Children of Light (Ephesians 5:1-14)

We are in Ephesians chapter 5.

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention

We're going to be starting in verse 1.

And as we've talked about from the very, very beginning, this is a book full of encouragement and full of encouragement to grow.

And there's going to be back and forth with that as we go through this.

So it's going to be a fun ride with that.

So if you are able, please stand for the reading of God's Word.

Ephesians 5, starting in verse 1.

Therefore, be imitators of God as dearly loved children, and walk in love, as Christ also loved us and gave himself for us, a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God.

But sexual immorality and any impurity or greed should not even be heard of among you, as is proper for saints.

Obscene and foolish talking or crude joking are not suitable, but rather giving thanks.

For know and recognize this.

Every sexually immoral or impure or greedy person who is an idolater does not have an inheritance in the kingdom of God and of Christ.

And of God, of Christ and of God.

Let no one deceive you with empty arguments, for God's wrath is coming on the disobedient because of these things.

Therefore do not become their partners.

For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.

Live as children of light.

For the fruit of the light consists of all goodness, righteousness, and truth, testing what is pleasing to the Lord.

Don't participate in the fruitless works of darkness, but instead expose them.

For it is shameful even to mention what is done by them in secret.

Everything exposed by the light is made visible, for what makes everything visible is light.

Therefore it is said, Get up, sleeper, and rise up from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

Let's pray.

Lord, I thank you for your word.

I thank you for your love for us in all things.

I thank you for the salvation you have offered us through the sacrifice of your Son, through faith in him.

And I ask as we study your word, Lord, that you would fill me with your spirit to rightly teach, that you would fill the hearers with your spirit to rightly discern and divide and absorb what is of you.

And I ask, Lord, that ultimately that we will grow more and more and more in your image and closer to you and be glorified in your name.

Amen.

Alright, go ahead and have a seat.

So by a show of hands and no judgment at all, how many of you have read through 1st and 2 Kings and 1st and 2nd Chronicles before?

Okay.

It is riveting.

No.

In these books, there is largely a rundown of the divided kingdom, the Northern Kingdom, and the Southern Kingdom.

And you have these kings in lists mentioned of who they are, what they did, and so forth, and the events and adventures therein.

And so there are three main categories of kings that we see.

There are the good kings who followed the Lord, rightly followed him, acted that out, led the people in truth, people like Hezekiah, people like Josiah.

There are the bad kings, boo, and those are the ones like Manasseh, who was basically the worst, except we see in Chronicles he repents at the end.

Praise God for that.

And then there's a third category, and that is a lot of them.

And a lot of them are people who followed the Lord but.

What was the but?

The high places were not taken down.

The high places were allowed to remain, the people continued to worship other gods in addition to the one true God.

That third category is so heartbreaking and so sad that it was like they followed the Lord, they loved the Lord, but those high places remained.

What does that have to do with our passage?

Stay tuned.

So, starting in verse one, therefore, be imitators of God as dearly loved children, be imitators, memetis, which is an imitator, a follower, a mimicker.

That's where we get the word mimic from.

Two pieces to that.

Number one, be imitators of God.

Imitate him in all things.

As dearly loved children.

So not only is it a following his ways, following his purposes, trying to conform to his image, but as children, culturally, we think of the idea of carrying on the family business.

So if your father was a stonemason, guess what?

You're probably going to be a stonemason.

If your father was a potter, odds are good.

You got potter jeans.

And so at that point in time, you would be imitating them carrying on that work.

Both in character as you're growing in that, but also you would start very young learning the family business.

Be imitators of God as dearly loved children.

There is a lot of exhortation in these verses, and so I just want to make the most important point in all of this abundantly plain, so that if you hear nothing else, you will hear this.

And we have a slide for that.

We don't imitate God in order to become dearly loved children.

Rather, because we already are dearly loved children, we imitate God.

This is crucial above all else.

Because anytime we go into passages that have a little more exhortation, a little more do's and don'ts, and do this, don't do that, be careful of this, watch out for that, don't do these things.

Uh, it can really start to poke things within us that are like, wait, do I have to how am I measuring up?

Am I doing this right?

Does God like me still?

Is he mad at me?

All of these different things.

We already are, if you have put your faith in Jesus, we already are dearly loved children.

Period.

Therefore, he calls us to imitate him.

So if you hear nothing else today, hold on to that truth.

That if you are a follower of Jesus, he is well pleased with you.

He loves you already.

You are not trying to earn his favor, because you already have it through the blood of Jesus.

Okay.

Now having that said, Paul is challenging them to imitate God.

And we're gonna take a look at what that could look like.

But verse 2, walk in love.

Love.

Simple word, right?

Only has one meaning, no nuance, no context depending on what's going on with God.

Love could mean a million different things to a million different people.

So I love that he tied it to a definition.

Lock in love.

As Christ loved us.

It's like, okay, cool.

God loves us.

Good.

That sounds good.

That sounds easy.

We can do that.

Oh no, it continues.

And gave himself for us a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God.

Ooh, that one's a little bit more challenging.

So the love here, the agape love here, is a giving of self, a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God in that way.

There is sacrifice involved in that.

There is the other involved in that.

We've been talking about this a lot in the past passages, so just to super condense this, I have a little blurb for that as well.

We have a slide for that.

The third one.

Agape love is a care for another, for their well-being above your own.

When motivated by this, we forgive, we sacrifice, we bless, we exhort, we challenge, all because we pursue health and wholeness more than convenience.

In this way, love counteracts the idolatry of cultural conformity.

That last sentence is something we're gonna dive into.

So this love is not only forgiving, sacrificing, giving of self, but also being willing to bless, to encourage, to exhort, to challenge.

It involves genuine interaction with one another.

And I say that and you're like, well, yeah, done.

That's what we do.

Church.

Jesus! But there is a differentiation here between walking in love and what we kind of see as Christian culture, depending on where we live.

So I have a diagram for that, for that imagery, to which when my son saw the slides, he's like, ooh, Venn diagram, and got all excited.

So I had to do this for uh make it obvious.

But there's walking in love, there is Christian culture, and there are things that work between the two.

I would like to think, optimistically, that the middle part is a lot bigger than that, but it doesn't make for a good graph.

So, but just imagine that that middle piece optimistically is a lot larger than that.

Now, why do I say that there are some distinctions between walking in love and between church culture?

Well, who's Paul talking to?

Ephesians, believers, followers of Jesus.

Right?

In the next verse, he is having to tell these followers of Jesus that sexual immorality, impurity, and greed should not be heard among you.

He's having to tell them, hey, these things do not belong.

These are things that in their culture, crazy as it may sound, seem acceptable over here as yes, we can follow Jesus and still do these things.

And Paul is saying that does not have any place in the body of Christ.

So we're having to make those distinctions between what is tolerated culturally and what does not belong in the body of Christ.

These are the high places.

These are the things that we can allow because our culture allows it, because our context allows it, and we go, well, I follow Jesus, I can also do these things.

The God and spoiler alert, God wants to smash the and things to rubble for our well-being.

So we can look at this and go, sexual morality?

Impurity in verse 3.

Impurity, think of that as just the converse of holiness.

Think of holiness and then think of the exact opposite, and you get that word, impurity.

Greek is nice because they just throw an A at the beginning and it's like reverse.

They throw the reverse card.

And then greed.

In our culture, I would say in our little our little bubble, I don't think we would struggle with the idea that sexual immorality is not a part of a healthy body of Christ.

I do think there is a pervasive cultural aspect of sexual immorality that is very permissive because nobody can see you doing it that involves the internet.

That affects two out of three people, at last I saw.

So, with that, there is aspects of that, but what they're talking about here, we'd be like, well, yeah, duh.

And impurity, well, yeah, duh.

He's talking to the Ephesians.

Remember, they live in idle central.

Part of that idolatry involves worship practices that involve sex.

He's in a place that is very wealthy.

It's a port town, all the money coming in, coming out.

And so this is an example of the Gentile world following Jesus and then holding on to these things as well.

It may look different to us in our context because we don't necessarily, our idols are more nuanced, I'll put it that way.

But with that in mind, there seems to be a largely a Gentile issue because it's a similar ver uh similar lists in Galatians 5, 19 and in Colossians 3.5.

So when Paul is preaching the gospel to these Gentile areas, he's having to tell them, hey, these things don't belong in the body of Christ.

And we in 2025 at Cascadera are like, duh, of course.

Why would we think that?

But in Ephesus, they're like, what?

This is this is everyday life.

This isn't normal.

I didn't know that these are things that don't belong with that.

Can't I have both?

Now, having that said, we zoom in on those first two, right?

Sexual immorality, immorality, impurity, and we're like, oh gosh, that's disgusting.

Greed, let's just move past that one.

That I would say is very endemic to our culture.

But no, no, it's not greed, it's stewardship.

Just to let you guys know, you just flip it a little bit.

So there is a potential for things that don't belong in the body of Christ to be tolerated culturally, and they may look different in different cultures, like here, sexual morality, impurity, greed.

He's diagnosing the church, not the world.

So, what do we do in our age?

What do we do in our world?

Because when we think about the things that don't belong in the body of Christ, how often do we simply do we look at the things that the world does that we might not uh think uh as Christians do?

Painting with broad strokes in our current culture.

We look at this and we're like, oh wow, in our current culture, that would be abortion, right?

That would be um same-sex marriage or um those kinds of things, right?

Except those are not necessarily in our context things that we struggle with within our church.

That's what the world does.

And so there's a very interesting thing that we see here is that I would say in our culture, we might be adept at pointing out the sins of the other.

But what are the things, what are the high places in our life?

I can't answer that necessarily for all of you, but there are things that are much more nuanced.

We can hold on to greed, we'll keep that one.

But what about pride?

What about envy?

We see in James 3 better envy and self-seeking.

Similarly, he's saying, those are unspiritual and demonic.

I would say those are pretty common potentially in our culture with that.

And so that's why I said, if you can put up the love definition again, that it's a care for others, for the well-being of your own, for above your own.

When motivated by this, we forgive, we sacrifice, bless, exhort, challenge, because we pursue health and wholeness more than convenience, and in this way, love counteracts the idolatry of cultural conformity.

To love someone and to sacrifice them, it may be if you have that kind of relational equity, to be pointing out of, I don't think that belongs in the somebody following Jesus.

And I think that that may be harming you and harming others.

It's a lot more convenient to say, be warm and filled, and God bless you.

Something that blew my mind when we're talking about cultural Christianity, things like this, um, I had a friend who is the prototypical, charismatic, engaging, encouraging Christian, the kind of person everybody wants to be around.

And he told me something that I will remember till the day that I die.

And he said, Are you aware that someone like me can operate completely in their flesh and nobody notices in the church?

That's my danger, is what he told me.

It's not my danger.

I'm not charismatic, I'm not allowed to see.

But you know this.

But uh, with that in mind, he it was an interesting thing that those who seem most naturally equipped for the church culture part of the Venn diagram sometimes are most susceptible to do so in the flesh.

So, what are the high places involved in that?

That may involve actually being willing to have hard conversations with people.

Something that's hard for encouragers to do.

Anyway, continuing forward with that, because Paul here, one thing I love about him is he ministers like tomorrow is not guaranteed.

Continuing forward here.

Verse 4 obscene and foolish talking or crude joking are not suitable, but rather giving thanks.

I think this was addressed really, really well last week in greater detail.

So I really encourage you to, if you didn't get a chance to listen to that, to listen to that on the podcast, because I think that was done better than I would do in recap.

But one thing just as a paraphrase here, in Luke 6, 43 through 45, I encourage you to check that out.

That's our homework for the day.

The paraphrase is the mouth speaks from the overflow of the heart.

Jesus who doesn't lie.

So, with that in mind, when he says uh obscene and foolish talking or crude joking are not suitable, but rather giving thanks, it's very, very easy to start to parse.

Well, what does that mean?

What can I do?

What can I not?

How far does this go?

Am I stuck giving dad jokes for the rest of my life?

How far does this happen?

I learned yesterday that my son won the dad jokes competition at a party.

Pray for me.

So, and he's a better man than.

Okay, so with that in mind.

What comes out of our hearts is the big thing to have here.

What are we prone to?

Are we prone to be giving thanks?

That is hard sometimes, especially depending on what time our alarm clock goes off.

But that is what I would summarize, verse 4 in that summary.

What's coming out of our mouth that reflects what is uh breeding in our hearts?

So here's the stakes in verse 5.

No one recognized this.

Every sexually immoral or impure or greedy person who is an idolater does not have an inheritance in the kingdom of God and of Christ.

Paul pokes the nerve of Ephesus.

Because what's Ephesus known for?

Idols.

Idols, idols, idols.

Everywhere, here, there, everywhere, an idol.

And he's saying, yes, but these things, the ones who practice these things, are idolaters.

He's willing to push the wound there and say, this does not belong.

To the point where he says, those who do these things do not have an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

He is going so far to say, no and recognize that those whose calling cards are these things do not follow Jesus.

Do not have a relationship with Jesus.

That's pretty heavy, right?

When we hear things like this, we can go, okay, but what does that mean for me?

I've sinned before.

I've struggled before.

Am I like on the bad list?

And if I'm on the bad list, do I have to do the good things so I get back on the good list?

How does this work?

How do I do that?

What's happening?

Do I am I even saved?

Here is the best way that I can put this.

We have a slide for Ephesians 1.

The Holy Spirit is the down payment of our inheritance until the redemption of the possession to the praise of his glory.

So, when we commit to following Jesus, when we put our faith in him, the Holy Spirit is put within us.

And that is a down payment of what?

Of the inheritance.

Which is the same thing that Paul is saying here, that these people do not have.

So, how do we reconcile those things?

Well, we see these items as worshiping at the high places of the world: sexual immorality, impurity, greed.

God does not share.

He is the one person, entity, in all of history where that's not selfish.

God does not share.

He does not coexist peacefully.

So, he puts the Holy Spirit within us.

And when these things are within us, what happens?

Struggle.

Lots and lots of struggle.

And the Holy Spirit is not going to go, it's okay, guys.

Don't worry, I'll just take the couch in the living room.

We're fine.

God does not share.

And when we are his, part of the sanctification process is a raging battle within us between our flesh and the spirit.

Now, Satan, who is the bad guy, by the way, wants us to think that the fact there is a struggle means we are failing.

The fact that there is a struggle means that we are his.

Because prior to Jesus, there was no struggle.

So just hold on to that thing when you hear these things of, hey, if someone's sexually moral and pure or greedy, who they're idolaters and they don't have an inheritance in the kingdom of God and of Christ.

If there's a struggle within you where sometimes it goes real bad, and sometimes there's victory, that is continual evidence that you belong to Jesus.

Praise the Lord for that.

You know what happens?

Do you know when perfection happens?

Well, how many of you are still breathing?

Has Jesus come back again yet?

No?

Okay, so we're not there.

But the fact that there is a battle should encourage us.

Because Satan wants it to discourage us, but it should encourage us that we belong to God.

So, if there is a fight between those high places and between following the Lord, it means that the Holy Spirit's working.

Praise the Lord for that.

Now, continuing forward, we're gonna get a list that I would call don't go back in verses 6 through 11.

So we have a slide with all of these things here.

First in verse 6, don't let anyone deceive you with empty arguments, because God's wrath is coming on the disobedient because of these things.

Again, there were teachers, false teachers, people who wanted the Ephesian believers to think God was okay with this behavior.

And yes, it is okay to worship God and.

And Paul is saying, don't be deceived.

Don't go back.

Gnarliest thing in the book of Numbers, I believe, where uh such a bizarre story, but Balak hires Balaam to curse Israel, and he just doesn't do it, and he keeps blessing him, and the king is tearing his hair out, going, Well, I hired you to curse these people, and all you're doing is blessing them.

And then the immediate thing that happens directly afterwards is that they intermingle uh sexually with the Moabites and are led to sin and slaughter.

Such a weird whiplash of a story there.

And so the voice that says you can have it both ways is the voice of death.

Don't listen.

Don't become their partners.

Don't give audience to the voice that says that you can have Jesus and your pet sin.

Because we see in the book of James that sin is born out of desire, and desire get you feed it, you feed it, it becomes sin, and sin gets grown up and kills you.

All starts with that, that whole thing.

So he's saying, don't even listen.

Why?

In verse 8, you were once darkness, but now you are light in the world.

Can darkness and light coexist in the same exact space?

Ever?

No.

You get picked one, but we want to think that you can kind of have a dusk.

Or dawn if you're a you know glass half fulken person.

So you were darkness, now you are light.

Who are we as followers of Jesus?

Light.

Light in the Lord.

So, the exhortation here: live as children of light.

Walk as children of light.

And he says, the fruit of light, or that your verse may say the fruit of the spirit, consists of all goodness, righteousness, and truth.

These words parse out to uprightness.

You think of a plum line, you have the string and the weight on the bottom.

It turns out gravity works in advance of interfering magnetism, I understand that.

So that line shows what is upright.

All of these words, what is good, what is righteous, what is true, are the fruit of walking in the light.

God desires uprightness from his people.

Testing what is pleasing to the Lord.

We are to test what is pleasing to the Lord.

What are our instruments by which we test what is pleasing to the Lord?

The Word of God.

The Holy Spirit.

We see that in 1 John 4.

Didn't have time for that?

It's a really good read.

1 John 4.

We see that the Holy Spirit and the Word of God are our instruments to determine what is upright.

That cuts directly through all cultural nuance.

So don't participate in the fruitless works of darkness.

We saw the fruit of light.

Here we see the fruitless works of darkness.

Imagine this tree.

Beautiful tree bearing beautiful fruit in the light that looks delicious and healthy.

And then imagine this shriveled little plant in the closet.

Why would we pick that?

It's crazy, and yet there is something within us that is told to do so.

Don't participate in the fruitless works of darkness.

Instead, expose them.

That sounds dangerous.

Let's see what that means.

All of these things coming out of.

Now you are light.

Do not participate in darkness.

Do not cater to them.

Do not worship God and worship at those high places.

So, what does exposing look like in verses 12 through 14?

It's shameful even to mention what is done by them in secret.

I love how Paul is like, expose the works of darkness.

It's shameful to even talk about it.

Like I mean, you better be really good at charades then, I guess.

But maybe that's not what he means.

So it's shameful to even mention what's done by the shameful.

It goes all the way back to Genesis 2 and 3.

Well, here's what I know, and I am inferring here.

It doesn't say this in the text.

You cannot be a light that exposes darkness if you avoid the light at all costs.

I mean, avoid the darkness at all costs.

If we cloister ourselves and say, everybody come in here, it's safe here, the dark is bad, close the doors, we're safe here.

How what are we exposing then?

If you avoid the darkness, you're not living in a world that interacts and bumps shoulders with the lost.

How are we exposing?

You certainly can't expose the darkness if you partner with it.

We were visiting family in Ohio this last week, and uh it's just one of those fun Midwest things that doesn't translate here, but the pastor was basically saying how you can't resist the devil while your holy pinkies with them.

And I was like, that's weird, I'm using it.

So you can't expose the darkness if you partner with it.

So how does this exposing happen?

Let's go back to verse 8.

You were darkness, no, you are light.

Live, walk as children of light.

Walk in your faith, act out your faith.

Live in a dark world as a light.

Simple as that.

Continues forward in verse 13.

Everything exposed by the light is made visible.

I know that sounds like a duh, but still, if you take a flashlight and you point it at something, it illuminates it.

Magic.

That's what it does.

It doesn't, the flashlight, I mean the darkness doesn't push the flashlight back into the tube.

It doesn't happen that way.

So exposing dark the light to dark things without partnering with it.

What makes everything visible is light.

And here's the key here.

Verse 14.

Therefore it said, get up, sleeper, rise up from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

We don't know where this quote came from.

Not a clue.

So wherever he is pulling this, if it's a colloquialism in the day, or if it's something else, I don't know what that is.

But the key of this is you can boil that down to the gospel.

Wake up, sleeper.

Rise up from the dead, and Christ will shine on you, and you too will be light.

So that is what is an exposing agent as children of light is to live in such a way that does not imbue God and.

We talk about struggles, hang-up, difficulties, challenges, that if we just sit in one place and do nothing, God will just poof, make it go away, and affirm us in the process.

That is our culture.

What do we do?

Let's look at 1 John 1, 5 through 9.

If you can pull that up.

This is the message we've heard from him and declare to you.

God is light.

There is absolutely no darkness in him.

When we talked at the very beginning, pause, about imitating God as beloved children.

He is light and there is no darkness in him.

Continuing forward.

If we say we have fellowship with him and yet we walk in darkness, we are lying and not practicing the truth.

If there's no struggle within us and yet we say we're his, no struggle if we're basically like, no, I'm going to habitually sin without repentance, without any kind of struggle, and say that I belong to him, we are deceiving ourselves.

Struggle, I'm going to pause for a second.

Struggle has nuance.

Struggle does not have a shelf life, by the way.

So what we may think of like, well, I struggled for two days and then I blew it again, and so now I guess I don't know if I'm saved or not.

I have known people who struggled their whole lives.

And God brought about the victory after half a century of struggle.

So let's not put an end date on the work of that.

The question is, is there a struggle within us?

Okay.

However, if we walk in the light, as he himself is the light, we have fellowship with one another, the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanses us from all sin.

Now, if we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.

But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

I would make the case that culturally, and maybe it's just because we spent too long in the South, but culturally, confession is not something we do or talk about.

That's not a part of our hypertherapeutic culture.

Confession?

Ooh, that's a bad word.

That would indicate that you are not actually whole, and he affirms you no matter what.

When is the last time we have confessed something?

What happens according to 1 John 5.9 if we confess our sins?

He is faithful, he is righteous, to forgive us and to cleanse us.

Why would we not confess our sin?

We spend, if you're anything like me, if you're anything like me, so much of our Christian walk trying to put lacquer over our sin so people don't know what we are doing wrong and struggling with, so we look like good people when if we confessed it, yeah, he will forgive us, cleanse us.

That may not be a one-day process, but guess what?

We can confess again.

When is the last time we have repented of those high places in our life?

Do we even know what those high places are in our life?

Do we have people in our life who love us enough and have the relational equity to gently and appropriately, in the right time with all the qualifiers, call that out in our life and say, this don't look so good, guys?

Flip side, in what ways do we see God working through us as we walk in love and light?

God literally wired you with specific gifts and callings as a part of the body of Christ in ways that not very many other people are.

Do you see how he works through you?

It doesn't have to be huge and crazy and mind-blowing.

He works the most crazy things in the mundane.

Ten million people moving one inch goes farther than one person moving a thousand inches, even though that looks a whole lot cooler on a stage.

Be encouraged that God is using you and working through the things as you walk with him.

However, what things do we need to confess and repent of in our own lives?

Also, do we live and love in a manner that doesn't take tomorrow for granted?

One thing I love about Paul, he works with urgency.

One of the things, and I heard a different pastor preach this a long time ago that's stuck with me, is that one of the best things that Satan loves to do in our current culture is go go back to sleep.

Just go back, don't go to the gym today, just go to sleep.

Tomorrow, tomorrow.

We don't know if tomorrow's coming, guys.

Now that doesn't mean just start working in your flesh.

That's not helpful.

But ultimately, are we active?

Sometimes we call what is passive patient.

On the other side, sometimes we call what is impatient ambitious.

So just know there's a healthy middle place.

Who knows what that middle place is?

Sunday school answer.

Jesus! Yes.

So with that in mind, when we are unsure, what do we go back to?

The Word of God.

The Holy Spirit.

I know some of you pretty well.

I don't know all of you super well.

I cannot tell you what the Holy Spirit wants to stir up within you necessarily, and I cannot tell you what he wants to tear down.

He knows that though, and you can trust him to speak to you.

If we hear this, as Paul is pretty blunt in this passage about correction and about tearing down those high places, if we hear that and the result is uh fear and condemnation, the best cure to that is run straight to Jesus.

Run to his word.

Let him be the one who speaks to you by the power of the Holy Spirit.

But may we live in such a way that work confidently the ways that he has called us to, in the fruitless, sometimes annoying, exposing aspects of light, that we would tear down the high places, that we would listen to the Spirit, and that we would love one another well in all things as we imitate him.

Let's pray.

Lord, I thank you so much for your goodness.

I thank you for your faithfulness in all things.

Going back to the beginning, I thank you that you call us to imitate you because we who have put our faith in you are already yours, are already your children.

I thank you that you are not a disapproving father looking for ways that we fall short, that we are already accepted in you through the blood of Jesus.

I thank you that you are so good and loving that you do not share, that you do not cohabitate easily with darkness.

And so I ask, Lord, that we would be people, followers of you, children of you, who confess our sins to you.

Knowing that you already see them and haven't rejected us.

I ask, Lord, that we would be quick to call sin, even if it is culturally permissible.

I ask that we would be quick to lay that before you and ask you to obliterate it by your power.

I thank you that your spirit is within us, and struggle is not a sign of defeat, but rather a sign of your sanctification within us.

Let us continue to feed our spirit by your spirit.

I ask, Lord, do you would continue to work within us, stir us up, to walk in you, to be lights in our world, that we would not avoid darkness and cloister ourselves, that we would not commingle with the darkness and settle for cultural conformity, but that we would be joyful, exposing agents of your light, not by railing against the obviousness of sin in a fallen world, but rather by the joyful proclamation of your gospel.

For anybody who has heard this, who has not put their faith in Jesus, it is just as simple saying, Lord, I want to put my faith in you.

I believe, I confess I'm a sinner.

I believe that you died for me in my place and offer me life, and I want to receive that and turn my life over to you.

I ask, Lord, by your spirit, that you would work on hearts to do so, that you would work on hearts of believers to not tolerate darkness, to not give in to condemnation, to stir up light, that we would not be sleepy, but that we would not work in our own flesh as a result either.

Have your way with us in your name.

Amen.