The passage for our study, verses 3-20 of Ephesians 5 falls fairly naturally into three sections:
1. v. 3 - 7: Sanctity of Life
2. v. 8 - 14: Sons of Light
3. v. 15 - 20: Filled with the Spirit
In a moment we shall look at them each in turn, but first let me suggest a truth under whose umbrella we can hold these three elements together - so we get the drift of what Paul is saying throughout the whole section. Then we'll be ready to see how it leads into the next.
In ch. 4 he's been speaking about love, and the need for us to be imitators of God in the way we love one another. He will go on to speak about love from v. 21 onwards - about our love for one another in marriage, family and work relationships. In between, he has this stringent, tough-talking, no-nonsense section on moral purity of life.
There's no inconsistency in this, because God Who is Love is also Light.
We've not understood what God's love is until we've understood that it is Light as well. The love we discover in Christ, the very love that forgives and covers our sins, is a love that has a death to sin at its heart.
God does not so love us as to indulge us in our sins - He so loves as to cleanse us. There is no compromise with sin in the way He loves us ... neither, indeed, is there any compromise with sin in the way He forgives it! No-one ever truly experiences the forgiveness of God except as he heartily repents of his sins, hating them as God hates them, even while He's forgiving them. God is merciful; He truly is. But at the heart of His mercy there is a severity toward sin that we must never ignore.
And this is why Paul turns directly from a plea for kindly, tender-hearted, forgiving love between Christians to a hard-hitting plea for purity of life.
There are situations in which being loving
means saying "No", and saying it firmly ... even vigorously.
This needs to be said in our confused society, because there is a
mistaken idea abroad that love is never anything but non-judgmental,
that it's always accommodating, that it's in favour of just about
anything under the sun that takes our fancy, even when God has
expressly forbidden it.
But Paul says here that there's no way love and fornication can be reconciled, or love and adultery, or love and coveting. They're totally incompatible.
God has made His will in these matters quite clear. Our sexuality is His gift to us - His good and wholesome gift - and He means us to give full, free and glad expression to it within the covenant of marriage. The very nature of physical union is expressive of the total giving of the whole person of one partner to the whole person of the other, and the total receiving of the one by the other, and the only relationship that answers to this truth about sexual union is the marriage relationship. That's how God means us to enjoy it. Anything else, Paul says here, is immoral and unclean. It has to be described, not as love - not as love at all - but as covetousness: as greed for a satisfaction that is in defiance of God's declared will in the matter.
No matter how strong the temptation may become ... and it may indeed become so, even to a believer ... it is to be resisted. If our affections should stray, then they simply have to be checked, and wrestled back into captivity to Christ; if they're not, and we sin in this area, then we simply have to confess it as sin, repent of it wholeheartedly, and stop it.
We're to be children of the Kingdom - of His rule.
Anything less will incur His wrath - because He loves us - because He cares for us too deeply to stand idly by while we seek happiness along a path that can only lead to ruin.
Paul goes even further and says in v. 4 that we must beware lest loose talk among us lowers the standard. The word for "silly talk" is the word from which we get our word "moron": it refers to the kind of talk you don't expect from a man unless he's blind, stupid drunk.
The other word, translated "levity" refers to quick-witted, clever repartee. Dirty talk, in other words, isn't less dirty for being witty.
This is not to say that among Christians there's to be no mention of sex at all. When in v.4 he says "instead let there be thanksgiving", he still has our sexuality in mind. There's a wholesome way of talking about it that reflects our gratitude to God for it, and Paul has no intention of forbidding that.
Indeed there are some aspects of sexuality that are honestly funny, and an honestly funny comment on them isn't dirty merely because its subject happens to be sex. Some jokes about sex are funny! Paul isn't saying you can't talk about it at all. He's simply saying you shouldn't "talk dirty."
Then in verses 9-14, Paul launches into a wider discussion of the Christian's life-style. And here he says some quite remarkable things. We must touch on at least one or two of them.
In verse 8 he says, "Once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord."
Let me say in passing that for Paul to say that at all implies that though our sins may have been sex sins of the kind he's just been talking about, there really is forgiveness for them with God, and ... with His forgiveness ... real cleansing; "once you were darkness, but now you are light."
But what I really want us to see is the truly remarkable thing he goes on to say.
He doesn't say that the heathen are children of the dark, and Christians children of the light: he says that the heathen are darkness, and that Christians are light.
He doesn't say that we're in darkness before the light of Christ shines upon us, but that darkness itself is in us.
He doesn't say we're in the light now because we live in fellowship with Christ, but that the light is in us.
As you receive the light of Christ into your mind and heart, you become, yourself, luminous with it.
Paul is saying exactly what Jesus had said: "You are the Light of the world." He said first, "I am the Light of the world." (Jn 8.12) We affirm that happily with gratitude and joy. But then He said, "You are the light of the world; let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father Who is in Heaven." (Mt 5.13)
The light of God isn't simply for shining on you: it's for shining from you.
That's the same thing Paul means here when he says, "the fruit of light is found in all that's good and beautiful and true."
And that brings up the second remarkable thing Paul says that I'd like us to see.
It's that phrase, "the fruit of light." How can light bear fruit? Can light, like seed, be sown, so as to bear a harvest?
The Bible says it can. There's a quite remarkable statement to that effect in Psalm 97.11, "Light is sown for the righteous." Let me try to explain it this way
When you burn coal (I miss coal fires since we came back here to Australia; I know they're messy things, but an open hearth in a living room is warming in more ways than one!) when you burn coal, you're seeing light and heat appear that has first been sown.
That coal was first a living tree, which drank in light and warmth from the sun shining upon it in some primeval forest. The tree drank in the sun's light through its leaves.
Then, like a seed, it was buried in the ground. Over long periods of time, the forests sank beneath the soil, and as the weight of soil above them increased, the wood petrified and was compressed into seams of coal. When you dig up that coal and light a fire, what you have is "the fruit of light once sown, like seeds, in soil". The light and warmth the coal releases had first been "sown" in it by the sun.
So the light of Christ's righteousness and the warmth of His love may shine upon us, and we may drink it in, so that even out of the ugly black lumps, like lumps of coal, that we are, there may shine "the fruit of that light", come to harvest in us.
The third section in our passage has at its heart the familiar exhortation to "be filled with the Spirit" v.18.
As we drink in the light and warmth of God's truth and love, we are "sown" with them, until they shine back out from us. And what are these things but ways of describing His living Spirit?
It's the Spirit we're to drink in - that's how we get to be filled with Him.
I like Stuart Briscoe's comment on this verse. He says, "There's a school of thought which suggests that to be filled with the Spirit, you have first to be emptied of self. It's understandable, because the Spirit's ministry is often described under figures of speech that refer to pouring, which makes us think in pictures of liquids being poured in and out of things. But the Holy Spirit isn't a liquid; He's a person. So we don't have to think of ourselves being emptied first in order to be filled, any more than a man has to be emptied first before he can fill himself with liquor and get drunk.
"The most discouraging times in my Christian experience", Briscoe goes on, "have been when I was trying to empty myself of myself. I found the experience not unlike trying to get toothpaste back into a tube! Not only because it's next to impossible anyway, but also because both the toothpaste and myself had a remarkable facility for squirting out in a new direction just when I thought they were under control! But to get drunk (and Paul says that being filled with the Spirit bears some sort likeness to that process) you don't have to be emptied first. All you have to do is drink."
And that's clearly what Paul has in mind. We're to drink in the Spirit. It's quite illuminating to set this verse in Ephesians side by side with another, almost identical with it, in Colossians (3.16). Let me do so phrase by phrase, quoting first the phrase from Colossians, then the phrase from Ephesians ...
The two passages match each other almost phrase for phrase.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly
Be filled, not with wine, but with the Spirit
as you ... sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs
addressing one another in ... psalms and hymns and spiritual songs ...
with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
always and in everything giving thanks to God the Father.
But what's interesting is that in one passage Paul says,
"Be filled with the Spirit",
where in the other passage he says,
"Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly".
... as though those two phrases too are interchangeable, the same as the others.
They are! And that means that the way to "be filled with the Spirit" is to "let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly" ... do you see?
It's really very simple.
How does a person get drunk? All they have to do is drink - suitable stuff, of course - but just drink and drink and drink.
How does a person get filled with the Spirit? All they have to do is drink - suitable stuff, of course - but just drink and drink and drink!
In the Christian's case, the "suitable stuff" is the "Word of Christ"!
Paul is only saying in another way what he's already said when he said we're to "put on the new man"; that's the same as "to be renewed in the spirit of your mind", which is the same as "to have the mind of the Spirit", which is the same as to "have the mind of Christ", which is the same as "to be filled with the Spirit". You saturate yourself in "the truth as it is in Jesus" ... you soak it up ... you take your fill of Jesus.
There's no mystery about it. You don't have to have hands laid on you; you don't have to be worked up into some sort of ecstasy till you break out in tongues; you don't have to go through some rigorous artificial discipline; you just have to soak up Jesus and His Word.
John Stott has said there are four things to note about that phrase, "Be filled":
1. It's in the imperative mood - so it's a command;
2. It's in the plural form - so it's a shared thing ... something we experience, not in isolation from each other, but in fellowship with each other;
3. It's in the passive voice - which means you've to let it happen to you, not make it happen yourself by some technique you learn. God does the filling, if we trust Him to, just as at our conversion He does the saving;
4. It's in the present tense - which means that it is to be an ongoing experience. We're to open our lives to be filled repeatedly, even constantly, with the Spirit ... as though to say, "Be being filled with the Spirit".
To do that you simply put yourself under His influence
... by "letting the Word of Christ dwell in
you richly" ...
... by getting 'rapt' in Jesus.
The singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs was of course the way you did that in the days when Paul wrote to the believers in Ephesus. They didn't have the New Testament there then, as we have it now - it hadn't been finished: it was still being written. You couldn't go to the shop and buy a New Testament. There weren't any in the shops, or anywhere else for that matter, to buy. So what was in the process of being written they taught to their congregations in psalms and songs and hymns ... "Scripture in Song" in fact! (Don't knock it! it's thoroughly Biblical!)
The whole exercise is about living with such an awareness of Christ - an awareness we're to encourage in each other (it's a shared thing) - that praise and thanksgiving keep bubbling in us.
That's my last word for now - the shared nature of the thing.
A dimension of the New Testament world we've lost almost altogether is the corporate dimension. Most of the exhortations in the epistles we read as addressed to us personally ... individually. And most of the time, they're not: they're addressed to us corporately. They're in the plural, not in the singular.
Think about it. What does it mean for the way we should be together - how much more shared a thing should our Christian experience be?
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