Children of Light

This morning we're going to be looking at Ephesians again. We had a bit of a journey through it last week, so you can flip to Ephesians 5. But before we get there, one of my all time favourite Christian heroes or heroes of the faith is a man called William Booth. Does anyone know who that is? William Booth?

A few of us. He was the founder of the Salvation Army, which started in England in the eighteen hundreds. And he was an absolutely remarkable man, absolutely remarkable man. If you want to be challenged in your faith, go and read his biography. He died in 1912, aged at the ripe age of 83, but he never retired from ministry.

He never became a minister emeritus or anything like that. He was touring the country as much as possible, even at one point completely blind as he got an infection in his eyes, and right up until his very last, he was fighting the cause of the Salvation Army, but more importantly, the cause of Christ. In his final speech, he showed his determination for the cause of social justice when he said this, his final final speech, a man in his eighties. He said this: While women weep as they do now, I'll continue fighting. While little children go hungry, I'll fight.

While men go to prison in and out, in and out, as they do now, I'll fight. Where there is a drunkard left, where there is a poor girl lost on the streets, where there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I will fight. I'll fight to the very end. As a Christian and as a pastor, I can't help but be inspired by that, to be moved by the determination of this man. What is it that moved him so much?

Why was he willing to fight and fight and fight to the very end? And importantly, I asked myself, why did he have that conviction and I don't? Well, I think it had everything to do with that overriding metaphor that he used in this speech, in this quote, but also in his life. What William Booth saw in his life was a calling to bring the light of God to dark souls, to souls struggling in the blindness and the darkness that they found themselves in. If there was a metaphor that would sum up his ministry, it would be that.

The very last line that I read: where there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight. Now this is a concept we're going to be looking at, so I'll get our presentation up there if we can. This concept of light and dark, we find in the book of Ephesians this morning. Paul talks about this and we're going to investigate this a little bit more. We're going to understand why Paul uses it and in what context.

So let's have a read this morning at Ephesians 5:1-16. Ephesians chapter 5, verses 1 to 16. And Paul says to the Christians in Ephesus: Be imitators of God therefore, as dearly loved children, and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. But among you, there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality or of any kind of impurity or of greed because these are improper for God's holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk, or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving.

For of this you can be sure: no immoral, impure, or greedy person, such a man is an idolater, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God's wrath comes on those who are disobedient. Therefore do not be partners with them. 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 in all goodness, righteousness and truth, and find out what pleases the Lord.

Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for it is the light that makes everything visible. This is why it is said: wake up, oh sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. Be very careful then how you live, not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity because the days are evil.

Therefore do not be foolish but understand what the Lord's will is. So far our reading. When the apostle Paul warned the Ephesian Christians about the areas in life that they needed to surrender over to God, when he said that they were not to have even a hint of sexual discretion or immorality in them, he knew exactly what he was talking about. The context what Paul is writing to here is of a people that lived in the shadow of the Temple of Artemis. Think of places around the world that you will go and travel to.

Think of Sydney. You go to Sydney for the first time perhaps to visit what? The Opera House or the Harbour Bridge or the Harbour itself. Right? What will you go and see in New York?

You'll go and see the Statue of Liberty. You'll go and see a Broadway show. You'll go and see all these landmarks. Right? You would go to Ephesus for this one reason, a very big reason, to visit the Temple of Artemis, the biggest temple that existed in the ancient era.

Artemis was a fertility god and how you would show your love and appreciation and worship of Artemis is you would go and worship, bring your sacrifice to the temple and your sacrifice was to sleep with a temple prostitute. And here is Paul writing to the Ephesians living in the shadow of this temple. At one time, Gentiles, at one time worshipping Artemis in this way, and he writes to a church a few years later, after he had spent two and a half years there, he writes to them a few years later and they were really wrestling with this thing. He talks to them so much about this area of purity, purity of your body, purity of your mind, sexual immorality and so on. Two and a half years, Paul preached there and it's safe to say that some of these Ephesians he saw were wrestling with this thing.

And he writes to this church in Ephesus full of people massively affected by the immorality of the culture in which they lived. They may have been Christians now. They may have been in the process of God cleaning them up from the inside out, but everywhere else they had friends and family that were saying, no, this is how you do it. This is how you worship God. And so in every aspect, the shadow of the Temple of Artemis had its influence.

It affected every part of their social structure and here Paul is writing about this and he uses this metaphor: live as children of light. Live as children of light. Have a look at verse 8. This is what he says: 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 in all goodness, righteousness, and truth, and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. You've probably heard of a little movie called Star Wars, probably all over your news feeds at the moment, and I'm not going to spoil anything because I did go and watch it, but in the world of Star Wars, there is this overriding epic drama of the fight between the dark side and the light side. Right? If you've seen it, it's this epic battle between the two. And it might be tempting for us to think of what Paul is talking about here in that sort of way, this dark side, light side, epic battle.

But the image or the metaphor in Star Wars is one of dualism, that there's this balance that needs to be maintained, that there is a good side, the Jedi side, and there's the Sith side, the dark side, and they're in this struggle for universal supremacy. And it's based on, and the creator will tell you this, it's based on an ancient eastern philosophy that says there is this balance required, the yin and the yang, the good and the evil, and that neither will completely conquer the other one, but will always remain in a state of tension. That's not going on here. There's no dualism going on here. The biblical understanding of light and dark is a metaphor that's actually right throughout the Bible.

It's right throughout the Bible. Darkness in the Bible is symbolised not so much in an evil domain, but the domain of ignorance or lack of knowledge. Ephesians 4:18 and 2 Corinthians 4:4 will tell you that. This lack of knowledge causes sin. This lack of knowledge, this darkness causes sin.

Satan is not the origin of this darkness. Satan is as much clouded by this darkness as every other person living apart from Christ. On the other hand, light pictures knowledge, the knowledge particularly of truth when it comes to God being in our lives. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:6: for God who said, let light shine out of darkness when he created the world, when God created the world and said let light shine out of darkness has made his light shine in our hearts as Christians to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. Light is also, in 1 Timothy 6, pictured as the holiness of God who Paul says dwells in unapproachable light.

Where darkness cannot exist, the holiness of God is the unapproachable light of God. And as believers, 1 John 1:7 says, we are called to walk in this light, in this holiness. What we find here in Ephesians 5 is two things that I want us to reflect on. Firstly, we're going to look at what light is, and secondly, what light does. What light is.

Have you ever gone to a cave? I know there's some great caves in places like New Zealand or South Africa, there's some, and in Australia as well. Have you ever been to a cave and done a tour in a cave and the tour guide might take you there and might make you squeeze in through all these little cracks and find these massive caverns and then all of a sudden, just for the fun of it, he'll turn off the light. He'll turn off all the light and then he'll say, you know, try and find your way out of here now. It is so dark.

It is so dark. You can't even see your hand in front of your face. It's that dark. There's not a shred, not a little bit of light in that place. Paul says that we were formerly darkness.

Do you notice there in verse 8, he says you were once darkness. He doesn't say you were once in darkness, like in that cave where this darkness is around you, you know who you are, but he says you were darkness. You were so consumed by this. It was all encompassing. There was nothing in you, in your existence that had any separation from this darkness.

You were darkness. And therefore, you were by nature consumed with sin. We not only didn't see God's glory, we not only didn't want to know His truth, we didn't have the ability to desire any of it. There was nothing in us that wanted it. We didn't sense a need for a saviour because we didn't understand the absolute holiness and justice of God, and so we lived entirely for ourselves, Paul says.

We avoided every thought of death and eternity, living entirely for ourselves, Paul explains. And in verse 5 he says, this manifests itself in immorality, impurity, and greed. And he puts it in parenthesis, he says, which is idolatry. He says, this is the sin beneath all the sin. The sin beneath all the sin is idolatry.

We choose to be God. But then he says when God saved us as Christians, He opened the eyes of our understanding so that we saw the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. We saw our condition as it truly is. You see some of those really freaky looking fish at the bottom of the sea where it's like super dark? They're disgusting.

I wonder if they really can see the other person, the other fish, and be freaked out by it. They're really built more for practicality, pragmatic reasons. They've got that little light bulb that sort of floats in front of their face and stuff like that, but they're hideous. When God turned the light on in our life, we realised we were these fish. We realised how hideous we were.

There's nothing in us or about us that was pretty. And he says, now through the Holy Spirit, everything has changed for us. We have a new understanding of truth. We came to believe where we find this truth is in God's word. And through the power of the Spirit, He now has given us the desire to know God and this truth and strive for it. That's why I said last week, if you are wrestling with sin, if you are guilty, if you feel convicted by it, if you doubt that you are a Christian because you are so broken and so flawed, that's a good thing.

That's a good thing. God is already working. And while some of us can't exactly say when this change took place, maybe some of us have been Christians or in a Christian household for a long time, you know that it did take place somewhere, somewhere along the line. You were formerly darkness, not simply in darkness, you were formerly darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. But just because we are children of light doesn't guarantee that we will live perfectly, he says.

We still exist in a world surrounded by darkness. Paul says in effect, you are light, now be what you are. He said it in Ephesians 4, remember: I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. He says, you are light. Now be light.

You are light. Now walk in that way. And he describes this life of light in four ways and we see that in verses 9 and 10. Firstly, says, if we are children of light, we will be good. Paul says in 5:9: for the fruit of the light consists in these things.

First of all, goodness. Goodness is one of God's attributes. It's who He is in essence. To be good is to be like God. Applied to us, goodness is a broad term for a behaviour that benefits others instead of self.

A good person, according to the Bible, is concerned for the well-being of others, both spiritually and every way. They will walk in daily dependence on the Holy Spirit, since goodness is also a fruit of the Spirit, in Galatians 5:22. Since it is a fruit, it takes time to develop. That fruit, Paul says in Galatians, grows in us, but over the years, your trajectory will be to be good if you are a child of the light. Secondly, if we walk as children of light, we will be righteous.

This refers to being conformed to God's standards. A righteous person is someone who is right before God and others. They do what is right according to God's word in all situations. In all situations. They fight the fight in every circumstance.

They don't retire from Christianity. They will fight where there is darkness in someone's soul. Thirdly, we walk as children of light when we are people of truth. Again, in the context of Ephesians, truth spoken of here is in stark contrast to what Paul is talking about before. He says in Ephesians 4:22 and 5:6 that non-believers are deceived.

They are deceived. That we have been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth and that we are to speak as Christians the truth in love, 4:25. So we combat not this spiritual force of darkness, we combat lies, deceit with truth. We are to be people who shouldn't have anything to hide therefore, which is what deception and lies is. Right?

We are to be people who shouldn't have anything to hide because we walk in light. Therefore we are people of truth. And then lastly, in verse 10, if we are if we walk as children of light, we will learn what is pleasing to the Lord. It means that we don't determine what is pleasing to God. It means that we don't determine what pleases God by our own feelings, by our own rationalisations, because again if we were honest and once we approach that light and we see our little ugly, the little ugly fish that we are, we notice how we fluctuate all the time.

What we determine to be right and wrong fluctuates all the time. We don't even live by standards of what other Christians say or think. We don't determine what is good or right by our own conscience even, rather we learn what pleases the Lord from himself in his word. Living to please the Lord is a fundamental difference between what is a believer and what is an unbeliever. That is the fundamental difference.

An unbeliever may be considered a good man. At least outwardly he may be truthful, but apart from the transformational reality of coming to Christ, he does it out of selfish ambition. He is darkness. He is so consumed by it. There is nothing in him that is light.

So from an outwardly perspective, he may be a man with a lot of respect and goodness, but it could be that his motivations are driven by a need for self-respect or that others may think highly of him, but as Christians, Paul says, we live completely to please the Lord. We have a new personal relationship with the one who snatched us out of a horrible pit of this darkness. We now evaluate everything by this question: Does this please the Lord who loved me and saved me for Himself? Does what I do please the Lord who loved me and saved me for Himself?

So the first requirement, the first meaning for being a child of the light is to live light, to simply be different to the darkness. That is what light is. But then secondly, what light does, we see in verses 11 to 14. In Ephesians 5:11-12, Paul says this: have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.

Not only do we live in light, Paul says, not only do we exist in a completely different state as we used to as non-Christians around us, but we are to expose darkness as well. I read a lecture once by the great preacher Charles Spurgeon, and a phenomenally gifted communicator and preacher and theologian and pastor. And towards the end of his ministry, he was asked to do some lectures to Bible College students, to new preachers coming through. And in one of these lectures, he urged the newbie preachers to use illustrations well, to sow them into the message that they were going to preach. And he said it is so important to do this because illustrations can provide so much power to your preaching.

Says and it can be on anything. He says it can be as mundane or as normal as talking about a candle. And I think I don't know. I think he sort of said this just off the cuff, and all these students kinda looked at him and smirked and like, yeah. Whatever.

Candle, which is like our light bulb today. Right? It was so common. Was. And he said, really guys, you can preach for six months on the illustration of candle candles and how it illustrates or how it explains the Christian life, and they still didn't believe him. So he went and did two lectures on candles.

It's called sermons on candles, and this is what he writes, and he gives 35 different completely fresh analogies of a candle and candlelight and the Christian life. In one of them though that I want to share with you is he talks about Job. He got, you know, the man whose life was completely flipped by God and who was cast into this massive despair having lost everything in his life, and he talks about the light of Christ as a candle in this. He says, hear how Job sighs in chapter 29, verses 2 and 3. This is him speaking, Charles Spurgeon.

He says: Oh that I were as in the months past, sorry, this is Job. Oh that I were as in the months past, as in the days when God preserved me, when His candle shined upon my head. So Job is wishing that his life was like the good old days. And Spurgeon says, Job had known prosperity and that it was gone. He had enjoyed heavenly fellowship and that had been obscured.

The candle of the Lord was a candle indeed. When that brightness is reflected from our faces, we are as happy as the angels in heaven. But when it is taken away, we sit in a darkness which can be felt. He who once enjoyed fellowship with God, he continues, will never be happy again without it. If we had remained in the blindness of our nature, we should not have known of the glory of divine love, nor should we have been in distress when a conscious sense of it was withdrawn.

But now that we are enlightened by divine grace, darkness brings woe to us. Darkness brings woe to us. When we lose the candle of the Lord, he says, we imitate Job in sighing for its return. What Spurgeon points to in this is the reality that every Christian who has tasted the light of God's goodness, every Christian who has tasted the light of God's goodness cannot help but be deeply affected by the scourge of darkness around them. Once you know the joy of Christ's candle, darkness brings woe to us.

And Paul says in Ephesians 5 that light exposes darkness always. It is light that makes everything visible, he says in verse 14. But this light doesn't just bring exposure, it brings life. Paul says in verse 14, he quotes an old hymn that was being sung at that time. He quotes and he says, this is what making the darkness visible means.

He says: wake up, oh sleeper. Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. The light of Christ, he says, brings the dead back to life. And that is the power of being a child of light. Friends, this is the mission and the calling of every Christian, to bring those caught in darkness and death to the only place where there is light and life.

This is the mission. This is the calling. This is the purpose that will drive you for your entire existence on this planet if you truly understand Christianity. This is the mission and the calling that may drive us to say with William Booth: where there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I will fight because I know what that light means for me and I know how the darkness felt. Paul wrote to a church in Ephesus where every layer of their social structure was overwhelmed in darkness and he said to this little church, twenty, thirty, 40 people, be light.

Be light. Why should I care about the world around me? Because you are light. Not all of us will be called to be William Booths. Not all of us will be pastors.

So the question you have to ask yourself is how can my calling in life as a Christian bring life and justice to the world around me? How can I participate in everyday ways to bring light to the broken structures of my world? Firstly, you have to begin by understanding that you are light. In essence, that is who you are. Not in light, you are light.

But secondly, expose darkness because that is what light does. And that can be done in an endless variety of ways. It will mean that you have to think it through and pray it through very carefully, but here are some practical things, and I've spoken and used these examples before. Tim Keller, the pastor in New York writes this: On the calling of life, how you can see your work and your mission, your personal mission filled out. And so I'm just going to share that again with you this morning to be very, very practical.

Firstly, look at your affinity. Look at your own skills and your giftings, who you are as a person because God has created you to be in that way already. Start with your context first. What do you relate to? What moves you?

What do you feel deep compassion about? Do you get frustrated by programmes or projects that are disorganised, or don't have well-defined goals? What moves you to experience some definite emotions like anger or love or satisfaction or compassion? The reason many people hate their work, for example, is because it doesn't move them emotionally. It doesn't align with who they are, what they have an affinity for.

And it really is possible to get moved even by things like good administration if that is something that is your calling in life. You can become excited about good administration. The second thing is ability. We should look at our abilities when prayerfully working out our calling for work. If I'm particularly moved to a certain workplace or a certain charity or profession or trade, usually I lean towards those things because I have an interest and a skill in that area.

Question you have to ask is: what can I contribute to this trade? What strengths has God already given me to meet that particular need? We also need to have maturity to search ourselves and to know what we're not good at. To know where we are lacking. I might have the mind to be a great engineer and do some amazing things for the kingdom of God, can decide some great things, but I might be terrible at communication.

So being able to honestly plot our abilities and deficiencies is really important in living this out practically. And the last thing, just again, by way of making this really practical, is opportunity. Sometimes we overlook this one. We can do some strength and weakness, you know, exercises, but we don't look at opportunities. God is the one in charge of your life.

Remember that. He's the one that brings you to situations. He's the one that guides you, and sometimes that opportunity is right in front of you while you might be looking for something on the other side of the world, or on the other side of your ability, or whatever. We should always remember that God is in control of the calling on our lives. If we remain open to His leading and remain connected to Him through prayer, opportunities will come.

We must remind ourselves to keep our eyes open, to keep our ears to the ground. And even if you miss the opportunity, even if you don't see it initially, trust also that God is able to so flip your life around that He will eventually bring you back onto that course. If He is sovereign, if He is in complete control, even a mistake, even a sinful decision, He will bring you back because He is a redeemer. Right? He is a redeemer. Friends, remember that you were once not in darkness, you were darkness.

You were flailing about in blindness and desperateness of an existence without hope. That hope you have found in Christ alone. If you don't know Him, come to Him today. If you have not placed your trust in Him, if you still feel the angst of desperation, turn to Him, give Him your life. Let Him be the Lord of light in your life.

But Christian, if you do know Him and if you delight in Him today, you are light in the Lord. Therefore, live as children of light. Amen. Heavenly Father, there is a great purpose and a calling to each of our lives. It is no accident, Lord, that you have called us and drawn us to this place.

It is no accident that you have given us jobs, opportunities, inclinations, abilities, giftings. It is no accident, Lord, that we still are waiting for your return. It is no coincidence. It is no accident that we are waiting for your return. There is a purpose, Lord.

And we do sense, as our elder Quibi prayed, there is a sense of deep darkness around us even today. We sense it, Lord, even as we come to this glorious occasion of remembering your birth. Father, we ask that you will move us, move this church, move our professions and callings in such a way that we will be light, that we will expose the emptiness, the desperation, and the hopelessness of the darkness. Lord, give us the priority and the discipline and the desire to do this. May our lives reflect your glory, your goodness.

May our hearts be full of joy and thankfulness always. And may we be moved because of this as well. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.