William Burkitt's Expository Notes

Ephesians 4:17

Our apostle having finished this grand exhortation to love and unity amongst all christians, and enforced it with the most weighty arguments and motives in the former part of the chapter; comes now, in the latter part of it to press the Ephesians to the practice of particular duties.

The first of which is this, to take special care, that, being now converted christians, they walk no more like ignorant and unconverted heathens: Walk not as other Gentiles walk.

Next he gives particular instances how, and after what manner, the Gentiles, in the black night of paganism, did walk; namely,

1. In the vanity of their minds, following their own imaginations, and not any revelation from God, in the matters of his worship.

2. Having their understanding darkened; their minds void of saving knowledge.

3. They were alienated from the life of God: that is from. godly life: they were strangers to the life which God commanded, which God approved, and which God himself lived.

Here note, That holiness is called the life of God, because it is the life which God requires of us, it is the life which he works in us, it is the life whereby God liveth in us; the life whereby we live unto God; it is an everliving life; not obnoxious to death, as the Ephesians were: so every carnal man, before conversion, is alienated from this life of God; he has no liking of it, no inclination to it, but prefers. life of sin before it.

Lord, how many that are surrounded with the celestial beams of the gospel, are as impure and impenitent now as these Gentiles were then in the black night of paganism!

4. They were past feeling: their sottish stupidity had benumbed them, the flames of their lusts had seared their consciences to. desperate degree of hardness and insensibility: they were at once insensible of their sins and of their danger by reason of sin.. dead conscience, and. desperate dissolute life, are inseparable companions.

5. They gave themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. Here see how insensibility of sin begets insatiableness in sinning; they work uncleanness with insatiable greediness, who have once abandoned themselves to sin, especially to the sin of uncleanness.

Lord! this was the deplorable case of the heathen world, before the light of the gospel did arise and shine upon them.

But, alas! it is the case of multitudes that sit under the brightest beams of gospel light: they shut their eyes, and will not see; they extinguish all sense of immortality and. future state, and so abandon themselves to. life of brutish sensuality, working all uncleanness with greediness: but let them know assuredly, that though they live like beasts, yet they shall not die like them, nor shall their latter end be like theirs, the soul being under. divine ordination to an everlasting existence in. future state, in which it shall be eternally happy or intolerably miserable, according as we manage our deportment in this present world.

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William Burkitt's Expository Notes

Ephesians 4:17

Old Testament

New Testament