Living as Light

I'll get you to turn with me to Ephesians chapter five, and we will be looking at the first twenty-one verses of Ephesians. So Ephesians five verses one through to twenty-one. Paul writes to the Ephesian Christians. He says, "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 partners with them. For at one time, you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.

Walk as children of light, for the fruit 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 the 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, oh 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 of the 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 and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. So far, our reading, this is God's word. We're going to be talking about this, these metaphors of light and darkness this morning. And our series, as you may remember, is called living as light.

And that concept and those words have come from specifically this section of Ephesians. I want to maybe say this, and I don't think there's a lot of sort of young kids here this morning, but we're going to be speaking of things that are probably of a PG nature. And so parents, if you haven't had this sort of conversation, these conversations with your child and don't want me to force anything on you, it might be a good moment to take them out of the creche. The reason I talk about that or mention that is because this passage is, in large part, centred on sexual practices. Sex and sexuality is really at the core of these verses.

And if you thought that humanity for the first time is wrestling with sex and sexuality in the twenty-first century, think again. The issue of it as an identity, the issue of it as a private practice that should not, you know, be investigated by others is absolutely not true. It happened in the first century AD as we discover here. By way of context, we come to this passage having just transitioned from Ephesians chapter four, where Paul has been talking about a genuine unity and love within the body of Christ, within the church. Paul urges the Christians there to have a new set of clothing that they put on, to put off the old self and put on the new self that has been created to live a life like Jesus.

And then in verses one and two of this chapter, chapter five, we see this transition happening. Some translations, some Bibles put these two verses with the previous section, and the ESV has kept it in this section because it really is a pivot. Therefore, Paul says, "Be imitators of God as beloved children. Walk in love as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God." So again, a summary of the gospel as Paul pivots again into his ethical teaching, the implications of that love which we received in Christ.

We're going to look at basically three sections in this passage. Firstly, we are introduced in verses three to six of this metaphor of darkness, which is only really explained a little bit later in the passage. But really, Paul begins with a description of what he will later call darkness. The metaphor that Paul will run with is this contrast between light and darkness, and we find those two metaphors used throughout the New Testament. Today, when we read light and dark, we are sometimes swayed by, I dare say, popular understandings of those terms, those metaphors.

And so we have to be careful not to read in our own cultural baggage when we see those words. I dare say that today, when Christians read light and dark, we instinctively think of the battle between good and evil. I mentioned before that Desiree and I are working through the Harry Potter series, and one of the key enemies there is Lord Voldemort, who's called the dark lord. And everything about him is dark and sinister and so on. And obviously, the opposite side is the light.

A couple of generations ago, for some of us that are sort of Gen Xers and boomers perhaps, we had Star Wars with Darth Vader who wore all black and Luke Skywalker who was in white. The dark side of the force and the light side of the force. And we can read some of those concepts into Ephesians five here. But I wanna say that that idea of good versus evil represented by light and dark is actually not really what the Bible tells us about those metaphors. It's closer to an Eastern or a new age thinking if we assume that that is what Paul is talking about.

In new age beliefs, there's such a thing as dualism. That's a tension between light and dark, good and evil. These two are equal and opposite forces that push against each other and are at war against each other, and they are held in tension according to some older Eastern beliefs, that the yin and the yang idea of balance needing to be maintained between good and evil. Newer new age beliefs will tweak that a little bit to say that light needs to win, but that darkness is a reality and that it is a very powerful force. And so it's true that a lot of Christians today adopt these ideas of light and darkness and read that into passages like this one.

We can say as Christians that indeed, the battle between light and dark is an epic one. It is a struggle. And yet, we have to be careful that we don't fall into the trap that people in past generations have, where all sorts of superstitions can arise. Fear and dread at the power of demons. The need to carry holy symbols, holy water and crucifixes around with us, special rituals created to bless and sanctify houses and special incantations that we can pray over one another with this fear of the darkness.

But if you look closely at these verses in Ephesians five, where we find actually one of Paul's most extended explanations, extended teachings on the tension of light and darkness, you'll see that he's not so much referring to Satan or demons here or even pure evil. Darkness is referred to as ignorance, not understanding. So across the New Testament, the domain of darkness is found mostly in the state of lack of knowledge. For example, last week, we saw Paul saying that an unbeliever's mind is futile because it is darkened. Now, of course, the lack of knowledge of God is certainly steeped in sin, and so the evil of sin is naturally tied to the blindness of the darkness, but it's a very important distinction for us to make up front.

It means that you can say of Satan, that he is as much clouded by the darkness of ignorance as every other person is that lives apart from Christ. He is not the author of the power of darkness. He's not the dark lord like Voldemort. He is an object of this ignorant blindness himself. Alternatively, light here is the metaphor of the knowledge of the truth.

That truth comes when God enters our souls through this thing called regeneration, being born again. As Paul writes in two Corinthians four verse six, "The God who said, let light shine out of darkness at the beginning of creation, this God has made His light shine into our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ." That's why one John one verse seven, which we read this morning also, can challenge us as believers with these words: "If we say we have fellowship with God while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth." So the opposite of darkness is truth.

Darkness is not so much represented as the epitome of satanic evil as it's represented as being the opposite of the truth found in God. And so it's with that definition that we look at these verses three to six. Now, we may or may not be surprised to read that the example of darkened ignorant thinking is seen very clearly in how people think and talk about sex. This is, for Paul, just an example. It's not the epitome.

It's not the worst thing, but here is a visible, tangible, experiential explanation of the darkness of sin. It's how people warp sex and sexuality. Verses three to four stress in Paul's words that sexual immorality is a totally alien concept to the Christian way of life. For those called to live up to the gospel reality of their salvation, remember Ephesians four verse one, live up to your calling. There's a call here in these verses of distancing ourselves from the gratuitous sensuality and sexual greed that the world calls for.

Paul says, "Sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you. Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking." And then Paul warns us in verses five and six 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," he says, "for because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience." In short, sexually immoral, impure and covetous people will not be in the kingdom of God.

Now, a couple of things to say in Paul's description here of what darkness looks like. Firstly, it's significant that sexual immorality and impurity is listed here alongside covetousness. Did you think that's strange? To covet means to jealously, greedily desire something that isn't yours. To covet is to desire something that isn't yours.

Now, I've always thought when I've read this passage that Paul is sort of just taking a scattergun approach, just talking about sins in general. Sexual immorality and then for the rest of us that are greedy, not wrestling with that, but maybe with love of money, we'll talk about coveting. But I've realised this week that this is, again, speaking specifically about intimacy and sex. Where sexual immorality and impurity can be understood to be sins done with the body, covetousness here is the sin of the mind and heart behind that. It's your desires, your thought life, the reasons for you pursuing intimacy that drives those skewed understandings, skewed actions of the body. You could say that the scourge of pornography amongst men in particular, but women aren't excluded in that.

And it's just as rife in the church as it is outside the church. You could say that that is what is in view here. That coveting is a greedy desire for other women, for other practices, for fetishes, for a fantasy life. That is the sin of coveting mentioned here. The women aren't off the hook, however, because the world of fantasy in romance novels or drama movies or shows, that dreaming about certain celebrities or sports stars, that is the exact same sin that is in view here.

It is a selfish, me-centred, self-gratifying obsession with something that isn't yours, and it is an idolatrous thing, Paul says, because it is obsessing over something that is created and is not the Creator who is God Himself. The positive alternative therefore that Paul represents is found at the end of verse four where he says, "Instead, let there be thanksgiving." So don't do that, but give thanks. Now at first, this sounds like a strange alternative. Why is that the thing?

Why not say stop doing that? You know, avoid that. Run away from that. No. The alternative here is to be thankful.

How does thanksgiving overcome immorality? If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. While sexual sin is often completed by the body, it starts in the heart and in the mind. The key to overcoming the selfishness of that sexual sin is to have a heart that bursts with thankfulness to God. Why?

Because at the heart of thanksgiving is the acknowledgment that God is the Creator and that everything He makes is good. And that everything He has given to you is for a purpose that is good. To those stumbling in the darkness of ignorance, the Bible says, you have no recognition of the Creator God being at the centre of your life and being your heart's greatest desire. Instead, their lust has made the human body the object of their worship. And what a fallen, shortsighted object of worship that is.

That's why Paul ends this section of verse twenty with the encouragement to the Christians to give thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thanksgiving, the action of intentionally, mindfully thanking God for His goodness. Thanksgiving can overhaul your sexual sin by dismantling the narrative that you tell yourself about your romantic life. By forming the habit of the heart, which thanks God for your wife or your husband and the way that they love you, by disciplining yourself to thank God for what you have been given by Him in your husband or wife, by thanking God for protecting you against the emotional, psychological entanglements of intimacy with boyfriends or girlfriends who are not worthy yet of being your husbands or wives, and they aren't worthy because otherwise, you would have already married them. Even a fiancé isn't quite worthy because they've committed to a wedding date.

They haven't committed to you for life yet. Thanking God for keeping you single right now as a single person. You can thank God for your singleness, means you can thank Him for stopping you from making terrible life decisions. So if you can just discipline yourself to regularly sit down and list all of the good reasons for why God may have you in the romantic situation you are in, you start dismantling the narrative of the always wanting what I can't have story that you are making yourself believe. So that is why thanksgiving is listed here as the alternative to sexual sin.

Because at the centre of thanksgiving stands a God who so graciously loves you with a deep and understanding wisdom of every part of you who wisely chooses to give you specifically the things that you have now and He knows best. And you are simply invited by Him to enjoy His goodness and to delight yourself in those gifts to your heart's content. So delight yourself in those gifts and then ignore everything else. So that is what Paul begins with when he describes darkness. That is the life of darkness.

That is the turmoil that you'll have if you don't want to follow God and you want to worship yourself or another person's body. And then he says, don't become partners with them. And the fact that he can say that means that you can, as a Christian, become partners with them. This is not like this is hypothetically what you can be. And he's saying, you can choose to partner with that, but don't.

And he moves on now to talk about describing what the light is, living as light, verses eight to fourteen. In my travels, I've had a wonderful opportunity several times to visit some of the most amazing caves in the world. I've done caves in New Zealand. I've done very interesting caves in Israel and Jordan, and I've visited one of the biggest caves in the world in South Africa. Now invariably, I found that at some point in the tour, the guide tells everyone to turn their lights off.

And it's only for a few seconds, but it feels like minutes. It feels like hours that you stand there in complete and utter darkness. You can put your hand in front of your face and you don't know where your hand is. It's that dark. And Paul says that apart from God's intervention through Christ, you are that blind.

Apart from God's grace, not only are you surrounded by that darkness, verse eight says, you were that darkness. It's not only out there, it is in you. Did you see those words? You, you, you weren't in darkness, you were darkness. It means by nature, you are consumed by ignorance towards God.

We not only don't know God's glory and truth, we don't have the ability and desire to see it. There is no place where this darkness ended and we began. We are consumed by it. And Paul says, because of Christ, you are no longer that. And he says again, not you aren't in the light, you are light.

The amazing truth of the gospel is that as Christians, it's not simply that your circumstances have changed, that you've, when you become a Christian, joined the church and it's a positive community of friendly people who provide you with friendship and positive peer pressure. No, it's the situation that you have personally been changed, transformed. When God saved us, He opened the eyes of our understanding so that we would see the light of knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We've come to realise what our true condition was, and that is that we are guilty sinners before a holy God. And we've come to know the sufficiency of Jesus and His sacrifice on the cross for me.

And I've come to believe that He has washed away my sin, that He has cleansed me, and that through the Holy Spirit, God is now starting to give me His righteousness, giving me new desires to live how God intends me to live so that I now don't delight in ignorance and sin anymore. I grieve over it, in fact. I'm sorry about it every week when I'm confronted with it at church. I'm saddened by it when a Christian friend or a spouse reveals it to me. Now I desire to be like my Saviour Jesus and to be holy as my heavenly Father is holy.

"For at one time, you were darkness," Paul says, "but now you are light in the Lord. Walk, therefore, as children of light." Verse nine: "For the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true, and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord." Paul again says here, like he says in chapter four, become what you are. You are light.

Now, live as children of light. And then in verse nine, he describes what this living as light looks like. Very quickly, we'll jump through it. If we walk as children of light, we will be good, he says. For the fruit of light is found in all that is good.

And goodness, in its broadest sense, in the Bible, is a behaviour that benefits others above oneself. Goodness is benefiting others above oneself. A good person, in other words, is concerned with the well-being of others. That's why we can talk of God being good only in relation to how He treats us. God is good because He is concerned about our well-being.

And so being children of light means we will, by nature, be concerned with how well others are doing around us. Secondly, if we walk as children of light, we will be righteous. The ESV translates the word simply as right, but it really should be translated as righteousness. If we are children of light, we will be transformed towards living God's way. That's what it says.

A righteous person is right with God. They do what is right according to God's will, God's law. As a child of light, you pursue God's morality over all things. And we're feeling that more and more. Right?

The different morality that is out there. It doesn't matter then what others believe is right or true and try to pressure you into. A child of light lives according to what God determines as right. That is what a child of the light does. Thirdly, if we walk as children of light, we are people of truth.

Now again, in the context of Ephesians, the truth spoken of here stands in contrast to the untruth of darkness. We are to be people who celebrate in the truth. And so we shouldn't have anything to hide because we are children of light. When things get exposed in us, we should delight in those things. It means we speak the truth boldly, but also we should humbly be willing to hear the truth spoken to us.

We should be courageous to both speak the truth, but also meek and humble enough to realise that the truth has work to do in our lives as well. And then the sort of fourth phrase here, which isn't part of that verse nine. It's in verse ten. We, as children of light, learn what is pleasing to the Lord. Living to please the Lord is maybe the fundamental difference between a believer and an unbeliever.

It's true, an unbeliever may be considered a good man. Right? They might pursue the truth even. But apart from the transformational reality of coming to Christ, the reality of a heart gripped by fallen human condition is that the goodness and the righteousness and the truth that they project will in some way be done with ulterior motives. The motive is the difference here.

The truth is, on the day of judgment, there will be thousands of people presenting themselves to God who presented in their life on earth an outward display of morality. But on that last day, it will be revealed that it was all done out of a desire for other things, power, influence, self-promotion. But when you become a Christian, the desire of your heart moves away from yourself, and now the desire is to please the Lord. Live a life that discerns what is pleasing to the Lord is therefore a catchall phrase that summarises the motive behind those three actions of being good and righteous and truthful. We do those three things because we deeply desire to please the Lord.

So this is what it means to live as children of the light. Paul quotes verse fourteen, rather, a creed or a hymn that was potentially used at baptisms. "Awake, oh sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you." And Paul here is reminding the Christians of the radical transfer that happened when they became Christians. They were transformed from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the sun, the kingdom of light.

That is what happened with this moment of their adult baptism. They have switched allegiances. Paul says, don't go back to ignorance. You are light. Now stay in the light.

And then our third section here, and we'll try and wrap this up quickly. We find in verses fifteen to twenty-one, Paul moving away from the language of light and darkness and talking about wisdom and foolishness. Verse fifteen: "Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise." The central phrase of this section is probably verse eighteen with a command: "Do not get drunk with wine for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit." Now this plays off this contrast between foolishness on the one hand and wisdom on the one hand. Foolish people get drunk.

It is not something to be celebrated, Australia. To get drunk is foolishness. You look like an idiot. On the other hand, to be filled with the Holy Spirit means you are full of wisdom, careful, disciplined, self-controlled. The command to be filled by the Holy Spirit has this continuing understanding to it.

It's this continuing action. We are to continue being filled with the Holy Spirit, and it's this idea of actively choosing to remain open to the Holy Spirit, to be ready to receive His guidance, to be ready to receive His teaching, to not close ourselves off to learning. By the Holy Spirit, we are then driven to this continuous desire to be wise, to be light-filled, to be distinctive from the world. Now the interesting thing here is that Paul ties this back then to corporate worship.

And he talks about speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Being filled by the Holy Spirit isn't some mystical charismatic experience, if I can put it that way. Being filled with the Holy Spirit has something to do with your relationships in the church and the corporate worship of God. In fact, we are to sing all types of songs inspired by the Holy Spirit. So I came from a conservative Reform church where we only sang the Psalms.

It'd be difficult to understand these words as saying Psalms, Psalms, and more Psalms. Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. And these songs will edify and encourage and build up the church. We have to praise Christ and to thank God in our times of corporate worship, and we have to submit to one another in mutual respect and love, which ties back to what's been said in chapter four. So here is the radical, perhaps controversial, theological statement that I want you to go and debate at home.

Ready? According to Paul, the fullness of the Spirit is experienced at church on Sunday. The fullness of the Spirit is experienced on Sundays at church. In other words, to experience the process of being consistently filled with the Holy Spirit, we need to come together and encourage one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs which thank God and glorify Christ. And so to put away all false notions of mystical experiences of the Holy Spirit, and sometimes that touches on the light and the darkness mythology and all that sort of stuff, put away the thought that you have to go up to a mountain somewhere to go and pray to really be filled with the Holy Spirit.

If you want to go and pray alone, great. If you need to do that to be away from distractions, fantastic. But to be filled with the Holy Spirit, according to Paul, is to do that with God's people together in worship. And being filled by the Holy Spirit, in turn, makes us wise. It makes us restrained and disciplined.

It means that you're not to do dumb, stupid, idiotic things like getting drunk, sleeping around, making dirty jokes. It's as simple as that. I once read a lecture by Charles Spurgeon called Sermons in Candles. And he was speaking to a bunch of Bible college students on preaching.

And he said at the start that you could find hours of sermon illustrations from the most everyday objects. And apparently, a student kind of rolled their eyes at him, and then for the next two hours, he talked about the candle and the illustrations you can draw from a candle. Imagine that. I'm sure the students were cursing that student for daring Charles Spurgeon to elaborate. But in that talk, Spurgeon quotes what Job says in Job chapter twenty-nine verses two and three.

Job says, "Oh, that I were as in months past, as in days, as in the days when God preserved me, when His candle shone upon my head." Reflecting on that, Spurgeon says, "Job had known prosperity." I think I've got it up here. Job had known prosperity and that was gone, if you know the story of Job. God had taken His prosperity.

Job had enjoyed heavenly fellowship and that had been obscured. "The candle of the Lord is a good light 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 has once enjoyed fellowship with God will never again be happy without it.

If we had remained in the blindness of nature, we should not have known of the glory of divine love nor should we have been in distress when it is withdrawn. But now that we are enlightened by grace, darkness brings woe to us." He who has once enjoyed fellowship with God will never again be happy without it. But now that we are enlightened by grace, darkness brings woe to us. What Spurgeon points to is the reality that every Christian who has tasted the light of God's knowledge and goodness and purity cannot help but be deeply affected by the scourge of darkness. Once you know the joy of Christ's light, darkness brings woe to us.

And so Paul can say to us, for your own sake, stop pursuing the dark. It brings woe to you. Pursue the things of the light, and there you will find thanksgiving and joy and fellowship with God and with one another. Pursue the light. Live in the light because you are children of the light.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank You for these clear images, language that has metaphors and symbols and earthly examples that we can understand. We understand what light is. We understand what a candle does. We have felt darkness.

We know what it does. It blinds us. We are confused by it. We stumble and fall over and we hurt ourselves in the darkness. And Lord, we confess that we are individuals who know what is good and right, and yet we have stumbled back into old things.

We have become partners in the darkness. And thereby, whether we realise it now or not, we have hurt ourselves and we have hurt others, and ultimately, we have offended a good and holy God. Lord, there might be some of us here this morning that have realised, especially in the areas of sex and sexuality, we have failed. We're doing it wrong. We are in the darkness.

Lord, help us to realise again today the promise that You are simply saying to us, hop into the light. As distinct as the light is from the dark, there is no grey area. There is only light or dark. You are saying to us, move into the light. Put aside those things.

They won't give you joy. They will not give you fulfilment. There is no light of God there. Thank You that we have the promise again that You are willing to forgive and willing to set us free from those things. And please, Lord, today, by this conviction in our hearts, convince us that we are free and that we are simply now called to live as free people.

Lord, for some of us, we have lived in these areas in a good and godly way. And, Lord, I thank You for that, and we praise You for Your work in those things. I pray that You will keep our marriages strong and pure, that You'll keep any temptations to walk away from what is good, what You have given us as good things, that You'll keep us away from those temptations. Help us to see our husband and our wife as the good gift, and that all of our enjoyment can be found and is found in them. Lord, while we are single and we perhaps desire to one day be married, help us to do so with patience, to realise that we're not just treading water.

We're not just sitting and being forgotten about. Lord, You have a good plan for us. Help us to wait patiently and even joyfully, and to realise the hurt that You are protecting us from even now. Help us, Lord, to pursue what is good in the lives of others, to look out for them and their good before our own good. Help us to live according to Your will righteously.

Help us to delight in the truth. We thank You, Lord, that You are the Lord of light. We thank You that You will lead us even through the midst of darkness. And we thank You, God, above all, that even as we feel the world becoming dark, and it is already and has always been dark, even as we feel that darkness close in around us, Your church is promised to be the light and that we will shine ever brighter. Help us to be that light, to hold out the good news of Jesus to all who are willing to hear and receive it.

In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.