Filled with the Spirit (Part 1 of 3)

As Christians, our lifestyle ought to reflect one straightforward truth. We belong to Jesus. The apostle Paul calls this lifestyle our walk with Christ, and he not only tells us how to walk, but he also tells us why we're to walk that way.

Here's Alistair Begg with part one of a message titled Filled with the Spirit. I invite you to turn with me to Colossians chapter 3, and we're going to read the verse 16 or 17 verses of Colossians 3, which provides us at least in part something of a parallel passage to our verses today in Ephesians 5. So, Colossians 3 and verse 1. If, then, you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you—sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming.

In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator.

Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free. But Christ is all and in all. Put on, then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another.

And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Amen. Lord, this is the great longing of our hearts as we turn to the Bible, that our lives individually and collectively may be the very place where you come to live by the Holy Spirit. So help us as we look to the Bible now. In Jesus' name.

Amen. Well, I encourage you to turn to Ephesians and to chapter 5 as we pick up our studies there. Perhaps it'd be helpful for us just to read from verse 15 through to 21. Paul writes, Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Well, here we are in chapter 5 and moving on towards the end of the book. All of our studies have flowed from, essentially, the beginning of chapter 4 most recently, where Paul has urged those who are in Christ to make sure that they are walking or conducting their lives in a manner that is worthy of the fact that they belong to Jesus. He's writing to those who are in Christ, who have heard the word of the gospel, who have believed, who have been sealed with the Holy Spirit. And now he says to them, I want you to make sure that your life and your lifestyle bears testimony to this truth. And we've tried to say very carefully and consistently, all the way through the second half of his letter, that the imperatives—all the calls to action to do or to cease from doing—are grounded in the indicatives—in other words, in the things that are true of the believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.

He's not issuing a kind of ethical treatise, urging people to try and fix themselves, to try and become something they're not, but rather, as we've tried to say consistently, he wants them to become what they are. And classically, actually, if you turn back a page or two in your Bible, this comes across so strikingly in the fourth verse of chapter 2, where, having outlined the state of humanity outside of Christ, he then says, However, although you were once like this, but now God being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, he says, even though we were dead men and women, by his grace we've been saved. And triumphantly there in verse 6, and he's raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, not so that we would just be living in some rarefied and obscure atmosphere, but so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.

A wonderful, terrific picture. And when we studied that some months ago now—I remember I quoted to you from an old musical by Jimmy and Carol Owens that was around, certainly, in the early seventies in the United Kingdom—and these words, You are the children of the kingdom of God. Here's our identity in Christ. You are the children of the kingdom of God. You're the chosen ones for whom the Savior came. You're his noble new creation by the Spirit and the blood. You're the church that he has built to bear his name.

And then, keep looking down. We're seated in the heavenlies. God's mighty power has raised us over all. Keep looking down above all principalities, for we have died and risen with the Lord. So it is by virtue of our union with Christ, our identity in Christ… And some of you this morning, hearing me using this phraseology, may find yourself just scratching your head and saying, I'm not sure I understand exactly what you mean.

Well, the rest of the congregation would not be happy if I go all the way back to chapter 1 and start again. But I do want to tell you that if you have questions along these lines, we want to give you a Bible to take. We want to offer the chance to pray with you or talk with you so that the message might come across very clearly. Jesus Christ is great, and Jesus Christ is the one who gives us a new heart and makes us new people.

And we would love the opportunity to talk that through with you. Now, it is to such individuals that Paul is writing. And in verse 15 here of chapter 5, he has given them this exhortation. "'Steady as you go'—we might paraphrase it—'look carefully, then, how you walk.'"

He's been emphasizing this again and again. The walking of the Christian, peripateo, is an expression, is a metaphor, our way of life. So, you should walk in a way that is worthy of your calling.

He comes back to it on various occasions. And now, again, be careful in the way you walk. And then he gives us these three contrasts. Do not be foolish, but instead be wise. Don't waste your time, but instead make good use of your time. And now, in verse 18, and don't get drunk, but be filled with the Spirit. Incidentally and in passing, for those of us who are tempted to keep telling people, you know, that the Christian life is not about do's and don'ts, we have to be very, very careful about what we're saying when we say that, because the Christian life has a tremendous amount about do's and don'ts.

It's not that the do's and the don'ts are up front in order that we might find ourselves accepted with God on the strength of that, but that once we are in Christ, in order for us to manifest the change that is ours in Christ, it has to do with making sure that we do what we're supposed to do and that we refrain from doing what we're tempted to do—tempted to be foolish instead of wise, tempted just to waste our time. But the Christian employer and employee, they don't waste their time. They realize that time is a gift. They don't trivialize the passage of time.

They seize it. And in the same way as we consider now in this matter of the influence on our lives. Now, there is a little phrase there that I want to pause on, because I didn't when we looked at verse 16, but I want just for a moment to recognize what Paul is saying there when he says, The days are evil. The days are evil. It's a quite striking statement, I think you would agree. And what Paul is not saying is that these are peculiarly evil days in Ephesus.

They may well have been. But it is a comment on the fact that the world in which we live is a world in which evil is present—that the world in which we live is a fallen world. And the reason I want to pause on it is because I've noted—and perhaps you would have identified this too—that the word evil or the notion of evil is seldom a part of people's vocabulary in our day. I think we could see, certainly in Western culture at this point in history and definitely here in America, almost a fixed desire to make sure that we move ourselves away from any notion of evil or badness or wrongness at all. Now, you can test this out by just thinking and by considering the literature and the statements that are made in the media. I wonder if you agree with me that moral categories—moral categories, right-wrong categories—have been replaced largely in our culture with psychological categories, so that the problem with the child in kindergarten or the student in the halls of the university will not then be determined in relationship to right and wrong as much as it will be determined in relationship to, for example, where they somehow or another misguided, where they unfortunate, where they victimized, where they… all of these different things, which they may well have been—as if somehow or another these symptoms are actually the issue.

But if you think about our culture as it endeavors to address these things all symptomatically, without any awareness of the underlying condition, then it's virtually programmed for futility. So, for example, you go to the average parent-teacher conference, and the teacher is explaining to you about your children, and she seems to be a little bit this way and a little bit that way and a little rambunctious and this and that and the next thing. You just cut through it, and you just say, Yes, I understand. She's bad. "'Oh, no,' says the teacher. She's not bad.

No, no, no. She's not bad. Oh, no, she's worse than bad. She's evil. Oh, no, you can say evil. You can… We can't have this in the school.

Any conversation like this at all. No." But that's what the Bible actually says, you see. Now, people say, Well, this is a dreadful thing for the Bible to say. No, follow with me.

Follow with me. You see, unless there is a proper diagnosis, then there is no possibility of cure. So symptomatically, we're trying to deal with the fact that everything is messed up. Now what the Bible says is that we live in a fallen world, so that the days are evil.

All the days are evil. Not… They weren't evil in the garden before Adam sinned. There was perfection. There was no contradistinction to God there at all.

Perfection. The world we know it today is not the world as God made it, but it is the world as man by sin has spoiled it. And as a result of that, since the fall, men and women by nature defy God's authority, disobey God's law, reject God's Word, and refuse God's Son.

Your sensible people think it out. People say, Well, I'm not going to obey the law of God and what it has to say about marriage, for example. I don't have to submit to that kind of authority.

I'm in my own authority. And what are you talking about about that Bible of yours? There are many possible ways to think about God and his revelation and so on. I reject the notion of an authoritative, insufficient Word of God.

And I at the same time am prepared to give some credence to Jesus of Nazareth, but I refuse to accept him as a Savior and a Lord and as a King. Man, consequently, is hard-pressed to explain why we are as we are. Quaman recognizes that our world is dark, it is broken, and it is full of hatreds. Into all of the brightness and gladness and joyfulness of it all, the achievements and the advancements and the programs and the progress, the fact of the matter is that in the heart of man there is a deep, deep shadow, there is a deep darkness that shines into or overshadows even our greatest achievements. And man has great difficulty in trying to make sense of it. War in our world is simply the expression of the war in our hearts. We have the capacity to be jealous of one another, to be spiteful, to be hateful. No one ever taught us this. We never went to a course—I'm sure you never went to a course on how to be an absolute pest.

Chapter 1, being a complete royal nuisance in your family. No! You're a natural at it! And if you're not, my wife says, I am. It is just there.

It is endemic in us. And so, when nations go to war—nations are the collective expression of individuals. So why would you be surprised that nations fight nations, since husbands fight wives, since parents fight children, since employers fight employees, since the brokenness is there? I came across an interesting quote, as I was thinking along these lines this week, by the fellow who was the founder of Twitter, Ev Nussbaum. Because one of the things about social media in the last quarter of a century or so has been, with the expansiveness of it all, a kind of optimism that this is probably gonna really fix a lot of things for us—the fact that we can all communicate like this, we can all be in touch with one another. And there is tremendous joy in that, isn't there? I mean, who would ever have thought that you could FaceTime across the world with your friends and your loved ones?

It's fantastic! But this is F. Williams. Quotes, I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place. I was wrong about that.

I was wrong about that. Because what do we know? We know that all of the benefits that are represented in this are counterbalanced by all of the other stuff, which is dark and undermining and broken and hateful and evil. You see, the only way that we'll ever get to this is from our Bibles. And that's why when we've gone through Ephesians and we've had to wrestle with these statements by Paul, you were dead, you were sinful, you were accountable, and so on, it comes across with just a resting, chilling engagement, doesn't it? And we go back to Paul as he writes his great treatise in Romans chapter 1, and how he explains there—and we've said it again and again—that the fact that although God has made himself known in this world, that man, men and women, have chosen to disregard that. They knew God, they didn't honor him as God, they didn't give thanks to him, they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Darkened. And claiming to be really wise, they became fools. And the implications of it, he says, since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

How did that work out? They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to their parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless, though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die.

They not only do them, but they give approval to those who practice them. It's a devastating critique of life without God, isn't it? And so what possible hope is there? Well, God speaks through the prophet Jeremiah and says, The heart is deceitful above all things. And through the prophet Ezekiel then he says, And I will give you a new heart. I will give you a new heart.

You see, here's what's needed, isn't it? And here we are at the center of heart surgery in the entire United States. Tomorrow, as every day, there will be those who are the beneficiaries of the transforming power of heart surgery. They will go in breathless and impoverished, and in the goodness of God they will come out breathing and enriched. There's not enough to give them a little cream, not enough to give them a little tune. They need a new heart.

And that's what the Bible says. So you see, the bad news is more than impacted by the good news. First, I need to recognize what the predicament is. I live in an evil world. Why? Because I myself am evil. Even on my best days, that's who I am. Well, what possibility is there for me? I've tried this, and I've tried that, and I've tried to fix a number of things in my life, but I've really taken one step forward and two steps back.

What did you say? That he'll give you a new heart? You get a heart transplant?

Yes! That's the gospel. That's why Nicodemus was stunned by it when Jesus said to him, you know, I wanted to tell you, Nicodemus, unless you're born again, you will never see or enter the kingdom of heaven. The word that is used there is for regeneration, in order that you might be reborn.

That's what it takes. And only in the gospel is it provided. You're listening to Alistair Begg, who reminds us that only the gospel can provide us with the answer we need for the predicament we face in life. That's the message that fuels our mission here at Truth for Life.

We heard today that every one of us needs a new heart, and although we might try, we're never able to fix our own hearts. We need Jesus. That's why we teach the Bible every day at Truth for Life in a way that is clear and relevant.

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Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio 44139. I'm Bob Lapine. We're surrounded by things that can easily become a temptation. How do we avoid the pitfalls? Tomorrow find out how the Spirit of God enables us to walk in a way that keeps us on the straight and narrow. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.