Paul continues to give practical teaching about living the Christian life… he is still reinforcing the teaching he made in chapter 4 (where he has been talking about honest word, honest financial dealings, and finishes by saying become kind to one another) He begins this chapter by using that same word, become… summing up the previous one, (therefore, become imitators of God, v. 1)
1. Become like the Father.
We are dearly beloved sons. That both requires and enables change – becoming like Father – to take place. It isn’t enough to say to someone “Remember you are a child of God, and make sure you behave like one!” It is experiencing the love of our Heavenly father, which results in our treating other people differently – whether by forgiving instead of holding a grudge, or by respecting instead of cheapening and sexualising. If you have problems being like your Father in Heaven, I call you not to “try harder” but to spend more time with father, soaking in his love and becoming more assured that you are really precious to him.
2. Love like the Son.
The motive here is Jesus’ love: he loved us and gave himself for us, a fragrant offering and a sacrifice. We celebrate Jesus’ amazing sacrificial love for us as we break bread together later in the service. The love of Jesus for us, is meant to release us to love each other, sacrificially. In Phil 4. 18, Paul uses exactly the same words about the gift the Church in Phillippi sent to support him: it was a “fragrant offering and sacrifice.”
Paul again uses that word “walk” (v2 cf vv. 8, 15) I like The Message, which catches the ideas of true and false love… there is a contrast between the self sacrificing love of Jesus, and the self-indulgent sexuality Paul describes in the rest of the chapter.
The key to the problems our society has over sexuality, is summed up simply in this one concept: self-sacrifice instead of self-indulgence. As we said thing morning, Paul warns about three areas…
a) Our mouths. There are things that he says we are not even to talk about… sexual immorality (whoring) impurity and covetousness (in context, it’s coveting your neighbour’s hunky husband or dishy wife.) Avoid suggestive talk; foolish talk (again in context it’s foolish talk about sex) and crude jokes. (in a foretaste of our world, the ability to invent double intenders and innuendo was considered something really clever in ancient Greece). Such things are not even to be talked about Paul says. That doesn’t mean we are to be afraid to talk about sex. For too long Christians have been too coy about human sexuality. Like the clergyman writing in the papers who referred to toilet rolls thrown at football matches as “Excessively wide streamers” That’s just Victorian and silly and not what Paul means. What eh does mean is that we must not allow sexual matters – jokes or gossip – to become something that is talked about for the pleasure of it. We are, interestingly, to replace all this kind of talk, with thanksgiving.
b) Our bodies. We are told not to be partners with people who are walking in disobedience to God or take part in what they do. Paul is not telling people they are not to mix, just that they are not to join in the wrong things people do. We are in the kingdom of light. We are to live as children of light. We are not to indulge in the deeds of darkness but to expose them, to show them up for what they are. We do this, not by our words; not by standing up and tut-tutting about how bad people are; we are to expose the wrong by living the right, and by demonstrating that right is right.
c) Our minds. See verse 6. In all these discussions and thoughts about sexuality, we are to guard our minds. We can allow ourselves to be too smug about all this stuff, so we end up wagging the finger at that rest of the world. There once was an old preacher, in a simple uneducated church, who said in a sermon “Sin is like a pack of big dogs. My big dogs were tobacco, alcohol and sex. I have killed the big dog of tobacco. I have killed the big dog of alcohol; and I have killed the big dog of sex.” At that point someone interrupted: “Pastor, are you sure that last dog didn’t just go and die a natural death?” It’s a bit too easy to be self-righteous and smug as we criticise others for their lifestyle, if you’ve never been tempted I that area; or when on the outside we look respectable but inside our minds is what C S Lewis called a zoo of lusts and other wrong thoughts. .
i) So in every area of life, sexual and everything else, right behaviour starts in the mind. Look how you live: not as unwise but wise.” (v15)
ii) In the use of our time, to trade with it wisely, because we have a limited quantity. (v16)
iii) Not mindless (literally) but with joined-up thinking about what God wants for you. (v17)
iv) Not under the influence of substances…(v 18a) There is a connection between substance abuse and all of the abuses and evils we see around us.
And this is the final “don’t do this but do that” sentence…
3. Drink of the Spirit
But be filled with the Spirit. Being controlled by a substance is foolish; begin controlled by the Spirit is wisdom. In Acts 2 the disciples were filled with the Spirit of God and some people thought they were drunk. The Jewish scholar Philo said “When grace fills the soul, that soul thereby rejoices and smiles and dances, for it is possessed and inspired, so that to many of the unenlightened it may seem to be drunken, crazy, and beside itself. For with the God-possessed not only is the soul wont to be stirred and goaded into ecstasy but the body also is flushed and fiery” Finally, keep on being filled with the Spirit.
a) It’s present tense. That means it’s something that is supposed to be happening, over and over again.
b) And it is passive. That means it isn’t just something you do nut something that is done to you. You allow the spirit to have control…
c) It is primary to the Christian experience. Paul has built up a theology of the Spirit in the life of the believer in Ephesians. See 1:16f I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the spirit …; 2:18 For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. 2:22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. 3:4f the mystery of Christ … revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. 3:16 that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 3:19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. 4:3 maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 4:4 There is one body and one Spirit. 4:30 do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God
d) It produces results… speaking to yourselves with psalms, hymn and spiritual songs. We don’t get filled by doing these things; we are released by being filled.
© Gilmour Lilly June 2011
© Gilmour Lilly June 2011
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