Sermon Tone Analysis

Ephesians 5:18-19

Envision a group of people who gather once a week or more and come from all walks of life.

White collar/blue collar, men/women, wealthy/working class/lower class, all kinds of cultures, it makes no difference.

They drop their façade and talk to each other, welcoming each other with open arms.

They laugh, listen, share their sorrows, talk some more, and even sing sometimes.

They don’t watch the clock very well, but when they eventually go home, they look forward to coming back again soon to do it all over again next week.

What sort of group is this and where do they gather?

Perhaps you think I’m describing a church.

This wouldn’t be a wrong answer, but neither would be a pub since there’s a sense in which both these scenarios have common features.

Both are venues for people from all walks of life to gather on a regular basis, and they share thoughts and feelings openly, at least in theory.

Yet, there’s a major difference between them.

One relies on the influence of intoxicating drinks and the other depends on the Holy Spirit.

One is motivated by fleshly impulses and the other is motivated by godly desires.

One gathers around the pursuit of temporal pleasures and the other around shared spiritual values

Believers should gather together as a church.

First, Paul is speaking here about walking in a wise, skillful way, living with our eyes wide open to God’s truth, making good decisions that use our time well.

What he describes here is the first way that he mentions for using our time in a way that pleases the Lord.

Second, he refers to how nonbelievers who are living in moral darkness make choices, wasting time and acting foolishly.

He contrasts their behavior with how we as believers should make choices that are motivated by Christ, and which make good use of our time.

Third, he speaks to believers in a corporate, group sense.

He not only encourages u to gather together, but he tells us what should do when we gather together.

This is the theme of the entire letter of Ephesians – the glory of God through the church.

Chapter 4 shows us how the church is like many different body parts assembled working together as one healthy body.

He speaks to the church with collective plurals; so, when you see ‘you,’ think of the Southern word ya’ll for “you all.”

Furthermore, he twice uses the reciprocal pronoun ἀλλήλων, which means “one another” or “each other.”

So, he is describing how we should behave when we gather together as a church.

So, we see that in Eph 5:18-21, Paul explains how gathering together as a church is a wise and good use of time that pleases the Lord – it’s what God expects us to do in a world where we so easily waste days doing evil and useless things.

Gathering together as a church is far more important than we realize.

It’s not just something we do when it’s convenient.

It’s what we do to be wise, to use our time in a spiritually, eternally skillful way to please our Lord.

If we understood and believed this more deeply, we’d participate with our church more regularly and wholeheartedly.

Let’s also notice that Paul refers to what unsaved people do together – they drink lots of alcohol.

It’s how they socialize.

It’s what they do when they hang out together.

When they finish the work week, they gather at bars and drink.

They drink at parties, reunions, weddings, ballgames, at every chance they get when they gather together.

They count on drinking to make their gatherings meaningful and enjoyable.

What’s more, they do what followers of Christ should never do – they drink until they’re drunk.

As God’s children, the church, not the bar, should be the center of our social lives.

Nonbelievers hang out at the pub (or choose another preferred place to hang out), but believers hang out with their church.

Fools hang out with drinking buddies; wise people hang out with the members of their church family.

In fact, nonbelievers who knew us before we came to Christ will think it’s strange that we don’t go out partying with them anymore (1 Pet 4:2-4).

Paul is also pushing back at the ways drunkenness permeated pagan religious practices.

For instance, the worship of the god Dionysus (or Bacchus, the god of wine) was known for prolific drunkenness.

Once intoxicated, worshipers would engage in all sorts of degrading, immoral behavior, dancing and singing in wild revelry.

Some even believed that increased drunkenness brought greater spiritual enlightenment, though it exposed them to ecstatic delusions and demonic intrusion instead.

Even today, alcohol features prominently in gatherings of other religions, from Catholicism to Buddhism.

Many of the Ephesian believers had been saved from such a background, so Paul warned that intoxication (or getting drunk) was not the Lord’s will for the church.

With this backdrop, we can make two important observations before moving on:

First, the church is our new place of belonging, acceptance, confession, and open conversation.

This idea of “I don’t need to go to church, I can be a Christian at home,” is severely shortsighted for we can’t live a healthy, obedient, God-glorifying life without regularly attending, worshipping, fellowshipping, and serving together as a church.

If we attempt to do so, we’ll live as amputated body parts and orphaned children.

Second, church gatherings should have a distinctly different feel than a night at the pub.

This difference is more profound than a change of venue or location.

It has to do with the underlying basis for the gathering in the first place.

When nonbelievers gather, they rely on in the influence of impersonal, controlling substances like alcohol, drugs, and so on to relax their minds and get them talking.

As believers, we rely on the divine person of the Holy Spirit.

We should be aware of his presence and submit to his influence with a clear, and Scripture-saturated mind.

When we drink too much alcohol, it controls our minds.

Technically speaking, Paul is not banning all consumption of alcohol here.

If he were, then he would be contradicting himself what he would later tell Timothy, who was a pastor of this very church.

In 1 Tim 5:23, he told him to “drink a little wine” to help improve some stomach ailments and other chronic health issues that he suffered from.

So, the issue here is not whether or not alcohol is inherently wrong.

The issue is drinking too much.

Scientific studies show how alcohol passes into our brain cells.

If we drink too much, this dynamic eventually leads to slurred speech, poor decisions, delayed reflexes, decreased brain activity, mindless talk, reduced memory, blurry vision, confusion, dehydration, and more.

Not to mention, the morning afterwards becomes much more difficult.

Debauchery (dissipation) describes behavior that’s wasteful and wicked – the reckless, immoral behavior of people who are drunk.

It also describes how drunk people waste time and money.

They stay out later than they planned, spend more money than they intended, do things that are worse than they realized at the moment of their drunken state.

This wasteful, wicked living is a normal part of how nonbelievers socialize, and even how they worship in some religions.

Yet Paul is clear that when we gather as believers for fellowship and worship, drunkenness and its bad effects should have no part in what we do.

We should remain in full control of our minds, walking in the light with our eyes wide open and our hearts in full submission to the Jesus Christ our Lord.

We should be filled with the Spirit instead of being drunk with wine.

Contrary to some false and popular teachings, being “filled with the Spirit” is not an ecstatic experience like a “spiritual high,” or something like that.

It does not involve rolling on the floor, babbling in a strange language, crying like a baby, or having a cold shiver go through your spine.

These kinds of experience have more in common with being drunk than being filled with the Spirit.

To understand what it means to be filled with the Spirit, we must remind ourselves that the Holy Spirit is a divine person, the third person of the Godhead.

He is God, not just a force from God.

So, unlike nonbelievers who submit to a lifeless, controlling substance like alcohol, we submit to a perfect, personal being who is God himself.

We have already learned some things about the Holy Spirit in this letter.

He seals us permanently and indwells us personally until the day we enter God’s eternal kingdom (Eph 1:13).

Also, we may grieve him (Eph 4:30).

The Holy Spirit has divine and personal feelings, so when we say or do things contrary to God’s holy, righteous nature, the Holy Spirit experiences sorrow, grief, and distress – he winces, you might say.

To “be filled with the Spirit” is to acknowledge that the Spirit is God, that he is a personal God, that he is present within and among us as followers of Christ, and then to yield to his influence in our lives.

To “be filled” is a passive idea, something we allow to happen to us, not something we do to ourselves.

So, the Spirit fills us as we yield ourselves to him – and he fills us as a group of believers who have gathered together.

The emphasis here is not on individuals being filled (like a cup being filled with water), but rather as a group of gathered believers being filled (like the entire kitchen being filled with water).

The focus here is on a shared experience in which we gather together to worship God in mutual dependence upon the Holy Spirit.

This should be more than a communal, shared experience, it should also be a continual one.

“Be filled” (present tense, linear) indicates an ongoing activity, not a one-time event.

So, this is not something we hope happens to us one time.

It’s not a special experience we hope will happen, as when lighting strikes a barn or an ecstatic feeling overtakes our body.

We should experience it (or allow it to happen) every time we gather for worship and fellowship.

It should happen every Sunday (or Wednesday, etc.) we gather as a church.

It should be our regular experience as a church, not occasional or rare.

Paul gives three results of being filled with the Spirit.

Here are three things that should occur when we gather together and submit to the Holy Spirit as a church: we should (1) sing, (2) say thank you, and (3) submit to one another.

In a future sermon, we’ll focus on what it means to “submit to one another” as members of the church, but for now we’ll focus on what it means to sing.

We should all sing to one another.