Why Your Sin Must Go #2

Because God has given you a new nature in Christ, because God has imparted His Spirit to you, you know what that means? It means that your sin has to go. Last time, Don pointed out that because we are partners with Christ once we become believers, we should seek to leave sin in the rearview mirror by exercising our will against it when temptations arise.

Today, our teacher will provide two other points to consider. We'll once again be in Ephesians chapter 5, so if you would turn there in your Bible as we join Don Green now in the Truth Pulpit. So your sin must go. Beloved, your ungodly talk, your ungodly behavior, you have to renew your war against that. You have to renew your commitment against that. And realize that being a Christian means that you're called to a life of change, of progressive growth and holiness.

And you rejoice in the ability to do that. Now, Paul reinforces that reasoning as he moves along. He says, consider your partnership. Your partner is in the gospel of Christ, not in the ungodly lives of those who reject him. And so let your partnership inform how you respond to spiritual growth. Secondly, he says, consider your present. Consider your present, who you are now.

And as he moves on, he stresses the contrast between their former and their current lives. He says, don't be partakers with them, verse 7. Verse 8, for, here's the reason that he's giving, don't be a partaker with them. Why should I pay attention to this? Why is that a natural consequence of being a Christian?

Why? For, because you were formerly darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light.

He says, you're a Christian now. You used to be darkness, but now you're light in the Lord. Understand, remember the contrast. Remember the past that God has delivered you from. Remember the past that you have rejected in your repentance, and recall who you are now. And let that inform the way that you live your life. Paul here is using darkness and light in a symbolic way.

Darkness representing ignorance of spiritual truth, sin, evil, wickedness, darkness representing all of that which belongs to the realm of Satan. And he says, that's what you used to be. You know, it's interesting as you read that. Look at verse 8 with me again.

As you read that, notice what he says. He says that he doesn't say that you formerly were in darkness. He says you were darkness. That a non-Christian extends darkness wherever they are, even if they're outwardly moral and, you know, what we would call a basically good person. If there is not a love for Christ in their heart, a respect for God's word, a calling of people to repentance, a pursuit of holiness, then they're darkness. They are casting a shadow by their lives and by their conduct and by their thinking.

They're casting a shadow on the light that God would bring to the world. And Paul says that's what you used to be when you were not a Christian. Certainly true of what my life was. All of that anger and pride and all of the other sins of a young man that came out of my life, that anchored and dominated my heart. Oh, I grieve the thought of it to remember the utter darkness that my life was and how it cast a shadow and turned people away from Christ rather than calling them to him. I grieve that to this day, that that was true of my life.

But you know what? It's true of your life before Christ as well. What Paul is saying here is remember you were darkness. Now remember who you are in the present. Now God has called you out of the darkness into his marvelous light.

Now God has imparted his Spirit to you, given you a new nature in regeneration, given you a new hope. Live according to that light rather than drifting back into the darkness. Christian, friend, beloved, your life should not be casting shadows on people in darkness through your angry attitudes and your sinful life and your spiritual indifference.

Your darkness sets a pattern that makes it easier for others to move into sin also. Stop it, is what Paul says. Stop doing that. Stop having that effect on your family.

Why? Look at verse 8 again. He says, now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light.

What does he have in mind? He makes a little parenthetical statement in verse 9. He says, the fruit of the light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth. Those great spiritual virtues that come from God himself. His truth which confronts error and is found primarily in his word. The goodness, the holiness of his being. The holiness of Christ.

That understanding which grants discernment and clarity of perspective to be able to know the true from the false, the right from the wrong. He says, that's who you are now. God has given you a new identity, a new nature. Live according to it.

That's the mindset. So you consider your present. You consider who you are. Spiritually speaking, before you became a Christian, and for those of you who do not belong to Christ now, this is true of you now. This is a description of who you are right now. But for you as Christians, you were so permeated with sin, so identified with error and darkness, that you could not be separated from the realm which defined your existence. It's who you were. You belong there. You were an extension of the kingdom of Satan.

Wow. It's kind of sobering, isn't it? And to realize that those of you here that have not bowed to Christ, that that's what you are now, wow.

Come out. Come out of that darkness and come to faith in Christ. You were so identified with it that you were one with it. Now, for those of you who are Christians, now you belong to an entirely new dominion.

Now you belong to an entirely new realm. Now you are in union with the Lord Jesus Christ, and you are so closely identified with him, so joined to him by the Holy Spirit that you cannot be separated from him. You are in union with Christ, and you belong to him. You are his, and his life flows through you. His spiritual blood courses through your spiritual veins. You are on the receiving end of divine favor. You are included in the divine purpose, established before the beginning of time, working through time, and will be culminated in glory after the end of time. That's what you belong to, Christian, most of you in this room speaking on faith. That's what you belong to, the goodness and the truth and the holiness and the purity of that. What a high calling God has bestowed on your life. What a lofty purpose he has given to you who once belonged to darkness. Well, all Paul is saying is, in light of those glorious truths, live like it.

Let that shape what you desire and let that shape what you think and shape what you do. Look over at Colossians, two books to the right, after Philippians and then to Colossians. As we've often said, Paul wrote Ephesians and Colossians at the same time, really, in his Roman imprisonment. And so there are a lot of common themes that are in play between the two books.

They elucidate one another. In Colossians chapter 1 verse 13, Paul says, He rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Consider your present, beloved. Remember that God has transferred you from one domain of slavery and darkness into a different, completely separate realm of light and freedom in Christ. And when you remember your origin, you remember where you came from, then you are much more likely to live in accordance with it.

That is the force of his argument. And because God has given you a new nature in Christ, because God has imparted his Spirit to you, you know what that means? It means that your sin has to go. You have to put sin to death.

You have to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. You have to manifest the reality that is already true about you, that you belong to the kingdom of light and you're going to live accordingly. You think differently. What entertains you is suddenly completely different.

Your desires, your goals, your priorities in life are completely reoriented, redefined, made completely new. Don't you want to have a life? Don't you want to live a life that just radiates and sparkles and declares the glory of God by your very being? Isn't that what you want as a Christian? Aren't you content to let the world go?

It's recognitions, it's accolades, it's trophies, all that stuff. If by letting that go, your life would be a greater vessel for the glory and the proclamation of the Savior who gave his life for you. Well, you know what? I've got a piece of good news for you here. If you squandered opportunity or your family isn't what it could have been because you didn't lead it the way you could have, I've got a word of good news for you that is undeniable, absolutely undeniable. The fact that you are here and still breathing means that God still has good purposes for you ahead, even if you squandered opportunities in the past. You do not have to be chained to your past failures. Paul here is writing to help Christians, as it were, break from those bad patterns so that going forward they would become more of what Christ would have them to be.

That is your prerogative, that is your opportunity here even if you are later in life and you've squandered quite a bit. Praise God. Praise God.

You can still be light even if you've hid your light under the bushel for a while. Praise be to God. You should walk out of here grateful that your very breath, your very present life, your very existence is a token, a sure indication that God is not done yet and there's more grace to come. So this applies to all of us across the board and these characteristics that Paul describes, go back to verse 9, this goodness, this righteousness, this truth that he calls us to, all of this is a result of God's work in our lives. We are expected, commanded, and able to manifest this kind of life because God has put His Spirit inside us. We have the indwelling Spirit. We have the promise and presence of Christ.

We are able to live this way. It is the purpose for which you exist as a Christian is to be like this. And all of a sudden lofty aspirations are set before us and the reason for your existence is clarified and for some of you redefined.

You say, yes, I'll give myself over to Christ. But when you consider your present, you consider your partnership, these are the things that it leads you into. It leads you into noble aspirations of life and that's what each one of you should desire, even as you're pursuing it in what seems to be a mundane family life, a mundane job, that's okay. Not everybody has to go into ministry.

If the whole body was a hand, where would the eye and the hearing be? That's not the point. The point is that you take the life that God has given you and you give yourself over to the pursuit of goodness, truth, and understanding in the midst of whatever that life might be. And Paul concludes really on that note.

This is so sweet. Third and final point here. Consider your purpose. Consider your purpose as we go to verse 10. And with a text like this, I understand that you might be sitting there with a sense of saying, well, I don't know what comes next. How do I go from here to what you're describing in this text?

And where do I go from here? Well, Paul really anticipates that question in verse 10. As he says, there in verse 10, he says, trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord, or proving by testing, it could be translated, what is pleasing to the Lord. You see, you can develop discernment. We understand that this text comes to us at a time, and that we've got room to grow.

We need to grow, and we're not necessarily sure what the way forward in this. Well, what this verse does is it teaches us two things. One, beautiful, what this verse teaches us, is that you can know with certainty what pleases the Lord in your current circumstances in life. God has appointed your circumstances. God has given you the life that you now have. And that means that he intends for you to learn, to figure out, to show forth what it is that pleases him in the midst of the life that he's given to you. He intends for you to learn that, to manifest that. You can know that you're pleasing God in your life. It's not hidden. He's not playing the shell game where what pleases him is one pea under one shell, but then there are three or four others, and he kind of shuffles them around and makes it hard for you to follow. I like that.

The shell is open. The pea is right there. What pleases the Lord can be known in your life. That's cool, but there's something else that's involved in this. When Paul says you're trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord, it means that there's going to be a process to it. Learning is a process. You pick up one piece of information as you're studying math, and then you build on that, and you learn something else.

You go back and rehearse something you forgot. There's a learning process to this. But it's not hidden. What pleases God is not secret. But the call in your life is that you would give yourself over to learning, to devoting yourself to a life that is pleasing to the Lord, starting with right where you're at today as you sit in that pew, and then move forward and let God cultivate. As you read His Word, as you seek Him in prayer, as you serve Him in the body of believers, He will move and direct, and it will become clear to you what's pleasing to Him with the life He's given to you, with the giftedness that He's given to you.

It's not meant to be secret. And what Scripture does is it tells you that there's a part that you play in that. God doesn't just do it for you, and you're a passive observer to it. The Bible calls you to evaluate life in light of these principles so that you can follow the right way. And so you think, you consider.

Who are your partners with? You remember, oh, that was my former life in Christ. I don't want that. I want to manifest the light of the Lord. I want to learn what pleases the Lord. And so how does this play out?

How is it practical? Well, it starts with you approve it, God's will. You approve what pleases God. You affirm it.

You strengthen it. How many synonyms do I need to help express it with your priorities? You have to deal with the question, what is important to you in life? Is it your notoriety? Is it your wealth? Is it something else?

Is it something human? Or is your priority, is your defining reason for your existence to return glory to the one who saved you? To manifest and live the life that He's called you to be. You see, and once you establish the direction of that priority, then a lot of other things become clear.

But you have to think at that deep level that a lot of people don't even want to go to. Scripture tells you to go there. And when your priorities are clear, then you develop discernment so that, and God sanctifies that and blesses that establishment of that heart priority and develops you and grows you in a way that what is presently maybe unclear and uncertain to you. What your next step should be is uncertain about what would please the Lord. Over time, He works in a way that that becomes clear. So that you know and you've learned and you know what's pleasing to God. I knew years ago with the direction of my current life that I needed to do something different.

I knew because there was just, that the months were just being squandered in things that were not profitable, comparatively speaking. It's not that I was doing anything sinful, I just wasn't doing, my life was not engaged with that which I was most able to do. And I knew that my whole life needed to be redirected in direction. And the recognition of that and I didn't know what that meant or where that was going or all of that, but I knew that I had reached the end of my usefulness and where I was at in life.

Didn't know what that meant, didn't know. Kept praying, God help me, God show me, God direct me. And in the midst of that, the email pops up, would you consider coming to Cincinnati to pastor a church? Ha!

Well there you go, there's the clarity. I just say that to help you say that even as a growing serious Christian you come to those times and you say, I don't know, but I know that something more needs to come out of my life than what was there to begin with. And so you give yourself over, Lord I want to please you, God you've got to help me, God the years are going by and time is getting short, help me, help me, help me. And as you pursue that priority, you learn. You start to know, you grow in your understanding and opportunities come and you say, ah that's it, that's what I should, that's what will please the Lord. And so don't expect it all to happen once and for all, don't expect it to happen immediately as you're walking out, but devote yourself, beloved. Give yourself over, I beg you, I plead with you, as those who will one day soon stand before the judgment seat of Christ when no one around here is able to stand with you and it's you before your Lord and he is going to determine the reward that he will give to you throughout eternity.

I beg you, honestly, I beg you to make it your heart desire and your heart priority. I want to know what pleases the Lord while I've still got time. I want to know because I want to stand before Christ and have him look on me with a smile as it were on his face and say, well done thou good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your master. Don't you want to hear him say that? If Christ says that to me, nothing else in this life matters by comparison.

If I can just hear him say that, all of life will be worth it. That's true for you too. That's what I want for you. That's what Scripture wants for you. That's what God wants for you. That's why it says try to learn what's pleasing to the Lord and then give your life over to it. It's not going to be what the world is offering to you, the cheap substitutes.

It may not be that which leads you to notoriety and prosperity. But beloved, try to learn what's pleasing to the Lord. Let your defining moment of existence as you enter into eternity be the Lord Jesus saying, well done thou good and faithful servant, I see what you've done with your life, I see the priorities that you made, enter into the joy of your master. Hallelujah. That would be great, wouldn't it?

Wouldn't it? That moment happens and will happen for those who give themselves over to the right priorities now, who remember what their partnership is, who remember their present compared to their past and give themselves over to the priorities of God. Beloved, all of these things mean that the Bible has poked its finger right where you live. It has gotten into your kitchen and is arranging the menu for you going forward. It tells you that you can no longer tolerate that disposition you have toward immorality, greed or coarse, filthy talking. Your sin must go because a higher calling is beckoning you to a life that glorifies God now and ends up with you being blessed through all of eternity.

That's why you exist. You have a higher calling. You have a better calling. And so, beloved, I beg you for the sake of Christ in His name and for your own sake, I beg you to put your sin away. Love Christ with your life, not just with your lips, and settle in your heart. It's time for your sin to go. Sin must go from our lives. In consideration of our partnership with Christ, our present status as Christians, and because of our purpose. Pastor Don Green will have more of our series, As You Walk with Christ, next time here on The Truth Pulpit, and we hope you'll join us then. But, Don, why is addressing sin from the pulpit so important?

Well, Bill, I guess I would put it this way. The gospel of Jesus Christ makes no sense whatsoever apart from an understanding of sin. Scripture says that Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners. And so you need to understand sin to realize that you're a sinner and therefore you're in need of a savior. Men won't turn to Christ as savior unless they realize that they need to be saved.

And so faithful preaching will expose you to sin and then point you to Jesus Christ. Thanks, Don. And, friend, we hope you'll visit thetruthpulpit.com to learn more about our ministry. Again, that's thetruthpulpit.com. I'm Bill Wright. See you again next time as Don Green continues to teach God's people God's Word from the Truth Pulpit.