"This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind" (Ephesians 4:17).
A warning is necessary if you are a new Christian living among old pagans. Your lifestyle has to be different! How do the pagan nations live? People wander in a world of illusion and futility (see Eph. 4:18). Love has become lust, and their darkened understanding says that what is temporal is eternal, and what is eternal is irrelevant. Spiritual experience is not for people living in the real world, they say!
This worldly thinking is the result of a callousness of heart (see Eph. 4:18). People sin and get away with it, then stick out their chins and say, “See, the sky didn’t fall on my head!” They are greedy, wanting more of everything even though they have most everything. They indulge in outrageous conduct, living without care for high personal standards or social sanctions, and they have a passion for sexual indulgence at the expense of others. This is how the nations without Christ walk about this earth. They become so indifferent even to the sanctity of human life that they reduce everything to the mighty dollar.
The story is told of a man’s watching another man drown in Hong Kong harbor. The drowning man begged the observer to jump in and save him, but the man refused until a passer-by offered him some money! Not every unbeliever behaves in such a callous way, but every unbeliever, with no mighty checking power within, has the potential for all of the above. Alone against the foe, the Christless one is easy prey.
