This post is Day 26 in a series of studies about “The Spiritual Blessings” in Ephesians, I strongly suggest you begin with the introduction to this study, please click here to read it.
Feel free to comment below with your own thoughts about each verse and how you will be acting on each thought. Also, if you haven’t yet signed up to receive the notifications of new studies, you can do that today (the form is at the bottom of the page).
The Spiritual Blessings – 26
You were taught to change the way you were living, to have a new attitude. It is in our thought life that change begins. It has to become a regular mental activity until we really have grown to be more like Christ. And even afterwards.
Ephesians 4:22-24
You were taught to change the way you were living. The person you used to be will ruin you through desires that deceive you. However, you were taught to have a new attitude. You were also taught to become a new person created to be like God, with a life that truly has God’s approval and is holy.
The Thought
When a person becomes a Christian, it is often referred to as being “born again”. Jesus Himself used the expression twice in John 3, and Peter used it in 1 Peter 1:23. The problem for many of us is that the old personality remains. Even if we have been believers for a very long time we still are tempted sometimes to think as the world does, and not in the way God does.
Paul tells the Ephesians, and us, that one of the blessings we receive as believers is that new birth. But it is something we have to be conscious of and grow into. In the verse for today Paul talks about having “a new attitude”. It is in our thought life that change begins.
To put off the old, and put on the new has to become a regular mental activity until we really have grown to be more like Christ. And even afterwards.
In Romans 13:14 Paul tells us to “clothe ourselves with Christ”, and in Romans 6:4 he talks of baptism as a total new beginning.
Action
How can you and I “become that new person” so that we act as Jesus would throughout the day?
The verse above tells us to be made new in the attitude of our minds. Paul speaks about this to the Corinthians telling them to take “every thought captive for Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Try it today.