NOTES for Eph 4:20-24
For Paul the main task of Christian life, which constitutes the meaning of Christianity, is the transformation of the human being, a qualitative change in human nature. Above all, the apostle reminds us that such a change, even while still in process, allows no conscious sin. Of course, at first no one can control his emotions; that comes with experience. But at the moment when control becomes possible, a person must separate from himself what does not correspond to the inner Torah, which now becomes the chief instrument of changing his nature.
At first, for example, it is hard not to fall into anger, which can overwhelm the soul before the novice has time to respond. But if that same novice continues to nurture the anger that flared up even when he could already have been free of it, then this is already his choice, for which he will answer before God. Most importantly, this conscious, will-level maintenance of oneself in a state that does not foster normal communion with God destroys a person's spiritual life and slows him on the path of Christian life on which he has set out.
At the beginning of the path it happens to everyone that for a moment he can lose himself, swept over by an emotional or intellectual wave. But one cannot live in such a state of forgetfulness, plunging into the abyss of sinful psychic and psychophysical states, giving oneself over, in the apostle's words, to 'debauchery unto insensibility.' Human renewal consists precisely in the fact that such uncontrolled states become fewer and fewer in a person's life over time. Indeed, such states leading to sin are only a particular case and concrete manifestation of the unconsciousness generally characteristic of fallen human life, that unaccountability reaching automatism which by itself excludes any deep relationship, whether with God, with Christ, or with any human being at all. One can be freed from all this only by being 'renewed by the breath of the mind,' as the apostle says about this process.
By 'mind' Paul here means what biblical books usually call the 'heart': the spiritual 'I' of the person, which conceals God's 'breath of life.' To the Christian, in the depth of his spiritual 'I,' there is also opened that breath of the Kingdom which he feels as he enters the relationships of the Father with the Son. Unlike the Jews, the Greeks traditionally called this depth by a word usually translated into Russian as 'mind,' and Paul, writing his letters in Greek, also uses it, wanting to make his speech understandable to people for whom the Greek tradition was closer than the Jewish one.
From the spiritual depth of the human 'I,' behind which stands God's real presence, acts the breath of the Kingdom that renews the person. Not immediately, of course; this process requires time for its completion, time exceeding the span of a person's earthly life. But the main thing is that it has begun: before the day of the full triumph of the Kingdom and the return of the Savior, there is time enough. If, of course, one does not stop and does not turn aside from the path.