The Bible is clear. Because of what God has done for us in Christ, each one of us as believers are called to live differently, with different priorities and different motivations. Today on Truth for Life, we'll learn how we're to live in the world without blending into the culture or isolating ourselves from it.
Here's Alistair Begg. Ephesians 5 verse 6. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore, do not become partners with them, for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light, for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true. And try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret.
But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. Amen.
Well, we'll pray. Our God and Father, we pray that as we turn to the Bible that you will so work by the Holy Spirit that we don't just get more information but that we actually have a life-changing encounter with you, the living God. Accomplish your purposes, we pray, for Jesus' sake.
Amen. Well, we are continuing our studies here in Ephesians 5, where Paul has been reminding his readers consistently of who they are in Christ. And we have been trying to say to each other and understand and believe it that it is our identity in Christ which then gives rise to our activity for Christ. It is our new life in Jesus which then is the foundation of our new lifestyle. And this, of course, is not unique to Paul in his letter to the Ephesians. He says similarly in Colossians, The Father has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son. And we've already seen the important antithesis between darkness and light. The same thing, you find, when Peter writes to the scattered believers of his day in his first letter as he describes who they are in Christ, he then reminds them that God had called them out of darkness into his marvelous light. And so it is because they're no longer what they once were that they must no longer live as they once did.
And it is foundationally important that we get a hold of that. Throughout the entire first half of chapter 5, the emphasis has been on life and lifestyle, walking—we're going to see later about walking in wisdom. We've already considered what he has said in the opening verses concerning walking in love. And we began last time what we continue now—namely, to consider what it means to walk in light. Last time, we spent all of our time thinking about the change that he describes, the change there in verse 8, at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. And we said we would come back to it, and we would consider not simply the change he describes but the challenge he delivers. And the challenge that he delivers is equally clear, and I want to point it out to you.
I want us to think about the challenge in a three-dimensional way. First of all, that it comes negatively, then it comes positively, and then, if we have a moment or two left, it comes, if you like, evangelistically. So, first of all, negatively.
The apostle is not bashful about explaining about what ought not to be happening. We live in a culture where negativity is very, very bad. It's regarded as, you just can't be negative at all, it's not a good thing to do. It doesn't translate into every area of life, clearly. It's a very negative thing to avoid a collision with another airliner at ten thousand feet. We ought to be very, very happy that the pilot is prepared to take avoidance, to make avoiding action and so on, and to do so in that negative fashion, to turn away from things, and so we could go on from there.
It's pretty straightforward. But Paul, for example, when he writes to Titus, he says to him, now, Titus, you need to make clear to your people the nature of Christian doctrine so that they will be both apt to teach themselves and that they will live lives that commend the gospel. And in the heart of that, he says, Titus 2.11, for the grace of God has appeared, teaching us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions.
So he doesn't share our concern about ever being thought negative, where being negative is actually a very positive thing to be. And so verse 7, here he says quite negatively, do not become partners with them. Partners with whom? Well, if your Bible is open, look up a phrase, and you'll see partners with the sons of disobedience in verse 6. Who are the sons of disobedience? Well, the sons and daughters of disobedience. It's a description of the unbeliever.
It's a description of what we are by nature. And the reason that we are not to be partners with the sons of disobedience is because we're now members of a new group. As we have seen in Colossians 1 from what we just quoted, we are now in the saints of light. So, we were once in a band, and the band was called the Sons of Disobedience, and we're no longer in that band. We're now in the saints of light. And we've got a whole new song to sing. We've got a new score to sing from and so on.
It makes perfect sense, as I was thinking about that in preparation. It took me way back to my schoolboy days in Yorkshire, when I tried—with emphasis on tried—to play rugby for our school team. They were very gracious to me. They took me along.
I was hopeless. But I was able to go on the bus and back on the bus, and it was there that I was introduced to the singing of rugby songs. And if you have ever been in that context, you know there's some of the filthiest songs you ever heard in your life, sung by teenage boys on the bus. And right there, as a professing Christian, as somebody who would have declared himself to be a child of the light, the challenge was real obvious. Because those songs were funny.
And I like funny. But they were rude, and rude as out. So, how are you going to live as a saint in light in the context of the Sons of Disobedience? You can't go in a swimming pool and swim without getting wet. And so the challenge that comes across is a clear challenge. You're different now, therefore, you live differently. Now, notice carefully what he says. He doesn't say, therefore, do not become friends with them. He says, do not become partners with them. He's not ruling out friendship. He's ruling out partnership. And there's an inevitable tension in this.
I've alluded to it already. Many of the new believers in Ephesus would have had members of their family who did not share their faith. They were unconverted. When they went back to the workplace as they lived in their communities, they would be routinely in contact with those who had no notion of the things that these new believers had begun to hold dear. And the challenge for them—and indeed the challenge in every generation—is to say, How do we apply, for example, verse 7? How close can these relationships be without violating the principle that Paul is laying down here? Now, Paul very helpfully in other places addresses this. And I don't want you to have to trail all the way through your Bible, but I will mention a couple of references.
You should at least note them so that you can go back and see if they're there. But in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, where he is giving direction to the believers in Corinth, he's not giving direction to the culture in Corinth. He's talking about immorality, but he is not condemning the Corinthian culture. He is confronting the believers within the church in Corinth in relationship to the matter of sexual immorality. And he says to them, I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people.
Okay? Now, that's a fairly categorical statement. He then goes on to say, not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world or the greedy and swindlers or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.
In other words, it is impossible for you to live in Corinth. You would have to be removed to heaven not to be associated with the everyday ins and outs of life. And then he's actually going on to say, what I'm actually writing to you about is not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister, who professes to be a saint in light and yet is living as a son or a daughter of disobedience. That's the thing. That's the great concern. And that, of course, you see, is one of the challenges that faces the contemporary church. The reason for the ineffectiveness of much in church life is because of the incongruity whereby those who profess to be one thing live as another thing.
And it is that, says Paul, that needs to be addressed, hence the nature of discipline in the church and the importance of what that means in various ways. So, he's not actually calling for the establishing of a Christian ghetto. He is not arguing for monasticism, if we might put it that way. He's not giving a foundation for some of us who would like to make a statement like this a kind of call to ensure that our contacts are exclusively with Christians, and then, almost inevitably, exclusively with those who actually share our views as Christians, and then eventually just get smaller and smaller and smaller, until what you have is what we've referred to in the past as, us four, no more, shut the door.
In other words, we simply round ourselves away from all of this, and we will live like Austria at the beginning of the Second World War in splendid isolation. No, says the Bible. No. Jesus said no. Father, I do not ask you to remove them from the world but to keep them from the evil one. So, when we take a phrase like this, when we take this negative directive, do not become partners with them, we need to be equally clear that he is not only saying no to isolation, but he is saying at the same time no to accommodation.
In other words, we're not going to accommodate ourselves to the lifestyle of those who still live in the darkness out of which we have been called and brought. And again, let me give you Paul, this time in his second letter, and in verse 14 of 2 Corinthians 6, he says, Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. Don't be unequally yoked with unbelievers. When I read yoked, I thought two things.
One, I thought about oxen and the picture of a yoke, which I think you're supposed to think, and then I actually thought, at a far more trivial level, of the egg and spoon race at our sports day, again, back in Yorkshire. Do you ever do the egg and spoon race where they strap your ankle to the other person's ankle and you're yoked? I mean, if you get a good person to be strapped to, you can maybe make a go of it. If you don't, or if you're useless, eventually you'll just tear one another apart. But you've definitely got to be going in the same direction. If you don't want to do that, then don't get strapped together. It's clear in relationship to marriage.
I'm growing old, listening to people tell me, but that doesn't really matter. If it doesn't really matter, why is it in the Bible? There is no relationship in the physical realm that is more clearly a yoking than marriage. Therefore, it has to address the issue of marriage. A Christian, a believing boy or girl, should only marry a believing boy or girl. The Bible says so. If you're setting out in partnership in business, beware of violating 2 Corinthians 6.14. And he applies it very clearly by saying, Think logically about these things.
And when you do, you will realize that there is a complete antithesis here. Don't be unequally yoked with unbelievers. Let me ask you, he says, what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? None.
What fellowship has light with darkness? None. What accord has Christ with Belial, or the devil, as it is? None. What agreement has the temple of God with idols?
None. So when we come to this as we do, and his challenge to the believer in Ephesus and the challenge to all of us in all time, we're gonna have to work it out. And when you go down to verse 11, you realize that in some ways he ups the ante here, doesn't he? Not only you're not supposed to be partners with them, but secondly, take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness. Darkness has unfruitful works. A trap in the seventeenth century says, Lest by infection of their sin ye come under infliction of their punishment.
Pretty good. He says, Don't get involved in this, in these unfruitful works of darkness, lest you find yourself on the receiving end of the punishment that accompanies it. Now, Paul is not breaking new territory here. He's simply reinforcing what he has previously said. You remember we said that we'd begun at the beginning of chapter 4, exhorted to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which we've been called. And then in verse 17 of chapter 4, he says, I testify in the LORD that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to the hardness of heart. He doesn't say that in the spirit of judgment.
He says this is the reality. Without God and without hope in the world, this is descriptive of life. This is life for the unbeliever—darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, an ignorance that is due to the hardness of heart.
And as a result of that, he goes on to describe the behavior that flows from that kind of conviction, that kind of view of the world. And he's reminding them that the works of darkness are unfruitful. They're ultimately empty.
They're an expression of futility. One of the great questions that confronts a man or a woman every day that we wake in is, you know, what am I actually doing? What am I? Where am I going? How do I make sense of this strange existence? Now, you may not think that every morning when you wake up, but you'll think about it. You may think about it when you put your head on the pillow at night. You may think when you're parked in a long line of traffic. You say to yourself, How many more times in my life am I gonna be stuck just in a line of traffic like this? You say, If only I could get out of here and go there. Let me tell you, when you go there, you go there. There is no there. You're the you.
It's me. You see? And the works of darkness are eventually barren. At the end of the day, what have you got left to show, you see? That's what he's actually pointing out. In fact, when he writes to the Roman church at the end of chapter 6, he actually says to them, Listen, let me ask you a question, he says, about the worthless works that characterize your pre-converted life.
And this is how he puts it in verse 21. What fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? What fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed?
Now, I could ask people to come up here, and we could spend the balance of the time there, and numbers of you would come up and say, Absolutely no fruit at all. I thought I was. I thought it was everything. But the further I got up the ladder, I suddenly realized this ladder is—this is the wrong ladder. Or this ladder is propped against the wrong wall. Because I got up, and I got higher up than I thought I would get up.
But when I got up there, there was nothing there. It didn't satisfy. The degree didn't satisfy. The job didn't satisfy. The relationship didn't satisfy. Whatever it was. And he's saying to them, You think about it.
What benefit did you get from those things? What fruit? The things of which you're now ashamed. Now, it is at that point that he then turns from the negative to the positive. Look at this. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but now he tells them something that they need to be doing, not something they shouldn't be doing, so he turns positively.
What are we to do? Expose them. Expose them. Who or what is the them? The them refers to the unfruitful works, not to the unfruitful workers. Some of us are perfectly happy to get an exhortation like, Go out and expose all these people.
Some Christians, they've got that in them. If you've got it in you, you need to get it out of you. That's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to expose them. Well, how does the exposing take place here?
How do you expose unfruitful works of darkness? You see, there is a prurient tendency in some of us. Sometimes you hear ministers talking about things, pastors talking about things in such a way that you wonder whether they're actually getting their jollies out of describing these dreadful things. You know what I mean? There's a kind of voyeuristic element in it.
I think that's probably why he goes on to say what he says. It's shameful even to speak of the things they do in secret. So in other words, don't waste your time talking about all this stuff. You don't need to give illustrations. People know.
Nobody knows. You don't need to hold the poison up and put pictures on the screens. It's actually shameful, he says. So then, how in the world does the exposing take place?
Well, I think it's pretty straightforward. And it is this. What he is seeing is that the essential difference in the believer's life, the shining light that is present in the life of the believer, however strong or dim it may be at any point along the way, but the light in the believer shows up the dark stuff for what it is. It shows up the dark stuff for what it is.
You're different. Therefore, live differently. You're listening to Truth for Life. That's Alistair Begg reminding us that our lives are to reflect the light of the Gospel as we walk in a dark world. It's our prayer at Truth for Life that God will work through these messages to lead those who are unbelievers to follow Jesus and to encourage believers to remain faithful in a culture that is increasingly challenging. And we want people around the world to have access to this kind of Bible teaching without price being a barrier. That's why we offer free online sermons, why we sell books and audio studies at cost. In fact, we regularly hear from listeners who contact us to say how grateful they are for being able to listen and share Alistair's teachings so easily.
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You can tap the image on the app or visit our website at truthforlife.org slash donate. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for joining us today. Be sure to listen tomorrow when we'll hear the conclusion to Alistair's message about walking in the light. We heard today what we need to avoid. Tomorrow we'll find out what we're supposed to do, how we walk in a manner worthy of our calling. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-06-17 23:19:18 / 2023-06-17 23:28:24 / 9