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This is The Oaks Equipped, a podcast from The Oaks Church in Liberty Hill, TX where Pastor Josh Mings talks through the stuff he didn’t have time to say on Sunday, answers the questions people are actually asking, and keeps things way more real than polished. Expect biblical truth, practical takeaways, and just enough humor to keep you guessing whether he meant it.
If you want to follow Jesus with clarity (and laugh at least once), you’re in the right place.
Welcome to The Oaks Equipped, a podcast designed to help you grow deeper in your faith. Each week we unpack sermon insights, explore what didn't fit on Sunday, and answer real questions, even the skeptical ones. Let's get equipped.
Speaker 2:Welcome once again to the Oaks Equipping with Josh.
Speaker 3:Howdy. Howdy. So
Speaker 2:we've gone through one week of New Year. How are those resolutions going?
Speaker 3:Hey. I learned a long time ago. I I I just decided I'm not doing any new new year's resolutions, and I don't have to let myself down. I just try to be faithful. That's all.
Speaker 2:I I decided I was gonna do one I wanna read a book outside the Bible at least one chapter a day.
Speaker 3:Oh, wow. How's that going?
Speaker 2:It didn't happen. I've had more interruptions this week than I I could
Speaker 3:check a stick at
Speaker 2:it every time I went to do something, and then I was up to eleven doing other things, and I never
Speaker 3:got
Speaker 2:to
Speaker 3:Well, you pick shorter books like kids' books, then
Speaker 2:you Yeah. Books on tape. Well, this week we jumped into Ephesians five, which again, where Paul is talking about our walk, right? Now we're talking about walking, imitating God, and recognizing again the offering that Jesus did, the aroma, the sweet aroma of his offering. But the key point here was that our identities are driving our actions.
Speaker 2:And that's if you step back and really think about that, that really is a big concept. Huge. Identity is driving our actions. We see that only within scripture, but we see that even in the culture sometimes. We'll talk about that later.
Speaker 3:Yeah. 100%. It's funny. Maybe to our listeners, they feel like we probably start every Ephesians conversation the same way. But it's it's cool to see in real time when people come up to me and talk.
Speaker 3:It's like even though we've said it, we try to say it in different ways to try to make it land and connect. It's always beautiful when like, I just had someone today come up to me and say, I've been following the Lord for forty plus years, and I finally get it. And so that's the beauty of it. So Paul is repeating it. The big phrase that we kind of draw this from is identity dictates biography, that what we believe about ourselves informs the things that we do.
Speaker 3:And it it doesn't take really a rocket science to figure this out. Like so using Paul's, you know, vocabulary and the way he defines it, let's talk I talked about a firefighter. Yeah. A firefighter does not wear the same clothes as me and you. They put on the right clothes.
Speaker 3:And when a fire starts, they run towards the fire because that's who they are. Therefore, it's what they do. And so Ephesians five starts with a beautiful truth. The command is in the imperative tense, which just is a fancy way of saying it's a command, be imitators of God, beloved children. So let me beloved is a is an old word, but let me say it in a way that I think that will hit us.
Speaker 3:Be imitators of God as loved children. Yep. God loves us. God secured us into his family. And so he's saying, Act like him.
Speaker 3:And we can do that from that identity. So our new identity as children informs our biography, what we do. We we are called to imitate God. Now imitating God is what got Satan in big trouble. So we're not imitating God in the sense of we have the same attributes as God.
Speaker 3:We do not. We're not omniscient. We're not all powerful. We're not trying to be the ruler of the universe. Satan is imitating God.
Speaker 3:He is trying as a counterfeit to replace him and will fail. What we're trying to imitate them to the point that you started this off is we're trying to be like Christ in our obedience to the father. Christ was obedient. He died for us as the will of the father instructed him, and he was obedient to the father. That's our responsibility.
Speaker 3:And so this identity dictating biography, while it's been a major conversation in the book of Ephesians, it is the foundation for your life. You do not imitate God to earn favor with God. You have it in Christ Jesus, Ephesians one and two. You imitate God as a response to the reality that you are loved.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and that leads to flourishing, which you're gonna talk about a little bit later.
Speaker 3:Oh, huge.
Speaker 2:But we when we talk about walking as imitators of God, it says we're walk in love, right, as as Christ loved us. And and that's, I think you kept bringing that point back that, like you said, maybe it's forty years, but it needs to set in like Christ loved you enough to die for you, and now is with you to live
Speaker 3:like him.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I hope we never lose that. That, you know, that that truth alone should lead to such humility, such worship, such excitement, such joy that to be loved by like, that is the greatest truth in the universe. Of all the things to have and be, this is the highest honor that any you know, we gotta remember we gotta remember Genesis three. We're we're dirt.
Speaker 3:You know, I know that's not on anyone's greeting cards or, you know, what you wanted to hear, but the fact that the God of heaven loves me in you and our listeners is a reality that should just inspire us. And, you know, my warning is if you find yourself in that cold, dark place where it's like that doesn't that doesn't give you flutter, that doesn't cause you to pause, that doesn't cause excitement and joy to bubble up in you, man, let's do some soul searching about where your identity really is.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah. And that can make a big difference when you're talking to other people if you're just basically parroting a set of words or thoughts or presuppositions versus seeing that love come through that. Right? That's that's huge.
Speaker 2:A And 100 Paul calls us in here, it's just sort of along those lines, he doesn't just call us dirt or people, but he calls us saints. Think Saint Josh, Saint Golan. We always think of that as those people that are memorialized on certain churches. Right? But saint has a different connotation here.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Again, he's building the same argument. In context, he's saying, Don't act a certain way because you're saints. So he's appealing to identity.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, I don't remember the exact rules and and regulations, but in Catholicism, to become a saint is a is a fifty to seventy five year process. Have to be confirmed. You know, you have to perform a miracle.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You have to do all these certain things. But biblically, to our listeners who are in Christ, you put your faith in him, you repent of your sins, boom, sainthood. You you can put it on your LinkedIn profile if you'd like. But, again, Paul is appealing to our identity. Those who are in Christ are the saints.
Speaker 3:We are the people of God, the children of God, and that identity should inform all of our actions. You're not you are not your sin. You are not a sinner. You are not broken. You are in Christ Jesus.
Speaker 3:And from that, you now have the ability to live out what Christ calls you to.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But the next passage, verse three, Paul gives us an imperative to put off immortality and impurity, things that should be among named amongst us and lead to sexual immorality.
Speaker 3:A 100%.
Speaker 2:So now we're going to the deep water here.
Speaker 3:Yes. Yeah, Paul's not mincing words in this first part of chapter five. So the the context of this, you know, the the city of Ephesus was a pretty, pretty gross and nasty place. It was a port city, you know, at the heart of the Mediterranean on in Turkey. Heart of the Mediterranean, lots of trade.
Speaker 3:That part of the world was really known for leather and spices and fruits and things like that, carpets. And so, you know, people would come and go to Ephesus all the time, And it would be common practice for those in that city to show up. They would come with their seafaring vessel full of whatever their merchandise was. They would unload it, sell it. And then before their journey home, they would go through this rite and ritual of going to a certain shop, buying some idols for worship.
Speaker 3:The primary temple in the city of Ephesus was to Athena or Aphrodite, but depending on which, you know, Greek or Roman deity that you really followed, but the same essential goddess. And and the role in visiting this temple was it was a it was a spiritualized brothel is is really what it was. And so this is the this is the sin city, Las Vegas esque environment in which a church is being planted. And and some of the cool backstory, if you read the book of Acts, the gospel is so powerful, and the church in Ephesus is so faithful and strong that it actually destroys the economic well-being of the city because it destroyed all the people kept getting saved, they stopped buying the the idols. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And they literally brought it to a ground to the point to the point where the people of the city decided to riot, and they went hunting for Paul. Yeah. So it shows you the power of the gospel. But, nevertheless, the people who are being saved are being saved from an environment where everything was sexualized. It was common practice daily, weekly to go to this temple and to and to participate in these disgusting, ungodly acts.
Speaker 3:So you have this church that's growing out of a former life into their new life, and Paul is saying, hey, man. We can't be we can't associate with this. That's who we used to be. That's not who we are now as children of God.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But the people living there, this wasn't like they were standing on the other side of the road with protest signs. This was normalized. This was what Greg Culpo likes to call velocitized. It uses the analogy you're driving in your car and you accelerate up to 60 miles an hour, you feel like you're going fast.
Speaker 2:You drive 60 for a while, you hit it to eighty, eighty starts to feel normal. A 100%. They're looking around going, this is what everybody does. What's the deal? And Paul comes in and says
Speaker 3:A 100%.
Speaker 2:That's not what the new you is. Correct. You're saints.
Speaker 3:It is in every way countercultural. And and to your point, it's the same as us. Yeah. You know, sexual immorality and at the movies is is a normal place. You know, we go grab popcorn and candy, and then we see things that are inappropriate.
Speaker 3:It's normalized in commercials. Yeah. And so we may think that we're more sophisticated because we don't have a temple and we don't assign some type of spiritual deity to it, But this kind of immoral behavior is all around us in countless different ways, screaming and trying to be normalized. And the people of God, the saints, the children of God, we're to call we're to live countercultural to that and to see it as different. And this is important because there's always a there's always a whiff of compromise that's intentional, and then there's always a type of compromise and deception that comes that's subtle.
Speaker 3:And I think I think that most of the listeners are probably aware of the more aggressive things, and we're we're able to push back on that. But it's the subtle ones that concern me. And it was just this week. I've heard this argument for years, but it's just this week that I I stomached my way through a video where a so called pastor was making the claim that Paul, using the similar argument, and Peter, who makes a similar argument in his writings, well, they're not Jesus. And so when they say sexual immorality, they're just talking about a type of sex that isn't in some type of committed relationship.
Speaker 3:And then they take that, they kind of discredit the apostleship of Peter and Paul. And then they go, in the Old Testament, you know, when it talks about these things Yeah. That's Old Testament, old rules. We're not we're not under that. We don't apply to that.
Speaker 3:And then the cherry on top is, well, Jesus never once talked about sex. And so these arguments are not new. These arguments are recycled garbage that just seem to pop their evil little head up from time to time, and all three of those arguments are categorically wrong. Right.
Speaker 2:And and just on that last one, Jesus, as a rabbi, was living in a culture where those standards were upheld. Yeah. It wasn't like he needed to go around to try to find out, okay, here's some deviation that's going on here with the sexual immorality. But he does talk about it, right?
Speaker 3:He does.
Speaker 2:He pointed out, what, Matthew 19.
Speaker 3:This is foundational. Number one, we're not on a witch hunt. Number two, we have a great deal of compassion because because sexual sin is so permeated our culture, we come in the sense of some of the previous podcasts and messages, we've come to speak truth as love to build back. The new life in Christ is the path to freedom. And Jesus, in that same spirit, speaks the truth.
Speaker 3:And so one day he's cornered in Matthew in gospels the the gospel account in Matthew where they're, like, wanting to trap him on divorce. And the idea is there's a group of people who believe, well, if you divorce and get married or can you get married? And just all these kinds of unique ways to trap Jesus. And he does something so interesting. This is in
Speaker 2:Matthew nineteen forty five.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna notes put here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Make
Speaker 3:sure I I wanna make sure I get this right because it's it's so important. He goes on and and he what Jesus does is he says, as it was in the beginning. Mhmm. So Jesus doesn't appeal to Roman ideology, which would have been more of a Western reality of what we live in now. He doesn't appeal to that.
Speaker 3:He doesn't appeal to a Jewish opinion that would have been from a rabbi that was passed on to a rabbi to another rabbi. He doesn't appeal to any of that. He affirms the Old Testament truth and he quotes Genesis that as it was in the beginning, a man and a woman leave their father and mother and cling to each other and become one flesh. Like that argument, Jesus is appealing to the Old Testament as true and good, and he's not allowing any cultural deviation to inform what is right. He's saying one man, one woman together in marriage becoming one flesh for life.
Speaker 3:And anything outside of that definition is at its core sexual immorality. It is a misuse of God's original intended design. And so the argument is, oh, well, Jesus never talked about sexuality. I know that the answer to that question that I'm providing is a tad bit technical, but what Jesus does is he sums up everything to say original intent. God created marriage.
Speaker 3:God created man and woman, and he designed and intended it. Like, he's appealing to that. Go back to the beginning. Any iteration of perversion is not the way thing that we go back to. We go back to God's original design.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's he's laying out the the intent, the intent from the beginning, and what the purpose was for flourishing. Mhmm. He's not going back into all the deviations that could occur. And even from a social perspective, he didn't try to attack any other issues or address other issues that we see today in our society.
Speaker 2:Right? But he's looking back to Genesis, what the original design was for men and women to flourish. Yeah. And from that, the world would flourish as a whole.
Speaker 3:Yeah. To your point, this is the deep end of the pool. It just it kinda popped in my mind as I'm thinking this through. I remember the charge. The question was about divorce, And he he's acknowledging because there's a there's a statute in the Mosaic law for what can happen in the event of a need for divorce.
Speaker 2:For the certificate?
Speaker 3:For the certificate. So Moses put in a provision. Hey. Look. If if there's gonna be a divorce, not ideal, not what we want, but you need to make sure that the woman is taken care of.
Speaker 2:That's right. And and that's a good point. You should maybe expand on that. Yeah. It's not for the benefit of the man to be able to go find the lady down the street he likes.
Speaker 3:And so what what he's even saying in that is that's not God's intent. Mhmm. It's protect intent was not it was it was a means of grace to protect women from being abused.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And so we're we're we're going in the minutiae of this to point out this reality. Jesus didn't take on the issue of divorce because of the the cultural narrative. He was going to the heart of the problem. So people will say, well, Jesus didn't speak about homosexuality. Okay.
Speaker 3:I hear you. He's speaking to the heart of the issue. The homosexuality is forbidden in in the in the Old Testament, in the New Testament. Jesus is getting back. I want things to be how I designed them.
Speaker 3:That's where his mind is, not what is the new deviation and depravity expressed through sexuality of 2026 and what other invention will be created by a depraved mind because we're not evolving to the good. We're evolving to the worst. He's not addressing that. He's saying, as it was in the beginning, one man, one woman together as one. And as we finish out Ephesians chapter five, you'll see that Paul is gonna take that same idea and there's a picture of that heterosexual married for life together in one union.
Speaker 3:It serves a purpose for the kingdom of God, and it's so important.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not to go too far down the road on this, I think we've gone pretty far, but I think of in a practical way, I get new power tools to do work around the house. Never in the instructions does it tell me that it's designed, Don't do these things so you won't cut off your fingers. It doesn't give me instructions on how not to cut my fingers off. It says, Use it this way properly.
Speaker 2:And I think that's your point, is that Jesus is laying out, This is the way it was designed. I think that's a key point. This is what how men and women were designed, and it's pretty obvious how we've been designed.
Speaker 3:A 100%. And and hear me say, you know, one of our core values, one of our house rules is that we love the truth, and we speak to build. To the listener who has participated or been a a victim of some of these topics that we're talking about, do not hear condemnation, sexual immorality, homosexuality, and all the variations of this sin that exists are not the unforgivable sin. So to the listener who's fighting an addiction to pornography, who's one of their spouses being unfaithful, whatever the dark, gross reality is, hear us say the gospel is strong enough and that Christ can forgive you. Paul's command here is is not if you do these things, you're off the team.
Speaker 3:Paul's command here is that this should not define us, characterize us. And I'm calling you, brother. I'm calling you, sister, who have this deep sin. I'm calling you to repent of it, and I'm calling you to fight. You now have the spirit of God residing in you and a body of believers around you who wanna fight with you and help you and stand with you.
Speaker 3:And so please do not hear any form of condemnation or hate or bigotry. To Glenn's point, we you've tried it. We've tried it. We've all human history has all tried this way, and it doesn't lead to the best of us. It leads to the worst of us.
Speaker 3:God's way is what will lead to human flourishing. And so I know that it can feel like a dark hole of loneliness. The point of this passage is to bring it into the light. You were darkness. That's your old identity.
Speaker 3:Your new identity is you are light in Christ. And so let's bring it to the light. We're here to help. That's why we have this podcast is to equip you, to train you. But the the deep, dark secret sin and the sexual immorality that Paul's calling you to abandon, it's not the unforgivable sin.
Speaker 3:The power of the cross and the gospel is far greater.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's good. And part of this is too is as saints, as as believers, we're to be walking steadily forward. Right? And and I think this is an encouragement.
Speaker 2:Again, this is who you are. This is how you identify. Here's the actions. Now, move forward. And you used a very interesting analogy at the airport that shows that we could walk or we can walk with force.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Used a silly example. I hope I hope this makes sense to everybody. You know, I'm intense when it comes to travel. You know, you go to the airport, we get there early, but that doesn't we don't get there early to rest.
Speaker 3:We get there early to find the best seats and to make sure we have everything in order, and I'm constantly pacing and moving. But my favorite part of the airport are those special walkways where there's the moving floor because I can buzz through and fly through it quickly. Now in my view, those moving floors or whatever they're called, they're not for standing. They're for walking. And so in my mind, I just had this picture of, okay, I'm a child of God, which means I belong to Christ.
Speaker 3:I'm in his family. But more importantly, the spirit is in me. And so I think Paul's command here, because he continues to build on the same idea to walk, to walk, to walk. I know that my effort as not to earn my salvation, not to earn my standing, but from my standing, my walk will be amplified because the spirit will be inside of me helping me. Okay?
Speaker 3:So it's my effort and spirit empowerment. And so I to me, I just like to share some of the things that I've done through the years to try to help me through this. And so I want I want the listener to begin to get really practical. Okay. How can I take my spiritual walk and get on a moving floor like at the airport that moves me quicker to God?
Speaker 3:Because if we're not intentional and we're not practical and we're not we'll create rhythms, we'll drift back into our old life so easily. And so that's the picture I want you to have. And I was thinking today, and I haven't really fully thought it through, but to those who are young Christians, they often ask questions like, well, is this a sin or is that a sin? And I understand why they ask that. And that's don't hear any judgment in my voice as I tell this story.
Speaker 3:I think that's the wrong question to ask. The writer of Hebrews tells us it kind of signifies this imagery that we're in a race. And he tells us to lay aside every hindrance and to run. Okay? I think the question that we need to be asking ourselves is not, is this a sin?
Speaker 3:Is this okay? Instead, we need to ask ourself, will this help me run fast to Christ? And it to me, it's not when I was a kid, it was always like, well, if I ask if this is a sin, it's almost like I'm trying to get up as close to the line as possible so I can have as much approved fun without crossing over the line. That's not how sons think. That's how slaves think.
Speaker 3:And so my encouragement to the listener is this, stop thinking about is this a sin or not? There are some things that are sins and we reject them. But I'm not trying to get close to the line. I'm trying to get close to Christ. So what are the things that I need to improve my walk with that stop me from running, that make it harder for me to rung, that make it harder for me to wake up in the morning and spend time with God.
Speaker 3:That's what I want my focus on because I wanna get on that moving floor, and I want the spirit to empower me, and I wanna have a passionate, meaningful relationship with Christ that that's thriving, not is this a sin. I wanna know Christ, and I want that for you too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And just to wrap it up here, like you mentioned, there's things that we can receive, redeem, and reject. And as far as staying on the path moving forward, there are things that we wanna receive. We wanna receive the goodness of God. We wanna receive encouragement for one another.
Speaker 2:But there are things that we can redeem within the culture that are worthwhile. But there are some things we should reject, and those are the things that are gonna knock us, or maybe it's the guy standing on that speed sidewalk that you are, and he's not gonna let you go through. Those are the ones that we wanna reject, right? Yeah. We don't
Speaker 3:want This would be a fun podcast in and of itself. What good is there in keeping a law that produces nothing? So we receive, we redeem, and we reject. So yes, Paul is good at telling us the things that we need to reject and hear me say, we need to reject those things. But I like the avenue of thinking through, okay, what's gonna help my relationship with Jesus?
Speaker 3:Saying it in the affirmative and then realizing that there are things in life that I can receive and enjoy. We're free men and women, and we're not law based under that condemnation. But then there are things that I've just learned through the years, like we can redeem. We can use them for good. And that's part of the that's part of the missional mindset that I want us to live with.
Speaker 3:It's like, yes. Has something been used for harm? A 100%. And I think Paul gives us the best example in the book of Corinthians when he talks about food that was sacrificed to idols. It was bad, but they didn't he wasn't commanding anyone to reject it.
Speaker 3:He said, look, as as long as your conscience is clear, receive it and use it for good. And so that's all I'm trying to get at. So I think in each of our minds, if we can begin to just think through that lens, what would free men do in Christ, sons, saints, as he's identified, and then ultimately, okay. Will this help me grow in my relationship with Christ or not? That's the big idea, and I think it will be a freeing freeing reality if we all lived into it.
Speaker 2:So the net net freedom comes from passionately following Jesus.
Speaker 3:Yes. Amen.
Speaker 2:Amen? Amen. And you'd hate to give up all that good beef
Speaker 3:I think potential brisket. Seriously.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks. This was a tough one. This was your first You initiated your first rant for 2027. I did.
Speaker 3:I did. But you You'll have to go and listen to that.
Speaker 2:You wrapped it up well. Yeah. Definitely check out the sermon, but also check out if you want more on this and want to look at what TikTok videos come out and how we actually can address those, check out Red Pen Logic with Mr. B.
Speaker 3:Great. It's a great resource.
Speaker 2:Great resource and a great way to learn how to kind of talk to people who are bringing up some of these objections. Like we brought up Matthew 19, great way to actually start a conversation. Don't have to have the whole answer, at least you have what, again, what Josh articulated earlier. It gives an answer for the hope that lies within. Josh, thanks so much.
Speaker 2:My pleasure.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to The Oaks Equipped. If you want to learn more about following Jesus or get connected here at The Oaks Church, we'd love to hear from you. You can visit us online at exploretheoaks.org or email us anytime at helloexploretheoaks dot org. Stay rooted and stay encouraged. Until next time.