In Christ: Know It, Live It - 57 (Who I was Before Christ)

"Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity." Ephesians 4:17-19

The Word of God is clear: we MUST NO LONGER live our lives as we did BEFORE we came to know Christ. We were not all equally pagan, but we were all pagan. What characterized our lives before Christ?

• FUTILITY of MIND: Futility means useless or worthless. This is how we thought before Christ. We had no ability to reason with a God-centered sanity. We valued what was ultimately worthless: pleasure, stuff, personal glory. We were spiritual investors in Florida swampland.
• Darkened in our Understanding: We were without the light of the glorious gospel in the face of Christ. HE who is the GREAT FACT of life was missing from all of our reasoning. We were living our lives in the dark. We could neither see where we were really headed nor where we SHOULD be heading.
• ALIENATED from the LIFE of God because of the ignorance that was in us: Unless we can SEE God and His Kingdom, we remain outside of His life...dwelling in death (Ephesians 2:1). We can NEVER see the King or the Kingdom unless we are BORN AGAIN (John 3:3). The spiritual ignorance that held us captive also held us in death.
• DUE TO THEIR HARDNESS of HEART: But we were not VICTIMS. We lived in useless, darkened, dead thinking because WE WANTED TO LIVE THERE. We COULD NOT see because we WOULD NOT see. This is the great insanity of those dead in sin: they go on choosing to live in death and darkness. We say "NO!" to God and His light. We reject the light of conscience and creation and Scriptural revelation. We PUSH the truth of God away and what is left is darkness and hardness.
• They have become CALLOUS: a calloused heart is a deadened conscience. A deadened conscience is one that no longer feels what it should. Right and Wrong do not register differently in his mind. A Calloused heart no longer feels the things the heart was created to feel: appreciation for goodness and kindness, abhorrence of evil and injustice, guilt when doing wrong. A calloused heart brings on the doldrums of the soul.
• They have GIVEN themselves up to SENSUALITY, GREEDY to practice every kind of IMPURITY: If the heart can no longer feel what it was created to feel, it looks for feeling elsewhere. Nothing brings rushes of substitute feeling like SEX. So the pagan truth-rejecter turns to physical pleasure...or pain. It is yet one more useless, darkened attempt to fill the emptiness that alienation from God creates.

This is the resume of the lost. It was OUR resume...BEFORE CHRIST. And we are told plainly that we MUST NO LONGER LIVE THIS WAY. Since we have been given life in Christ, we are NOT those whose minds are darkened, who hearts are hard, who push truth out to the periphery of our lives. We no longer make our goals pleasure and stuff and glory. JESUS CHRIST has rescued us from that futile life. We are BORN AGAIN and we can see the King and the Kingdom. As we were GREEDY for sensuality, now let us be PASSIONATE for our Christ.