In The Light

  

Text: Ephesians 5:6-14

Focus: Being good

Function: to help people see doing good has its rewards

⁵You can be sure that using people or religion or things just for what you can get out of them—the usual variations on idolatry—will get you nowhere, and certainly nowhere near the kingdom of Christ, the kingdom of God.

^6-7Don’t let yourselves get taken in by religious smooth talk. God gets furious with people who are full of religious sales talk but want nothing to do with him. Don’t even hang around people like that.

^8-10You groped your way through that murk once, but no longer. You’re out in the open now. The bright light of Christ makes your way plain. So no more stumbling around. Get on with it! The good, the right, the true—these are the actions appropriate for daylight hours. Figure out what will please Christ, and then do it.

^11-16Don’t waste your time on useless work, mere busywork, the barren pursuits of darkness. Expose these things for the sham they are. It’s a scandal when people waste their lives on things they must do in the darkness where no one will see. Rip the cover off those frauds and see how attractive they look in the light of Christ.

Wake up from your sleep,
Climb out of your coffins;
Christ will show you the light!

So watch your step. Use your head. Make the most of every chance you get. These are desperate times!

Good morning to the beloved Children of God.

I bring you greetings and thanks from the residents at Warren Correctional Institute where I spent the day yesterday in a retreat as we explored the meaning of some of the beatitudes.

I want to pass along thanks from the residents for all the cookies that are lovingly baked for these guys. I gotta tell you, I don’t know how they survive in prison. I hear horror stories of the food and the conditions that they have to put up with.

The blessing of Kairos is that we treat them like men. Yesterday they served lunch and it was beef stew. Somehow some of the beef got burnt and gave an acrid odor to the room where it was prepared. But the team toughed it out and separated the burnt from the caramelized and fed the residents. One guy at my table eating the tinged beef almost broke into tears of gratitude because it was the first time he had beef this year.

When we go in there and show them unconditional love, it is powerful. They respond with faith and belief that they are worth something.

And that is an introduction to my message this morning as we look at the effect and the power of the light of the gospel as it transforms darkness.

The passage contrasts light and darkness. It contrasts good and evil. It contrasts worldly living with living by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The book of Ephesians is one of several letters written to different churches to encourage and or correct the church as it was struggling with its foundation.

In the letter, Paul has just got done telling them what worldly living is. And it is centered on greed and selfishness and it leads to impurity and immorality. Those are referred to as the deeds of darkness. They generally have to do with one person taking advantage over another. We are called to treat others just as well as we treat ourselves.

And sadly, he points out that some of this worldly living comes from people in the church telling others that it is okay to keep on living for themselves instead of being a part of the community into which Christ called us.

I believe we see it happening still with the obscene wealth collected by some of these TV evangelists.

Paul is trying to warn us off a doctrine the leads to greed and selfishness. Our doctrine should always leads us to the same mercy and compassion for others that we expect for ourselves and our loved ones.

When he tells them that they groped their way once through that kind of life he is reminding them of the time that they were ignorant of the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives.

I want to emphasize that we are called to love others as well as we love ourselves and that sometimes that is difficult. We have to forgive when we have been hurt. We have to endure the foibles that another person has might rub us wrong.

And I want to emphasize that we cannot do that in our own strength. We read the Old Testament and we see the failures that the people of God had because the Spirit of God was not generally given to humanity until the sacrifice of the Christ.

Somehow only a few people were filled with the Spirit in the OT accounts. But now, the Spirit is given to the world entire and all we have to do is tap into its power and love.

In our text, we see the contrast between light and dark. Paul implies the the difference should be obvious to us. Do good and don’t do bad things.

When we do good, we are fulfilling the law of Christ.

That might seem obvious to all of us.

But the world we live in tells us that it is okay to live just for ourselves. As a matter of fact, we are taught the world is a jungle and we have to fight our way through it to survive the dangers that lurk everywhere.

We are taught to fight to survive instead of cooperate to survive. But Jesus calls us to better.

The Church changed the economic picture in Jerusalem when they started their commune. The took seriously the words of Jesus and held their lives in common.

Sadly, or apparently, that didn’t work out because it didn’t continue and subsequent attempts at communes fail after a generation or so.

I’m not advocating a commune, but I illustrate it to point out just how radical their willingness to obey Jesus was. They were taking the command to love others as well as themselves to its logical conclusion.

They focused on love for others. In my biblical opinion, there just isn’t anything more important for us to be doing as believers. That is how we shine the light of Christ.

So Paul takes a very hard stand against Christians living in greed in this passage and tells us that instead we are called to be bearers of the light.

We are called to do good for others. Earlier in the letter, Paul reminds them that they are saved by God to do good works. And now he is telling them that those preachers who preach personal prosperity are wrong and we shouldn’t listen to them but rather expose them.

We do good and we love because love covers over a multitude of sinful behavior. Love shines the light.

It is love that transforms the heart and that is where our power lies.