Transformation Redefines Our Mind

It doesn’t mean we’re perfect, we’re not yet perfect, but we are transformed so that we have new affections, new intentions, new motivations. Our speech changes, our attitudes change, our behaviour changes, our relationship changes. The focus of our life moves from the worship of self to the worship of the true God. This is total transformation, and as a result of that, there are exchanges that can be noted, and that’s what we see beginning in verse 25. 5. You exchange lying for the truth. Verse 26. You exchange unrighteous anger for righteous anger. Verse 28. You exchange stealing for sharing.

Verse 29. You exchange unwholesome words for edifying words. This is to say that if you are a believer, it shows up in how you conduct your life. You walk differently, you will, and you must. Now just a word about a couple of weeks ago for those who weren’t here that we looked at. Verse 25. The first thing that the Apostle Paul notes is that when you have been transformed by the Gospel by the power of Christ, you’re laying aside falsehood, and you speak truth each one of you with his neighbour, for we are members of one another.

That language is basically borrowed from Zechariah 8.16 as we saw. You lay aside, that’s a verb that can mean to take off your robe, take off your cloak. It’s used in the book of Acts in chapter 7, when the people who were going to stone Stephen took their cloaks off and got ready to throw stones on him. So it’s a simple picture. You shed some things when you have been transformed. And the first thing is, you shed falsehood, and in its place comes truth. And we looked at that in some detail. Everything in the control of Satan is essentially part of the fabric of lies.

John 844, Jesus said Satan’s a liar and the father of lies. He operates in deceit. It is endless deceit. It is unending deceit. Occasionally he’ll say something true, like the clock that doesn’t run is right twice a day, but only for the purpose of further deceit. He is the deceiver. He is bent on deception. He is the architect of all false religion, which is the ultimate deception. For it is the most damning of all ideologies, because it keeps you from the true salvation only in Christ. Satan is a liar, the father of lies. So since the whole of society, 1 John 5, lies in the lap of Satan, the world is basically a house of cards held up by lies.

I think we seem to be somewhat overwhelmed by the current brashness of lies. Society reaches a point in our case where they don’t even try to hide that they’re lying, even though they’re being videotaped, and you can repeat the things they say and show that they’re lies. It seems to have no influence on them at all. It’s disturbing to all of us to live in a world of lies, but it’s not really nothing new. It’s always been lies that damn people, lies about God, lies about man, lies about everything. The whole system of Satan is a house of cards built on lies.

And this is obvious to us, I think, because we see those lies, but it’s also obvious because we see how desperately this society wants to protect itself from the truth. The greatest danger to the system of lies is the truth, and therein is the reason for persecution coming against Christianity. We are the people of the truth. The church is the pillar and ground of the truth. We expose the lies. We will continue to expose the lies. We expose not only lies, theological lies, spiritual lies, but all lies, whatever those lies may be. And the system has a hard time tolerating anyone who speaks the truth about anything.

We all have seen that with the internet. Now we see the evil system in a panic, because Elon Musk bought Twitter and threatens to let people tell the truth. And nothing is more dangerous to a complex of lies than the truth. Society depends on deception, it’s nothing new. But when you become a believer, you lay all that aside, you strip that off, and you become a truthful person. We looked at that a couple of weeks ago. But let’s come to verse 26, because this is a second sort of default sin in human fallenness.

Men are born liars, we said that, they’re born liars. They start lying when they’re tiny little kids, trying to deceive mom and dad, and you have to be trained not to lie. They also are angry. A six month old will scream and throw a tantrum if you take his toy truck away. This is a default position for human depravity, to lie and to be angry. And that’s consistent with what Jesus said about Satan. He’s a liar, and he’s a murderer. And murder is the end result of anger and hate. So we all come into the world as little liars and little haters, and discipline is to drive primarily those two things out of us, make us tell the truth, and to make us have affection and love toward others, and not hate and anger.

So those are the default positions of humanity, and that’s why verse 27 says they give the devil an opportunity. Since the devil is a liar and a murderer, you’re playing into his hands if you lie, and if you are angry. So let’s talk about this second exchange. The first one is exchanging lying for telling the truth. The second one is exchanging unrighteous anger for righteous anger. Be angry, and yet do not sin, do not let the sun go down on your anger. Be angry, and yet do not sin. Now that indicates to us that there is an anger that is acceptable, there is an anger that is acceptable, or a level of anger that is acceptable.

Be angry. It may seem strange to you that God says be angry, but there’s a kind of anger that is justified. And by the way, those words are essentially borrowed from Psalm 4-4, where it says that be angry, some translations say tremble, and don’t sin. In other words, there is a kind of an anger that you can have that’s short of sin. What kind of anger is that? Anger in itself may not be sinful. It is certainly sinful on many occasions, if not most occasions. But there is a category in which anger is not sinful, and that would be defined for us by the sinless ones, God himself and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So let me take you back to Exodus 32 and show you sinless, holy, righteous anger and what it looks like and how actually fierce it is. Exodus 32.19. Now we’re at the foot of Sinai, with the children of Israel coming out of Egypt, headed for the Promised Land. Moses has been up on the mountain, getting the Ten Commandments. The people have been down below, and they have begun to worship a golden calf. Verse 19 has Moses coming near the camp, and he saw the calf and the dancing. And Moses’ anger burned, and he threw the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain.

He literally destroyed the tablets of stone on which God had written the Ten Commandments. His fury was so great. And then what he did is really interesting. He took the calf which they had made, and burned it with fire, and ground it to powder, and scattered it over the surface of the water, and made the sons of Israel drink it. They drank the tiny pieces of the remnant of the calf that they had made to worship. Then Moses said to Aaron, What did this people do to you, that you have brought such great sin upon them? You were supposed to be watching them.

What did they do to you, to allow you to make this happen? Aaron said, Do not let the anger of my Lord burn, you know the people yourself, that they are prone to evil. This is the classic response, right? Oh, it wasn’t me, it was them. For they said to me, Make a God for us who will go before us. For this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him. He’s gone, we don’t know where he is. I said to them, Whoever has any gold, let them tear it off.

So they gave it to me, and I threw it in the fire, and out came this calf. Really? Now when Moses saw that the people were out of control, for Aaron had let them get out of control to be a derision among their enemies, then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Whoever is for the Lord, come to me. And all the sons of Levi gathered together to him. If you’re on the Lord’s side in this, come to me. So the Levites came to him, and he said to them, verse 27, Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, every man of you put his sword on his thigh, go back and forth from gate to gate in the camp, and kill every man his brother, every man his friend, and every man his neighbour.

Go slaughter your family, your friends, and your neighbours. So the sons of Levi did as Moses instructed, and about 3,000 men of the people fell that day. And then Moses said, Dedicate yourself today to the Lord. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of transformation redefines our mind. Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong, and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way. [tr:trw].