Ephesians 5:15-20. In the last couple of readings Paul has been encouraging the followers of Jesus in Ephesus to do just that, follow Jesus, to be “imitators of God”. Paul has been careful to point out both the negative and the positive sides of following Jesus. The old way of seeing life and living doesn’t work and it has bad consequences. It doesn’t give purpose and meaning to life; it leaves our relationship wit God broken. That leaves us empty in this life and out side the kingdom in eternity. Letting Jesus take the punishment (separation from God; spiritual death) for our disobedience and disrespect toward God (sin) immediately restores our relationship with God (the Bible calls that restored relationship “life” (spiritual) and describes it as eternal; our fixed relationship with God is forever. We are a part of God’s forever family and have the privilege and purpose of representing God to the unsaved or lost people of the world. We do this by living like Jesus would; by being imitators of God. To do this we have the help of the Holy Spirit (see “Three or One?”).

Verse 15 starts with the word “therefore”. When you see that word you need to think about the things you have just read. The word points back to what you have just learned and what come after usually tells you what to do because of what you have just learned. God has given us a purpose, to be His ambassadors or representatives in this world, therefore we need to “walk” wisely. That doesn’t mean be careful about where you step (which we won’t even get into since two nights ago our very old cat decided to leave a couple of surprises on the floor for me that I found in the dark with my feet). “Walking” is a way of describing “living life”. Paul is saying “live wisely”. Proverbs 9:10 tells us that “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” The two parts of that sentence are parallel, they express the same idea. The word translated “fear” contains the ideas of “fear, reverence, honor, and respect.” Knowing God means understanding who He is, what He has done, what He can do and what He is like. The second part of that verse calls God the “Holy One”. Although some people like to see that word “holy” (which means dedicated, separate, special) and contrast God’s purity with our rebellion we could also thing of God’s love and faithfulness and mercy that also make Him different from us.   God is amazing and we should stand in awe of Him. Part of the reality of God is that our disobedience and rebellion (sin) has a consequence, separation from God forever, for those that reject Jesus and that should make people afraid in the way we usually think of fear. As believers though that “fear” is removed, we are part of God’s forever family. WE need to be wise though and understand the whole story, we need to see all sides of God and then do something with that knowledge, we need to “walk wisely”.

In verse 16 Paul gets more specific, he tells his readers to make the most of their time because we live in evil days. The word he uses with respect to our time means to “buy back or out of”. Some translations use the word “redeem”. Other word that carry the same idea for us are “bail out” or “ransom”. The word for “evil” has in it the idea of hard work and poverty; even the idea of living day to day, like a homeless person. Part of the consequences of disobeying God was hard physical labor. God had place Adam and Eve in a fruitful garden with plenty of food, Adam was supposed to work, to till and keep the garden productive, but the work was not harsh. In Genesis 3:17-19 God changed all of that. From then on the ground would easily grow thorns and thistles, weeds, but food would require intense hard labor. That consequence was to be a lesson and reminder of our broken relationship with God, a reminder that would hopefully turn people back to God.

According to Jesus, though, the difficulty of earning a living can often distract people from God (see Mark 4:18-19). Here in Ephesians Paul is telling us to “buy our time back” from that bad or distracting perspective. We need to understand that the difficulties in life are the result of living in a world broken because of our sin and the fact that God is in the process of fixing it. But the important part of all of it is the people. God loves people and wants us back (2 Peter 3:9,15). He won’t force us back but is giving us time to “repent” or “turn around” and come back through Jesus. We need to be wise and understand why life is difficult and help people see the truth and return to God. Verse 17 says just this. In that verse Paul tells the readers, the believers in Ephesus, not to be foolish (that word means “without understanding”) but to understand what God want. As we saw in that verse from 2 Peter God wants us back.

For a lot of the world the way to deal with the difficulties of life is to drink, take drugs or find other ways to distract ourselves from reality. In Ephesians 5:18 Paul tells the believers not to ignore reality but to let the Holy Spirit teach them and move them in ways that really deal with our broken world and lives separated from God. It is interesting that the word that Paul uses to describe the results of getting drunk means “without wholeness, without salvation, without healing”. Paul implies that being filled with God’s Spirit will bring healing, wholeness and salvation.

In verses 19-20 we see what that “filling” looks like, we are filled with songs about God and what he is doing in our lives. It is interesting that the Psalms, in the Old Testament, are filled with pain and doubt and trials and suffering but they seem to always come back to the love and comfort found in who God is and what He is doing. Hymns and spiritual songs aren’t as well defined from the Bible but certainly would be similar. All three are the result of letting God’s Spirit each us and fill us with God’s truth (see John 14:26; 15:26). The filling also helps us understand that God is working out the “sin” problem in the best possible way and for that we can be thankful.

God thank you for giving us purpose. Thank you for giving us power and understanding through your Holy Spirit. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be your representative in the world. Help me help others see the truth about the evil in our world. Help me help others find you, fix their relationship with you through Jesus. Thank you for saving me and giving me purpose, help me make the most of my life. Help me not be distracted by the work of living as I work and live through it all.

Ephesians 5:8-14. Paul has been encouraging the Ephesian believers to live like God. In yesterday’s reading he encouraged them not to live like the world and talked about the consequences of not being a part of God’s forever family, the Kingdom of God. That’s a negative reason for putting your eternity in Jesus’ hands; you don’t want to go to Hell. I think most people start at that point though. Most of us hear about Jesus and sin and Heaven and Hell and think, “Well I don’t want to go to Hell so I’ll let Jesus take the punishment for me.” Of course being in Heaven, or as Jesus told the thief being crucified next to him, the one who recognized him as the promised coming savior and king (Luke 23:39-43), being “with him in paradise”, is a good thing. But I think most of us start at the “I don’t want to go to Hell” part and eventually move to the “I want to be with Jesus” part. For some it’s a long journey wanting to be with Jesus. We don’t want to go to Hell when we die but we are not in a hurry to go to Heaven either, most people want to live a long peaceful life in between.

In today’s reading Paul gives some “positive” reasons for “being like God”; living like Jesus would if he were in your shoes today. At the end of yesterday’s verses Paul told the believers not to live lost pointless lives like unbelievers around them and he had just reminded them how unbelievers won’t share in that ‘paradise” that Jesus promised the thief. In verse 8 Paul uses the idea of light and darkness to explain the positive life the believers should live. He starts out by telling them they were “once darkness”. Notice that he doesn’t say “you were in darkness” (He does use that kind of language in other letters though) but that they “were darkness”. I think this points to the fact that they were not just like people lost in a dark place but that they were responsible for being in that dark place. The good news is that now they are “light”. And we are told that they are light because they are in “the Lord”. “Lord” is one common way Paul refers to Jesus. Although being “darkness” included responsibility for the bad evil place we live in, being light doesn’t mean that we get credit for now being “light”, what ever that means (we will see in a minute what it means). We are light, not because of what we have done, but because Jesus has made us light(s). He ends verse 8 by telling his readers (and us) to “live as children of light” and in verse 9 he explains what that means. In verse 9 he uses the idea of a plant or a tree. Tomato plants make tomatoes, peach trees make peaches. In Matthew 5:14 Jesus told his followers that they are “the light of the world”. In a way we are “light trees or light plants” and that “light” looks like “goodness, righteousness and truth”.

The word translated “goodness” has in it the idea of kindness and also the idea of usefulness. The word “righteousness” is talking about doing the “right” things; living the way God would want you to live. Truth is referring to living according to the way things really are. We are not to stick our heads in the sand or hide in some pretend world. We need to understand the reality of who God is (He is loving and kind but he also has standards or rules and when rules are broken there are consequences), the reality of what we have done (sin-disobedience and disrespect toward God), the reality of the consequences of sin (a broken world and a broken relationship with God (the idea of death in the Bible is the idea of separation. Physical death is the separation of our soul or spirit from our physical body, spiritual death is the separation of our soul or spirit from God)), the reality that we cannot undo our sin and that we cannot repair our broken relationship with God, the reality that only Jesus (the infinite God become a real man) can pay our infinite prices by his personal separation from God the Father (see “Three or One?”) and the reality of God’s love when he allows each of us to chose to accept Jesus’ sacrifice for us or not; to be a part of His forever family, His kingdom, or not. Paul finishes his explanation of living as “children of light” by telling us that if that is what we want to do we need to try to figure out what pleases God. God has offered us a place in His forever family. If we choose to join that family we need to try to honor its father; God.

In verse 11 Paul returns, just for a moment, to the negative side, he says not to participate in the things from the “dark side”. But he gives a reason and an alternative. He calls the deeds from the dark side “fruitless”, If we keep in mind what he was specifically talking about before it was sex and greed. And in the context of the world back then it was about life having meaning and purpose; it’s not much different in or world today either we try to find meaning in physical relationships and money. Paul is saying that those things don’t give our lives meaning. Remember earlier (Ephesians 2:10) he told his readers that Jesus saves us not just to spend eternity with God but also to do good and useful things here and now. That comes out in the alternative I mentioned above. We don’t want to live our old meaningless lives instead Paul wants us to live lives that “expose” those deeds.

But don’t grab your phone and run off to catch your friends “in the act”, that is not what this “expose” is about. Paul isn’t telling believers to run out and make a holy version of “Cheaters” or “TMZ”. In Matthew 5:15-16 Jesus told his followers that they were a light to help the people in world see. He also describes their light as their “good works”. What Paul is saying here is that these believers, these “Christians”, these Christ followers, now have purpose and meaning for their lives; purpose and meaning that reach beyond here and now and into eternity. We have found out how to have our relationship with God restored and how to be assured of a good, no an awesome, eternity with Him. We also have the power and help of the Holy Spirit; God living in us, to live lives that reflect and help others see and know God. Those God honoring lives are our light to the world, light that helps the world see the pointlessness of their old lives and how to have a relationship with God too.

In verses 13 Paul says when the lights are on you can see. It is interesting that the Greek word (the New Testament was originally written mostly in Greek) translated visible isn’t so much about seeing as it is about understanding . The end of verse 13 is very troubling for many Bible experts because it literally says that “everything that is exposed becomes light”. That almost makes it sound like the evil actions, the dark actions, become “OK” once we see them but that’s not what Paul is saying here.

Verse 14 helps us understand what he is trying to say. In verse 14 Paul quotes some sort of Christian saying from his day, “Wqke up sleeper, rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you.” In this saying the sleeper is dead. This is not about physical death but spiritual death (see above).   The saying is inviting people who don’t have a relationship to let Christ, Jesus, fix them; let the good work Jesus did on the cross shine in their lives. And then those lives will have purpose and meaning and help others find out about sin and death and Jesus and Heaven and all of that. You see when your life “shines” for God, when your renewed relationship with God is seen by others it pushes away the darkness and helps people see haw to be all they were created to be, friend’s with God. Paul assumes that many people will see the pointlessness of the way they have been living and accept Jesus and in that way become “lights” themselves.

So we need to live for and with God. Our new meaningful lives will be examples to the world that will draw people toward God by helping them see that their actions aren’t going to fill that God shaped hole in their lives. The light isn’t so others can see them and say “Ewwww” but so people can understand their own lives in light of reality (see above). In 2 Corinthians 5:20 Paul told the believers in Corinth that we are ambassadors of Christ and that God is begging the world through us to come back to Him. That is way awesome, we get to show the world how much God loves people by living God focused lives, lives with purpose now and a beautiful eternity ahead.

God help me “shine” for you each day. Help me be a good ambassador. Let my life draw people toward you. Let the light of Christ’s good work shine on them and bring them into your forever family. Thank you for shining on me, now shine through me.