Calibrating Our Loves

Think back with me to the 1600s, a philosopher named Rene

Descartes. He said that humans are race

cogitons, which means thinking things.

So he's arguing that human beings are primarily rational

creatures. And our culture, following after

him, argues that we are primarily thinking rational

beings, and this shapes primarily who we are.

He said famously, I think therefore I am.

And with those words, he was combating a deep skepticism and

responding to it. And he, he, he was thinking to

himself, if everything else is false, this one thing, I know

that because I can think, I know that I exist.

And we go all the way back, 1300 years before him.

We go to the church fathers, we go to Augustine and our

forebears, They, they say more biblically, there's a different

story. We have a different response.

They would say we're not primarily rational creatures.

We're primarily something else. How would you answer that?

I'm not primarily A rational being.

I am, Augustine said, a loving being.

We're not primarily thinkers and rationalizers.

We are lovers. What most fundamentally moves a

human being, if not the mind and the reason we're moved

ultimately by what we love, which is why when Jesus, when

he's restoring the disciples that sinned, he doesn't come to

him three times. Jesus doesn't pull Peter aside

and said, Peter, do you believe in me more than these things?

He says three times, do you love me more than these things?

And you go and think about Jesus calling us to be followers and

disciples. If we were primarily rational

beings, then Christianity would be primarily a religion or a

relationship of the mind. But it's, it's not that way.

True Christian piety doesn't start with what we learn and

what we know with, but with what we love, which is why the Shema

in Deuteronomy 6 says you shall love the Lord your God with all

your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and all your

strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

And Paul's prayer to the Philippians in chapter 1 is not

that their knowledge would abound more and more, their

understanding and belief would abound.

But he says that your love would abound with all knowledge.

And there's our balance given for us.

And if you'll turn to Ephesians 5, we're turning the page into

Ephesians 5 this morning, coming toward the end of the book.

This is a section that is Paul forming the church by reordering

what they love. He's calibrating our loves for

us and therefore shaping the direction of their lives.

And you can see it happen in verses one to seven.

Read it with me. Therefore, be imitators of God

as beloved children, and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave

himself up for us. A fragrant offering and

sacrifice to God. But sexual immorality and all

impurity or covetousness, must not even be named among you, as

is proper among Saints. Let there be no filthiness, nor

foolish talk, nor crude joking which are out of place, but

instead let there be Thanksgiving.

For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually

immoral or impure, or who is covetous, that is an idolater,

has no inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and God.

Let no one deceive you with empty words.

For because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons

of disobedience. Therefore do not become

partakers with them. So regarding the section of

vices and of virtues, the medieval theologian Thomas

Aquinas, who's following Augustine, we've already

mentioned 900 years before him, is saying there's an inverse

relationship between law and virtue.

And what that means is the more virtuous that you become, the

more morally excellent and loving and kind and courageous

that you become, the less you need the the law to point at you

telling you what to do and what not to do.

So the more that you become imitators of Christ, the more

that you become Christ like, the less you need the 10

commandments to remind you what is good.

You are a lot unto yourself, you know, oh man, what is good?

So how do we do this? How do we become virtuous

people? And the church and philosophers

have answered, this is how you become morally excellent and

patient and just and humble and kind and courageous.

There's two ways. From the earliest church fathers

to the medieval ages to today, there's two ways you become

virtuous #1 they say is imitation and #2 is repetition

or making it a habit imitation. Look at Ephesians 51.

Therefore be imitators of Christ repetition.

Look at Ephesians 5 two walk in love.

Make these things a daily habit. Imitate Christ commit to the

daily habit of ordering your life around a cross shaped love

and you will become a virtuous person.

This is spiritual progress and and moral virtue.

They come first looking at verse one through imitating Christ.

Look with it with me again at verse one.

It says simply and amazingly, therefore be imitators of God as

beloved children. This is the only place in all of

the 66 books of the Bible that tells you to imitate God.

You've got Paul saying be imitators of me as I imitate

God. But here is the is the one place

that it commands you to imitate God.

And we say what a what a beautiful thought that God has

given you the power and the means and the grace that you

might imitate him. How beautiful is that?

I'll just read a few of these commentators.

William Barclay says this is the highest standard in the world.

You go to Alexander McLaren, the the preacher says this is the

sum of all duty. And Dean Martyn Lloyd Jones says

Paul's supreme argument, the highest level of all in doctrine

and in practice, this is the ultimate ideal that you get to

imitate God, however imperfectly.

So you go down and see this word imitate.

This is the the Greek word mimitates where we get a word

mimic. And in the ancient world, the

word meant quite literally to follow a good role model.

So the scripture saying you've been given the standard of Jesus

Christ, you've been given the the the role model and now

pattern your life after him. And it's a very interesting

thought that when you go to Judaism, they made much of this

idea of imitating God and they they held, what makes it

interesting is that they held a strong emphasis on the otherness

of God. And when we think about God, we

know we've come through Isaiah where it says that he is

transcendent and God is spirit and we worship him in spirit and

in truth, and he dwells in inapproachable light.

He's completely other from us. And so if that's true, and if

God is all powerful and all knowing and he's spirit, how do

we imitate him? In what way do we imitate God?

And the Jews look to passages like Deuteronomy 10/12, which

says, and now Israel, what does the Lord your God require of

you? But to fear the Lord your God,

to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God

with all your heart and with all your soul.

They look to the Holiness code, which is what Paul's quoting

from Leviticus 1912 that says be holy as I am holy.

And the rabbi said if we were to become like Him, we don't become

like Him in his power or in his omnipotence or omniscience.

We become like Him in his mercy and in his compassion.

We become like Him in sharing his love of the poor and the

vulnerable and loving justice and seeking mercy and walking

humbly. And this is what Jesus asks in

Luke 636 when he says be merciful even as your Father is

merciful, because in so doing you imitate God.

So we imitate his character, his his focus on other people, the

lack of emphasis on his self, your your sacrificial love.

This aligns with what we learned last week where we have all of

these moral vices that we are to put away as we put off the old

self. And there's all these moral

virtues that we are to put on as we as we image God and put on

the new self. He says you have to replace

falsehood with truth, replace controlling anger with righteous

anger, replace stealing with generosity, replace language of

cursing with language of blessing, replace animosity with

kindness. And when you do that, you are

imaging God, you are imitating Christ, and you're developing

the virtue and calibrating your love.

The second way we put on virtue comes in verse 2.

It's not just imitating Christ, but he says to use Paul's

language, we are putting on the new self, we're putting on

virtue. It's repetition or it's habit.

That's why he says in verse 2, you can read it with me.

Walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a

fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

And of course, this is how it always is in the gospel.

Before Paul demands anything of you, before he makes any moral

demands on you, he goes back again in the spirit of Ephesians

one to three and he says this is who you are in Christ.

Before he asks anything of you, he says this is what Christ has

done for you. And you see, he grounds your,

your, your commitments in identity and relationship with

God. And in verses one to two, most

specifically, he grounds your identity and relationship in

love. He uses the word love three

times in these two verses. You can see it with me in verses

one to two. It's almost a a gospel in

miniature because in verse 2 it says that Christ loved us.

And you say, well, how much did he love us?

He loved us so much that he, he sacrificed on our behalf.

He loved and so he gave. And this is a pattern that you

see all the way through the New Testament that Christ loves.

And so he gives and our response as we imitate him as we love so

much that we give. It's it's John 316 which we've

already heard. For God so loved the world that

he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him

shall not perish but have everlasting life.

So our identity is is grounded in love.

It's this love that it's it's saying here that that Jesus set

on us before we were ever even born, before he even created us.

He set his love on us. And you look at verse one, it

says be imitators of God as beloved children.

This is describing your state, your identity, your

relationship. You are beloved, He loves you.

You're an object of his love. You've been brought into a

relationship with him. And then the gospel response in

verse 2. So walk in love as it

categorizes your life. This is your gospel response as

a creature of love. Pattern your life after love,

love of God. We call this the the ordo

amoris, the order of loves. We love the Lord our God first,

we love our neighbors second, and then when there's love for

ourselves last. And verse 2 also reminds us with

all of this sacrifice language that love requires sacrifice.

If you truly love someone, you sacrifice yourself for their

interests and for their wholeness.

Martin Luther famously said if you were to truly imitate

Christ, then you must on some level suffer for the sins of

other people and remember that as you go and serve them.

Paul says in Romans 5 that the greatest sacrifice that you can

give, the greatest demonstration of love that you can give, is to

to give yourself, to give your life.

Which is why Romans 55 to 8 God shows his love for us, and that

while we will, we were yet sinners.

Christ died for us. And in the language of Ephesians

4 it says that he gave himself up as a fragrant offering, a

sacrifice. And then beautifully Paul takes

that language of of what Jesus was for us, and he uses it to

describe the same language of what we are to do for other

people. Philippians 418.

I'm well supplied this talking about money having received from

Epaphroditus the gifts you sent a fragrant offering, a sacrifice

acceptable and pleasing to God. Paul says in Romans that you

were to give your life as a living sacrifice which is holy

and acceptable in the sight of God.

Second Corinthians 214 Thanks be to God, who in Christ always

leads in triumphal procession, and through US spreads the

fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere.

So multiple metaphors bringing in multiple senses the the

metaphor of light. You are the light of the world.

So when people see you through your actions and your love and

your mercy, they actually see Jesus Christ in you.

And use a slightly more awkward metaphor, right, of the of the

senses, of the sense of smell. He says in you as you preach and

as you go. You are the aroma of Christ so

that the world smells you. They smell the Saviour, they,

they see something of him in you.

You are the salt of the earth. You are beloved.

And so we imitate Jesus. You are to imitate Jesus and

walk in love. And then you have these two

commandments, imitate Christ, walk in love.

And from that fountain flow all of the seven verses that you

have in front of you. So then after being grounded in

love, after being rooted in love, after been reminding of

the gospel and where your source of virtue comes from, he says

now there's some moral vices that you need to put off.

Now there are some loves that you need to reorder.

And what Paul is going to to give in the verses that follow

as he rebukes his own culture for their sexual immorality and

their greed and their crude talk feels like he's rebuking us

because these sins that were common to the ancient world are,

are so common today. And what Paul's doing is he

doesn't want you to to look at these sins through the lens of

you need to will yourself to do what is right versus willing

yourself not to do what is wrong.

It's it's not the way he's he's looking at this.

He wants you to see these sins through the lens of calibrating

your loves. Think back with me to Augustine.

He defines sin. We define sin frequently as want

of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God.

And in layman's terms, we don't do the things that God tells us

not to when we do the things that he tells us to do.

And when we we violate one of those two rules, then we've

sinned. But Augustine says that is true,

but I want to see it through a different lens.

He says sin is also disordered love.

When your love becomes disordered from God's design,

when it's ordered toward the wrong object, when it's in the

wrong measure, when it's in the wrong order, then you find sin.

And so when our love of the world becomes disordered, and

Augustine says then our hearts become restless.

When your loves are not calibrated according to God's

loves, your hearts become restless because he says our

hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.

Oh, Lord. And so God is love.

And when everything flows from the relationship with God that

he's just described in Ephesians 5, one to two, there is peace,

there is joy, there is blessedness.

So Paul gives 3 areas where the churches love needed to be

recalibrated in ancient Ephesus and in that region.

And the same is true for us and our culture.

Number one, sexual immorality #2 greed and #3 crude joking.

If you'll read verse three with me, we'll start where he starts,

with sexual immorality, he says. But sexual immorality in all

impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as

is proper among the Saints. There's a word in our culture.

The word is erotic, and it's associated with negative

connotations in our culture. But the word comes from one of

the three words for love in the ancient world.

It comes from the word Eros, which is not it's not a bad

word. It's not an evil word.

It actually just indicates a desire or an attraction.

And if you want to read more about this some love, there's a

book downstairs by James KA Smith called you are what you

love. And he says Eros is just a

rightly ordered agape love. When you're when your love of

God is in the right order, then Eros is in its proper place.

Your desires are in their proper place.

There's nothing wrong with desire.

There's nothing wrong with attraction.

The problem, the problem is that our erotic love must be

calibrated. It must be in proper order with

God's love. So sexual immorality, like all

sin, is enjoyment and satisfaction in the wrong

measure or pleasure in the wrong object.

And So what that means for sexual immorality is that we

place too much emphasis on sex, or we place too much emphasis on

pleasure, or we emphasize the wrong objects out of sexual

relationships. Sexual immorality is literally

the word pornea, and it's a word that describes very simply any

sexual activity outside of God's marriage covenant.

That's the shorthand. That's what the word means.

And so under this meaning come all of the vices in the vice

lists that we talked about last week, all the things that the

church is against with respect to sexual relationships.

We, we are against those things. That's what this word is

describing. And remember, even as we said

last week, the church is known in the culture primarily by what

we're against. We want to be known primarily

for what we are for. We're not primarily against

sexual immorality. We are for truth, we are for

love, and we are for mercy. But what that means that we are

also against pornography and adultery and bestiality and

prostitution and pedophilia and homosexuality and premarital

sex. And Paul, when he writes these

things, he knows what is what he's up against in the culture.

He knows what the culture loves. He knows what the church is at

risk of falling into partnership with.

And he knew what their temptations were.

And if you want to know more about it, there's a book

Upstairs in the library by Hubbard.

It's called Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome, and it

shows all of the culture. And you're going to see all the

parallels between our culture and theirs.

And you'll see that theirs, if we can use modern language, was

more progressive than ours. And they, you see that

pedophilia was accepted by much of the culture.

And you see that mistresses were extremely common, and they were

seen by many as necessary for the body, much in the same way

that pornography today is seen as necessary for the body by

many. And there was another church in

town that a friend of mine pastors a few years ago, he put

up on the marquee, or rather somebody else put up on the

marquee for him. It said God hates all sexual

sin. And it listed all of these vices

that we just listed. And the town rioted.

There were there were people knocking down their door.

They got phone calls or social media blew up.

There was threats that were made against the church, and you

might and probably do disagree with with how they stood for the

truth. But what I want you to see from

this illustration is even in this city, even in the Bible

Belt, there was a a war being waged.

The culture and the church have two competing visions of love

and we have two competing visions of belonging.

And So what do we do as the church?

We are the salt of the world, and so we want to exert our

preserving influence to protect marriage and we want to protect

the family because Satan is trying to pull it apart.

And we are for marriage and for family and for children.

And so we say we're not prudish. We get that rap.

We're not prudish at all. We love sexuality when it's

rightly ordered. And we don't hate sex.

As Christians, we love sex, but it has to be according to God's

design. We love it and we enjoy it in

its context. And we're not telling the world

that they don't love or that they can't love.

We're urging them to calibrate their love and to say to love as

God designed. And we're not saying don't love.

We're saying you're, you're substituting A counterfeit and

you're loving a counterfeit. And you would be so much more

blessed if you would put away the counterfeit and enjoy

marriage and family as God designed it.

And we do this and we tell them this.

We want them to be blessed because we love them.

So if you're in this church and you're, you're tempted with with

any of these sins, Paul's asking you to order your loves around

God's pattern rather than the world's pattern.

Make sure your love has the right object and it's in the

right order and it's in the right measure.

And then Paul takes this word pornea and he couples it with a

higher word, a higher umbrella, more encompassing term impurity,

which includes all sexual sins. But then it adds other ideas

like drunkenness and riotous behaviour and crudeness.

And even the use of the word impurity is giving a nod back to

Leviticus 18 to 20, which was Jesus's standard.

And the apostles and the Pharisees, this was their

standard of sexual immorality. That was what they thought of

when they thought about pureness.

And it's it's winking toward that.

And he says that these sins are to be so universally absent from

the church that we're not even to be accused of them.

There must be no hint of it. He says.

They must not even be named among you, as is proper among

the Saints. So the first disordered love,

we, we disorder it sexually. There's sexual immorality.

And then he moves to the second. And this isn't a disordered love

that's outwardly done with our hands and our feet, but this is

an inward disorder of the heart. He moves from the external to

the internal. And he says the second

disordered love is greed. The word is covetousness.

It's the last of the 10 commandments.

It's such a serious thing. It's one of the commandments.

And what this is, is a discontentment for what you have

and a desire for what you do not have.

And so it's it's why he's going to say in a minute that you need

to replace discontentment with Thanksgiving.

Why not be thankful? The cure for this is just to be

thankful with what you have and not to be consistently

discontent with what you don't in our own culture.

Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in 1831.

And he looked around and he said this American experiment is

amazing. It's beautiful.

But he says I have one thing against American culture.

He said money seems to be, quite simply, the only achievement

that Americans respect. So you've got money and you've

got security and you've got comfort, and all of these things

are wonderful desires and they're all good.

But here our love is disordered because covetousness puts love

of possessions over love of God and over love of neighbor and

over the good of our neighbor. And so not being content with

sufficiency, greed always demands more.

Greed is love in the wrong measure.

And so for this reason, if you look down to verse 5, he links

greed with idolatry. This is for you may be sure of

this, that everyone who's sexually immoral or impure or

who is covetous, that is an idolater.

You go to Colossians 35 and it links the same thing with the

same words to idolatry. Put to death what is earthly in

you, sexual immorality, impurity, evil desire and

covetousness, which is idolatry. And it's idolatry when you think

about it through the lens of love, because you're loving

something else more than you're loving God in that moment, which

is why Solomon prays in Proverbs 30.

Give me neither poverty nor riches, only my daily bread.

He goes, I don't want to be in the top 1%.

I don't want to be in the bottom 10%.

Lord, just give me what's needed for today.

Spare my heart from greed. And this is my own pastoral

observation over the years. There's three ways that you can

get rid of greed in your heart. It's perspective, contentment

and giving away and I love Andrew Reed.

He says in the greatest of these is charity.

If you want to keep your heart against greed, if you want to to

save your soul in this way, take the perspective of scripture

that it has on money, that it's dangerous, that it's a wonderful

blessing for other people's, but it's a it's a danger to your

soul and be content with what you have.

This is what John the Baptist preaches as he's there paving

the way for Jesus Christ. He says be content with your

wages, be content with what you have and and give it away.

If you want to be free from the love of money, then give it

away. The greatest of these is

charity. And Paul gives one final

disordered love when he brings up something that's so seemingly

trivial. He talks about how we joke with

one another. And the third, the third

criteria here is how we play quiplash with one another.

It's crude joking. Read verse four with me.

Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk, nor crude joking

which are out of place, but instead let there be

Thanksgiving. Why is this wrong?

Because crude joking is delighting in shock value and

amusement and laughter, a quick laugh over edification and

Thanksgiving. And so Paul doesn't say stop

telling jokes, they're funny. It doesn't say replace crew

joking with silence. He says replace crude jokes with

Thanksgiving. He says rather than make crude

jokes about these things, express thanks for these things.

He doesn't say that the crude jokes aren't funny.

If they weren't funny, then he wouldn't have to tell you not

to. Not to say them, but to put it

in John Stott's words, I love this.

He says, don't joke about sex, give thanks for it.

And he goes on, and he commands them just to work through some

of this language with you. He says no foolish talk, which

is worthless talk, speculative talk, empty and speculative

words. And he moves on.

And he says no crude joking, which is a word that's only used

here in the New Testament. And so there's nothing, there's

nothing for us to compare it to. But if you go to the ancient

world and you see how Aristotle uses it, he says it's quote, the

fondness of laughter characterized by youth.

End Quote. And I've told you this story

before and I think it's so hilarious that my dad, as a as a

school teacher for years and years retiring, he says that if

he could spend any verse, use any verse to describe his time

teaching junior English, it's Ecclesiastes.

Where he says the laughter of fools is like the cackling of

thorns under a pot. Because he says this is his kids

and there's nothing as serious and nothing as weighty.

And they just laugh and it's the laughter of fools.

And he says it's obnoxious. It's like listening to thorns

burn under a pot. First Timothy, 4/12 He says if

you're a youth in the room, if you're a young man in the room

and you want people to respect you, you want people to take you

seriously, you want to be respected and you want respect

where respect is due, he says. Then you set the believers an

example in speech. It's the first on the list.

There's a way the world talks, and then there's the way you're

going to talk. If you want to be respected and

you want to be taken seriously, don't talk like the world talks.

Don't joke like the world jokes. Aristotle sets limits on this

same word, and he gives us the idea of its ancient usage.

He says it incorporates constant joking when seriousness is

called for humor that trivializes important things,

acting like a fool to get laughs.

You're rude, coarse and lack refinement or respect.

And you see that this is in the context of of sexual immorality

and impurity. And so he's he's probably

alluding to dirty or suggestive jokes.

He's saying this is not how you learned Christ and you put it

away. This is not imitating Jesus.

This is not walking in love. The Paul's not saying don't be

funny. He's saying control your humour

and Orient it according to your love of God, and it's

interesting that Thanksgiving and gratitude are given for you

to put in place of crude joking and idle speech.

Sinclair Ferguson says that it's because Thanksgiving is one of

God's remedies for this thing, for these things.

He says rather than coveting what you don't have, you focus

on what you do have and express gratitude for it.

It allows you to see things from God's perspective and from the

light of his Word. He says you should ask, how can

I be thankful for these things? And the moment that you are, you

take a step toward a pure life, a pure life.

And Paul answers a sobering question, what if you don't?

What if you don't imitate Christ and these things?

What if you don't order your loves and you choose to walk in

the world's definitions of love rather than in God's definition

of love? Paul's just unpacked three ways

that you can break free from these desires.

But he doesn't just stop with a description of it.

He moves on to consequences. What are the consequences if you

remain with these disordered loves?

He says it doesn't just lead to a lack of peace and blessing in

this life, it leads to an eternal lack of peace and

blessing in the life to come. Read verse 6 with me.

Let no one deceive you with empty words.

For because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons

of disobedience. So you're saying God's wrath is,

is a real thing and, and hell is a real place and disordered

loves are real. We have real disordered loves

that we struggle with and they exist.

Hell exist and wrath exists because of these things, sexual

immorality and greed and corrupting talk.

And the world's going to bring 1000 arguments and they're going

to get in your ear and they're going to say, this is all the

reasons why the loves of the world are OK.

And I want you to remember what Spurgeon says.

People are going to believe anything if it's put plausibly

before them. We can't listen to the arguments

of the world. You have to be wooded and

grounded in the word. They're going to bring arguments

like this. Some are going to argue that the

scriptures are patriarchal. And so we need to go to war with

them because they're oppressive and restraining.

Other people aren't going to go to war with the word, but

they're going to they're going to deny it and say, you know,

the the word is archaic and it's it's old and it's irrelevant to

the modern age. And they're going to go a couple

lines of thinking in this. They're going to some are going

to say it's a cultural artifact of the sexual standards that

existed 2000 years ago, but those are not relevant for

today. And other people are going to

say we need to reinterpret the word through our enlightened

biological understanding. And neither of those are true.

And for others, they're going to say that we're fine to believe

whatever we think this may be true as long as we keep our

thoughts on money and sex in our own private lives and in our

churches, and we don't allow them out into the public sphere

and into the marketplace. And they don't affect the

culture. Paul says in verse 6, let no one

deceive you with empty words. And this is the great warning.

It's emphasized, and Paul underlines it.

If he had a highlighter of it for your Bible, it would be

highlighted. He says, you may be sure of

this, verse 5, no one who is immoral, no one who is impure,

no one who is covetous will inherit the Kingdom of God.

So there are a lot of things in Scripture that are unclear.

There are some things that are that are so clear a child can

understand. For God so loved the world, He

gave his only begotten son. There's no room for ambiguity in

that. There are things that are

ambiguous. There are things that are

unclear. Scripture's trying to highlight

it and say here, this is not one of those things.

Pay attention. This is true.

You can know that it's true. I'm emphasizing it before you

now, that no idolatus person will inherit the Kingdom of God.

If your love, if you love sexually deviant behaviour, if

you love more money more than you love God, He says your

disordered loves will damn you, and your disordered loves will

shepherd your soul to hell. But what do the scriptures say?

And in response to this, Titus 33.

But we ourselves were once foolish and disobedient.

We were once misled and became slaves to many lusts and

pleasures. Our lives were full of envy and

evil, and we hated each other. But when the goodness and living

kindness of God our Savior appeared, He saved us, not

because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to

His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration, by the renewal of

the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus

Christ our Savior. So when your, when your loves

are disordered, when you come to Jesus Christ, you come to him,

not on the basis of virtue. He builds virtues in you.

You come to Him not on the basis of virtue, but on the basis of

his mercy, and he will give mercy to you, and he will

reorder your loves. And that's why he says here,

imitate Jesus Christ and walk in love.

If you do not know Jesus as your Lord and Savior, if you don't

know the joy and blessing that comes from ordering your life

after him, a cross shaped love. Come and talk to me.

Come and talk to Chris. Come and talk to one of the

pastors. We'll be in this green room

right after the service. I would love to talk to you

about a relationship of love with God the Father and his son.

But as you look and remember again, the first verse,

Ephesians 51. There's a famous book in church

history that was that was titled after Ephesians 51.

It was by Thomas Okempis. It's called The Imitation of

Christ, and the book opens this way.

I want to read to you the whole introduction.

Akempus says what that means from campus.

That's not his actual last name, but Thomas Akempus says he who

follows me walks not in darkness, says the Lord.

By these words of Christ we were advised to imitate His life and

habits, if we wish to be truly enlightened and free from all

blindness of heart. Let our chief effort, therefore,

be to study the life of Jesus Christ.

The teaching of Christ is more excellent than all the advice of

the Saints. And he who has spirit, His

Spirit will find in it a hidden manner.

Now there are many who hear the gospel often, but care little

for it, because they have not the Spirit of Christ.

Yet whoever wishes to understand fully the words of Christ must

try to pattern his whole life onto that Christ.

What good is it to speak learnedly about the Trinity, if

lacking humility, you displease the Trinity?

Indeed, it is not learning that makes a man holy and just, but a

virtuous life makes him pleasing to God.

I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it.

For what would it profit us to know the whole Bible by heart,

in the principles of all the philosophers, if we live without

grace in the love of God? Vanity of vanities and all is

vanity except to love God and to serve Him alone.

This is the greatest wisdom, to seek the Kingdom ahead of heaven

through contempt of the world. It is vanity, therefore, to seek

and trust in riches that perish. It's vanity to court honour, and

to be puffed up with pride. It's vanity to follow the lust

of the body, and to desire things for which severe

punishment later must come. It's vanity to wish for long

life, and to care little about a life well spent.

It's vanity to be concerned with the present only, and not to

make provision for the things to come.

It's vanity to love what passes quickly, and not to look ahead

where eternal joy abides. Often recall the proverb, the

eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with

hearing. Try, moreover, to turn your

heart from the love of things visible and bring yourself to

things invisible. For they who follow their evil

passions stain their consciences and lose the grace of God.

My final reminder to you is remember, you are not first and

foremost a rational creature. You are first and foremost a

loving creature. And it's love that moves your,

your heart and your soul and your desires and your wills.

And so consider and think about your own idols, your own

passions, your vices, and hear Jesus speak these words to you.

Do you love me more than these? Church?

Pray with me, God, we, we want to image you and all of your

communicable attributes. We want it to follow after the

pattern that you've set. We want to love the poor and

God, we know that we cannot do that perfectly and we need you

to to buy your spirit order our loves calibrate our life and our

love so that we can experience blessing and joy and and peace.

And Lord, we want to love you with all our heart and with all

our soul and with all our mind and with all our strength.

But but help us when we fall short and every time we open

these scriptures and every time we sing songs together, Lord,

help us to fall in love just a little bit more with you.

Fall in love just a little bit more with your Son Jesus Christ

whom you sent, and even more in love with this church body.

God, take away from us these idols that are our our hearts

are as the church says the the reformers said they're, they're

idol factories. There's so much impurity and

uncleanness in US and we ask, please, Lord, purge it from us

as we imitate you as we walk in love, Lord, make us pure people

so that we don't even need the 10 commandments to remind us

constantly, Lord, but your spirit convicts us and we walk

in holiness and in love because we love you, because you're

forming Christ in US. Purge these things from us,

Lord, we love you. We ask this in Christ's name.

Amen. Thanks for listening.

To learn more about Heritage Church or if you'd like to

respond to this sermon, visit our website at

www.heritageshawnee.org.