Sermon Tone Analysis

PRIORITY LIVING      EPHESIANS 5:15-17

 

            One of the great cathedrals in Milan, Italy, has a beautiful triple-door entrance.

All three portals are crowned by splendid arches artistically carved with thought-provoking inscriptions.

Over one, etched in stone, is a wreath of roses with the words: "All which pleases is but for a moment."

Over another is sculpted the outline of a cross accompanied by this engraving: "All which troubles is but for a moment."

On the largest doorway - the great central entrance to the main sanctuary - is chiseled the most impressive thought of all: "That which is important is eternal."

The key to the Christian life is learning to distinguish how to live between these three options.

As we continue our series /Living Like You Were Dying/, things must be prioritized.

Let me ask you a series of questions.

Where do you spend the majority of your time?

Where do you spend the majority of your talents?

Where do you spend the majority of your money?

In other words, what are the priorities of your life?

In the passage, we are going to study this morning, I want to exhort and encourage you from God’s Word to priority of living.

So take your Bible and turn to the fifth chapter of Ephesians beginning in verse 15 and going through verse 17.

From this passage, I want to provide you with three directives for priority living: wise up (15), wake up (16), and watch out (17).

WISE UP – 15

            *Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise*

*            *Paul, in this verse, points back to what Christians have been rescued from the domain of darkness and brought into the kingdom of light.

Therefore, they ought to be imitators of their heavenly Father.

They ought to live wisely in regard to this very truth that they have become a new person in Christ.

Yet, there are times Christians do not live as wisely as they should live.

So Paul says wise up, Christian, because Christ has saved you and given you the power to live differently.

So as Christians, we are to observe how we are to walk.

In verse 11, Christians are to expose darkness in others, but if we are going to do this faithfully, then we need to make sure our walk is what it needs to be.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “Your actions speak so loud, I can’t hear what you are saying?”

As parents we say to our kids, “Do as I say and not as I do.”

In other words, talk is cheap.

Our walk must back up our talk is what Paul is saying here.

The word *walk *is found several times in this letter.

For example, Paul told the Ephesians to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called (4:1); no longer walk as the Gentiles do (4:17); walk in love (5:1); walk as children of light (5:8); and here walk in wisdom.

This word carries the idea of the whole round of activities of an individual’s life.

The Christian is to walk in newness of life, Rom.

6:4, after the spirit, 8:4, in honesty, 13:13, by faith, 2 Cor.

5:7, in good works, Eph.

2:10, in love, 5:2, in wisdom, Col. 4:5, in truth, 2 John 4, after the commandments of the Lord, v. 6.

And, negatively, not after the flesh, Rom.

8:4; not after the manner of men, 1 Cor.

3:3 ; not in craftiness, 2 Cor.

4:2; not by sight, 5:7; not in the vanity of the mind, Eph.

4:17; not disorderly, 2 Thess.

3:6.

It has to do with our conduct and behavior.

A relationship with Christ should make our lives different from our lives before Christ.

It ought to have an impact on the way we live because of what we believe.

Since we are to pay attention to our walk, Paul emphasizes the importance of this by stating how we are to do it.

We are to do it carefully, circumspectly.

Akribōs (*careful*) has the basic meaning of accurate and exact, and carries the associated idea of looking, examining, and investigating something with great care.

It also carries the idea of alertness.

As believers walk through the spiritual mine field of the world, they are to be constantly alert to every danger that Satan puts in their way.

That is why Jesus warned that “the gate is small, and the way is narrow that leads to life” (Matt.

7:14).

We are to be wise rather than unwise.

Proverbs 14:12 says, “There is a way which seems right to men, but the end thereof is death.”

James 3 also gives a description between wise and unwise living.

What this means is that there is a way that leads to eternal life and there is a way to live that leads to eternal death.

There are only two ways to really live this life: God’s way or Man’s way.

One leads to heaven and the other leads to hell.

So Paul is saying be wise rather than unwise.

Being unwise is reverting back to your days before Christ.

It is the idea of being foolish.

Paul told Titus all people were once foolish before Christ.

Scripture is filled with examples of foolishness such as David taking a census (2 Sam.

24:10).

The Galatians were foolish when they fell prey to a heresy.

Also, we can play the fool when we put our hearts on the wrong things such as money, fame, prestige, popularity.

The opposite of wisdom is folly, meaning the short-term self-indulgence which marks out the person who doesn’t think about long-term priorities and goals but lives on a day-to-day basis, asking, “What is the most fun thing to do now?”

(James Packer) Running red lights is the No. 1 cause of car crashes in American cities.

Annual cost to society: $7 billion in damages, medical bills, and lost work time.

The average amount of time saved by running a red light is 50 seconds.

Wisdom is the ability to take God’s word into the fabric of one’s life.

It is living as God intended.

This word is pictured of a skilled craftsman who can complete a task with raw materials.

Steve Lawson, pastor of Fellowship Church in Mobile, said wisdom is the God given ability to see life from God’s perspective, to size up situations for what they really are, and to select the best solution to achieve the highest end.

WAKE UP – 16

            *Making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.*

*            *What Paul is saying is that we ought to live life with a sense of urgency.

In other words, it is living for today because we are not certain about tomorrow.

Time is shrinking and the influence of the world is increasing in its influence.

Folks, we have to understand that this is not a fair fight because the world is only going to get worse.

By *the days are evil* Paul may have specifically had in mind the corrupt and debauched living that characterized the city of Ephesus.

The Christians there were surrounded by paganism and infiltrated by heresy (see 4:14).

Greediness, dishonesty, and immorality were a way of life in Ephesus, a way* *in which most of the believers had themselves once been involved and to which they were tempted to revert (4:19-32; 5:3-8).

*            *Less than a hundred years after Paul wrote the Ephesian epistle Rome was persecuting Christians with growing intensity and cruelty.

Believers were burned alive, thrown to wild beasts, and brutalized in countless other ways.

For the Ephesian church the* evil* times were going to become more and more evil.

Several decades after Paul wrote this epistle, the Lord commended the church at Ephesus for its good works, perseverance, and resistance to false teaching.

“But I have this against you,” He continued, “that you have left your first love” (Rev.

2:2, 4).

Because the church continued to languish in its devotion to the Lord, its lampstand was removed, as He had warned it would be if the believers there failed to “repent and do the deeds [they] did at first” (v. 5) Sometime during the second century the church in Ephesus disappeared, and there has never been a congregation there since.

Because the church at Ephesus did not heed Paul’s advice and the Lord’s own specific warning, it ceased to exist.

Instead of helping redeem the evil days in which it existed, the church fell prey to them.

Things to today are worse than then and Paul warned Timothy that times would get worse in the last days (1 Tim.

3:1-5).

There we need to make the best use of our time.

The word for time does not refer to clock or calendar time.

It refers to allocated or fixed seasons in life.

God has set boundaries to our lives, and our opportunity for service exists only within those boundaries.

Ecclesiastes says that there is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to laugh and a time to mourn, a time to plant and a time to pluck up, a time for war and a time for peace.

A great illustration of this is found in an ancient Greek statue depicted which a man with wings on his feet, a large lock of hair on the front of his head, and no hair at all on the back.

Beneath was the inscription: “Who made thee?

Lysippus made me.

What is thy name?

My name is Opportunity.

Why hast thou wings on thy feet?