You Can’t Live Like Christ Without Christ (Ephesians 4:31-32)

In Ephesians 4:31–32, the apostle Paul draws a sharp contrast between the old life shaped by sin and the new life formed by Christ, calling believers to put away bitterness, wrath, anger, malice, and unforgiveness, and to instead live in kindness, tenderness, and Christ-like forgiveness.

In this in-depth Bible study, Nathan Johnson walks through Paul’s two contrasting lists—what must be put off and what must be put on—and shows that genuine Christian transformation is not achieved through self-effort but through the indwelling life of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. This teaching helps Christians understand how the gospel reshapes the heart, how forgiveness flows from Christ’s forgiveness of us, and how a life centered on Jesus produces practical holiness for the glory of God.

Listen to + Download the Audio Study

Key Passage: Ephesians 4:31-32

Let all bitterness and anger and wrath and shouting and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Instead, be kind to one another, tender-hearted, graciously forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has graciously forgiven you.
– Ephesians 4:31–32

Put Off / Put On (Review)

• 4:25 – Lying / Truth… for we are members of one another
• 4:26–27 – Anger motivated by self / Anger motivated by love… don’t give place to the devil
• 4:28 – Stealing / Work … that you might have something to give those in need
• 4:29 – Unwholesome language / Edification … may impart grace to the hearers
• 4:30 – Do not grieve the HS / Honor and obey … you are sealed for the day of redemption

A List to Put Off

• Ephesians 4:31 – Let all bitterness and anger and wrath and shouting and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.
  • Bitterness: bitterness, animosity, anger, harshness; that taste experience when something bitter is eaten … can include an unwillingness to forgive, harsh feelings toward others, or a “smoldering resentment” ⁽¹⁾
    • D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones – It is an unloving condition. Indeed, it is a condition which never sees any good in anything, but always contrives to see something wrong, or some defect and deficiency. … It puts into everything it looks at some unworthy element. Because the person himself is jaundiced and bitter, everything he looks at is tinged by the same thing; it is like looking through coloured spectacles. ⁽²⁾
    • Lynn H. Cohick– “[Bitterness] identifies the root cause of the resulting anger and shouting … [and] looks only to the immediate and not the past great gift of God in Christ, nor to the future resurrection and glory shared with Christ.” ⁽³⁾
  • Anger (thymos): indignation, anger, wrath; passion, passionate longing; rage … a fleeting fury or angry passion (intense anger or an outburst of anger that tends to subside quickly) 
  • Wrath (orgē): anger, wrath … a feeling of intense anger that does not subside (an internal smoldering, sometimes a subtle and deep emotion); often on an epic scale
  • Shouting/Clamor: shouting, crying, clamor, wailing … wrath, anger, and strife expressed in speech. It is fighting with words (verbal violence) … often reflected in an outburst of anger, words, and and a loss of verbal control
  • Slander / Evil Speaking (blasphemia): slander, blasphemy, reviling, denigration, disrespect, profane speech
    • Deliberate speaking to do harm to others. It includes the enjoyment linked with slandering others, deliberate saying or repeating things about others that are calculated to do them harm.
  • Malice: evil, wickedness, malice; baseness, depravity, vice … living in such a way that perverts all things and turns that which is good to evil
• Colossians 3:8 – But now you also, lay them all aside: wrath, anger, malice, slander, and abusive speech from your mouth.
• Klyne Snodgrass – All the words in verse 31 are intended to express hostility and actions that destroy human relations. ⁽⁴⁾

The List to Put On

• Ephesians 4:32– Instead, be kind to one another, tender-hearted, graciously forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has graciously forgiven you.
  • Be (ginomai): to become, to be, take place, to enter of assume a certain state or condition … a cultivation and progression of the attribute
  • Kind: good, kind, benevolent (not harsh, stern, or severe); loving; to be useful and helpful
    • Luke 6:35 – “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to the ungrateful and evil.”
    • Romans 2:4 – Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance?
    • Matthew 11:30 – “For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”
    • 1 Corinthians 13:4 – Love is patient, love is kind …
    • 1 Peter 2:3– … you have tasted the KINDNESS of the Lord …
    • Psalm 34:8 – O taste and see that Yahweh is good; how blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!
    • Psalm 145:9– Yahweh is good to all, and His compassions are over all His works.
  • Tender-hearted: compassionate, tenderhearted, with healthy (good) bowels [seat of emotion] … a deep affection
• Our lives and intentions should be marked by love, kindness, and compassion … yet when we do wrong each other, we must walk in forgiveness
  • Graciously Forgiving: forgive, show favor, give freely, give graciously, cancel, forgive, pardon
    • Root: grace
    • In the exact same manner that Christ forgave us, so too are we to forgive one another
    • Ephesians 1:7–8 – In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our transgressions, according to the riches of His grace which He caused to abound to us …

Living in Light of the Spirit

• Put Away: take away, to be eliminated, terminated, finished, killed, removed
  • Verb: Aorist, Passive, Imperative
  • Different word than E4:22
  • Must walk in surrender to, dependence upon, and abiding in the One who sanctifies us
• Ephesians 1:4– … just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love …
• 1 Peter 1:14–16 – As obedient children, not being conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance, but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your conduct; because it is written, “YOU SHALL BE HOLY, FOR I AM HOLY.”
• 1 Thessalonians 5:22–24 – … abstain from every form of evil. Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely, and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He who calls you, who also will do it.
• 1 John 4:9 – By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him.

We need Christ to live the Christian life!

• Ian Thomas – It takes God to be a man! Man, that is, as God intended man to be! God created man to be inhabited by God for God! ⁽⁵⁾
• Ian Thomas – [The Holy Spirit] is essentially indispensable to each of us. God so engineered you and me that His presence is indispensable to our humanity, teaching our minds, controlling our emotions, directing our wills, and governing our behavior. Your new birth puts God into action in you. It lets all of God loose, clothed with the redeemed humanity of your own flesh and blood as a forgiven sinner, so that at last you become a normal human … ⁽⁶⁾
• A.W. Tozer – Deity indwelling men! That is Christianity in its fullest effectuation [operation] … Deity indwelling men! That, I say, is Christianity, and no man has experienced rightly the power of Christian belief until he has known this for himself as a living reality. ⁽⁷⁾

» What areas, thoughts, motives, habits in my life need to be transformed by the Living God so that I might be a pure and holy vessel for His use?

FOOTNOTES

(1) William MacDonald, Believer’s Bible Commentary: Old and New Testaments, ed. Arthur Farstad (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1995), 1940.
(2) David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Darkness and Light: An Exposition of Ephesians 4:17–5:17(Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1982), 279.
(3) Lynn H. Cohick, The Letter to the Ephesians, ed. Ned B. Stonehouse et al., New International Commentary on the Old and New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 301.
(4) Klyne Snodgrass, Ephesians, The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996), 252.
(5) Ian Thomas, The Saving Life of Christ and The Mystery of Godliness (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1988), 186.
(6) Ian Thomas, The Indwelling Life of Christ (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah Books, 2006), 25–26.
(7) Aiden Wilson Tozer, God’s Pursuit of Man (Camp Hill, PA: WingSpread, 2007), 100.

Photo Credit: Kevin Carden

---

Join the Conversation

Question: What areas, thoughts, motives, and habits in your life needs to be transformed by the Living God so that you might be a pure and holy vessel for His use?

» Leave a response below the video on YouTube(click here) …

The difficulty with podcasts is that they are typically one-sided—so I encourage you to head over to the deeperChristian YouTube page and leave a comment on the video study to join in the conversation. And don’t forget to subscribe to the channel while you’re there!

---

In Our Next Study Together …

I invite you to join me on this journey from the book of Ephesians to discover God’s eternal purpose, His plan for your life, and learn how to practically live out an abundant and fruitful Christian life. 

• The focus of our next study: Ephesians 4:17–32
  • We are going to step back and talk about the idea that we are to be always and in every way, a Christian
  • I encourage you to read through Ephesians a couple of times this week and focus specifically on all of Ephesians 4.