Lesson 19 – Walking Wisely
Read Ephesians 4:17-32 - https://www.bible.com/bible/59/eph.4.esv

Our next responsibility in how we walk in faith is in verse 17 of our passage. We are told not to walk as unbelievers do, in the futility of their minds. Let’s turn this to a positive command – that we must walk wisely. We’ll look at this way of walking in 3 different relationships: our inner thoughts, our relationship to others, and our relationship to God.

How do we walk wisely in our inner thoughts? The first is that we must leave behind what was in the past, what we used to be. Look at verse 22 which says we are to put away our “old self, which belongs to [our] former manner of life.” Some of our ways of walking before, in our old self, are listed in the verses above that:

Calloused
Giving ourselves to sensuality
Greedy
Practicing every kind of impurity
A corrupt life
Deceitful desires

Those are things we did before we were made new in Jesus Christ. But the fact that God tells us to “put off your old self” says we sometimes are tempted to return to our old ways of walking. We have a choice in this matter. If God had said, “let me rid you of these things” it would have been His responsibility. Instead He tells us to “put off” these things – we take them off ourselves like we take off a coat we’ve been wearing.

But putting off this old self is only half of our responsibility in our inner being – we must put something in its place. Look at verse 24, we are to “put on the new self.” We take off the old, dirty coat we’ve been wearing, and put on in its place a new and clean coat.

What does this new self look like? It is “created after the likeness of God!” In fact, as we saw in earlier lessons, it is Christ’s own righteousness we are to wear, but it must become ours. It is Christ’s in the fact that it is pure, but we must accept it as our own coat.

The “new self” we put on has one more layer to it – holiness. God has told us in other Scriptures that He wants us to be holy, for no other reason than that He is holy – 1 Peter 1:15-16. What does it mean to be holy? It means to be set apart. We must separate ourselves from what we used to be, we must identify ourselves with God by stepping over to stand beside Him. Remember the games we played when we were children and we had to choose which side we wanted to be on? It’s that simple for us now too, we must choose – do we stand with the world in our former ways of thinking, or do we choose to stand with God in His righteousness and His way of thinking?

Remember, we cannot do any of this “walking” by ourselves. As from our earlier lessons, we are “in Christ” and only in His strength, only in His righteousness can any of this take place in us.
*How must we walk?
*When we follow Jesus we must leave behind what was in the _____
* We must separate ourselves from what we _____