Light

Intro:

Are you light?

As you can tell, the passage we will be working through today deals a lot with darkness and light. This passage is Ephesians 5:7-14. I found it necessary to include verses 1-6 as well, to give us insight into the reason for verse 7.

Read passages.

Verses 1-6 is who the Ephesians once were. Paul uses verse 7 as a transition into his discussion of darkness and light. (Read verse 7 again). Paul made it clear that the Church of Ephesus was not to partake in the sins of the world, not to be brothers of the sons of disobedience. Paul says in verse 3 “these things should not even be named among you”. He illustrates this by naming specific ways the “sons of disobedience” live. Impurity, greed, obscenity, foolish talk, deceitfulness, sexual immorality, etc. were all prominent among the sons of disobedience. We must also understand that there is a “therefore” here. As Kristy said on Tuesday, what is the therefore there for? I want to bring you back to verse 1, where Paul says to be imitators of God. We cannot imitate God by walking contrary to how He wants us to live. What does our passage today have to say about this? I hope to show you how our passage today explains that:

BIG IDEA: In a world engulfed in darkness we are called to imitate Christ by walking in, for, and as His light.

I want to ask you this question to think about as we walk through today's passage, and I hope to answer it as we study together this morning. How are we called to be imitators of God? Well we can see in my first point that we are called to be imitators of God by living in the Light.

Live in the Light (5:7-8):

Live in the light by not partaking in the sins of the world (5:7)

(T) We are called not to partake in the sins of the world because of what God has done for us, He has transformed us.

Verse 8 says “for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light”. Light is a very prominent theme in this passage, so I want to take a moment to ask. What does Paul mean by light? This concept was not specific to the Ephesians. In fact, it appears throughout the Bible, in many places. If we look back at Genesis 1, we see light as one of the very first things of Creation. Genesis 1:3-5 says “And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. (It is clear here that God intends for darkness to be separate from light. Literally) God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” It exposes, it reveals, it makes things seen. We will talk about these things later on. And darkness is not light, it is the absence of light, it keeps things hidden, makes it hard to walk, blinds people, etc. What does 1 John 1:5 say about this? It tells us that God is light. Acts 26:18 says that when we turn from darkness to light we are turning from the power of Satan to God. Many other OT and NT passages point to the fact that God is light. We will get more into how that functions later, but for now we need to understand that God is light. So what verse 8 is really talking about is how we are to:

Live in the Light and be set apart (5:8a)

“For at one time you were darkness”. This brings us back to verses 3-6, where Paul illustrates how the “sons of disobedience” or in this case “sons of darkness” lived. He is basically saying “for at one time you were sexually immoral, at one time you were covetous, at one time you had a bad mouth, at one time (you fill in the blank), at one time your lifestyle was sin”. There was no light in the Ephesians before the redemptive work of Christ. We saw earlier how darkness and light are separated, there can not be darkness and light in the same place. In other words, Paul is saying that when we were darkness, we were separated from God.

We were once darkness (5:8a)

That is who we once were, that is who the Ephesians once were, before the redemptive work of Christ. Praise be to God for the work on the cross that has enabled us to become light in Him. We would not know Him if He chose not to make Himself light to us, and we would not be able to have a relationship with Him if He had not paid the price for our sins on the cross. So because of our newfound life in Christ, we are now light in the Lord.

We are now light in the Lord (5:8a)

(T) Since we are now living in the Light, being transformed from our previous selves as sons of darkness, we have become Children of light, we are now called to live for the light. This brings me to point two:

Live for the Light (5:8b-10):

We can imitate God by devoting our lives to Him, living in pursuit of Him and His will. Remember the illustration I gave at the beginning of this message? We were in a dark room, but now that the light is on we can see the purpose, we can see the path that we are supposed to take and now know how to navigate the room. In the same way, now that we are light in Christ, we have a purpose, we have a path to follow. That path is to imitate God in our words and actions. Paul uses the illustration as a child in the end of verse 8, saying that we are to live for the light by being Children of light.

Live for the light by being children of the light (5:8b-9):

Consider the relationship between a child and his or her parents. A parent knows what their child needs, at least they should. It is sad how warped our culture's view of family has become. So we will look at it in the way Paul intended it to be looked at. He talks about children and parents later in the chapter, and reminds them of the fifth commandment, to honor their father and mother. Living for the light as a child of light means living in a way that brings honor to God.

We should walk as Children of light (5:8b)

What criteria does Paul give to this? How were the Ephesians supposed to know that they were walking in the light? Well, Paul writes in verse 9 that the fruit of the Light is found in all goodness, righteousness, and truth. This is how we know that we are walking in the light, when our actions result in goodness and righteousness and conformity to truth, when our hearts become more aligned with the will and purpose of the Lord.

We can know we are walking as Children of Light when we are walking in goodness and truth (5:9)

(T) Since we are walking as children of light, our desire should be to please the Lord as talked about in verse 10.

“And find out what pleases the Lord” It is a very simple command. Our desire should be to seek that which pleases the Lord, and what does this passage tell us about that? We please the Lord when we abide in His light, and we can know we are doing that when the fruits of our actions are found in goodness and truth and right eousness as we just talked about!

Our desire should be to please the Lord in our actions (5:10)

(T) We have now looked at how we are changed from our old life to new life, now we will look at what it looks like to be continuously walking in this new life in my third point.

Live as the Light (5:11-14):

Paul moves on to how we should live in a world that is enveloped by darkness. Verses 11-14 deal with living among the spiritually dead, among the sons of disobedience. We will look at verses 11-12 first, which talk about

Live as the Light in the darkness and expose the darkness (5:11-12):

We already talked about this in verse 7, and Paul is re-stating this command, to not have any part in the deeds of darkness. However, Paul goes one step further, saying to expose darkness. I think mentioning the Greek word here would be beneficial for our understanding of the passage. The word used here is ἐλέγχω. This word is not just “expose” but is used very commonly with convict or rebuke. This word is not meant for uncovering good, but solely exposing evil deeds and darkness. He uses the same word in verse 13. By unfruitfulness we can go back and look at verses 3-6 which talk about the deeds of darkness that we have already looked over. However, we see that God commands us not to participate in those because they bear no good fruit. So:

As children of Light we must expose darkness (5:11)

What did Paul mean by expose? Did he mean to call out? Did he mean to judge? Did he mean to talk about evil deeds? I do not think this is what Paul is referring to. As this passage is talking about our walk, and walking in a way that the light of God is reflected in our lives. Verse 12 also discusses that it is shameful to talk about the works of darkness done in secret. So it would be important to note here that Paul is talking about living in a way that others can see that the light of Christ is in us.

There is no benefit to talking about evil deeds (5:12)

This is crucial to understanding the meaning of verse 11. “Expose” is not necessarily talking about using our voice to call others out and tell them of their sin, there could be instances where this is necessary. But I think that Paul is telling the Ephesians, given the context of the passage, that their lives should be so vastly different from the lives of the sons of darkness, that people who aren’t Christians would begin to ask “why are they so much different, how are they different?”

(T) We are called to live lives contrary to the world around us so that they may see that we are light in the Lord, we see this continued in verses 13 and 14.

The light of God shines through us expose others to His light (5:13):

This is the process of transformation from darkness to light, first it is exposed to the light, then it is made visible, finally it is made light. John Piper describes these verses as the way of speaking to the spiritually dead. There was one morning, I was out for a run. It was like 6am or something like that, middle of the winter, freezing out so I was all bundled up and everything. I thought I had everything, but forgot one thing. A headlamp. When I went to run outside I could barely see the path I was on. Thankfully I could just barely see it, but let’s imagine I couldn't for the point of this illustration. Anyways, as I was running I noticed this other guy running with a headlamp on that brought light to his run. So I started chasing him, just kidding. But I noticed that he had a light, and if he had offered it to me or to run with me I would have gladly taken it. Maybe he just had it for himself, but I saw how the light led his run, and I realized my need for a light too.

(T) Paul wanted the Ephesians to know that they were seen by unbelievers and should therefore be walking in a way that ministers to those in darkness, and the message they should preach is “awake oh sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you”.

We should speak to unbelievers in a way that calls them to the light of Christ (5:14)

Unbelievers do not know or comprehend the light of the Lord, so we cannot seek to judge them without them understanding the light. Therefore we are called to allow God to use us to reveal Himself to unbelievers. That is why Paul emphasizes the manner in which the Ephesians walk so much, so that others may see their walk and know Christ.

I had a dream a couple months ago. I do not remember much of what it looked like, but it left such a vivid image in my mind that I remember the idea of it to this day. Maybe you’ve heard a story similar to this before. But in this dream, I was hanging out with some friends from work (who were unbelievers), and during this time we were hanging out, chatting, having fun as friends do. Something happened though, in the middle of my dream I remember that the sky changed, and the Lord appeared for His second coming. I was so excited, and I remember these feelings as I experienced the dream. As I was caught up into the sky with the Lord, I looked around me and realized I did not see my friends, I did not see the people I was just with. As I reached the Lord in the sky, He directed my gaze back to the ground, and immediately I knew. This is the most vivid picture I have ever remembered from a dream. And something that moved me to tears even in my sleep (when I woke up my pillow was soaked). These friends were down on the ground, crying, saying “you had all this time with us, but you never told us… you never showed us Christ.”

Yes I want to meet Jesus face to face, and yes I want to experience the joy of being with Him for all eternity. But I also want others to see Him as well. We should seek to be made more like Christ and live in His light every day both so that we may experience the beauty, and joy, and peace that comes from being with Him, and so that others can look at our life and say “something’s different, they have Jesus.”

Are you light?