In Christ - New Clothes

Continuing In Christ, Derrick Overholt opens Ephesians 4:17–24 with a striking picture: the story of Hetty Green, a woman of immense wealth who chose to live like she had nothing. It becomes a mirror for the soul—why live like you’re spiritually poor when Christ has given you everything? New Clothes calls us to stop dragging yesterday’s mindset into today’s faith and to walk out of what Paul calls “the futility of the mind”—a life that looks busy but stays empty.

Derrick slows down in the text and makes it practical. He shows how Paul diagnoses the inner life: darkened understanding, alienation from God, and a calloused heart that keeps circling back to the same habits. He cautions against chasing “purpose” in Ephesians 4–6 without first embracing the identity of Ephesians 1–3. Purpose flows out of who we are In Christ, not out of self-improvement or moral striving.

A key turning point is the difference between learning about Jesus and learning Jesus. Drawing from the Greek idea of manthano, Derrick explains that biblical learning reshapes the student. This isn’t trivia for the brain; it’s transformation by the Spirit. He shares clear, real-life “consequence learning” moments—like finally grasping how debt works or coming to see the weight of life-and-death issues—that mark true repentance and a new direction. The Holy Spirit brings conviction, opens our eyes, and empowers change so that truth moves from theory to obedience.

From there, Derrick unpacks Paul’s clothing metaphor: put off the old self and put on the new. In the ancient world clothing was precious and only discarded when it was beyond repair. So it is with the old life—we don’t scrub it cleaner with moralism; we discard it. In Christ, we receive a new self “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness,” like the prodigal clothed with a robe and welcomed home by grace.

With a vivid light-and-darkness illustration, Derrick challenges the idea of keeping a “small” hidden corner while claiming to walk in the light. He confronts the modern false gospel that makes peace with compromise and reminds us that real life in the Spirit bears real fruit—repentance, kindness, love, and generosity—rooted in good soil. If you’re fasting, praying, or simply hungry for renewal, let this message help you name the old clothes and throw them away for good. Watch and invite a friend who’s ready to stop living like they have nothing and start living fully In Christ.

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Transcript

The Richest Miser And A Warning

Ephesians 4 Call To Change

Futile Thinking Without Christ

Learning Jesus Not Information

Worldview Shifts That Prove Learning

Put Off Old Clothes Metaphor

Light Drives Out Hidden Darkness

Rejecting The False Gospel Of Sin

Fasting Prayer And Final Charge

Derrick Overholt 0:02

Good morning. It's so good to be with you guys. There's so many good areas of scripture. If you haven't uh had the chance yet, maybe this is your first few weeks here, and you're just catching up. We are in a Bible, um, walking through the Bible in Ephesians. We went through uh chapters one through three at the end of last year, and it was talking about identity. And then, of course, we've started back with this uh Bible uh sermon series called In Christ for Purpose. And so we are in the purpose section. Um really hope that you take it and look at the scripture as it was written and don't go to chapters four through six first and try to figure out what your purpose is without going back to chapters one through three and figure out who you actually are in Christ anyway. Right? So if you've missed any of these, we he was just talking, Joshua was just talking about doing our uh fast that's starting tonight, and we do have a service tonight to kick that off at six o'clock. This would be the perfect time to catch up with the sermon series. This has been such a good sermon series, and really need to understand what the first three chapters of Ephesians says about us. So this would be a great week to, as you're not eating lunch or as you're not eating breakfast, that you pop on to our website and find the sermon series that started back in, I think it was October of last year. You can go to any of the podcasts that you listen to, like any form of way that you watch or listen to a podcast, they're on there, and you can catch up with all of those and so that you can continue on as we step in to chapter four. So, uh number of years ago, I had heard a story about this lady who was like the richest person, the richest woman ever was in America. And so I looked it up this week. I wanted to bring back the facts of this lady, and her name was Hetty Green. She lived in the late 1800s, and honestly, probably one of the most successful women of all time. She at the time in 1916 was worth over like 200 million dollars in 1916, which is like hundreds of billions today. But yet she didn't actually live that way. Not because she was humble or anything, but because she liked her old life so much, she acted like she had no money. She ate oatmeal every day. She wore the same black dress for years and never changed it. She lived as if she was totally broke, so much so that her son, who uh had something happen to his leg, she refused to go pay a doctor to have him taken care of. Ultimately, it was an infection that got into his leg and he lost his leg. She died in the early 1900s worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but didn't spend any of it. Not taking care of her, not taking care of her family, nothing. And so that story brings us to uh where I want to go today in Ephesians chapter 4, where I feel like the Lord's bringing us. So we're going to just dive right into the scripture. If you want to turn in your word, or you can look here behind me. Now, this I say in testifying 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 within them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to all sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to the former manner of life and is corrupt through its deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much that we have your word that has stood the test of time for thousands of years. God, that you gave these words to these men who put it down on paper for us to see two thousand years later. And God, I just pray right now that you help us to hear what you want us to hear this morning. God, we've already had a great word, Lord, talking about repentance, laying down the old life, Lord Jesus. And I know that that's where you're leading us today. And so we just pray right now across this room for open hearts, open minds to hear your gospel this morning so that our lives can change in the name of Jesus. Amen. So as I'm reading these scriptures, there's so much built into these verses. So I'm going to walk verse by verse through these because as I was reading it, there were some words that stuck out to me that maybe I didn't fully understand. That's the cool part about the Bible is we read the Bible and it's alive, and we read it yesterday and we read it today, and there's two totally different things, right? But God is so good like that. And we also have to realize that when we're reading the Bible, this was written in different languages than we speak. All right. And this one here is in Greek, and it's a more complex language than what we speak, and so it might take a sentence or two to describe one of their words because it was so complex. So then I was thinking about this, and I was looking at this scripture right here in verse 17. So he says, no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. Well, I really wanted to know what futility meant to them. And the word is, I'm gonna butcher this word. You see it behind me, I think. Matoete's how do you say it, Neil? So you see it on the script. I don't know how you put that together, but its definition is emptiness, purposelessness, producing no real fruit. There's no truth or substance. Ultimately saying that when you're not connected in Christ, all of your thinking, all of our thinking before Christ is complete garbage and complete rubbish. Okay? All of our thinking has no meaning, it has no foundation, it has no setting because all of our hopes and dreams before we come to Christ are just built on sand. It's there's it's useless. So no longer walk with the useless mindsets of our old life. So a gentile, in case you don't know, those are us, right? It's anybody that's not a Jewish person. And then we get saved and we come into the life of Christ and we become adopted children of his. But before that we were called Gentiles. So you know, don't have this mindset any longer. So then we continue to go on, and I love how he broke this down because he he said that these people and us, and I say these people, us, our old life, we were darkened in our understanding. And when we were darkened in our understanding, it was again, we had no thoughts that were worth anything. Then we're darkened in our understanding because of our ignorance. And here's the thing today, in today's world, we think that ignorant is a bad word. It's not, it means untrained, right? So it's not bad that we're saying this, we're not calling somebody a bad word. So we're ignorant, which then caused our hearts to be calloused and hardened because we look at ourselves as God. All of us are all about ourselves. Before we come to Christ and realize that this life is all about him, it's all about us. And it's wild as he starts breaking into this because even in 17 through 19, I feel like I'm reading the newsletter of today of what's going on because nothing has changed. We're still the same. We're always trying to fulfill our own desires because all that matters is us. And so we get to this point when we're not saved, and the truth doesn't matter. How many people in the room have have talked to somebody and you're trying to walk them through something, and you feel like you just want to punch them because they just keep doing the same stuff, expecting different results. But it doesn't work. And you could tell them truth, truth could be standing in front of them, and they would run the opposite direction. That was most of us. Because we needed something to come inside of us and take our vision off of ourself to get the darkness out of our mind. There's only one that can do that, and that's the Holy Spirit. And I'm so thankful that God allows that and comes in. But how do we come to the place of knowing the Holy Spirit? How do we come to the place of the Holy Spirit coming inside of us? And we see in verse 20, it's not the way you learned Christ. So again, this is one of those places where I stopped again. And I says, What is learned? Because the truth is, is I could go read any car magazine and learn a few things about a car, and hey, it's great. Now I know a little bit about a car. Uh you could go read an owner's manual for half of us in the room. That'll never happen. But we can go and we can read a little bit about it, but it just goes back in the glove box, or it just goes back in the box as we're trying to build something and we throw it away and we're trying to figure out why this thing won't go together. It's because you missed step seven, right? So this is what we do. We go and we think we learned something, but this is not the learned that Paul is talking about. The learned here is, and I'm gonna try this word, mano. That makes the most sense. Manthano. But it's learning from a teacher in a way that shapes a student. Learning that changes the student. This is not you sit down and you hear some instruction. This is not some head knowledge where you go to college and you're sitting there in class and you're just trying to retain it for two weeks so that you can pass your final and forget it it ever happened. That was my whole high school experience. Get me through. But it's bringing it from the head knowledge into heart knowledge. Head knowledge is it's fine. But for eternity, it's useless. It's just a bunch of stuff up there. If it doesn't change, if it doesn't do something, it's useless. So the key distinction there is people who heard the gospel that just walked away. And we've seen that, and some of us have even done that. Some of us in the room right now are still trying to run so hard. Stop running. It's exhausting. But those who heard the gospel and allowed it to come in and transformed their mind. A couple of examples. Before I understood what abortion was, I just knew that it was something that people did if they didn't want to be pregnant. And then I came to know Jesus and my life changed. And then all of a sudden, I heard abortion and I learned what it meant by seeing a video of how it happens. And I'm gonna tell you right now, my whole life changed around learning what it meant to have an abortion. And now I know that it's wrong, and scripturally it's wrong. And so my whole life then changed around the thought of that. And what we're talking about is biblical worldview. It's allowing our lives to be what the Word of God says. If it says it's wrong, we know it's wrong, not believe, no, right? But the thing is, is you see the difference of when you have learned something, I'll go and I will fight against things and I will uh not literally fight, but I will push through and sign and uh vote, whatever needs to be done to make sure that this heinous action of abortion has to stop. It changed me because I learned it. Then another one that kind of shapes how I've done things as I was growing up, I didn't have a whole lot. So when I got the opportunity to spend money, I did previously, just all over the place. And I found this little plastic thing that would allow me to buy anything. And um, and I'd swipe it and swipe it and swipe it until I started getting these letters in the mail saying I had to pay that back at 28% interest. And wait, I don't understand, but it took like I'd heard, I knew what they were. I truthfully knew what was gonna happen when I swiped the credit card, but apparently I didn't learn its consequences. So when I learned what happened, my life changed, and I said, I'm gonna stop doing that. I'm no longer going to swipe a card and pay stupid interest for something. I'm going to get debt free. And my wife and I did, and we're debt-free today. Because you learn something, it changed the way I do things. That's the kind of learning that he's talking about. Not that you step into a classroom, but you come in and you learn by a teacher and he disciples you. We've been talking about discipling. We walk with one another. Iron sharpened iron doesn't mean that the two swords stay rusty. They scratch against one another to keep themselves shiny and bright, but that doesn't feel good for the sword because you see little red things that fly off. They're called sparks. Yellow sparks. I'm sure if it had feelings, it would hurt. But it's time that we have true learning, which is what 21 he says, assuming, he's making an assumption here, that you have heard about him and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus. This is a big part again. These scriptures are so deep, and the truth is we could sit here for a month of sermons and just one scripture at a time, because you're taught in him as the truth is in Jesus. How many know that truth is Jesus? He's the definition. If he said it, it's gonna happen. Truth is in him. Now the question is the truth that's in him that makes him up. I mean, he's the definition of truth. The way that the truth is in him, are we in Jesus? That same way. Right? So when we learn Jesus, we learn about, it's not learn about him. Nope. It's learn him. Because Paul never said learned about Jesus. He said you learned Jesus. So then the truth in us about him should be that same truth that's like Jesus. But yet we can't do that in ourselves. It goes back to the Holy Spirit again. When we learn Jesus and his life comes in and truly changes us, the Holy Spirit comes in. Because here's the truth, and we see this through other of Paul's letters. We cannot come to Jesus about the knowledge of Jesus without the Holy Spirit coming and revealing to us our need. So I thank God that God uses us to bring the gospel to people, but I also thank God that I'm not the one that has to change your heart. Because nothing would happen. I might be able to force you into a couple things. You'll just learn about it and you won't learn it. But the Holy Spirit comes into our life. That is how we can be in Jesus like the truth is in Jesus. Because Jesus Christ allows his spirit to come inside of us, and that's how we see lost lives change. That's how we see that the former manner of life was wrong. That's how we see that we need to allow something to change inside of us. It's learning that changes us. One of my favorite things that I found here in verse 22, he says, put off the old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through its deceitful desires. Mark already touched on this a little bit. Must mean that the Lord's really wanting us to hear it today. But what he's talking about when he says, put off the old clothes, he's uh in this scripture, he says put off the old self. He's talking about old clothes. All right, he uses a metaphor for clothing. Now, for us, it's not a big deal. My closet's full of clothes. If you have me throw away one of my old work shirts, it's fine. I got 15 more. If you tell me my jeans are too ripped up and they got too much paint on them, it's fine. I've got 12 more. And I'm sure as do most of us here. But in this time, they usually had about three items and they wore them daily, all three of them. So they didn't have closets to go to. Matter of fact, these clothes they would pass down from generation to generation. Right? And so if you were good enough and blessed enough to get a new set of clothing, you would pass that old clothing down to your son so that he could have some nicer clothes. They would never throw clothing away until it was filthy, too stained to wash, rotten, could no longer be repaired. Is it starting to sound like something? It's our life before Jesus. We tried over and over and over in our life to wash the sin out of our life because we want to do the right thing. Oh, because you know, that's just what everybody else is doing. It's moralism, right? So if I just do right enough, if I'm just nice enough, and if I can just clean up my outer garments just enough, then maybe I'll be accepted in. But that is totally against the word of God. These old clothes, we can't wash them clean. We can't repair them enough. They're too rotten already. They smell me coming from the front lot. We we can no longer wear these things. They're severely defiled, totally unrepairable. But there's awesome news. And it started in 23. But it says, to be renewed in the spirit of your minds brings me back to one of my favorite scriptures that I think about a lot, is Romans 12, 2. Be not conformed to the ways of the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And he says it again in, I think it was Romans 6, he's talking about the dead man. We'll talk about that in a second. There was another one in Colossians. So we really like to say this. But we need to allow the learning to actually come in and change us. No longer keep putting on these old clothes. He says, to put on the new clothes and the new self in verse 24, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. So we don't just get new clothes from Abercrombie, we get new robes of righteousness, like Jesus, like God, in the likeness of God. And I'm reminded to uh back in Genesis chapter one, when God says, Let us make man in our image to be like us. God always originally wanted us to be with him, like him, but yet we separated ourselves from him, and in his great righteousness and mercy, he brought us back in through the blood of Jesus, right? But he's always putting righteous clothing on us. Think about this. Jesus is given the parable of the uh rich man and the son, and the son takes off and goes off. And one of the last things we hear in the parable is before he comes back to the father, he's eaten in a pigsty, right? And he's like, Man, if I could just go back and be a servant in my father's house, it'll be much better. And he's running down the road. And what's one of the first things that the ruler did? Put a robe, put it the righteousness on him, the nice clothes, a ring on his finger, brought him back into the house. And so it wasn't about the old clothes anymore. Well, no, I've covered that's covered by my blood, right? And in this way of saying. So I love to hear that he's saying to us put on the new clothes, stop wearing the old, trash, broken, ripped, stinky, filthy clothes, and put on the news On the righteous outer garments that I've given you because you're now covered by my blood. You're in a new family, in a new way. It's a different way of living. He has made all of this possible. But so often we continue to try to hide things. He's talking about earlier, allowing the old self to be alive, to not letting the Lord change us. And so we feel really comfortable in our old clothes. Really comfortable. My wife years ago, now she's in the back work, and I'm probably going to get beat up for this, but she had this pair of sweatpants from high school. And she wore them to bed every night till about eight years ago. And they were torn to shreds. I don't know why. Like, I'm not sure how they made it through the washer each time. But she loved them. One day they disappeared. And in their place came some nice new sweatpants. Yeah, I threw them away. But she wanted to wear those old ones because they were comfortable. How many times in our life do we continue wearing the old clothes because they're comfortable? How many times are we trying to cherish our sin because it feels good and we don't know anything different because we've not tasted of the goodness and the righteousness of God? Some of us are too afraid to lay it down because it's been so good. It's felt right. It's the way that I've done it for so many years. It's the only way I know. And the Lord's saying, it stinks, it's filthy, it's trash, it's torn up. Throw it in the trash because it no longer belongs on your body. And that's what Paul's reminding us of is that the old clothes don't have any right to be in your home. None. We must throw them out. I'm gonna do something here. If everybody would stay seated for just a second, Timothy, would you turn out all the lights? Okay, but I want you to look around. You can still see clearly, right? Why can you still see clearly? Somebody say it. Light. Light. Alright, turn them back on, Timothy. Light. When Jesus comes into your life, light enters into your heart. This room could not go dark because light is infiltrating it. When you bring light into a dark place, it will never stay dark. It can't. So you're telling me this morning, but I've got Jesus in my life, and I'm trying to live this way, but I'm gonna hold on to the one thing: the darkness. You're fighting to hold on to some darkness in your life. But we're supposed to cast those darkness out. And the light already does it. This is not something you have to do. You have to allow it. My wife could have gone to the garbage can that day and pulled them back out. But she decided to leave it there because she knew after she put on the new ones they were much more comfortable. And she was okay with it after that. But it took actually trying on the new clothes. And that's what we have to do. We have to stop putting on the old stuff. We have to stop making excuses for our sin. We have to stop saying, but oh, this is okay. It doesn't cause me any problems. It's all right if I wear it. No, it has no right to be in your life. None. And the light's trying to dispel it, and you're wondering why you're still walking through hell, and it's because you're sitting there literally fighting with hell to keep it there. When the light's trying to push it out. Sometimes we fight ourselves when we could just let the Lord take it out. Well, I don't know what my life would be like if I didn't go to the bar anymore and hang out. I don't know what my life would be like anymore if I didn't go to that party. I don't know what my life would be like anymore if I didn't watch those videos I shouldn't watch. I don't know what it would be like because it's just something I've done for so many years. When we come to Jesus, we should give it all up. 100%. The clothes don't belong in the closet no more. They need to be out in the trash can getting burned. And that's what we need to be doing every morning. Deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow him. And allow the righteous wear of God to come inside. Allow that righteous wear to be put on. Because he doesn't want you to walk around in filthy rags anymore. He doesn't want you to stink from seven miles down the road. He wants you to smell good to people when you come around them. Maybe your attitude still sucks and it's trash. And you need to allow the Lord to come in and change that. Because here's the truth: when we come in and we allow the dead man to be alive, the Holy Spirit comes inside of us and begins to transform us with repentance, with kindness, with grace, with love, with mercy, with generosity, and so on and so on. Those things will become of us when we just allow Him to do it. But we can no longer put on new clothes if the old clothes stench and everything is still right there. You know, you've got one sleeve in the nice new righteous robe and one sleeve in the falling apart robe. That's not, that doesn't work. So we need to allow the Holy Spirit to come inside of us and change us because the gospel doesn't change, but yet people are teaching that it does. And what we're seeing on Facebook and what we're seeing on TikTok and Twitter and Instagram, I don't know what all's out there still. But there's a lot of them. And it's a lot of terrible news and a lot of lies. There's a false gospel that's floating around saying that it's alright to live in sin and wear the old clothes. It's alright to do that because, oh no, that's not what the scripture says. It's alright to live with your boyfriend or your girlfriend for six years before you get married. It's totally fine to be sleeping around with multiple people. It's fine to get drunk three times a month. It's totally fine as long as you just say a prayer once in a while. That's a false gospel. That is nothing that's been in the scripture. That is not what we should live like. The old should be gone. It should be gone. It's not an option to wear the new clothes that Christ has given you of righteousness in the likeness of God. The old clothes have to be burned. The old clothes have to go away. Now we're starting our fast this evening. And what a time it would be to take the time while we're fasting to pray. As Mark prayed a minute ago, Lord, reveal in me any wicked way. That was David's prayer. Because if we want good and real fruit to come out of us, then we gotta be planted in good soil. If you take a beautiful plant down here at Lowe's and you take it home and you stick it in really bad soil, it's gonna die. And yet we think daily that we can take our life and keep planting in trash soil with all of this stuff coming in our mind, all these terrible things that we watch, our mouth, our talk, and hanging out, listening to nasty stuff with the boys, and all of this gossip that's going on, and we think we're gonna grow well. This would be the perfect time to stop and say, Lord, I want to be like you. When I wear my righteous robes that you gave to me, I want to be in the likeness of God, in the holiness of God, because you have allowed me to step into that. I didn't earn my way there, but you gave it to me and say that I can stand boldly in the throne room with you, God. You, Lord, give us that opportunity. But we can't step in because we keep wearing the nasty clothes. And God's saying to us this morning, throw them off. Throw them off, for you are in Christ if you've learned Him. And that's what our sermon series is about. In Christ. So, Father, we just pray right now that there be any wicked way within us, Lord, that we would cast it off. Lord, that we would forcefully throw it in the garbage, that we would want nothing of our old life, nothing because it feels good, nothing because we know what really feels good is to have your robe of righteousness in the likeness of God placed onto us. God, and in the areas that we have not learned truly in our heart who you are, that you would reveal to us even as we start to fast and pray, Lord, that you would come in and change us from the inside, Lord. That we would no longer wear the trash robes, that we would no longer stink to the world. God, that we would no longer keep trying to put this stuff on and claim that the light has come into us, even though we're trying to hide little dark pockets and make a little shelter for our dark pockets. That you would break through your light through them, Lord, and that they would burn them out of our life so that we can have that robe that looks like you, that smells like you, that lives a life like you want us to live, Father. We thank you for it in Jesus' name.