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Written by Pastor Darrell Cooper
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Friday, 01 August 2008 14:48 |
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Ephesians 5:8-14
March 2, 2008 - Lindsborg Cov.
“Are You Serious”
(Who we are in Christ)
Sermon Outline
I think you would all agree with me, wouldn’t you, that we live in a world that is often very dark. I mean, all you have to do is pick up any major newspaper and before you read very far you will run into all kinds of wickedness and depravity.
This evil begins in our own hearts. Perhaps it begins with a hardness of heart, insensitivity, bitterness, anger, malice, or greed. Then, these sinful heart attitudes begin to spill over into the way we talk, because the Bible says that out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. So, we hear unwholesome talk, obscenity, lies and deception, slander, and telling dirty jokes. This leads to all kinds of evil behaviors, such as stealing, laziness (not working for a living), rage, violence, drunkenness, impurity, lust, and all kinds of sexual immorality. It can be a very dark world indeed.
What I find interesting about this list is that in some ways things have not changed much in the last 2,000 years. I say that because that list of sinful attitudes and actions I just read to you I did not pull from the pages of the newspaper. I pulled it from the pages of Scripture. In fact, I took it from the context of today’s passage in Ephesians chapter four and five.
Paul is using the metaphor of darkness and light here. Darkness refers to evil, wickedness, and deception. Light represents goodness, righteousness, and truth. As I studied for this message, I noticed that almost every single New Testament writer uses this imagery. If you will look inside your bulletins you will find an insert. If you open the insert on the right-hand page you will see the title “You are the Light . . .” Here is a list of some of the passages that employ this metaphor of darkness and light. This is just for you to take home and look up later if you wish to do so.
Jesus used this image on more than one occasion. Paul uses it in our passage for today. We are in Ephesians chapter five today, beginning in verse eight. In verse eight, Paul is talking about our identity. Actually, he is talking about two identities. He talks about our old identity before Christ, and our new identity in Christ.
What I find interesting about these two identities is not just what Paul says about them, but what he does not say. Notice in verse eight, Paul does not say that there was once darkness in our lives. He does not even say that we used to walk in darkness. He says we were darkness. We were darkness itself. Likewise, he says that now we are light in the Lord.
Now, before we simply brush past these two claims, I want to pause here for just a minute to think about this a bit. Do you remember what Jesus said in John 8:12? He said, “I am the light of the world.” In fact, He said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Now, that would be an extraordinarily arrogant statement if it were not true. Imagine if I stood up and said that I am the source of all truth, goodness, and righteousness in the whole world! That claim, on my lips, would be incredibly arrogant. But, of course, we believe that Jesus is God in the flesh, so it is not at all strange or arrogant for Jesus to say something like that. We might even expect God to say something like that, so that is not really at all surprising.
What I think is astonishing is what He says in Matthew 5:14. He said, in reference to His disciples, “You are the light of the world.” He said that WE are the light of the world! In John 9:5 He said, “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Now, as He prepares His disciples, He says that we are the light of the world. I think it is almost shocking that Jesus would give away His identity in this way, and that He would give it to us.
So, the question I begin with today is, “Who do you think you are?” Who do you think you are? Who are you?
We derive our identity from many different sources, don’t we? You may have heard before that men, for example, tend to derive much of our identity from our work, what we do for a living. Women typically derive much of their identity from their primary relationships. If they are married, from their husband. If they have a family, from their children. If they are not married, do they have a boyfriend. Many women base much of their identity on these kinds of primary relationships.
Many people, both men and women base much of their identity on their socio-economic class. They define themselves by their status symbols - what kind of clothes they wear, what kind of car they drive, how big their house is or what neighborhood they live in. Most people derive much of their identity from what other people think of them, their reputation, or, what they think of themselves, their self-image.
But what I want to say to us today, and what I believe Paul is saying to us in this passage, is that as followers of Jesus we are none of those things. Not one of those things defines us. The source of our identity is not in any of those things. The source of our identity is not in what other people think of us. It is not even in what we think of ourselves. As followers of Jesus the source of our identity is what God thinks of us. He is the one who tells us who we really are.
And that begs the question: What does God think of us? Well, I am glad you asked. If you will look at that insert one more time, this time on the front page, the one entitled “My Identity In Christ”, you will find a long, two-page list of statements and Scripture references. If you are a follower of Jesus, then this is what God thinks of you. This is who you are. This is a partial list describing your new identity in Christ.
This list is just for you to look at later. I want to encourage you to do that. Read what it says about you. Look up the Scriptures if you want to. Perhaps even memorize a few of these so that you can begin to own your new identity.
We have experienced a radical identity shift. We used to be characterized by darkness (spiritual iniquity and rebellion), but now we are characterized by light (goodness, righteousness, and truth). One of my seminary professors said that perhaps we don’t take our salvation seriously enough. (Klyne Snodgrass)
I wanted to know if we were indeed taking our salvation, our new identity in Christ, seriously. Paul said, “You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light.” I wanted to know if we, as the Church, are living as children of light. So, I did a little research this week.
I went to our good friend, George Barna, (www.barna.org) the famous Christian pollster. He conducted a survey in which he called well over 1,000 adults in the continental United States and asked for their opinion on ten different moral issues. I want to show you the results in this chart. I am breaking them down into three categories. The first is the percentage of the general adult population who believe the given behavior to be morally acceptable. The second category is a subset of the first, those surveyed who consider themselves to be born again Christians. The third category is simply the difference between the two. So, let me take you through this chart rather quickly:
Do you believe the following behaviors to be morally acceptable?
Moral Issue All Adults Christians Difference
Illicit Drug Use 17% 11% 6%
Homosexual Behavior 30% 20% 10%
Drunkenness 35% 24% 11%
Profanity 36% 29% 7%
Pornography 38% 28% 10%
Affair 42% 35% 7%
Abortion 45% 33% 12%
Sexual Fantasies 59% 49% 10%
Cohabitation 60% 49% 11%
Gambling 61% 45% 16%
Average 42.3% 32.3% 10%
Let me say a word about the averages. Keep in mind that from God’s perspective, all ten of these activities are wrong and directly or indirectly the Bible condemns them. Notice that on average, 42.3% of the general adult population in the United States disagree with God on these issues. That number probably should not surprise us too much because many of these people are not followers of Jesus. They have not submitted their lives to the authority of Jesus. They may not even know what the truth is, let alone follow it. And even if they wanted to, they do not have the Holy Spirit living within them to enable them to live godly lives. So, we should not expect unbelievers to live like believers. So personally, I am not shocked by that percentage. I am not even disturbed by it.
What I do find disturbing is the next number (32.3%). Almost 1/3 of us said that we reject God and His Word as the final authority in our lives and have decided that we know better. That is very sad and an indictment on the Church.
But the number that bothers me the most is the last one on the chart. Now, I understand that this number is not wholly accurate. It does not take into account that Christians are part of the general population surveyed and this artificially inflates the morality of the non-Christian culture. This means that the gap is actually greater than the 10% shown here. But even if the gap were three times bigger, that would only be a 30% difference between the two. So, assuming that these numbers are correct, this means that there is only a 10-30% discernable difference between the way we live our lives as followers of Jesus Christ, and those who don’t even know Him.
To return to the image of light for a moment, I would like you to imagine that you are at home. It is late at night and you are in your dining room. It is too dark to see anything, so you fumble around in the corner and turn on a nightlight and it begins to give off the glow of a ten-watt bulb. Tell me, is that little ten-watt bulb enough to read by? Not really, at least you would not want to read for very long that way. Could you use that light to host a dinner party at your house? No, not at all. That little bulb gives off barely enough light to avoid stubbing your toe on the dining room table, and that, after all, is its function. Granted, it is better than nothing, but it is not useful for much more than that.
Is this not a fairly accurate word-picture of where the Church in the United States is today? Have we not become a very dim bulb in the corner of our culture? Listen to what Jesus said in Luke 11:33-35: “No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead he puts it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are good, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are bad, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness.” Jesus says that there is light within us, but warns that it is possible to let our light grow dim or even go out altogether. Is this not what is happening in the Church in the West today? Perhaps my professor was right. Perhaps we do not take our salvation seriously enough.
In this passage Paul is saying that this kind of behavior does not make sense because it goes against who we are. He says, “You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light.” Live consistently with your new identity.
So how do we do that? What does that look like? What does it mean to live as children of light? Well, Paul gives us four commands in this passage to help us out. Two of these commands are active and two are passive. In other words, two of them are things that we are to do, and two of them are things we are to refrain from doing.
The first one is an active command and it is found in verse ten: “Find out what pleases the Lord”. Find out what pleases the Lord. Perhaps you are ignorant and you really don’t know what He wants from us. Learn. Seek the answers. Find out.
One way to do that is to simply read the context of this passage. As I said before, if you will read Ephesians chapter four and five you will see a list of things that God hates as well as a list of things which please Him. That could be a good place to begin finding out what pleases the Lord. Perhaps my favorite place to look is in the Sermon on the Mount. Read and study Matthew 5-7 and you will get a clear and beautiful description of the kind of life God is calling us to live in the context of community. Find out what pleases the Lord.
The second command is a passive command and is found in verse eleven. “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness.” We are to have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness precisely because they are fruitless. In other words, evil is a waste of time and energy. It leads nowhere. It is a dead-end road. So, we are to avoid participating in anything that is evil or sinful.
The third command is active and it is also in verse eleven. Expose the deeds of darkness. We are to expose sinful attitudes and behavior. This is what light does, isn’t it. When you walk into a dark room and flip on the light switch, the room is flooded with light. Everything that was once hidden in darkness is now exposed to the light and plainly visible. This is the nature of light. This is what light does. Paul is saying that we should live our lives in such a way that we reflect the glory of God into the lives of others. If there is sin around us it will be exposed by the light within us.
The fourth command is in verse twelve and is a bit hard to understand, I think. Paul says that it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. We are not supposed to talk about sin, but didn’t Paul just tell us to expose it?
Let me offer my best shot at interpreting this tension. I think what Paul is saying here is, “Do not talk about sin in order to revel in it, but only in order to expose (correct & rebuke) it. It is possible, even as followers of Jesus to talk about sin in a sinful way. We can sin vicariously by dwelling on all the gory details and having titillating conversations. That is not what it means to expose the darkness. We must, of course, talk about sin, ours and others, but only in the context of rejecting and condemning it.
Matthew Henry said, “Observe, A good man is ashamed to speak that which many wicked people are not ashamed to act; but, as far as their wickedness appears, it should be reproved by good men.”
So, these are two things we can do and two things we can avoid doing to live as children of light. In this way we can live consistently with our new identity in Christ.
Now, should you decide to live like this, let me help you know what you can expect from other people. It seems that there are two basic camps of unbelievers in the world. They are what I call the cockroaches and the moths.
Cockroaches hate the light. Have you ever had the experience of turning on light in a dark room and seeing the cockroaches scatter and go back into hiding? They simply hate the light and will avoid it if possible.
Jesus described the cockroaches in John 3:19-20. He said, “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.” If you live as a child of the light, be prepared that some people will automatically hate you. It is really not about you. It is about them. It is about them trying to hide their evil deeds and the light within you is threatening to them, so they hate you.
But there are also moths. Moths love the light. They are inexorably drawn to the light, sometimes even to their own peril. Jesus talked about the moths in Matthew 5:16. He said, “let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” Some people will like what they see. They will be attracted to the light they see in you. They will be drawn to the love and the goodness and the joy and the holiness they see in you, and it just may lead them into a relationship with our Father.
So, I share that so we can all be aware and prepared that some people will like us for being light and some people will hate us. But regardless of how other people respond to us, we are still called to be light, to live as children of the light, to live consistently with our new identity in Christ. Paul says over and over again, “Live this way because that is who you are.”
So, I will close with this question: Are you serious? Are you taking your salvation seriously? Are you living consistently with who you really are? Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”
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