Ephesians 5

We could summarize the whole story of Ephesians in one sentence if we wanted to: Know God more and more in all His grandeur and grace (1-3), and then act accordingly (4-6). Since the beginning of God’s dealings with man, the root commandment has been this simple. The Lord speaks as our great and loving Father. He says to us, “Be like Me.” Of course there are some things that we just cannot do. God is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His very nature. Yet as creatures of God, as those created in His image, we can consider this our prime directive, that in every appropriate creaturely way, we are to be imitators of God, as His beloved children.

The coming of Jesus Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit are together a tremendous advance for us in terms of our understanding of this way of life. We could not conceive of a better way for us to understand this duty of divine imitation than this two-step plan of God. 1. God would become a man in the person of His Son and display the life of love before His people, and then, 2. God would plant Himself within their souls in the person of the Holy Ghost and would move them along in the way of resurrection obedience.

Before we proceed further in the way of appropriate Christian living, we need to remind ourselves that all who call upon the name of the Lord are saved. Even this statement is not broad enough, since there are those who die in the womb before they are born, and there are surely other elect who die in infancy or without the physical capacity to call out to God in a way that any man could here. Can we doubt the Lord’s mercy to His elect in such situations? Therefore we should remember the Lord’s plan to build a kingdom of grace, and we should never doubt that all of God’s elect shall certainly be saved. The point of Christian ethics after this reality of salvation is admitted, is to act as those who are bound for glory, not to win for ourselves a glory that we could never merit through even our best actions.

There is a way of life that is inconsistent with the hope of resurrection glory. Things like sexual immorality and covetousness are so far from the way of heaven that Paul says that they should not even be named among the people of the Lord. We must not think that grace permits us to descend into debauchery. Though Christians may fall into all kinds of sin, we need to think of ourselves, at root, as new creatures in Christ, not as idolaters or swindlers. We are children of light, and we should walk in that way by the power of the Lord. We cannot continue in associations with those who will drag us back into the old ways of darkness, for we are, in Christ and by His Spirit, the light of the Lord in the midst of a world of depravity.

There should be much about us that speaks of good news to others around us, a way of life that says, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” It is a way that does not condemn, but which is deeply convicting to others because of the work of the Holy Spirit calling them to the Lord. We cannot live out this calling as monastics who have no contact with the world, but we surely cannot live the heavenly life in drunkenness and debauchery.

We need the way of resurrection thinking to come to us by the hand of Almighty God through the Holy Spirit. We need more than a touch from the hand of God; we need to be filled with the Holy Spirit. When God’s Spirit fills His people, what do they do? They worship by the Spirit. They give thanks by the Spirit. Finally, they submit to one another by the Holy Spirit out of a sense of reverence for the One who submitted to the Father and travelled the way of the cross on His way home to heavenly glory.

This Spirit-filled submission is not dismissive of the structures of authority in this world, but deeply respectful of the order that the Lord has established for honest and holy living. As Spirit-filled Christians we do not turn away from an orderly life of marriage and family; we find our place within that life according to our calling. The joy of being a wife takes on a renewed meaning for Christian women, since the church of Jesus Christ is to be the holy bride of our beloved Husband. The privilege of being a man who gives himself for his bride is not a despised entanglement, but an opportunity to serve as one who is thankful for the best of all husbands.

Our confidence is in this great ascended Lord of the church. Not only did He give Himself up for us, but now He is cleansing us by Word and Spirit. We shall be His forever in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. Let us live now as those who are counted as holy in Him. Our faith cannot just be a matter of holy words, it must be more than that, displaying the beauty of our shining Husband who will never leave us or forsake us. We need to live out the glory of our salvation in our homes and in all of the structures of society that our God has established as we await the day of the fullness of glory reserved for us even now in the heavens, where our Beloved Savior lives and reigns.