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Getting Started

1. Paul says that the futility of those without God exists in the mind. Can you remember how old you were when you started thinking and asking questions about God? What questions did you ask?

• Read Ephesians 4:17-20

2. What insight, principle, or observation from Sunday’s sermon did you find to be the most helpful, eye-opening, or troubling?

Digging Deeper

3. Paul diagnoses the Gentiles’ futility as atheistic ignorance (Eph. 4:18) and amoral behaviour according to “every kind of impurity” (Eph. 4:19). How then should the Ephesian Christians have evaluated the common and accepted worldviews and moral standards of the Gentiles?

4. How would you explain the difference or similarity in Romans 1:24, 26, 28, where there is the repeated frightening phrase, “God gave them over” and Ephesians 4:19, they “have given themselves over to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.”?

5. “But that is not the way you learned Christ!” In Ephesians 4:20–21, Paul draws a sharp line between the believers’ former manner of living and the new life found in Christ. How important are correct hearing of the gospel and faithful discipleship to shedding the old life and taking on the new way of living?

The Heart of the Matter

6. How would you counsel a person who claimed to be born again and yet was living as verse 19 describes?

7. Some may say, “Paul is being kind of extreme here. I know many unbelievers who don’t fit his dire description in these verses. They are decent, moral people. They are faithful in their marriages. They love their children. They are responsible to work and pay their bills. They’re good neighbours. So, how does what Paul says here apply to them?”

8. Read Psalm 90:12. In light of standing before God and in light of what you know of His Word, how do you want to spend the fleeting years that the Lord gives you? When you look back from the end, what do you want to have accomplished in light of eternity?