Strip!

Ephesians 4:20-28

Sensuality, impurity, indulgence and greed are not the way of the disciple. We learned a different way of life when we were taught the truth of Christ. We are supposed to put off the old life which has been corrupted by sin and put on the new self which is purified by Christ. Basically Paul is teaching that when we were saved, we were changed into the person that God originally intended at the creation of the world before sin entered the picture. Even though this new self is a creation of God and a gift from him, there is still a responsibility on my part to take action: to take of the old and put on the new. Without God change or transformation is impossible but there is still something that I have to do: strip up the old, dirty, corrupted clothes of sin and put in the shining, new, perfect clothes of Christ. Randy Stonehill (now I'm dating myself) has a song about this: I'm packing up my old clothes with my old and foolish ways; they just don't seem to fit me anymore...
Paul then goes on to tell us how to do that practically: strip off lying and put on truth, put off sinning in anger and put on righteous anger (ok, I'm reading into that a bit), and finally (the one that seems a bit weird), put off stealing and put on an honest day's work and genorisity to the poor. That one stands out a bit because the others seem so general: everyone lies, everyone gets angery but there's not a lot of people who steal, is there?
If we look at a biblical definition of stealing, maybe Paul's admonition isn't so strange: stealing is keeping back any of your tithe from God (Malachi), stealing is not looking after the marginalized (James), stealing is not giving to God what belongs to him (Jesus) and stealing is taking anything that doesn't belong to you or keeping for yourself what is owed to another. Traditionally this means that you give your employer, your customer, your spouse, etc. everything that they deserve or expect. If they are paying you for 8 hours of work, you give them a solid 8 hours. I wonder if this is exactly what Paul had in mind since he remedies stealing with working in this passage.
When I look at it this way, I am a thief. Personally I think I work pretty hard but honestly I often steal from my spouse to give to my work. I need to remedy that!