that when the pastor stands up week to week and says, don't walk like that anymore.

He's not accusing us of surrendering Christ. He's telling us just what Paul is telling us. Remember, you were this way, and this is the way you will want to be. If you didn't come back next week, and you thought, I got it, Ephesians 2.8, I'm done, and you didn't come back, and you kept believing, formally, these words, but you never came back, You never got to know Dave Abusara, or you stopped knowing him. I knew Dave until I was saved, and that's all I needed him for. And then you went away. What would you be like in a month? If you just stopped coming to church to worship, what would you be like in a year? Let's see it. Thumbs up or thumbs down. See if you got the, yeah. Because there is still in you a past. There is still in you where you came from.

And if you don't hear, if you don't come to hear good news, you will hear bad news. You will hear false news. And you will drift. That's why the writer to the Hebrews says, let's not forsake the fellowship. Let's not forsake the gathering of ourselves together. Because we'll drift. We'll have the voices inside us talking to us, like Martin Lloyd-Jones talked about in Spiritual Depression. Each of us needs to keep preaching to ourselves because otherwise we'll start listening to ourselves. And when you start listening to yourself, all yourself is is deadness, a past of being fooled, falling for false gospels and false teachers and false things about yourself. If we stop hearing this good news about what God has done for dead people, enemies of Christ who are walking in disobedience will become that all over again. We will fall away and there will be no true good news to hear anymore about us.