Sermon Tone Analysis

Good morning and welcome to Dishman Baptist Church.

Please take your Bibles and turn them with me to Ephesians 5, Ephesians 5.

Among the many superlative offerings to the Christian faith the late Dr. R.C. Sproul authored there was a set of children’s books meant to teach the principles of the Gospel to children in simple allegories that they can grasp.

One of these books is The Lightlings.

The premise of the story is that the King of Light creates the lightlings to inhabit His garden of light.

Not only was the garden full of light, but the lightlings reflected the light of the King.

But the lightlings weren’t content to live the way the King of Light asked them to live and decided to do what they wanted instead.

When they did this, the light in the garden and in them faded.

Ashamed of what they had done, the lightlings fled the garden into the woods and the darkness - and there they lived in deeper and deeper darkness until they couldn’t tell the difference between day and night.

And every lightling that was born continued to live in this condition.

Now that’s not where the story ends, but for our purposes this morning it is where I’m going to stop at least for now.

This allegorical tale fits very well into the passage we’re going to be examining this morning - a passage that is a mere eighteen words long but literally drips with theological significance.

My goal this morning is to wring this passage out, to expose for our eyes the richness of what it teaches and to magnify the God that is at the center of these great truths.

Please join with me as we dive in and plumb the depths of this passage.

We’ll be reading from Ephesians 5:6-14 but we will focus in on Ephesians 5:8 alone.

Please follow along in your Bibles as I set this great verse in its context.

Paul is going to continue to challenge the Ephesian believers to deepen their walk with Christ in this passage.

You will recall that the word walk has played a significant role throughout Ephesians as Paul has been teaching the Ephesians the implications of their new life in Christ.

Earlier in chapter 5 Paul tells the Ephesians to walk in love and now here in this passage this morning he will add to that charge, telling them to walk as children of light.

Before he gets to that point though Paul delivers the Gospel in a succinct, pithy statement.

In so doing he reveals the total depravity of man, the redemption provided through Jesus Christ, the monergistic nature of salvation and the work of sanctification.

Paul begins this next section with two indicative statements that reveal to the Ephesians what they were and what they are and then an imperative that tells them what they must do.

This is something we would do well to learn from Paul - we have a wonderfully bad habit of simply telling people what they must do rather than revealing to them either what they are or why they must do what it is that we think they must do.

In so doing we aim more for behavioral modification - moral behavior - rather than true heart change.

This is the only kind of change that will have any lasting significance or impact on the person’s life and it should be the aim of our teaching.

Paul is going to set up a contrast between what the Ephesians were and what they now are and in the process is going to reveal our true original natures, our new condition and finally the mission that we are to fulfill.

Our Origination

In 2017 country singer Luke Bryan released the song “Most People Are Good”.

The song ascended the charts of Billboards Country songs and eventually sat at number one in 2018.

The song says “I believe most people are good; and most mama’s oughta qualify for sainthood, I believe most Friday nights look better under neon or stadium lights; I believe you love who you love ain’t nothing you should be ashamed of; I believe this world ain’t half as bad as it looks, I believe most people are good.”

In 2021 Psychology Today released an article entitled Are Human’s Naturally Good, or Intrinsically Evil?

The article concludes that “humans may be inherently good but we have assembled a horrifyingly long rap sheet over the past five thousand years, and it is not getting any shorter.”

Of course you might say - that’s just the world.

But is it?

Do we really believe that people are inherently bad, inherently evil or is it just that we do bad things?

Deep down if we’re honest with ourselves many of us would whole heartedly affirm that we are born in darkness and that when Christ saves us that we are brought out of that darkness into the light.

But in most respects people are good people who just make bad decisions.

Until this last week many of us would probably have said something to that effect about Will Smith.

Then he walked up on stage and slapped Chris Rock.

And you could even excuse that and say that proves our point - he’s a good person and he just made a bad decision.

Who are we to judge?

We might even be willing to qualify his actions.

He’s under a lot of stress.

We are very good at explaining things for people.

We live in a society that has embraced the crutch of victimhood and uses it to explain away any manner of bad behaviors.

We list sexual abuse, physical abuse, in-utero drug exposure, your parents didn’t hug you enough, you’re the wrong skin color, you’re the right skin color, you’re the wrong gender - we have all kinds of excuses for people’s behavior to the point where they are not responsible for the decisions that they made because they are the outworking of some event in their life.

But now here comes Paul and he takes all of our qualifying and all of our opinions of man’s inherent goodness and throws them aside.

Look at what he writes here - for.

He writes this to show that he is going to continue the discussion that he has just started regarding Christians not being deceived by empty words, that we shouldn’t be swayed by the cunning ideas of the world because there is really nothing to them.

That as Christians we should be convinced of something higher and keeping our eyes on that not be deluded into thinking that actions don’t matter.

That we will be okay, that God will save all of us in the end.

We shouldn’t give in to a Love Wins sort of idea that is basically fundamental universalism - that everyone is going to get to Heaven in the end so our behaviors in this life don’t ultimately matter.

And his next statement is the really controversial one.

He writes for you were once darkness.

Um, wait a minute Paul - don’t you mean that we were once in darkness.

Or that we were once under the power of darkness?

Surely you can’t possibly mean that we were darkness.

This is a typo Paul - you can’t say this to people.

They’ll never believe it and no one’s going to get saved that way.

Remember God loves the sinner and hates the sin - calling people darkness doesn’t really fit that.

And Paul would respond - no it doesn’t.

Paul is reminding us that we aren’t sinners because we sin, we sin because we are sinners by nature.

He is laying out the doctrine here of total depravity.

The idea of total depravity is this - that mankind is completely corrupted as a result of the influence of sin in our lives.

It does not mean that we are as bad as we could be but rather that sin has affected every aspect of our being - the body, the soul, the mind, the will, etc.

It is the concept that there is no part of the human that is good at all.

In his book “What is Reformed Theology” R.C. Sproul describes total depravity as radical corruption writing “to say that mankind is radically corrupt is to say that sin penetrates to the root or core of our being.”

There is no separation between the man and sin because it is intrinsically mixed into our nature.

Writing to the Roman church Paul would describe the human condition this way Romans 3:10-18 “as it is written: There is no one righteous, not even one.

There is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God.

All have turned away; all alike have become worthless.

There is no one who does what is good, not even one.

Their throat is an open grave; they deceive with their tongues.

Vipers’ venom is under their lips.

Their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.

Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and wretchedness are in their paths, and the path of peace they have not known.

There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

As a result of Adam’s fall sin became a part of the nature of man such that David could write in Psalm 51:5 “Indeed, I was guilty when I was born; I was sinful when my mother conceived me.”

There is nothing good in us at birth.

We are not corrupted after birth but are born with a sinful nature.

It is a good thing that babies are born small, helpless and cute because if they weren’t they would certainly be trying to fight or kill us.

Voddie Baucham got in trouble for this - and it was a joke - but he called babies “vipers in diapers” and he is right.

Let me ask you this - those of you who are parents - how many of you ever taught your children to hit?

I was thinking about this yesterday - it is an indicator of the existence of sin in each of us from birth that we have to teach children to hug but we don’t have to teach them to hit.

That happens naturally whenever they don’t get their way.

If they could they would kill you and hang you on their walls like a trophy.

“How’d you take that one?” “Oh he was surprisingly easy that one.

Got him from 300 cm away.

He never even knew I was there, he was on his cell phone the whole time.”

Paul says we were darkness.

That everything that comes out of us in a pre-conversion state is tainted by darkness.

I made the statement last week that there is only one race and I stand by that biologically.

Spiritually though there are two races in God’s economy - the saved and the unsaved.

We are either completely dark or completely light.

This is the danger for kids that grow up in the church - they often don’t have a concept of how bad they really are.

They are - most of them anyway - are good moral kids that follow most of what their parents tell them and don’t really commit those “big” sins and so for some of you the concept that you were actually darkness and not simply in darkness is shocking.

But in a pre-converted state we are darkness.

We are the personification of darkness.

Jesus, speaking to His disciples, described the human heart this way Mark 7:20-23 “And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him.

For from within, out of people’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immoralities, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, evil actions, deceit, self-indulgence, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness.