Hey, podcast listeners! Thanks for streaming today's podcast, From Pathway to Victory. Pathway to Victory is a nonprofit ministry featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. Robert Jeffress. Our mission is to pierce the darkness with the light of God's word through the most effective media available, like this podcast. To support Pathway to Victory, go to ptv.org slash donate or follow the link in our show notes. Now, here's today's podcast, From Pathway to Victory.
God's Word with you every day on this Bible teaching program. On today's edition of Pathway to Victory. Those who want to be true successes in this life, they have a longer horizon than the present. They have a greater purpose than their self-gratification, and they will rely on a greater power than their own human strength. That's what it means to walk wisely. Welcome to Pathway to Victory with author and pastor, Dr. Robert Jeffress. Living wisely in today's world can often feel like an uphill battle.
It's not easy to emulate God's character when we're surrounded by opposing influences. Today on Pathway to Victory, Dr. Robert Jeffress outlines several biblical principles that will help us walk in wisdom and live out God's plan for our lives. Now, here's our Bible teacher to introduce today's message.
Dr. Jeffress. Thanks, David, and welcome again to Pathway to Victory. Imagine escaping the demands of your daily life and traveling to the Mediterranean with someone you love. Well, this coming May, you're invited to join us for the Pathway to Victory Journeys of Paul Mediterranean Cruise.
The dates are May 5th through 16th, 2025. This is a life-changing vacation with a purpose. Our luxury cruise ship will take us to the very place where our Christian faith flourished, and we'll visit iconic sites in Ephesus, Italy, and the Greek Islands. So please go to ptv.org and look at the itinerary, then make plans to join us for the Pathway to Victory Journeys of Paul Mediterranean Cruise. Living wisely in today's world can often feel like an uphill battle.
Have you ever felt that way? I certainly have. Well, I've written a brand new book for you. It's the one that complements our current study in Ephesians called Holy Living in an Unholy World. In my new book, I show you the riches that God has given to everyone who follows Christ.
That's right, riches. God wants you to receive these blessings so that you're empowered to stand up for Him in these difficult days. While there's still time, please get in touch with us to request Holy Living in an Unholy World. A copy is yours when you give a generous gift to support the ministry of Pathway to Victory. Well, today we're turning to Ephesians chapter 5 to discover God's blueprint for success. These biblical principles will help us walk in wisdom and live out God's plan for our lives.
I titled today's message, Soaring with the Eagles While Surrounded by Turkeys. Success is something everyone craves, but few know how to experience. Art Williams, the founder of Primerica Financial Services, has his own formula for success. He said, you beat 50% of the people in America by working hard. You beat another 40% by being a person of honesty and integrity standing for something. And the last 10% is a dogfight in the free enterprise system. That's one way of looking at it. If you want to be a success, you choose to be successful.
You choose to work hard, to maintain your integrity, to keep pursuing your dreams no matter how hard it is. The apostle Paul had another formula for success we're going to discover today. It's found in Ephesians chapter 5. If you have your Bibles, turn there as we discover how to soar with the eagles when surrounded by turkeys.
Have you ever felt that way before? Even Paul did. He's in the section now of Ephesians that deals with our walk with God. And now when we come to verse 15, he's going to talk about the third way we imitate God. Walking in light, walking in love, and walking in wisdom.
Look at verse 15 of chapter 5. Therefore, be careful how you walk. Not as unwise men, but as wise.
Well, how do you do that? How do you walk wisely? Well, Paul's going to share with us the three components of walking wisely. That's the heart of this section. What does it mean to walk wisely?
First of all, write this down. It means to maximize God's provision. To maximize God's provision. You know the greatest provision any of us has received from God?
It's time. That's why Paul says, make the most of your time. Some translations say, redeem the time. Three insights about time are found in scripture. First of all, time is valuable. Remember Benjamin Franklin's words?
He said, does thou love us life? Then do not squander time. Because time is the stuff life is made of.
That's a biblical view as well. Time is valuable. Secondly, time is limited. At least in this world. We have a finite number of days, hours, minutes in which to live. That's a profound truth. As the old soap opera says, as sand in the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.
It's going away just like that. Those allotted times. James said it this way. He said, your life is but a vapor, a mist that appears and then passes away. The Bible tells us time is valuable.
It's limited. And thirdly, time is uncertain. Verses 13 and 14 of James 4 say, come now you who say today or tomorrow we'll go to such and such a city and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit. Yet you don't know what your life will be like tomorrow.
And then he writes, you're just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Now, James isn't condemning making plans. We ought to all have plans. But we ought to realize how conditional our plans are. We can think about tomorrow, but we have no guarantee of tomorrow.
All we have is today. That's why Paul said if we're going to wisely use time, we need to understand how valuable, how limited, and how uncertain it is. Now, I need to point out at this point that the word Paul uses for time, make the most of your time, is kairos. K-A-I-R-O-S. Now, the word we usually think of with time is kronos. Kronos, chronology.
It refers to clock time, hours, minutes, seconds. But that's not what he says when he says make the most of your time. The word kairos instead means seasons. Make the most of this season of your life. We need to understand the season that we're in personally.
But we also need to understand the season the generation we're living in. He said make the most of your time because the days are evil. Paul understood what was happening in his culture.
He knew time was limited. If things were evil in the first century, just imagine what Paul would say about the 21st century. We need to understand there's a reason God has placed us in this century, the 21st century, in Dallas, Texas, or wherever you are. There's a reason God has you now and didn't put you in the first century or didn't put you in Toronto, Canada.
We're to make the most of the season God has placed us in. When I think of somebody who did that, I think about King David. It says in Acts 13, 36, here's David's epitaph. For David, after he had served the purpose of God in his own generation, fell asleep. David served his generation and we have a generation, a time in which to serve.
Shakespeare is right. When he said all the world is a stage, we make our entrance, we say our lines, play our part, and then we exit. We're going to walk wisely in this world. Number one, we need to maximize God's provision, the provision of time. Secondly, we need to understand God's plan to walk wisely. He says in verse 17 of Ephesians 5, so then don't be foolish, but understand what the will of God is. If you're going to walk wisely, you have to understand God's will. You know in previous series, we've said the term God's will is used in three different ways in scripture.
You might want to jot this down. First of all, there's God's providential will. That is his master plan for the entire universe, his plan that is hidden in most parts from us. We don't know the ultimate plan, but God has a plan that he's working all things for. And by the way, there is one providential plan. There's not God's permissive will and his perceptive will, plan A or plan B. God has one plan. Ephesians 1 says he works all things according to his will, singular, not his wills. There's one providential plan.
And by the way, that plan is big enough to include terrible things, horrible things. His providential plan includes the rebellion of Lucifer in heaven, the fall of man in Genesis 3, the torture and crucifixion of God's own son. That's all included in God's providential plan.
Not that everything is good, but God causes all things to work together for good, his providential plan. Then secondly, there is his perceptive will. That is the commands in scripture. What he clearly says is his will for our life. For example, in 1 Thessalonians, Paul said this is the will of God for your life, your sanctification that you abstain from sexual immorality. That is God's will. The Ten Commandments are God's will.
That's his perceptive will, his commands. And then finally, God's personal will. That is the plan he has for your life, whom you marry or if you marry, your children, your vocation, your location for a living. All of that is part of God's personal plan. Some people want to deny that God has a personal plan, but why would we be surprised God has a plan for our life? I love what the late Bible teacher Warren Wiersbe said, that God would have a plan for each of our lives is an obvious truth. He is a God of wisdom and knows what ought to happen and when it should occur. And as a God of love, he must desire the very best for his children. Too many Christians look on the will of God as bitter medicine they mistake instead of seeing it as the gracious evidence of the love of God. The other night at our dinner with the pastor during the Q&A time, somebody said, Pastor, how can I know God's will for my life? And he was obviously talking about the personal plan.
I said, there are three ways. One is through God's word. He'll never ask you to do something that violates his word. Colossians 1. His Spirit, secondly, who dwells within us, all who are led by the Spirit of God.
These are the children of God, Romans 8 says. And through the working of circumstances in our lives. The circumstances many times reveals God's will for our life. And that's what I think Paul has in mind when he says, understand what the will of God is. He's not just talking about our personal plan.
He's talking about his ultimate plan for us. Remember Romans 8 28? All things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to his purpose. That's Romans 8 28, but verse 29 is key. What is God's purpose? For whom God foreknew, he predestined to become conformed to the image of his Son. God is working in your life not to make you happy, not to make you successful, but to make you like Jesus Christ.
And it's so important that we understand that. Because if we don't understand that ultimate will of God for our life, then we get off track. If we think God's plan is to make us happy and then something happens that makes us very unhappy, we wonder, did God fail us? Did God not do what he promised to do?
Does God even exist? We need to tell people the truth. God's will is to make us like Christ, and that sometimes means hard things. I think about what Dorothy Sayers wrote one time. She said, if you will tell me ahead of time that the road is difficult, then every bump and jolt along the way will remind me I'm headed in the right direction. We need to tell people the road is difficult as a Christian. It's not easy. It's difficult. It's hard.
But as we experience those bumps and jolts, it's a reminder that we're headed in the right direction. I had a friend, pastor friend, named Rick Ferguson, who was pastor of the Riverside Church in Denver, Colorado. He was killed in a freak automobile accident. His 17-year-old son was driving. Rick was in the front seat, the passenger seat. He had two family members in the back seat, and then a second car filled with other family members was following them. The tire blew out, causing the vehicle to turn over two and a half times. Rick was killed.
Others in the car were just slightly bruised and walked away. At the funeral service, 3,700 people came to the Riverside Church to pay tribute to their pastor. Rick's 22-year-old son, Brett, preached his father's funeral service using the Bible that belonged to his pastor father. And in that funeral service, I want you to listen to what Brett said. He said, you can view my dad's death in one of three ways. You can think of it as an accident, but if God can't even control a tire of a car, there's no way I'm giving him control of my life.
You can think of it as an attack from Satan, but if that's the case, then God is impotent. Or you can realize my dad's death was an appointment. It is a beautiful, hurtful, gloriously painful appointment where God has much to teach us and will bring himself glory through it. This is my choice, and it's God's truth. What a great illustration of what it means to walk wisely, understanding the purpose of God.
How do we walk wisely? We maximize God's provision of time. We understand God's plan.
And thirdly, we access God's power. Notice the command in verse 18, the mandate to be spirit-filled. He says, and do not get drunk with wine, for this is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit. Now, it'd be easy to go off on a detour here and talk about the pros and cons of drinking and talk about what the Bible teaches about drinking. We all know there's no verse in the Bible that says you can never allow alcohol to pass your lips or you're going to hell. We know the Bible doesn't teach that. But we also know the Bible has many warnings about alcohol and the dangers of alcohol. And what is dangerous about it is allowing it to control your life.
That's what the word means. Don't be drunk with wine. Don't let wine control your life.
But instead, be filled with the Spirit. That word translated filled, playro, means to control. It was a Greek word that was used to describe the wind filling the sail of a ship and giving it direction. The wind directed where that ship went. And that's the command here. Be controlled by the Holy Spirit of God.
And it's interesting. When the wind fills the sail, the sail doesn't have all of the wind, but the wind has all of the sail. It completely controls what direction that ship is going. It's interesting to me that there is never any command to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. There's no command that we have to go out and baptize ourselves with the Spirit.
That's what God does. The moment you're saved as a Christian, God's Holy Spirit comes into your life. And you don't just receive a little bitty part of the Spirit of God. You receive all of the Spirit of God.
All of Him is in your life. But your job and my job is to surrender ourselves to the control of the Holy Spirit as we give over different areas of our life and say, not my will, but your will be done. We're not commanded to be baptized, but we are commanded to be filled with the Holy Spirit of God, surrendering every part of our life to Him.
And by the way, this is a way for us to meditate on God's Word, memorize God's Word, so that we know what it means to surrender to God in our marriage, in our work, in our finances, and every other area of our life. We have a mandate to be Spirit-controlled. And then there's the measure of being Spirit-filled. Well, how do I know if God's really controlling my life? I think this is interesting. He says the measure of being filled or controlled with the Spirit is not speaking some ecstatic utterance that nobody can understand.
Notice what he says. It is speaking, but it's speaking, verse 19, to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord. Remember we saw last time Mark 12 says, it's out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
What comes out of our mouth reveals what is in our heart. If we have vile anger, bitterness, wrath coming out of our mouth, that's evidence we're not being controlled with the Spirit. But if we are being controlled by the Spirit, we will express it in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. My friend David Jeremiah points out in his book, My Heart's Desire, that there is a link, that music is the link between God and his people.
It's always been that way. There are more than 575 references in the Bible to music, to singing, to praising God. There are more references to praising God than prayer to God in the Bible. Did you know that? It's always the way God connects with his people.
Think about it in the New Testament when Mary got the message from the angel that she was gonna be the mother of the Messiah. What did she do? She sang.
That beautiful magnificat. The early church sang when they gathered together. When Paul and Silas were stuck in that Philippian jail, what were they doing at midnight? They were singing where everybody heard. Did you know there's no record in the Bible that the Pharisees ever got together for a sing-along?
It never happened. It was God's people who were the ones who prayed, praised God through song. And notice what it says here. We're to sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. It doesn't say psalms or hymns or spiritual songs. We're to sing all of them. What were the psalms?
Well, they would have been the traditional music of the day. Going back to the Old Testament, they sang psalms, but they also sang spiritual songs. Those were the songs being written in Paul's day. Did you know some of the sections of Scripture we read were actually songs to begin with? Philippians 2 verses five through eight have this attitude in yourselves that was in Christ Jesus, although he existed in the form of God, didn't regard his equality with God a thing to be grasped, but he emptied himself and so forth.
It's the passage we call the kenosis, the empty and out. But it was a song, first of all. There was a song in 1 Timothy, he who was beheld by the angels, revealed in the flesh, and so forth. That was a song at the early church. So Paul says, sing the old songs, sing the new songs, the hymns, and then spiritual songs.
What were those? Sometimes during the Sunday evening worship service, the time they were gathered together for the Eucharist, people would just pop up and compose a song right there on the spot. What if we tried doing that one time? Can you imagine what it would be like just to let everybody sing as God moves them to? Again, it's not one or the other, it's all of these were to be music made to the Lord. What is Paul saying? He's saying if you want to walk wisely, maximize your provision, that is time. Understand God's plan, access God's power, or to put it in even a more practical way, those who want to be true successes in this life will live their life with a longer horizon than the present. They have a longer horizon than the present. They have a greater purpose than their self-gratification, and they will rely on a greater power than their own human strength.
That's what it means to walk wisely. Most people go through life with a short-sighted outlook towards success, purpose, and power, but those who are in Christ have been called to live with eternity in mind. To accelerate your walk with Jesus Christ, I'd like to send you a copy of the brand new book I've written called Holy Living in an Unholy World. My book goes into far more detail than what you've heard today. You see, God wants to unleash His power within you, but we need to understand how to engage this power on His terms, and my book will help you do just that. I'm prepared to send you a copy along with my thanks when you give a generous gift to support the ministry of Pathway to Victory.
Now, the special offer concludes this Friday, so please reach out to us today. In closing, I want to share Christine's story. Christine grew up going to church and assumed she was a Christian, but at age 24, her world fell apart. She started doubting her salvation after a series of tragic events. Her friend was diagnosed with cancer, her relationship with her parents began to suffer, and she almost got kicked out of college. Well, Christine started listening to Pathway to Victory every morning on her way to work. That's when she realized she had never trusted in Christ.
She finally took that step of personal faith, and today she's not only a believer and genuine follower of Christ, but she's serving the Lord in her local church. As you can see, Pathway to Victory is truly making a difference in people's lives, and your faithful partnership helps us reach people just like Christine and countless others. Thank you for standing with us to make an eternal impact for the glory of God.
David. Thanks, Dr. Jeffress. Today, when you support the Ministry of Pathway to Victory by giving a generous gift, we'll say thanks by sending you Holy Living in an Unholy World. It's the brand-new book by Dr. Robert Jeffress. Simply give us a call at 866-999-2965 or visit online at ptv.org. Now, when you give $75 or more, you'll also receive the complete Holy Living in an Unholy World teaching series on both DVD video and MP3 format audio discs.
You'll get that along with the companion study guide. Now, this offer will only be available for a few more days, so don't put off calling any longer. One more time, call 866-999-2965 or go to ptv.org. If you'd prefer to write, here's that mailing address, P.O. Box 223-609, Dallas, Texas, 75222. That's P.O. Box 223-609, Dallas, Texas, 75222.
I'm David J. Mullins. In Ephesians 522, the Apostle Paul instructs wives to submit to their husbands. Many see this statement as outdated and oppressive, while others twist the words to justify domineering behavior.
But what does this verse really mean? Find out when you listen Thursday to Pathway to Victory. Pathway to Victory with Dr. Robert Jeffress comes from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. You made it to the end of today's podcast from Pathway to Victory, and we're so glad you're here. Pathway to Victory relies on the generosity of loyal listeners like you to make this podcast possible. One of the most impactful ways you can give is by becoming a Pathway partner. Your monthly gift will empower Pathway to Victory to share the gospel of Jesus Christ and help others become rooted more firmly in His Word. To become a Pathway partner, go to ptv.org slash donate or follow the link in our show notes. We hope you've been blessed by today's podcast from Pathway to Victory.
