I. Note the very significant, though brief, outline sketch of the facts of universal sinful human nature which the Apostle gives here. (1) The first of the characteristics of the sinful self is that every Christian life, whatsoever the superficial differences in it, is really a life shaped according to, and under the influence of, passionate desires. The desires are meant to be impelling powers. It is absurdity and the destruction of true manhood to make them, as we so often do, directing powers, and to put the reins into their hand. They are the wind, not the helm; the steam, not the driver. (2) The words of the text not only represent the various passionate desires as being the real guides of the "old man," but they give this other characteristic: that these desires are in their very nature the instrument of deceit and lies. The way never to get what you need and desire is always to do what you like, because (a) the object only satisfies for a time; (b) the desire grows, and the object of it does not. Whoever takes it for his law to do as he likes will not for long like what he does. (3) These deceiving desires corrupt. In whatever direction we move, the rate of progress tends to accelerate itself.
II. Note how we have here the hopeless command to put off the old man. That command "put off" is the plain dictate of conscience and of common sense, but it seems as hopeless as it is imperative. But what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending His own Son, did: He condemned sin in the flesh. So we come to
III. The possibility of fulfilling the command. The context tells us how this is possible. The law, the pattern, and the power for complete victory over the old sinful self are to be found "as the truth is in Jesus." Union with Christ gives us a real possession of a new principle of life, derived from Him and like His own. We shall die with Him to sin when, resting by faith on Him who has died for sin, we are made conformable to His death, that we may walk in newness of life.
A. Maclaren, Sermons in Manchester,3rd series, p. 105.
References: Ephesians 4:22-24. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iii., p. 207. Ephesians 4:22-30. H. W. Beecher, Sermons,1st series, p. 351.Ephesians 4:25. Homilist,vol. vii., p. 104.