Sermon Sampler: Sermons You Can Use!

New Clothes and a New Beginning

Ephesians 4:22-24
By Harold Dinsmore, M.Div.
© 2007 Harold Dinsmore

Most everyone is interested in clothes. Either as fashion or as necessity. Whether it is a fashionable matching handbag or those matching hot pink pair of high heels to the best fashionable dress! Some have good taste in clothes and some don’t. Man has always sought to cover himself up. Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves together to make clothes. I often wondered what they did when their leaves began to dry up? Anyway, God clothed them with animal skins, for Adam had no knowledge of clothing. Man’s ability to make better clothing has come a long way, but he’s still making clothes out of plants, cotton and by the way polyester come from oil, which at one time was growing as a plant.

In our passage today, Paul speaks of the Christian life in terms everyone could understand. He spoke in terms of clothing. Let’s read our passage together, “you were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:22-24) Markus Barth translates this passage this way, “you strip off what fits your former behavior, the old man ranting in deceitful desires. Instead you become new in mind and spirit and put on the new man created after God’s image in true righteousness and piety.”

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