I. Intro.
A. Prayer exercise: “Lord where are we in the scriptures right now?”
1. The whole bible speaks to us everyday, not suggesting we cherry pick what we want to hear.
2. But the Word is alive, its living and active, and the Lord speaks to us through His Word.
3. “What passage speaks specifically to where we are right now?” To what we are going through, to what God is doing among us, etc.
B. I heard Ephesians 5.
1. When I first heard this I thought it must be me. It seemed too simple, too basic, etc.
2. Steve Price just finished up our last session of men’s bible study with Ephesians 5 and it was a rich study, we gained a lot of insight from it.
3. But the more I prayed into this Sunday and into what God is doing at TRC right now, I kept coming back to Ephesians 5.
C. Intro to Ephesians 5.
1. After studying this chapter and meditating on it for a while, this is what I saw.
2. Sacrificial love is the basis and motivation from which we do everything else.
3. The Lord is calling us to:
a. Increase our holiness: personal consecration and separating ourselves to Him
b. Increase of worship and thankfulness: deeper in worship, focus on gratitude
c. Be filled with the Spirit: spending more time in the Spirit, dig a well, etc.
d. Submit to Christ: as Lord, not just Savior, to His will, to His way
4. But all of these things begin with love and are sustained by love. Our holiness, worship,
time in the Spirit and submission to Christ must not be a practice, a regimen, but an expression of love.
5. If love is not our motivation, then holiness becomes legalism, worship becomes
performance and submission becomes slavery.
D. Graphic.
1. What I hope to show you today is that we need to have agapé love at the core of our being. It becomes our constant motivation.
2. From there we walk in light with the people in our world. Light means God’s truth, righteousness and mercy.
3. Finally, we walk in wisdom with the world around us.
II. Walk in Love.
A. Eph 5:1&2.
1. An imitator of God as dear children.
a. Jesus said we must become like a child to enter the kingdom. (Matt 18:3)
b. We must imitate God the way a child imitates its parent.
c. Copy Him, act like Him, steal His homework, etc.
2. To imitate God, we have to understand what He is like, Who He Is, His character, nature, etc. Not our best idea of what God its like or what theologians tell us about God, pop culture, etc. But we must understand what makes Him tick in truth, for real, as Who He really Is.
3. Daniel Day-Lewis (Considered by many critics to be the GOAT, 3 Academy awards)
a. Actors prepare for a role by studying the people they are portraying.
b. Daniel Day Lewis preparing for Lincoln, read over 100 books, studied photos of him, read his speeches aloud, visited places where Lincoln lived, etc.
c. Lewis said about his process that he 1) studies the person 2) empathizes with them and then 3) subjects himself to becoming the vessel that portrays them.
4. To imitate God, we must do the same thing, study what His Word says about Him, empathize with His heart and motivation, and then subject ourselves to become the vessels that portray Him in this world.
5. But for us, the process is different from acting for two reasons:
a. 1st, because an actor portrays a role and hopes to pass it off as believable, then they go back to being themselves.
b. But for us, our goal is not to portray God for 120 minutes and the go back to being ourselves, our goal is to become exactly like Him 24/7.
c. 2nd, actors study people and situations that are mostly in the past, using multiple sources of 2nd hand accounts, they study what other people knew of them.
d. But for us, we learn from a living God and our source is His own Word, His very Spirit.
B. What God says about Himself.
1. Rather than study the facts about God (and there is nothing wrong with that, btw) if we understand His motivation, what makes Him tick, then we will understand His heart and be able to empathize with Him and do as He does.
2. 1 John 4:16 “And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”
3. “God is love.” So the greatest imitation of God is to imitate His love and every other expression of Who God is will flow from love.
a. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.”
b. Love is the fulfillment of the law.
4. Love means agapé:
a. the will to do good with no expectation of anything in return.
b. loving someone purely for the value that God places on their life.
C. Another example: Jesus.
1. In verse 2 we are given another example, Jesus.
“And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma.”
2. Here it is… “Walk in agapé…” that’s for us.
a. God the Father does it, Jesus did it and still does it, so we must do it.
3. Jesus gave Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God.
a. He calls us to give ourselves to others, not for their approval, thanks or even their acknowledgment, but as an offering and a sacrifice to God.
b. An offering: expressing gratitude to the Lord, thankfulness and worship.
c. A sacrifice: a sin offering, a sacrifice for sin, a victim for sin.
4. Rather than one big dramatic act of laying down our lives for one another, the Lord calls us to pick up our cross daily, to die a little every day, etc. The walk of love is one offering and sacrifice after another.
5. And these offerings and sacrifices are pleasing to God, a sweet smelling aroma to Him.
a. Phil 4:18 the church at Philipi sent aid to Paul when they were poor.
6. To walk in love is the greatest act of the Christian life. It is from this walk of love, this lifestyle of love, that every other holy act is conceived.
a. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but have not love…”
D. The heart is the issue.
1. And the walk of love is a walk of constant sacrifice. That’s what we are called to. Jesus said that if we can’t take up our cross daily and follow Him then we are not worthy to be called His disciple. The life of love is a life of sacrifice.
2. If we want our lives to be pleasing to the Lord, if we want our lives to be a sweet smelling aroma that is acceptable to the Lord, it will be a life of sacrificial love. A life that sacrifices for others as an offering to the Lord.
3. The heart is the center of this life of love, and the heart is what is under the greatest attack from the evil one. He will try to shut down our love by offense, abuse, etc. because if he can shut down our capacity to love, then he can ruin the offering and sacrifice of our lives even after we’ve put it on the altar.
4. Can we let go of everything that hinders us from loving as Jesus loved us? The demands of our soul for vindication, for restitution, for our name to be cleared, to be proven right, to finally get the apology, etc.
5. It’s not that we don’t matter, that God wants us to be a doormat and everyone else gets away with unloving. The point is that God is inviting us into a higher way of life, a way out of the self-serving rat race of ambition and putting ourselves first. He is offering us a chance to find freedom from the tyranny of self by crucifying our flesh so that we can love with out condition. Love without projection.
6. With this in mind, we should heed the words of Proverbs 4:23 “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.”
7. The enemy doesn’t have to shut down your faith, he just has a to destroy your love.
III. Verses 8-21
A. Verses 3-5
1. Call to holiness, personal sanctification.
2. Why is this mentioned right after the command to love? Because these behaviors are self-indulgences of the flesh and every time we seek to indulge our flesh, we have to ignore love to do it.
3. The desires of the flesh are at war with the fruit of the Spirit. Choosing the flesh instead of the Spirit only makes the flesh grow stronger and the spirit weaker in us, keeping us further from imitating the love of God.
4. Fornication: Gr porneia
a. root of pornogrpahy
b. in Paul’s day, it implied prostitution, ritual prostitution, idol worship
5. The rest:
a. filthiness: impure motives
b. foolish talking, coarse jesting: vulgarity, dishonoring words, etc.
c. covetousness: greed, envy, jealousy
6. All of these are contrary to love and keep us in the darkness of the fallen nature. No one who does these things will inherit the kingdom of God.
7. Revelation 21:6-8
B. Vs 8-14 Walk in Light
1. The love of God is what enables us to walk in the light of God. By walking in love, we will also walk in light. Love is the key. It all starts with love.
2. Vs 10 “…finding out what is acceptable to the Lord.”
a. ‘finding out’ is dokimazo and it means “proving what is acceptable to the Lord.
b. It means we have tested the walk of love and light by putting it into practice and we have proven by experience that it is acceptable and pleasing to God.
3. Proverbs 16:7 “When a man’s ways please the Lord, He makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.”
4. Vs 11 “… have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but…expose them.”
a. Not in a fault finding way, there is no love in that.
b. In a loving, compassionate way that cares for the safety and well being of your brother to sister.
C. Vs 15-21 Walk in wisdom.
1. So it all starts with walking love, in our daily lives we work out and express this love by walking in light, in other words, by doing what is right and loving. Then we walk in wisdom in our dealings with the world because the days are evil.
2. The Lord is calling us to turn away from the things that intoxicate and distract us because they are a false refuge, there is no hope in them, no life in them.
a. drunkenness vs being filled with the Spirit.
b. Not a coincidence that alcohol is called ‘spirits’
c. Alcohol is a counterfeit of what the Spirit offers us. (So are other distractions)
3. Be filled with the Spirit, keep on being filled with the Spirit. Keep drinking in the Spirit of God to maintain your spiritual euphoria.
4. Worship; the number one takeaway from this is that worship is one of the main ways that we stay filled why the Spirit.
a. Why? Because it bypasses our mind and activates our spirit.
b. The soul goes quiet and the spirit man rises up.
IV. Submission to one another and to Christ.
A. Vs 22-32
1. Before we process this passage in the spiritual darkness of the fallen world around us, let’s recap.
a. Everything must be done in love, daily sacrificial love.
b. We show this love practically by acting with pure motives instead of selfish motives.
2. When it comes to talking about submission and respect between husband and wives, we need to understand three things…
a. One, these are ideals, these are what we strive for. They are not meant to be rules that we punish each other over when we fail to walk them out.
b. Two, these do not exist in a vacuum, they are not stand alone. The source of them is the sacrificial love mentioned in the 1st two verses of Ephesians 5.
c. Three, these are not demanded by the husband or the wife, they are voluntarily given.
3. At the core is submission to Christ.
a. Vs 21 “…submitting to one another in the fear of God.”
b. Vs 24 “…just as the church is subject to Christ…”
4. What the Lord is trying to do with us is something like this:
a. Be motivated by sacrificial love at the core of our being.
b. Imitate God by adopting a lifestyle of sacrificial love.
c. Walking in wisdom when it comes to the influence of the world because the
world’s wisdom is foolishness to God, demonic in nature and leads to death.
d. Make our households a lamp on a stand by how we treat one another, so that those in darkness will see the light of God’s way.
e. Make our church a city on a hill for the same reason.
5. So the submission to your husband, the laying down your life for your wife is WAY bigger than an uncomfortable annoyance when you don’t get your way. It is God’s chosen means to express His love, light and wisdom being put on display through two people.
6. Again, at the core of this is submission to Christ.
V. Closing
A. Ephesians 5 isn’t just a list of rules—it’s an invitation into a lifestyle.
1. A walk. A daily rhythm where love becomes our core, light becomes our witness, and
wisdom becomes our compass.
2. The call of God today is simple but costly: Will you walk in love? Not just feel it, not just talk about it, but actually lay down your life in small, daily sacrifices that rise as a fragrance before the Lord.
3. Maybe for you it means forgiving someone who wounded you. Maybe it means putting aside an offense, or choosing to serve when you don’t feel like it. Maybe it means letting your home, your marriage, your friendships become a living sermon of Christ’s love.
4. And as you do, the Lord Himself will make your life a lamp that shines in the darkness. A city on a hill. A fragrance of Christ in a broken world.