[0:00] The following sermon is from Grace and Peace Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Grace and Peace is a new church that exists for the glory of God and the good of the northeast suburbs of Hamilton Place, Collegedale, and Odoa.
[0:16] You can find help more by visiting gracepeacechurch.org. We have been walking through the Apostle Paul's letter to a church in a city called Ephesus.
[0:28] This last fall and some this spring. And so we've come to the next passage in that series. It's our custom here at Grace and Peace to often walk through entire books of the Bible so that you get the entire sweep in context of what the Bible is trying to teach us.
[0:44] So this is the next passage. It's Ephesians chapter 5. So give your attention to God's Word as I read there. It's printed in your bulletin. Therefore, be imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God.
[1:05] But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you as is proper among saints. Let there be no filthiness, nor foolish talk, nor crude joking, which are out of place.
[1:20] But instead, let there be thanksgiving. For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous, that is, an idolater, has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.
[1:34] 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 partakers with them. For at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.
[1:51] 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.
[2:05] For it is shameful even to speak of the things they do in secret. But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible. For anything that becomes visible is light.
[2:17] Therefore it says, Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon you. Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.
[2:34] 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.
[2:47] 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.
[3:02] Amen. This is God's Word, and He gives it to you because He loves you. And He wants you to know Him. Amen. Amen. It's good news for us. I wonder if you've ever heard of the Indian monkey trap.
[3:18] Have you ever heard of this? It's where they used to do this in India, and they would take a coconut, and they would hollow it out, and they would put bait inside of it. Maybe it's like rice or a banana or something.
[3:30] And they cut a small hole in the top, and they would chain it to a tree. And so the monkey could get its hand inside of the coconut and grab a hold of the bait, but the hole wasn't big enough for it to pull its fist out with its fist all balled up.
[3:47] So the monkey would be trapped right there with his hand holding on to the bait. One author puts it this way. He says this, that it's trapped not by anything physical.
[3:58] It's trapped by an idea. It's unable to see the principle that has served it so well to this point. You know the principle. When you see a banana, grab it and hold on.
[4:10] It's unable to see that that idea has now become lethal. The idea of the Indian monkey trap is that you can be so committed to an idea, an idea about who you are, about what you want your life to be like, about what you want your future to be, that it can actually trap you.
[4:33] And the only way to get out of the trap is to let go of the idea. In some ways, this passage and really the entirety of the spiritual life, the Christian life, can be summarized right here in verse 1.
[4:48] Therefore, be imitators of God. Be an imitator of God. That sounds simple enough, right? Hey, here's Christianity. Be an imitator of God. Even more, walk in love as Christ loved us.
[5:01] That sounds simple enough, right? The problem is, is I know plenty of well-meaning people who would love to be an imitator of God, who would love to follow God, and yet the demands of life just seem like they're not able to fulfill what they want to do.
[5:20] They're unable to give their lives to Jesus. Well, why? Well, they're so committed to the ideas that they have for their life, the ideas about who they believe themselves to be, who they want to be, that they can't let go of them.
[5:38] We can call their ideas about who they are, we can call it a false identity. It's like that monkey trap. And this idea of identities, true and false identities, is what this entire passage is about.
[5:53] It's about what the trap of false identity looks like, how you get out of the trap, what life looks like when you do get out of the trap. That's what this passage is all about. So let's just walk around in this passage a little bit and see what the trap of false identities looks like.
[6:11] So right here at the beginning, Paul says that we are to imitate God as beloved children. I mean, right there, you get Paul's opinion about your fundamental identity.
[6:23] No matter who you are, no matter what you do for a living, no matter who you're related to, no matter anything else about you in this world, fundamentally, you are said to be a beloved child of God.
[6:35] That is the key thing for you and for me. But then Paul does this weird thing. He gets to verse 3, and he kind of changes course, and he starts talking about sex.
[6:45] That seems a little bit weird in the context. He talks about, you know, sexual sin. Don't use sex wrongly. Don't joke about sex.
[6:56] Don't think that sexual sin isn't a problem. What in the world is Paul getting at? What is the logical flow in this passage? Well, some people suggest that this passage is Paul simply condemning sexual sin.
[7:12] Essentially, what Paul is saying when he says here that, like verse 5, For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immortal or impure, who is covetousness, that is idolatry, has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.
[7:29] Boy, that's a hard passage. A lot of people, I think, think of this passage as essentially Paul saying that anyone who has sinned sexually is out.
[7:41] You're out. You're on the outside. That the Christians are only people who are sexually pure. That that's the whole thing. I think a lot of people come to this passage and they're immediately overcome with a sense of guilt and shame and fear for their own sexual sins.
[8:03] Well, I don't think that's the point of this passage. And I think that for two reasons. Here's the first one. Is that right before this passage, Paul has been listing out various sins.
[8:15] There's like five of them before we get here. And so it just doesn't seem like Paul... And Paul doesn't seem to use those other sins as using them as ways to exclude people from God's kingdom.
[8:29] So why would it be that Paul would now talk about another category of sin, sexual sin, but use it as a way that is somehow different from those other sins listed as a way to exclude people from his kingdom?
[8:42] That doesn't seem to make sense. The logical flow isn't there. The second thing is... The second thing is... Is that everyone is sexually broken. Every person you meet is sexually broken.
[8:56] No matter who you are, no matter how chaste your life may have been, everyone has misused their sexuality in some way or another.
[9:07] Your sin may not be as dramatic as somebody else's. That person in your mind who has a more dramatic sexual past than you do.
[9:19] But it's still there. Perhaps you've lusted after another person in your mind, in your heart. Perhaps you've lusted after another person's relationship.
[9:31] You know, boy, if my husband were that nice to me. Falls under the category of a sexual sin in some way. Using our sexuality to manipulate other people in their responses to us.
[9:46] Using pornography as an attack against other people's sexuality. A fantasy life.
[9:58] Sexual fantasy life. Even immodesty is a sexual sin. So the fact is, is that every one of us is sexually broken.
[10:10] And so Paul can't be saying that every one of those people who is sexually broken must be out of the kingdom because that would be all of us. So what is he saying here? What is the point?
[10:21] He's saying that the list of sins that he got to before this, he was talking about gossip. And he was talking about lying. And he was talking about stealing.
[10:33] And all of those things. He's talking about the issue of identity. Who are we? Fundamentally, what is our identity? Back in chapter 4 and verse 17, he says, No longer walk as the Gentiles walk.
[10:46] And then he gets to chapter 5 and he says, Follow Christ. Imitate God. He's saying that there's something different. Your life ought to be different. And it comes down to how you are working out your behaviors in life.
[11:00] Show forth your different identity. It's an illustration. Your sexuality is an illustration of where your identity is. Is what he's saying.
[11:11] You know, then, as well as now, sex, our sexuality, becomes a way that people organize their fundamental identities. Right?
[11:23] You know, these days, who you are attracted to seems to be the most essential thing about you. What gender you are seems to be the thing that you must decide on your own at an early age.
[11:38] And even more, how your sexual preferences or your thoughts about sexual identity then demand that it would influence your political thoughts.
[11:50] Of how the social world ought to be organized. How we think about our relationships. How central our relationships are to our life.
[12:04] Our sexual relationships are. We order life in this way. I'm trying to explain. Do you see the trap of this? That to identify yourself by your sexuality is as though it is the most fundamental thing about you.
[12:20] It actually cheapens you. To say that the most fundamental thing about me is who I am attracted to or what I do with my sexuality or what I have done with my sexuality that that is the most fundamental thing about me that actually limits your full humanity.
[12:37] Your sexuality is a part of your humanity but it is not the full thing. You are not most fundamentally oriented by either your desires for people nor are you most fundamentally oriented by the mistakes that you have made in your own life.
[12:57] You are a full human. And so you can't get trapped by this idea. Look at the way Paul uses this interesting word here that doesn't seem to make sense in the context of sexuality but in verse 3 and in verse 5 he uses the word covetous.
[13:12] We normally think of coveting to be like I want somebody else's stuff but here he uses it twice to talk about one commentator.
[13:23] John Stott calls it that the person that Paul is describing is sexually greedy. They're greedy for their own satisfaction for their own personal fulfillment for their own sexual freedom is the person that Paul is describing here.
[13:41] This is identity language. It's this deep-seated desire that is fostered and it's cultivated and he calls it idolatry.
[13:54] Making our desires a fundamental part of our personhood. It's a false identity. It's a trap. And it isn't freedom at all.
[14:06] Can you imagine anything worse than demanding that you have to follow the desire that you have right now? I feel something right now.
[14:18] And the entire culture is telling me that if I don't follow that desire right now that I am not being true to myself. Do you see what a trap that is? Because what that does is it limits you from saying I might feel something different later.
[14:34] What if I feel something different later? What if my desire right now isn't actually something that's good for me? That if I really thought about it I might not choose that path.
[14:47] It's a trap. It's slavery. To organize our entire existence around one desire makes no sense and is not freedom.
[15:00] It's slavery. Now that kind of false identity happens with other sins as well. Paul could have named any other kinds of things.
[15:11] Paul is using sexuality as one illustration. So we can't get overly focused on sexuality. Sometimes people do that with this passage. But Paul here could have named a lot of things. He could have talked about being greedy for success.
[15:24] Being desperate that people would see my reputation as being somebody who is successful and well put together. We could be greedy for money. Jesus talks more about money than he talks about sex.
[15:40] A lot more. We could be greedy for comfort and for the things that money buys us. We could be greedy for power over our circumstances so that we don't have to deal with things that are hard in our lives.
[16:00] Don't you want the freedom to be able to not have to be bound by circumstances and limitations but to be able to do what I really want and not have difficult things come my way? You can be greedy for your health and your own personal sense of well-being.
[16:15] You can be greedy for your children's successes or greedy for your children's achievements or greedy for your children's opportunities, greedy for your children's health, greedy for your children to be happy and not angry with you, greedy for whatever it is.
[16:32] The list can go on and on and on and on. The idea it's like a monkey being trapped by an idea that it just can't let go of and it's death to be trapped to a false identity.
[16:47] That's the idea. That's what Paul is describing here. It's death to be trapped to a false identity like that. So how do you get out of the trap? That's the question. What do you do if you find yourself trapped by an idea like this?
[17:01] Well, there's this really interesting detail. Look down in verse 8. He says this, For at one time you were darkness. Isn't that interesting? We've kind of become accustomed to saying you were walking in darkness or you were around darkness or there was darkness around you but he says, no, no, no.
[17:18] You are darkness darkness. But now you are light in the Lord. Paul's saying that being trapped in the darkness of your false identity has become who you really are.
[17:32] That those false identities actually trap us and do begin to shape our identity. But you can become light in God.
[17:45] What's the path out? Well, it's simple. He talks about this darkness and light kind of language. The way out of a false identity is to walk into the light.
[17:58] Look at that little poem he gives. You may not be able to see it in your bulletin but it's a little poem in verse 14. It says, Therefore it says, Awake, O sleeper. Arise from the dead and Christ will shine upon you.
[18:11] We can summarize it this way. Paul is saying, Wake up! Pay attention! Stop it! Don't be so committed to this idea for your life.
[18:24] It's killing you. It's killing you. Wake up! Is what he's saying. It's enslaved you. This false identity is difficult to give up but you have to see it for what it actually is.
[18:39] And you have to walk out into the light. Look at verse 11. Excuse me. He says, Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness but instead expose them.
[18:53] Expose. For it's shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret but when anything is exposed, there it is again, by the light it becomes visible. For anything that becomes visible is light.
[19:06] He uses that word exposed twice. That's a tough word. See, when our sin is exposed to the light it loses its power. You see, sin feeds on darkness.
[19:23] Our entrapment to sin feeds on being hidden away because it feeds our shame and our sense of failure and our self-hatred and our self-pity and our victim mentality but when it's brought out into the light it can be robbed of its power.
[19:41] And Paul is saying bring it out into the light. Exposure feels very vulnerable. Nobody likes their sin to be exposed. Nobody likes to be known for who they really are underneath it all that we work so hard to show everybody that we're really not and yet what Paul is saying is is when there is the exposure there is grace.
[20:05] you will be exposed but you will be loved. See, the place of entry into the Christian life is confession and repentance and confessing your sins to God and confessing your sins to a friend.
[20:26] You can come and confess them to me. There's nothing you can say that will shock me. Nothing. If you don't know how to expose yourself to God come and talk to me.
[20:39] I'd love to talk to you about that and here's why because I know what it feels like to expose your sins to God. Everyone who has come to Jesus has walked through the difficulty of exposure in order to be freed from the weight of their false identities.
[21:02] because everyone is a sinner. It's the only way. It's the only way. Okay, so that's the trap. That's how you get out of the trap. How then can you, how are you freed?
[21:16] Once you are freed from that trap, what does it look like to imitate God? What does it look like to follow Jesus when you do get free? I wonder if you're familiar with the art concept of negative space.
[21:29] Are you familiar with this? Take out your bulletin. If you've got your bulletin, turn to the very first page of your bulletin right there. And what you'll see there on the very first page, you'll see on the left-hand side, there's nothing there.
[21:42] There's no print because that's the back of the cover and it's just white. But on the other side, you see that there's some text there. There's a song. But, you know, there's a lot of blank space.
[21:55] I mean, we could have put some more text on there. We could make the font a little bit smaller. We could cinch up some stuff. We could put text on the blank page. We could do all of that.
[22:05] And, you know, we might even be able to cinch it up. We could get, we could probably lose one page out of this bulletin if we really worked hard and put it really small so that you'd all have to wear your reading glasses. And that would be super efficient.
[22:19] We could do that, but we've made the decision not to. Why? It's the concept of negative space. See, negative space is the idea of having, well, having all of the white space leaves the page uncluttered.
[22:36] So you can focus on what is actually there instead of getting distracted and your attention getting pushed to all kinds of different directions. You see, the lack of things in your field of vision focuses your attention on the most important things.
[22:52] A lot of artists will say that the negative space is almost as important as what fills the space. The things you leave off the canvas are almost as important as what is on the canvas.
[23:07] Eugene Peterson is a pastor and he tells this story about a woman who was in his congregation and she was becoming a Christian and she came to him and sat down with him and said, you know, I really, I want to become a Christian.
[23:20] I'm interested in becoming a Christian. But she wasn't totally sure and so he asked her to commit to being sexually celibate for six months.
[23:35] And she thought, well, why would I do that? She was, this was outside of D.C. She was this kind of, prided herself in being a successful modern woman. She was accomplished professionally.
[23:47] She was, she had had a string of long-term relationships but she really had no interest in getting married. She liked the sense of being free and being able to make decisions for herself.
[24:00] And so sex was just kind of a normal part of her life. But she decided, you know, okay, fine, I'll go along with it. And, you know, within a week her long-term boyfriend broke up with her.
[24:13] That wasn't in the cards for him apparently. Within a month, she had kind of stopped really even thinking so much about this sexual celibacy.
[24:24] It just had kind of become part of things. But after two months, she came back down and she came back and sat down with Eugene and she said this to him. She said, you know, when you asked me to do this, I had no idea what you were up to.
[24:37] But after two months, something is changing in me. She said, I begin to, I feel more at home in myself and with myself. She said, my desires and my relationships are beginning to seem less cluttered.
[24:55] They're beginning to seem much clearer. She said, in fact, I'm beginning to wonder if marriage might not be that bad of an idea after all. I think that's a fascinating story because what it's saying is what it's illustrating is that when you give up the false identity that you have for your life and most often we are forced to give up those false identities we have for our life.
[25:21] Very rarely do we choose to do this on our own but circumstances push us towards that. But when we give up on that and let go of those false identities, when she did, she began to experience the same thing as negative space.
[25:38] She began to see that the light of God's world as she was supposed to see it. she was beginning to see God's world as life-giving and flourishing and good for her.
[25:51] You see, she couldn't see what God wanted her to see in the world while her life was cluttered by this false identity and by her ongoing sin patterns.
[26:03] She was under the trap of this false identity. See, the way for her to see what God actually had for her in life was repentance.
[26:15] It was the way of freedom. It was the way of light. It was the way of life. It was the way of waking up. So what does this life that is free from the path of the trap of false identity look like?
[26:33] Well, Paul gives three brief descriptions really quickly. Verse 15, look carefully how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise, making the best use of the time for the days are evil.
[26:47] The first thing is that you can have a wise ordering of your responsibilities. Doesn't that sound great? Doesn't it sound great to like grow up and make wise decisions? I tell my boys this all the time that, you know, that God has made you to have a wise life whether that's finishing your homework when you're in middle school or whether that's paying your taxes on time or whether that's taking care, changing the oil in your car.
[27:10] God has made you to have a wise ordering of life. That's what it looks like when you get free. You can begin to make wise choices. Second thing, therefore don't be foolish but understand what the will of the Lord is.
[27:24] Don't get drunk on wine for that's debauchery but be filled with the Spirit. You know, you're going to be able to, when you're free like this, you're going to be able to make decisions according to what is true and good and beautiful.
[27:37] not simply making decisions by what's convenient for you or by what your emotions or your desires in the moment are leading you to. Third thing, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing, making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks always for everything to God the Father in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.
[28:03] Do you see how positive the relationship with other people is that Paul's describing? Singing for one another, being thankful for one another, submitting to one another.
[28:17] What that means is you can have a posture towards other people in your life that is for their good. You can serve them with their best intentions in mind before you even start in on your own best intentions.
[28:31] We'll talk more about that over the next couple of weeks. You see, what's interesting about this is that Paul seems to suggest that this freedom is open to anybody.
[28:42] Anyone can have this kind of life. They just have to stop holding on to the false identity and grab a hold of a truer identity in Christ, to be a beloved child of God because of the love of God in Christ Jesus.
[29:00] You have everything you need for a life of beauty and wisdom at your fingertips. All you have to do is let go of the false identity and grab a hold of the true one.
[29:19] You know, isn't it interesting and ironic that what Paul is not saying is, hey, you go, get rid of all this sin, clean your life up so that God will really love you.
[29:34] Prove yourself to God. That's not the gospel of Jesus. What he's saying is, is there, there is a life that is offered to you and all you have to do is grab a hold of it.
[29:48] And what will begin to flow out of your life is the kind of goodness and, and life-giving, flourishing that you so desire that your false identity is never going to give you.
[30:04] How can we do that? Where does the power to do that come from? Well, I mean, up at the top, verse 2, it comes from the sacrificial love of God.
[30:16] Walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. It's amazing that Paul uses sacrifice language here.
[30:29] I don't know if you remember this, but there's this Old Testament story about Abraham, and Abraham gets into this situation where he desperately needs a sacrifice, and he doesn't have one on his own.
[30:40] And so he all of a sudden looks up, and God has brought this ram, a perfect ram, and it's stuck. It's trapped in this thicket of thorns, and God has brought the sacrifice for Abraham to use.
[30:56] And right there, that's in Genesis, right at the beginning of the Bible, the picture that God is giving us is that that ram is a picture of Jesus. He's a sacrifice that we need in order for life to be made right, in order for our sin to be taken care of and atoned for, in order for us to be made right, in order for us to be freed from all of those false identities, we need something, some sacrifice to be made that we might be made right with God, and what God is saying right there at the beginning of the Bible is, I've given it to you.
[31:32] I've provided it to you. It's Jesus. All you have to do is take hold of Jesus, grab a hold of him, and you will find your life renewed.
[31:47] Jesus was trapped as a sacrifice for you so that you would never have to be trapped by your false identity and sin again.
[32:01] He was trapped that you might go free. That's what Paul is talking about. That's the message of your identity, being freed because of what Jesus was trapped for, sacrificed for.
[32:21] that's for you. All you have to do is grab a hold of it. Amen. May that be so for us.
[32:33] Let me pray. Our God, we do pray that you would allow us to grab a hold of Christ, to find life in him, and we pray you do it for his glory and for our good.
[32:48] Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.