PUTTING AWAY OUR FORMER LIFE

this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. That is not the way you learned Christ! For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:17-24)

This is not a once and then you are done deal. Putting away
the former life (the old self) and putting on the “likeness of
God” (the new self) is an on-going process. The text says,
we are “renewed in the spirit of our minds” and I believe this is the only way the old is exchanged for the new. Anything else is just probably morality, will power and trained flesh, all good for sure, but they are not instead of, or without, the Spirit.

“That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” Jesus