How To Live in a Broken World

Life of the church

Good morning, everyone. Happy Sunday. It’s good to see you all here for our worship service.

I’d like to touch upon a few of the announcements in your bulletin before we begin. The men’s group will meet this evening at 6:00 down at the pavilion, not 6:30 as it’s listed in your bulletin. All men are invited to attend.

There will be a church council meeting this Tuesday evening at 7:00.

October is World Hunger Month, and we’ll be collecting items for the community food pantry at Calvary. You can leave your donations in Randal’s Sunday school rom, or leave them in the church office. If you’d rather make an offering of money, make your check out to Stuarts Draft Baptist and mark your check and envelope “food pantry.”

Also, we’ll be doing a trunk or treat again this year. If you remember last year’s, it was a huge success. If you also remember last year’s, we ran out of candy before we even got halfway through. With that in mind, we’ll be taking up candy between now and October 30th. You can leave those in the church office as well, or in the family ministries office.

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Father, we’re so grateful when we consider your presence in the world. Grateful for the presence of your hope. Grateful for the gift of life. Grateful for your presence in our own individual lives and humbled by the gift of grace. Our hearts are lifted when we think of Your presence here this morning among a holy people worshipping our holy Lord. For all of this, Father, we thank You. Be with us now as we lift our voices in song and study Your word. For we ask this in Jesus's name, Amen.

Sermon

Have you ever heard the expression, “If you lay down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas”? Sounds like something my mother would have said. It speaks to the idea that when we surround ourselves with people who are morally less than what we should he, we usually end up being more like them than they end up being like us.

I think from a broad standpoint, that’s what’s happened to a lot of Christians.

They’ve been around the dogs too much, and now they have fleas. We think like the world thinks, act like the world acts, talk like the world talks. To the point where there’s really no difference at all between a person who has faith in Christ and someone who doesn’t.

And that’s a terrible state of affairs, because I can’t recall a time in all of my life when Christians needed to be the ones pointing the world toward Christ more than right now. So how do we stop that? How do we set ourselves apart as Christians while still being an active part of the world?

Our nation was founded on a simple but very profound principle — every person is endowed by God with the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In other words, we are all born free.

Great idea on the surface, and a true one. But there’s a problem with it too, because for as much as we crave freedom, we’re all ruled over by something. We’re made to be ruled, and if we don’t set God as the ruler over our lives, we’ll put either something or someone else in that position.

The truth is that we’re all free, but only in the sense that we all get to choose who or what rules over us.

As Christians, we know that true freedom only comes when we give God complete control over our lives. That sounds a little counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? To be free, we must become servants to God.

But that’s exactly what Paul is talking about in his letter to the Ephesians, and that’s where we are today.

Ephesians can be divided into two parts: the first section (about the first three chapters) talks about how as believers we’re new creations in Christ. The old us is cast aside so that the new us can take over. The section section (chapters 4-6) describes what it means to live as these new creations.

Because it isn’t enough to say that God has made us new again. We need to act like it. We need to live like it. That means turning away from all of our bad habits and being led by the power of the Holy Spirit.

If we call ourselves Christians, then we have to live like Christians. But what does that mean? Turn with me to the book of Ephesians, chapter 5, verses 15-21:

Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

And this is God’s word.

Sometimes we overlook just how strange the Christian faith can seem on the surface to people who don’t believe. That’s especially true to the non-believers of the first century.

Because there aren’t many gods, there’s just one. And that God doesn’t hate you, He loves you. He didn’t come into this world to rule as an emperor or a king, he came as a poor and gentle man.

It’s upside down thinking, isn’t it? It’s turning what everyone in the Roman world thought the gods were on its head. Jesus taught that you become greater by thinking of yourself less, and that we have to love those who hate us.

And then to top it all off, God died because we killed him. But when he died, he died for all of us, and took our sins upon himself. Then he rose, overcoming death itself, and if we have faith in Him, we will overcome death as well.

That’s a faith that was very hard for the Roman world to understand. There had never been a religion like Christianity, and in the Roman world there were a lot of different religions.

It’s easy to think a faith like that would have died out, but it didn’t. In just a few centuries, Christianity would overtake the entire known world, and now it’s the most practiced religion on earth.

And why is that? Because those early Christians lived and acted in a way that was completely different from everyone else.

They were joyful, peaceful, content. They were loving and gentle. They took care of the poor and the orphans and the widows. They possessed a love for life and for people — no matter who they were — that no one else did.

The unbelievers who lived and worked around those early Christians couldn’t understand it. It made no sense at all.

But they were absolutely fascinated with Christianity, because what mattered to those non-Christians wasn’t theology — not at first — it was something a lot simpler: They simply wanted what these Christians had. The thing that made the Christians live in a much better and deeper way.

Because they were set apart from the world but still entirely a part of it all at the same time. They both avoided the world’s darkness while bringing light to it.

And that’s the lesson for us today. The worse and more morally corrupt the world gets, the more differently Christians should live than anyone else. And the secret to that is giving every moment of our lives over to God’s control.

Paul shows us how to do that right here.

He begins in verse 15 by telling us to be careful how we walk, meaning how we live. That’s a great word there — walk — because it describes something that’s both inward and outward.

It’s inward in the way that we place our faith in Christ and surrender our lives to him, and it’s outward in the way that we deal with others and the world.

The idea is finding the straight and narrow path and then keeping to it. Keep an eye on yourself, Paul says. Pay attention to what you’re doing instead of drifting through life on autopilot. Don’t think less, think more.

Listen to the Holy Spirit more than yourself, because the Holy Spirit will keep you to that straight and narrow way while your own heart will just whisper those wants and desires and the world’s temptations over and over.

That’s Paul’s advice on how to get through each day with a spirit of love and dignity that sets you apart from the world.

If you listen to the Holy Spirit carefully, then you’ll walk carefully. And that’s the most important thing — how we walk. Not as foolish people do, but as the wise.

Paul says those are our only two choices. We’re either living wisely, or we’re living foolishly. There aren’t degrees — we’re not being mostly wise and just a little foolish. It’s one or the other. And the difference between those two depends on how much thought we give to our souls.

Paul frames this by suggesting that the unwise make up the majority of the world. Unwise is our default setting. The unwise go through their lives indulging their foolish pleasures.

They’re always chasing immediate gratification — never thinking ahead, always jumping from one impulse to the next. To them, it’s not their souls that matter, it’s their bodies, and so they’re always looking for the next thing that will make them feel good, or at least the next thing that will numb them to how depressing their lives really are.

But the wise are always keeping their immortal souls in mind. They pattern their walk after Christ. They keep their eyes open rather than shut. They let the Holy Spirit guide them. They live for eternity and say in every circumstance, “What’s right for eternity?” While the unwise only live for the moment and say, “What’s right for right now?”

It’s all an issue of time, isn’t it? And that’s exactly what verse 16 is about — the value of our time.

We’re all guilty of wasting it, but time is seen by Paul as a luxury that we waste on the things that don’t matter. He says don’t do that, make the most of our time instead.

That phrase is a weaker translation of the original Greek, which compares time to something we should buy up. It’s a metaphor taken from merchants who are shrewd in what they buy and sell.

It’s the idea of seizing time rather than letting it slip through our fingers, and having the wisdom to use that time for the most good. To Paul, the best way for you to spend your time is to do good and improve yourself, to make yourself better.

We all have a picture in our minds of the people we want to be, the people we should be, and often that picture is a much different one than who we really are. Paul says that’s okay. In fact, that’s good. But instead of using your time to beat yourself up, use it to work toward becoming your best self through the power and help of the Holy Spirit.

How we view the time we have in this life goes a long way in defining what sort of lives we live. We have to see every moment as precious. And why is that? Because of what Paul says at the end of verse 16 — the days are evil.

And they are, aren’t they? Our days are filled with all manner of pain and doubt and fear. We’re surrounded on all sides by all these different ways to live, and because of that we’re constantly being tempted to slip away and become as corrupted as everything else.

In Paul’s time, there were a lot of temptations that would draw people into sin. We have even more. Paul didn’t have the internet. He didn’t have social media or television. But he did have a sinful Roman culture that rivaled our own. And as such, we warns the Ephesians against temptation by always being on their guard against wasting their time.

We have just enough time to accomplish every bit of what God has given us to do in this life, and not a second more. So to waste one moment is to never have that moment again. We have to see every waking second is a treasure that we can use to do more good to others and to grow closer to God.

There’s a real sense of urgency here in what Paul is saying. He’s reminding us that life is fragile. And he’s also comparing the second part of this verse, the fact that the days are evil, with the first part, making most of our time. There’s a link there. It’s cause and effect — because so many of us aren’t making the most of our time, the days are evil.

Paul sums up the point he’s trying to make in verse 17: “so then do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.”

“So then” — see those first two words? Paul does this a lot. It’s his way of saying that everything that’s come so far is an introduction to what comes next. The five chapters and sixteen verses he’s spent writing were all so that he can get to this main point.

And the point is this: You are children of light. And because light is so valuable and because your life demands so much of your care and attention, don’t be foolish.

Only the wise know they’re unwise. Most of the people in this world never consider themselves foolish — it’s always everyone BUT themselves who are foolish.

But Paul says that all of us are foolish sometimes, because at some point we’ve all wasted time. At some point we’ve all put bodies that will decay over souls that will live forever. At some point we’ve all walked a crooked line rather than a straight one. We’ve all been foolish.

But we can’t afford to be that way anymore. The times are so evil and the danger is so great that we can’t ignore our duty as Christians. We can’t afford to put worldly things above our immortal souls. We can’t be like everybody else. What we have to do is seek God’s will in every time and place and circumstance.

That’s all wisdom really is, isn’t it? To know and follow God’s will. It know God’s purpose both in our lives and in the lives of others.

But what is it to know God’s will? How many of us can say that we always know what that is?

Not me. I’m always asking God what His will is, and more often than not I just get silence in return.

But even if we don’t know exactly what God’s specific will is in any given situation, we do know what His will broadly is, don’t we? We know that we should be praying, growing our faith and trust in him, that we should be reading His word. It’s loving him with all of our hearts and minds and souls and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

It’s trusting instead of turning away and hanging on when we want to let go. It’s loving when we’d rather hate.

That’s what it means in a broad way to walk the straight path of life.

But in verse 18, Paul moves from talking generally to being more specific. Everything he’s been saying about those who live foolishly can be summed up in his example of drunkenness.

Some translations have the word “excess” there. It’s a strange word, and a lot of scholars have different opinions about how it should be translated from the Greek.

It occurs in only two other places in the New Testament, once in Titus and another in 1 Peter, and in both that word is translated as “riot.” It means something that’s unsafe and lost beyond recovery.

That’s why drunkenness is a special sin in scripture. The Bible doesn’t say, “Don’t drink.” Jesus drank wine, as did Paul, as did most everyone back then. What Paul’s saying instead is don’t become a drunk. Don’t let wine overwhelm your life.

With something like drunkenness, the rational part of us is drugged to sleep, while the emotional part of us is left to run wild. It’s not only reckless, it’s the cause of so much other recklessness because our passions and appetites are never really satisfied. It’s the opposite of walking wisely.

Instead of filling yourself up with wine, Paul says, fill yourself with the Holy Spirit. He isn’t content with warning us against the ruinous excess of drunkenness.

He knows that every time an alcoholic reaches for a drink, what he or she is really reaching for is to satisfy a craving for physical and mental excitement.

But the true way to satisfy that craving is to be filled with the Holy Spirit instead. Because it’s the Spirit that gives us true joy, and the Spirit can be said to only dwell in a mind that’s well-balanced and prayerful.

And in verse 19, Paul states a specific way in which we can stay filled with the Spirit and how we can make sure our walk is straight and unwavering. He says to speak to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord.

Speak to yourselves, he says. Lift one another up. Pray together, and sing together. In other words, worship together.

This has the force of a command, and from it we can take that Paul intended this to be an obligation for all Christians.

In a world where the soul isn’t valued and where there are so many temptations to keep us from doing what we know we should, it’s more important than ever for Christians to come together and strengthen one another.

And for Paul, worship and music go hand in hand. And all of this singing and worship is to be sung to the Lord. In singing we should consider ourselves speaking directly to God just as much as in prayer, and so the words should be sung with a sense of awe.

If we sing, we can’t help but praise, and if we praise, we can’t help but give thanks. It’s a formula that Paul gives here - the world is dark and always chasing you, always tempting you to turn from you know is right to what you know is wrong.

But if you fix your mind on what is good, on God’s love and Christ’s sacrifice and on the peace those things offer you, then you will feel thankful. And it’s very hard for anyone to live unwisely if give they continually live with a spirit of thankfulness.

All through Paul’s letters, he says thanksgiving is the fundamental element in Christian worship. It’s the mark of the Christian life, both when you’re happy and when you’re down.

It’s the music constantly playing in the Christian’s heart. But notice what he says here. Don’t give thanks to God for some things, don’t give thanks for just the good things or for the things we don’t understand. No — give thanks for ALL things.

For the good times and the bad times, for the things we understand and the things we don’t, for the preservation of our lives every moment and for the mercies that God gives us.

For spiritual things and for our adoption into the family of God, for earth and heaven and kids and colds and work and rest and adversity and pain and grief and joy, for everything, because God uses everything to bless us even when it feels like He’s using everything to hurt us.

Everything works together for God’s good and perfect and acceptable will. And if we know this, really know it, how can we not be thankful? Because even if the bad times come, even if hardships strike us, we can rest knowing that we are still protected and being blessed. We are still living and working according to God’s perfect will.

If we really want to know how to live in a broken world, it’s that — be thankful. Because from that flows everything else.

We should praise God for his mercy to us and for all the happiness we enjoy. And one obvious effect of this is that it helps us to overcome the selfishness that we’re all born with. It allows us to rejoice int he happiness of others as well as our own.

No matter who we are, no matter the lives we live, we have much to be grateful for. We’re so often tempted to magnify our hardships, say that the whole world is going to hell, while we should instead search out the beautiful things in our lives.

In heaven we will understand that God has not allowed any of us to suffer a moment more than was necessary, and that even those sufferings were for our own good. We will see that God knew all along what was best for us, and the best way to lead us, however hard and mysterious it seems to us now.

Tough as it is, we should give thanks in our hard times. It’s okay not to thank God for those things specifically, but thank him instead for the help that he gives you through those hard times.

I’ve found that in my own times of trouble, God will often shine a light onto the good things that were always there but I never noticed. Things that ,when those hard times were done, I could still see and make life seem even more beautiful than before.

And that’s the way to real happiness in life. Be thankful. Not just sometimes, but always. Make it a habit in your life. The more you thank God, the more you see to be thankful for.

And why is that the key? Because it’s impossible to be bitter and thankful at the same time. It’s impossible to be hopeless and thankful at the same time. Over and over in the Bible, we see that gratitude is the secret to a holy life. It gets our eyes off the things that aren’t going well and puts them squarely on the blessings that God gives us every day.

Finally we get to verse 21 and the end of Paul’s instruction on this matter: be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.

Submit yourselves to one another, he says. If we allow the Holy Spirit to fill us and control our lives, we’ll experience godly relationships with one another.

Paul describes how the Holy Spirit influences the lives of believers. Those filled by the Spirit fill their speech with praises for God.

They continually give thanks to God. They willingly submit to one another. In other words, we’re separated from the world. We have that thing that nobody else has but everybody wants. And this happens when we focus on three things:

First, our words. There’s nothing that affects the mental and emotional state of the people around us more than the words we use. No other part of us is more powerful than our speech.

A simple word can build someone up or tear them down, give them hope or give them grief, bring them closer to God or farther away. That means we should help guide our friends who are believers along that straight path that Christ calls us all to walk, and we should allow our friends to help us walk our own straight path.

And it also means that for our friends who aren’t believers, every word we speak should be filled with grace, kindness, and understanding.

Second, our attitude. Paul says we’re to give thanks no matter what is happening in our lives. As we grow in Christ, allowing his spirit to lead us, we start seeing life not through our own eyes but through the eyes of God.

We start to view everything not through our own perspective, but His. What our words are to the mental and emotional health of others, our attitude is to us. And best of all, in a world where so much of what happens to us is beyond our control, our attitude is one of the few things that’s entirely up to us.

We can choose to be hopeful. We can choose to be thankful. We can choose faith over doubt and happiness over bitterness. And aside from our choice to accept Christ, that choice every day to adopt the proper attitude toward God, your place in the world, and who you are in Him is the most important choice you make. Make it every day.

And finally, our actions. How you choose to speak and how you choose to see yourself, your world, and your God directly influences what we do.

And in the Christian life, it’s usually those small things we do every day that make the biggest impact in the lives of others. Things like putting others ahead of ourselves. Giving others the benefit of the doubt. Seeing people as creations of God and eternal souls rather than what they believe and think.

It means setting aside our time, our talents, and our attention for the needs of those we love and even the needs of those we don’t. The Christian life isn’t about thinking of yourself as less, but thinking less of yourself.

Rules, right? That’s kind of what Paul is dishing out here. And if you’d listen to a lot of non-Christians in the world, you’d get the sense that rules are all the Bible is really about. All these rules set down to keep us unhappy, to make life less worth living, to make the world less fun.

But is that really the case? It’s true, God does give us rules, and we’re free to follow them or ignore them as we wish. But it isn’t less freedom that God’s after in our lives. Not less happiness or joy, but more. What he’s trying to teach us is that we have to take care of ourselves now in order to take care of our selves later.

Think forward. That’s the mindset we need to develop. That’s what Paul is talking about here.

There’s a great short story by Ray Bradbury called A Sound of Thunder. You might not have read it, but I bet you know the plot because it’s been borrowed by more television shows and movies than I can mention.

In that story a man invents a machine that allows him to travel back in time. When people get to the past, there’s a metal path like a rail laid just above the ground, and the warning he gives everyone is don’t step off the path.

Bad things will happen if you step off the path. Because if you step off the path and change one thing, just one tiny thing, the future can be ruined beyond repair.

Of course a man named Eckles does travel back in time and step off the path, and in all the chaos that ensues he steps on a butterfly. But that’s all it took to change everything. When he comes back to the present, the world is in chaos just because he stepped on that butterfly millions of years ago.

That’s a common theme with stories like this. The rule is always the same - be careful what you do, because if you mess up the past, the present might be changed so much that you won’t even recognize it.

But we never take that a little further, do we? We think, Oh, well if I travel back in time I have to be careful of what I do, otherwise my present will be damaged beyond repair.

But we never think, Oh, well I have to be careful of what I do now, otherwise my future will be damaged beyond repair.

Life is serious business, and all of it is lived inside a broken world. That’s what Paul is talking about in this scripture.

And he’s been given a reputation as this hard-nosed and serious guy, which is earned, but it’s only because he lived every moment of his life with that in mind.

We don’t have time to fool around. We can’t afford to let temptation have its way in our lives. We have to live seriously, consciously.

In a time when we’re tempted every day to become less like Christ, we need the conviction to become more like Christ. Be thankful. Speak words of life. Lift up others. Be part of the solution instead of the problem. Keep to the straight path.

Let’s pray:

Father, Your word says that as believers we are called to be salt and light in a bland and darkening life. Give us the strength to do just that. Just as even the smallest flame can stand out in the night, Your people can shine all the brighter in a world that is increasingly turning away from You. Help us to be the arms with which You draw the lost to You. Help us to be the words that lift people up rather than cast them down. Help us to be the bridge to healing rather than sources of divisiveness. Help us, Father, to be the people You wish us to be. For it’s in Jesus’s name as ask it, Amen.