Ephesians: How Do I Live a Holy Life? (5:1-21)

Hello, friends.

This is Pastor Creighton.

Thank you for tuning in to Newsong Church's Sermon Podcast.

At Newsong Church, we want to see Jesus lifted high in Port Perry, Ontario, as we worship, grow, and serve.

You can learn more about us and find contact info at newsongportperry.ca.

The second lesson is from Ephesians chapter 5, verses 1 to 21.

Ephesians 5:1–21

Therefore, be intimidators 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 immortality and all impurity or covetness must not 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 adulterer, 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 partners with them.

For at one time you were darkness, but now you are the light in the Lord.

Walk as children of light, for the fruits of light is found in all that is good and right and true.

And try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord.

Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.

For it is shameful even to speak of these things that they do in secret.

But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible.

For anything that becomes visible is light.

Therefore it says, Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise, making the best use of time, because the days are evil.

Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.

And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always for everything to God, the Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ, the word of the Lord.

Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love as Christ loved us.

Let's pray.

Lord, let the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts be always pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

Please be seated.

So how do I live a holy life?

How do we live the holy life?

What does a holy life look like?

The practice of holiness, a set apartness from corruption and sin, is in the front of Paul's mind as he's inspired by the Holy Spirit to write this letter to the Ephesian Church.

It's a letter that's addressed to the saints who are in Ephesus, literally the holy ones in Ephesus.

See, when Paul writes this letter, he doesn't have an elite class of Christians in mind, as though there's a bunch of regular church-going Christians in Ephesus.

And then there's a few folks that Paul has in mind, the A plus plus holy Christians, who may or may not end up portrayed on stained glass one day.

Paul understands that all Christians are called to be holy.

He writes that God the Father chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him.

Living a life of holiness is not an extra credit assignment for ultra-motivated Christians.

Paul says that it's the purpose for which each one of us has been saved.

We're to live lives caught up in God's own purity and resplendent and sinlessness as we journey into his everlasting kingdom.

Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, writes Paul in chapter 4.

And in our text today, he writes, At one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.

So walk as children of light.

In other words, live a holy life.

Live out your calling to show forth that purity, resplendence, and sinlessness that we know in Christ.

And we ought not to take this call to holy living lightly.

Paul warns in verses 5 and 6 that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure or covetous, that is, Paul notes, an idolater, someone who's made a god out of worldly pleasures and pursuits.

Such a person has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.

Let no one deceive you with empty words, Paul says, for because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.

So in a world full of empty words and cheap spiritual advice, Paul warns Christians against fudging on this point.

Holiness marks the difference between whether or not we share in God's everlasting kingdom, whether we receive God's acceptance or his wrath against sin.

So the question becomes: how do we practice personal holiness?

How do I live a holy life?

To practice holiness is to turn away from the fruitless deeds of darkness listed in verses 3 to 18.

We could take a deep dive into those today, but I think our time would be well spent to zoom in on the first two verses of this passage.

Because Paul puts positively what a holy life looks like here.

Paul tells us, Christians, a holy life looks like imitating God and walking in love.

Imitate God and walk in love.

It's as though he's saying that if we put these two means of personal holiness into practice, we'll find that the rest follows.

Corruption and darkness will give way to purity and light.

And friends, there's good news here.

Because I think we find that it's in the practice of the imitation of God, it's in walking in love that we discover even our personal holiness is less about how we're we're striving and earning it before God, and rather it stands upon what God has generously done for us in Christ.

So let's endeavor to live a holy life.

Let's imitate God.

Paul writes verse 1 if you've got your Bible, if you've got your order of service, please turn there with me.

Paul says, therefore be imitators of God.

And the word here for imitate is the Greek word mimetes, which is fun to say.

And we get the English word mimic from this word.

Mimic God.

Copy him.

Check out what God does, and go and do likewise.

You know, I really like these uh videos you find on YouTube.

Well, there's a lot.

Let me qualify that.

I really like these videos of um actors describing their craft.

It's kind of like a career timeline or something.

And, you know, uh just some of the actors I like.

I find it really interesting to track with their method and their practice of their craft, partly just because I enjoy listening and learning from those who just really excel at a particular skill and just want to talk about what it is to develop that art and that that craft.

There's a particular kind of acting you're probably familiar with called method acting, which is just total immersion in a particular character.

And what I what strikes me about some of these method actors who describe their career is they don't just describe what it was like to pretend to be someone else.

They talk about the kind of change that took place in their own personal life, having portrayed someone like Abraham Lincoln or you know, some of the some of the greats.

Maybe those who portray Jean Valjean, who was a recipient of such profound grace, start to come to grips with something of grace in their own life.

See, imitation ends up changing the imitator.

But for us, the imitation of God is not just being play actors who pretend to be someone we're not.

For us, it's practice.

It's practice with a personal impact.

Maybe it's less like an actor and more like an athlete who watches some of their, like a like a high school basketball player who watches professional basketball players work out their technique and work out the plays and wants to put that in practice for themselves because they want to endeavor to be the best basketball player they can be.

See, we're to mimic God, we're to imitate him, we're to see what he's about and put that into practice for ourselves and find that that changes us.

Mimicking God is not a new exhortation to God's people.

It's something that God's people have been called to throughout the history of salvation.

God's people are always to look and see what God is like and be like Him.

What's God like?

Well, first and foremost, God is holy.

In fact, He's the Holy One, completely set apart from a sin-corrupted creation.

That's why heavenly hosts praise him in Isaiah 6 as holy, holy, holy.

He's entirely pure, resplendent, and incorruptible.

He's holy, and all our experience of holiness and consecration and set apartness point us towards him.

In Leviticus, God gives his servant Moses an exhortation to share with his people, recently saved from bondage of slavery in Egypt.

God says, Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel, say to them, You shall be holy.

For I, the Lord your God, am holy.

You've been redeemed from crushing oppression.

Now go live lives in keeping with the character of your redeemer.

Set yourselves apart from sin and corruption.

God goes on to say, You shall be holy to me.

For I, the Lord your God, am holy, and have separated you from the peoples that you should be mine.

See, the practice of holiness is going to separate us from those around us.

Holiness is going to distinguish God's people from the nations that surround them, and so too does the Apostle Peter remind the church that as he who called you is holy, you also ought to be holy in your conduct.

Mimicking God means we notice something of God's set apartness, his purity, his sinlessness, and we desire to participate in this kind of holy life for ourselves.

The call to holiness means we're not going to be content to settle into ongoing and unrepentant sin.

We're going to think differently.

As Christians, we're going to stand apart.

We're even going to act counter-culturally if it means imitating God in his holiness.

But we should also bear in mind that even though there's a chapter division in our Bibles, we started in chapter 5, there isn't chapter divisions in Paul's original letter here.

He's still tracking with that same train of thought that he began in chapter 4.

Walking worthy of our call, which he concludes means that we're kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you, is the final verse of chapter 4.

So if we're going to live lives mimicking God's character, checking them out, and trying to put that into practice, we need to take notice of God's generous forgiveness.

Jesus gives us an illustration of forgiveness in Matthew 18.

He describes a servant who's been forgiven this enormous, crushing debt by his generous master, but who leaves the master's presence and goes to choke someone who owes him a couple of bucks.

And Jesus says, this shouldn't be.

If we've experienced such outrageous forgiveness, life-changing forgiveness, we ought to be those who put forgiveness into practice, who forgive others who trespass against us.

We have been forgiven much.

Apart from God's grace, even at the best of times, we qualify as the sons of disobedience mentioned in verse 6, corrupted by sin, living in darkness, with no holiness in us, against whom God's wrath is being revealed.

We have sinned in thought, word, and deed, provoking most justly God's righteous anger against us.

Yet it's God's generous heart that meets the remorseful sinner not with a lightning bolt, but with forgiveness, which consequently moves the forgiven sinner to forgive others as she herself has been forgiven.

So we imitate God when we practice his set apartness, his purity in who he is.

But we also imitate God when we practice forgiveness, a generous forgiveness.

We forgive others as we've been forgiven.

But imitating God is more than just play acting.

Imitating God tells us who we really are.

Paul writes, Imitate God as beloved children.

I just think this is such a precious image.

And we just need to sit here for a little while.

We're not method actors trying to perfect this character we're portraying outwardly.

Inwardly, deep in our hearts, we know that we're little boys and girls, dearly loved by our Heavenly Father.

And we love him because he first loved us.

When we love our Heavenly Father dearly, we can't help but want to be like him.

My dad's here today, so I get to share a story.

Some of uh, well, one of the things I remember my dad doing in my childhood a lot was sorting out his Gretzky cards.

Because he's got a lot of Gretzky hockey cards.

And if ever you're in Ottawa, I'm sure you'd love to show your Gretzky cards.

That's an offer I'm making on your behalf.

I didn't have Gretzky cards, I never really got into hockey, I'm sorry to say, but I had lots of Pokemon cards because I'm a millennial, and that's what I collected.

And when Dad would be out sorting his Gretzky cards, often I'd I remember pulling out my binder of Pokemon cards and doing much the same.

They didn't have to get sorted.

I just wanted to be like Dad.

See, being loved by a father means we're so enamored with him that we just think so highly of him and we want to be like him.

We check out what he does and we want to do the same.

If we're so loved by a heavenly father, we can't help but want to love him and put his character into practice.

See, maybe we need to live in that place where we come to the Father, not as those desperately trying to earn his approval, but as beloved children.

It would save us from a sort of legalism in our practice of holiness.

Because so often that's what comes to mind.

When I think personal holiness, somehow I get this snooty superior attitude.

I don't know.

We get this sort of legalism, this corrosive idea that holiness is somehow earned by our good performance.

So we get a holier than thou way we interact with others.

We compare ourselves to others.

We feel insecure about ourselves as Christians.

But instead, if we're beloved children, if we operate from that place where we recognize just how profoundly loved we are by a generous and forgiving Heavenly Father, we would recognize that personal holiness begins not with our effort, but with what God has done for us.

By grace, he has made us, formerly sons of disobedience, his beloved children, and gifted us with an everlasting love and a heavenly inheritance.

So if personal holiness is not something we're inclined to think very much of, or something we're not really inclined to practice, then I'd like to suggest that we haven't drilled deep enough into the reality of our adoption in Christ.

We're operating not from a place of being beloved children, and that's exactly where we need to be.

We live a life of holiness when we imitate God and his set apartness from sin.

We extend generous forgiveness towards sinners because we're children who want to be like our Heavenly Father.

We continue to live a holy life, Paul says, when we walk in love.

Verse 2.

Paul's exhortations to Christians here is to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you are called.

And in last Sunday's text we saw that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles, the non-believers, pagans do, in the futility of their minds.

See, it's our walk, it is our manner of living.

Paul is calling ourselves, calling us to be consistent with the calling to which we've been called and how we live our life.

And here he says we're supposed to walk in love, which is this familiar Greek word agape.

This kind of love is not just a fuzzy feeling or an affection for someone else.

It's far more profound.

Agape love is to will the good of the other, to desire to contribute to another's flourishing, especially at the risk of self-sacrifice.

We should catch reflections of God's agape love in moments like uh, well, in in places like uh Tale of Two Cities, with Sidney Carton giving his life for the sake of his friends, or Aslan, who's just such a direct uh reflection of Christ's own love, even Harry Potter, which I was very surprised to discover, such a profound example of sacrificial love at the end of this wonderful book series.

See, as Christians, we should catch these reflections of self-sacrificing love.

We should recognize them for what they are, reflections of our own call to walk in love, not necessarily to have fuzzy feelings of everyone, but conduct our lives to the will, or pardon me, conduct our lives in such a way that we will the good of the other at all times in every way, and especially when it's costly to us.

Jesus says that there is no greater agape than to lay down one's life for one's friends.

And Paul understands that in Jesus Christ we have more than just a teacher of agape love, we have the supreme example.

Walk in love, Paul says, as Christ loved us.

Notice the past tense here, by the way.

This isn't a conditional clause.

Walk in love, so then Christ will love you, or will continue to love you.

Christ loved us with an agape love even before we'd ever thought of living the holy life, before we even took our first step in walking in love.

Like the Father loves his children and we imitate him, so too does Christ love us, and we live out a Christ like love for others.

So how does Christ love us?

Paul answers.

He gave himself up for us a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

Jesus loved with a love that gave everything for the sake of the sons of disobedience.

God demonstrates his love for us in this, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

This is what we see when we look at the cross.

We see the ultimate symbol of God's agape.

And it beckons us to go and do likewise, not just for the friends and the people we like, but for our enemies as well.

Paul knows Jesus is our example of walking in love.

But he isn't merely an example.

He is agape love personified and lived out through the cross.

See, some misguided teachers have suggested that instead of elevating Jesus as our substitutionary sacrifice for sins, we should instead elevate Jesus' moral example, his agape love.

Christianity, they might suggest, is far less about placing our faith in Jesus, what Jesus has accomplished, and far more about following Jesus' example.

But friends, Paul wouldn't want to pit these two things against one another.

Jesus is both our example of walking in sacrificial love and the once-for-all time sacrifice made to satisfy God's wrath on our behalf.

Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

So a Christian both puts their personal trust in Jesus to cleanse them from their sin through his sacrifice and takes up their own cross to follow their Savior in sacrificial love.

Christianity is not an either or, it's a both and.

But notice this: if Jesus so loved us that he gave himself up as a sacrifice to take away our sins, then it follows that our personal practice of holiness is not about trying to make up for our sins and wrongdoings, but rather our practice of holiness, of good works and spiritual disciplines, spring out of gratitude and trust and a desire to be like Jesus, who loved us so limitlessly.

We walk in love, not because we want to earn it, but because he first loved us.

Paul's already written, because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we are dead in our transgressions.

It is by grace you have been saved.

So when practicing holiness seems dreary or unappealing to me, which from time to time it does, I need to recognize that somehow I have wandered away from God's profound and abundant love for me in Christ, the kind of love that grips me and draws me deeper into who He is.

We live a holy life when we imitate God and set apartness and forgiveness, and when we walk in sacrificial love as Christ loved us.

So Paul writes, look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise, making the best use of the time because the days are evil.

A heart set on holiness will not want anything to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness.

But we don't always make the wise decision, do we?

Even as we are redeemed in Christ and seek to live out the renewed life, even as we're called to holiness, our sin-corrupted hearts are still inclined towards the deeds of darkness, aren't they?

And when we live that out, sometimes we might be, we might wonder to ourselves, does that mean I have no inheritance of the kingdom of Christ?

Have I disqualified myself from eternity?

Here's where I want us to land.

It's one clause in verse 18, but I think it's so important for us.

In contrast to the deeds of darkness, and specifically with contrast to getting drunk, which compromises our judgment and our ability to love one another, Paul says, instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit.

Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Be filled with the Spirit.

Well, there's a lot of things we could say about being filled with the Spirit.

I'd like to major on the majors.

Being filled with the Spirit means we're assured that we're beloved children.

We're not left in doubt about how God thinks about us in Christ.

Let me paraphrase Romans 8.

The Holy Spirit bears witness with our Spirit that we are the children of God.

It's by the Holy Spirit we cry, Abba, Father.

Being filled with the Spirit means we know we are beloved children.

And when we're filled with the Spirit, we're assured of God's agape love for us in Christ.

God's love, his agape, has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

By the Holy Spirit, we walk in love as Christ loved us.

We are empowered to live the renewed life and a life of holiness in imitation of the God who loves us, the Father who brings sons of disobedience into his family, Christ who gave himself up for our sake, and the Holy Spirit who draws us to himself.

And the result of all this is singing and thanksgiving, which I think is so appropriate for a church called New Song.

Why do we sing a new song to the Lord?

It's an overflow of the holy life.

It's expressed in praise and worship, not only with our lips but in our lives.

Maybe it suggests that we bother with the church because this isn't just an individual matter.

It draws us together as the redeemed people in Christ and calls us to live the holy life as those sealed by the Spirit.

So, dear friends, be imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love as Christ loved us.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

We worship a generous God who calls us to follow Him in giving willfully, cheerfully, and sacrificially.

Newsong Church's mission and ministry is one hundred percent funded by the generous gifts of those worshiping and journeying with us.

If you'd like to offer a gift towards Newsong's ministry, please visit newsongportperry.ca slash giving for more information on how to do that.

May God bless you and keep you today and every day.