TRISTAN SHERWIN

Here’s my longer notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury service (26th July, 2026), as we continue our journey through Paul’s extraordinary letter, Ephesians.

You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).

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‘Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites … ‘

— Edmund Burke[i]

‘Did you exchange | A walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?’

— Pink Floyd[ii]

READ: EPHESIANS 4:17-5:2 (NIV/NLT)

STRINGS?

What we’ve just read can sound like little more than a list of commands. But that is not what Paul is giving us at all. Rather, Paul is wrestling with one of the oldest questions in the human story:

What does it mean to be free?

What does a genuinely free life look like?

Freedom is an idea that has occupied everyone from philosophers to songwriters for centuries. But I always think storytellers tackle the subject best. And so …

‘Once upon a time there was … a piece of wood.’[iii]

Thus begins Carlo Collodi’s famous story of Pinocchio—a story that most of us have heard of. Maybe you’ve read the book or you’re one of the many who have seen Disney’s famous cartoon version.

In short, Pinocchio is a marionette, a puppet, who has been fashioned from out of a miraculous lump of wood by a carpenter called Geppetto. He can talk, which is amazing! (Although, in the original book, the uncarved wood could already speak). More extraordinary still, and to everyone’s’ astonishment, is that Pinocchio can move all by himself.

‘I have no strings to hold me down … There are no strings on me,’ as he famously sings in the cartoon.

(If you now have a song playing in your head, you’re welcome.)

It’s a wonderful image of freedom. Pinocchio has no one pulling him this way or that. Nobody manipulating him. No controls or obligations. He can simply do as he pleases and go where he wants.

At least, that’s how it first appears … but it sours very, very quickly.

The tragedy of Pinocchio is that he mistakes liberty for licence, you could say. His sole motivations are I can and I want to, and he never questions them. He assumes that every desire deserves to be followed and so crowns his appetite as king.

In the “cute” Disney film he is remembered primarily as a liar, but Collodi’s original story paints a more sinister picture. Pinocchio becomes selfish, thoughtless, ungrateful and surprisingly cruel. He is a constant danger to himself and a source of suffering to those around him.[iv]

Pinocchio refuses restraint (strings) of any kind and flees from any outside voice that doesn’t align with his own internal impulses.

He runs from the voice of the father who created him, who appeals to Pinocchio to have his mind and thinking developed.

He continually silences the small, chirping voice of a conscience that keeps calling him to have a heart of compassion. (If you know the cartoon, you’ll remember the cricket he is always leaving behind or silencing beneath an upturned vase. In the children’s book, he uses a hammer!)

All this because he sees any loss of control as a means of manipulation.

Ironically, the absence of strings does not stop Pinocchio being manipulated. Quite the opposite. With no centre beyond himself, he becomes remarkably easy for others—and for his own desires—to manipulate. And so the gift of freedom slowly turns against him, gradually becoming a kind of slavery.

In the film, that process is symbolised as he is transformed into a jackass on Pleasure Island—an unthinking beast of burden, less human than before. In Collodi’s original ending (before his publishers persuaded him to append a redemption story), the story ends even more bleakly: Pinocchio dies hanging from a tree, returning almost literally to what he was at the beginning: a senseless, insensitive, hardened piece of dead wood.

It’s a disturbing parable, but one that has never stopped being relevant.

And it matches, more or less, what Paul describes, in verse 17-19: hearts hardened, understanding darkened, people just following their appetites, moving away from the humanity they were created to be.

Paul’s description, like the story of Pinocchio, is a caricature—an extreme picture of the reality[v]—but caricatures often get the truth home faster than careful prose does.

Both Paul and Pinocchio’s story remind us that freedom, when it has nothing except appetite behind the wheel, does not make us more fully ourselves. As we become increasingly driven by whatever impulse shouts loudest at the time, we become gradually less ourselves.

Paul uses a few key Greek words to describe this descent, but it all culminates in this word: apalgeō (ἀπαλγέω); callousness. Like my calloused fingertips, from playing guitar, that are unable to feel anything. A conscience gone numb, insensitive to feeling anything external to itself.

It’s not solely an insensitivity to God that Paul is talking about, though he is. But also an apathy toward others; the opposite of the kindness and tender-heartedness Paul mentions at the end of this passage. In putting our own appetite first, we can become heartless toward others. To such an extent that we can be ‘so walled off from the pain and suffering of others that it opens the way for [us] to’[vi] cause and add to their suffering.

When I want what I want, with no regards to others, I’m willing to lie, cheat, slander and give full vent to my rage. I am even capable to sacrifice the peace, comfort and lives of others to get want I want.

All of us, I think, have seen enough of our own times and enough of history in general to know that, any society in which everyone is simply allowed to whatever they want does not remain a free society for very long. It becomes a lawless one, where suffering and inhumanity thrive, and in which the loudest, strongest and most powerful appetites begin to dominate everyone else’s.

I want you to know, I’m saying this as an optimist!

I have a high view of humanity. I think we’re great and are capable, even in the most horrible of moments, of tremendous acts of selflessness and kindness. But I’ve witnessed and read enough to know that isn’t true all the time. And when it goes wrong, it goes horribly wrong.

Freedom without boundaries is not freedom; it’s just sugar-coated slavery. Licence eventually destroys both ourselves and everyone else around us.

We know this. Weirdly, though, the inclination of our culture—and even the inclination of myself—is still to see every boundary as an enemy of freedom, as though the highest possible good is the sovereign-self making sovereign choices.

Yet, there is another mistake that we can make when it comes to freedom. If one extreme, like Pinocchio’s, imagines every boundary is oppressive, the other extreme imagines the very opposite:

That if individual’s misuse freedom, then, for the sake of the “greater good”, so society can be “free”, perhaps we should remove freedom at all costs; more laws; more surveillance; more systems of control and oversight. More V.A.R! In other words, more strings. Let’s tie people up in them.

Let’s not only put strings back on Pinocchio but let’s also take away his ability to think freely and speak freely.

Storytellers like George Orwell, in his book, 1984, imagined one version of that kind of society. Contemporary science fiction imagines many, many others.

There’s a thought-provoking show on Apple TV called Pluribus. As the story goes, because of an alien virus, nearly all of humanity gets absorbed into a single hive mind, a single entity. Apart from twelve “survivors”, they are literally united; one person, made up of many. Because of this, because they are so joined together, every problem we’ve ever complained about, every issue that has stemmed from human free will, suddenly ends. No more war, poverty, crime, cruelty. All conflict and inequality are erased. It’s a utopia—but at the cost of any autonomous, independent sense of self.

1984’s ‘Big Brother’ and Pluribus’ ‘The Joining’ differ in detail, but they share this same assumption: that order can finally be achieved if only individual freedom can be sufficiently restricted.

We know these stories, too, and we know total control doesn’t produce a society free from horror or inhumanity. It has its own dehumanising tendencies; it steals the freedom that makes ‘self’ possible.

Those of you who know The Shawshank Redemption will remember Brooks, the elderly librarian who has spent so many years behind prison walls that, when those walls are finally removed, he no longer knows how to live.[vii]

Having more strings, like having no strings, is also sugar-coated slavery: where everyone loses their own individual humanity, we grow collectively inhumane.

Too little boundary and freedom curdles into licence. Too much boundary and freedom curdles into control. Both cost us the ‘self’ God made us to have.

Real freedom was never going to be found down either road — not licence, not control.

THE THIRD WAY AND THE ODYSSEY

This is the tension Paul walks through in Ephesians 4.

For three chapters, before we come to chapter 4, Paul has unfolded the astonishing work of God in Christ. We have been chosen before the foundation of the world, redeemed through Christ’s blood, sealed with the Holy Spirit, raised with Christ, reconciled across every dividing wall, and gathered into one new humanity in whom God himself now dwells, and called to be a working model of God’s new creation in our world.

Then, and only then, at the beginning of chapter four, Paul tells us to ‘walk worthy of this calling’ we have received.

That order matters enormously. Because if we forget it, we will hear everything Paul says next as one more list of religious expectations. But Paul has spent three chapters making exactly the opposite point.

In case we forget: Freedom/salvation is a gift. It’s not something our behaviours, or even a change in our behaviours wins for us or secures for us. It’s a gift of grace from God to be trusted in.

As Paul has already written, once we were dead… but then God, in his mercy and great love for us, rescued us from sin and gave us life. And that none of us can take credit for this by boasting in our efforts or behaviours. God has created us anew in Christ Jesus! (Eph. 2:1-10)

It’s God’s work. And it is a done thing!

We are a new creation, as Paul repeats in Eph. 4:24; present tense.[viii] Already a new creation, even while we’re still waiting for the fuller renewal of everything that’s still to come, even as we await a resurrection body. Paul lives in this overlap in every letter he writes; already a new creation, but not yet finished becoming one. But the ‘already’ is a real thing.

And if that newness, if that freedom is a gift already given rather than a prize still to be won, then Paul isn’t handing us a fresh set of hoops to jump through so that God will finally accept us. If that’s all it is, Christianity collapses into one more moral improvement scheme—try harder, do better, behave yourself—and forcing behaviour has never once actually changed the human heart.

You cannot legislate a transformed heart. Rules cannot create a people capable of keeping them joyfully (and have never done so).

Paul is not giving us strings here, or even more strings. He’s not out to remove freedom. He’s not playing Orwell’s Big Brother tactic. The freedom humanity had in its original creation, and had lost, is now restored in Jesus. Paul celebrates freedom and is its big defender. As he writes in another letter, ‘It was for freedom that Christ has set us free!’[ix]

At the same time, though, Paul is not offering us licence. He’s certainly not saying our behaviour is unimportant and so do whatever you feel.

True freedom is found in neither extreme.

Instead, what Paul offers is a change of clothes (to use his picture), that only makes sense because something deeper has already been changed. We don’t put off the old and put on the new in order to become God’s people. We do it because we already are.

We have an identity,

a purpose,

a home.

To explain what I mean, let’s go back to puppet with no strings.

Pinocchio’s problem was never his lack of strings. Freedom is a beautiful God-given thing. Pinocchio’s problem was that he had nowhere to go — he had freedom with no form, no home to grow into, so it just curdled into whatever his appetite wanted that hour.

You could say, freedom without form is a kind of homelessness.

That is why Paul describes the old way of life as one of futility (Eph. 4:17). The word suggests aimlessness. It echoes Ecclesiastes’ haunting image of chasing the wind, but it also recalls something Paul has already written earlier in this chapter, when he warned believers not to remain spiritually immature, ‘tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching.’ (Eph. 4:14)

It’s a vivid picture — a boat out on the ocean, with all the freedom and expanse in the world around it, but no course to steer by.

It’s a similar picture, really, to what the storyteller, Homer, gave us three thousand years ago, with The Odyssey. Christopher Nolan’s just put a version out on the cinema. In Nolan’s version, Odysseus is trying to get home, but there’s a moment where his mind is darkened, his bearings go, and he forgets his all-important search for home. The man who has faced down monsters and gods finds himself simply, hopelessly lost.[x] Not because he lacked freedom. He had all the freedom of the open sea. He lacked a heading.

That’s humanity’s odyssey too, isn’t it? We know we’re free. What we keep losing sight of is what for.

The Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, out of his own years in far darker circumstances than any of us here will likely know, put it about as plainly as it can be put:

‘Human freedom is not a freedom from but freedom to.’[xi]

Not merely freedom from chains, from sin, from death — from strings — though it is that. Freedom for something.

Take the “for” away, and freedom always collapses back into licence or control, because it’s got nothing else left to hold its shape.

THE PERFECT PITCH

We need something outside of ourselves to steer by.

We all do! We need to honest about how we’re wired.

C. S. Lewis noticed it years ago in his book, The Abolition of Man. He noticed that we’re constantly told to trust our instincts and do what you feel. And yet, the moment we try, we find our instincts arguing with each other, and not one of them is qualified to referee the rest. When you make yourself the final authority, and you don’t end up free. You end up pulled in six directions by six competing appetites. Our lives become like a boat in a stormy sea, tossed about by our own spasms and jerks, and our own cultures’ tides.

The American pastor and writer, Eugene Peterson, said much the same thing: that without worship, we become eccentric — literally, ‘off-centre’ — swept into a restlessness that leaves us, as he put it, living “manipulated and manipulating lives,” at the mercy of whichever advertisement, whichever siren call, happens to be loudest that week.[xii]

Think of a guitar. A guitar needs something outside itself—a fixed pitch that doesn’t move—for every string to be brought into alignment.

We’re not so different. We were made to be tuned to something beyond us.

This is what Paul’s been saying across the whole letter. We were made in God’s image to begin with, and we’re being remade in it now — free to be, as he put it two chapters earlier, “what God has made us… created in Christ Jesus to do good works” (2:10). Free to reflect the kindness and grace God has already lavished on us (2:7). Free, as Paul says in the opening of chapter 4, to be humble, gentle and patient (Eph. 4:2). Free to be honest and not deceptive (Eph. 4:25); Free to be in control of our anger and not controlled by it (Eph. 4:26); Free to be generous and not grasping (Eph. 4:28); Free to encourage and build others up, instead of abusive and slanderous (Eph. 4:29) Free, to be kind, tender-hearted and forgiving (4:32).

True, these things are good, and they build and strengthen the unity of the body of Christ, whereas the opposites are destructive to community. This has been a main theme of Paul’s, and it’s important we practice these things if unity is to exist.[xiii]

But more so, because these things reflect the very nature of God.

Go through this list again — every positive attribute (kindness, generosity, not deceptive, controlling anger, tender-hearted, etc.) is a description of God. The God in whose image we were made, and in whose image, in Christ, we have been remade and are encouraged to ‘grow up’ (Eph. 4:15) into.

Paul’s not teaching behaviour, so much as he is trying to get us to hear the melody we were intentionally crafted to play. As he writes at the beginning of chapter 5:

‘Follow God’s example in everything you do, because you are his children.’ (NLT)

Freedom is not an end in itself. It is the restored ability to become what humanity was always created to be: people who reflect the character of God into his world.

Again, Paul’s encouragement here is not toward strings, but that we are no longer homeless, we are no longer lost; we are not a people seeking a frequency to tune into.

In Christ we have been given an identity we no longer need to invent, a purpose we no longer need to manufacture, and a home towards which the whole of life is now travelling.

In Jesus, we have been given our perfect pitch. So, do not live an aimless life anymore. Put on the new.

Strangely, I will add, putting on the new doesn’t start with our actions!

As Paul has written, it comes because we ‘learn Christ.’ (v. 20).

It’s an odd phrasing, because you don’t normally learn a person the way you learn a subject or a skill. But that’s exactly Paul’s wording. To keep with the music analogy, in comes from learning Jesus, like we learn a song—you spend time with it, absorbing it.

Paul’s language is the language  of relationship. You learn Christ the way you learn anyone you actually walk alongside—not by memorising facts about him (though, that’s good), but by spending your days close to him so that his shape starts turning up, unforced, in yours.

It isn’t us gritting our teeth and performing a new self into being through sheer willpower — we’ve already said rules can’t create a people capable of keeping them joyfully. And maybe I’m speaking for myself again, here, but trying harder has never changed me.

But neither is it something that happens to us while we sit back and wait. It’s participation. God does the deep work; we walk with him, we listen, we keep showing up—in worship, prayer, scripture and fellowship—to be tuned.

This is not a quick fix program, by the way.

Paul will say it plainly a few verses on (v. 23): be renewed, in the spirit of your minds — and the tense of the word there isn’t a single, tidy, once-for-all decision. It’s ongoing. Continuous. You are being renewed, this week, and then again next week.

As someone else said, ‘Putting on Christ’ is not one among the many jobs a Christian has to do; and it is not a sort of special exercise for the top class. It is the whole of Christianity.[xiv]

To put it all another way, Freedom is received in a moment. Living freely is learned over a lifetime, one ordinary day of walking with God at a time.[xv]

Pinocchio thought freedom meant escaping his father. Paul says freedom begins by learning Christ.

One runs away from the voice that made him. The other spends a lifetime learning to recognise it.

TO THE WANDERER

I don’t want to leave you this morning with another instruction. Although, I would encourage you to read through the passage again during this week, along with what Paul continues to say into chapter 5 (his treaty on freedom continues, and we’ve only made it halfway through).

Instead, keeping with the idea of music, I want to leave you with a line from a song.

I’ve been listening repeatedly to a new version of an old hymn, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, and there’s a line that makes me blubber each and every time I hear it and attempt to sing it:

‘Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it

Prone to leave the God I love

Here’s my heart, Lord, take and seal it

Seal it for Thy courts above.’[xvi]

I’m prone to wander. I say that about myself as much as anyone here. But I suspect all of us know what it is to lose our heading in the midst of life; maybe for a few moments, maybe for a fortnight or longer. We know what it is to let appetite take the wheel the way Pinocchio did, or drift the way Odysseus drifted, simply forgetting where home is.

So, the invitation this week is not to try harder. This song, this prayer, is not the cry of someone trying to earn God’s love. They are the words of someone who already knows it. Someone who has been set free. Someone asking, ‘Lord, teach me how to live like a free person.’

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 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

— Jesus, John 8:36 (NIV)

‘Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you.’

— Paul, Galatians 5:1 (MSG)

‘May the soul which has once put [the old man] off, never again put him on, but say, with the Spouse of Christ in the Song of Songs, “I have put off my garment, how shall I put it on?”’’

— Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 313–386), Catechetical Lecture 20, quoting Song of Songs 5:3.

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ENDNOTES & REFERENCES

[i] Edmund Burke, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791). Burke’s argument is that liberty and self-restraint are not opposites but conditions of one another.

[ii] Wish You Were Here, written by David Jon Gilmour & George Roger Waters, featured on the Pink Floyd album Wish You Were Here (1975)

[iii] Carlo Collodi, The Story of a Puppet / The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1881. The full opening line is, ‘Once upon a time there was… “A king!” my little readers will no doubt say in a flash. No, kids. You got it wrong. Once upon a time there was…a piece of wood.’

[iv] As another literary reference: Mary Shelley gives us a much darker version of the same idea. Frankenstein’s creature, abandoned by his maker and formed with no moral compass, no sense of right and wrong, no safeguard telling him what he must never do, delivers one of the most chilling lines in all of literature: ‘Beware! For I am fearless, and therefore powerful.’ Though this may sound like a cry of emancipation, it is far from it. It’s the cry of an unrestrained conscience. And it is this absence of any boundary—not the presence of some “monstrous” ingredient—that makes the creature so sinister and threatening. He could, at any moment, do anything at all.

[v] That is not to say the extreme cannot be found.

[vi] Esau D. McCaulley, Ephesians, in The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 2024), p. 429

[vii] Stephan King’s character, Brooks, is a good fictional example of ‘institutionalisation’, but I have also seen this personally, where people leaving prison struggle because the freedom they now possessed felt less like liberty and more like disorientation. Wills had been suppressed for so long, that the burden of making uncoerced daily choices initially feels paralyzing due to the vastness of the horizon, the lack of barriers, the open nature of a freedom that seems to have no limits, no rules, and no commands. (Of course, I add, the opposite can happen, too. The sudden removal of all walls and codes can cause excess.)

Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist, neurologist, and Holocaust survivor, who, chartering the experiences of a concentration camp in his seminal work, Man’s Search For Meaning, states that the transition from totalitarian brutality back to freedom was not an automatic return to normal, but rather a profound ongoing psychological shock. He observing that many survivors struggled profoundly with the sudden removal of limits, detailing ways this acute shock could manifest. ‘”Freedom”—we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it.’ (Experiences in a Concentration Camp, in Man’s Search for Meaning (Rider, an imprint of Ebury Publishing, 2004), p. 95; but see pp. 94-100 for more psychology of a released prisoner.)

The Italian chemist, and another Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi (1919–1987), describes feeling like a stranger among the living. He wrote about the creeping realization that the oppressive structures of the camp leave permanent marks; accustomed to a constant state of suspicion and deprivation, he found the open-ended nature of freedom initially disorienting:

‘But only after many months did I lose the habit of walking with my glance fixed to the ground, as if searching for something to eat or to pocket hastily or to sell for bread; and a dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals.’ [Primo Levi, If This Is A Man/The Truce: (Hachette Essentials, Little, Brown Book Group, 2013), p. 420. Kindle Edition.]

[viii] The same language Paul reaches for when writing to Corinth, ‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation’ (2 Cor. 5:7), and when writing to Galatia, ‘neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but a new creation’ (Gal. 6:15). It’s already happened to you, in Christ, before it is asked of you.

[ix] Galatians 5:1. There’s a wonderful irony in who’s telling us all this. Paul writes this whole charter for a free life from under armed guard, under lock and key. He understood freedom better in chains than most people manage walking around outside them, because freedom, for him, was never first about circumstance. It began in Christ. Paul, under armed guard as he writes this (3:1, 4:1), tells free people how to live — not an irony he’s unaware of. His imprisonment proves his point rather than undercutting it

[x] Nolan’s film alters Homer’s traditional telling of the story by having Calypso feed Odysseus the lotus plant, turning his time on her island into an amnesiac state where his memories and desire to return to Ithaca fade away. In Homer’s original, it’s Odysseus’ crew that eat the lotus plant and who no longer want to leave, succumbing to Circe, while our hero remains steadfast in his endeavour.

[xi] Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy (Penguin Books, New York, 1988), p. 16

[xii] Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John & the Praying Imagination (HarperOne (Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1988), p. 60

[xiii] Three and a half chapters into this letter, his one great concern has been the Church — not me, us; Jew and Gentile built together into one new humanity (2:15), one body and one Spirit called to one hope (4:4), the same tapestry we sat with last time. N. T. Wright’s summary of the whole letter is worth borrowing here: the church, for Paul, is meant to be a small working model of new creation (N. T. Wright, The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God (SPCK, London), p. 97). Which means these instructions were never really about your private morality in isolation. They’re about what kind of family gets built when people who’ve learned Christ start living like it.

[xiv] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 4, chapter 8..

[xv] A clear parallel of this is seen in the Exodus story. Freedom came in one miraculous night of divine intervention. But learning to live free was a longer, messier story for the ex-slaves of Egypt. Leaving slavery and learning to live free turned out to be two very different journeys.

[xvi] Words are from the song Come Thou Fount (Above All Else), written by Shane and Shane, 2014, which is a rework of an older hymn, Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing, written by Robert Robinson, 1758. If you wish to listen to the Shane and Shane version, you can do so here.