Living As People of Light

Thursday, August 31, 2023

Imitate God, therefore, in everything you do, because you are his dear children.  Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ.  He loved us and offered himself as a sacrifice for us, a pleasing aroma to God.  Let there be no sexual immorality, impurity, or greed among you. Such sins have no place among God’s people.  Obscene stories, foolish talk, and coarse jokes—these are not for you.  Instead, let there be thankfulness to God. You can be sure that no immoral, impure, or greedy person will inherit the Kingdom of Christ and of God.  For a greedy person is an idolater, worshiping the things of this world.  Don’t be fooled by those who try to excuse these sins, for the anger of God will fall on all who disobey him.  Don’t participate in the things these people do.  For once you were full of darkness, but now you have light from the Lord.  So live as people of light!  For this light within you produces only what is good and right and true.  Ephesians 5:1-9

Apostle Paul begins this part of his letter to the believers at Ephesus with:

·       what to do (imitating God),

·       with the middle part telling us how to do it (thankfulness to God instead of self-centered obscenity),

·       and he ends it by pointing to:  what that will make of us (people of light, shining as good, right, and true.

Considering the culture in which we find ourselves in the 21^st Century, this passage would be a great one to memorize.  We live in a “coarse” society.  The word means rough, uneven, or raw.  That means we live in a hard place to navigate.  Waters like that produce sunken ships, and tragedy. 

The news (whether biased, or straight-up) screams loudly that Paul was talking about days like we now experience.  Prolonged times like this produce children who have little respect for authority.  And that is largely because they see very little worthy of admiration.  Sometimes it becomes obvious that children who are obnoxious and selfish are (at least) just acting out their natural inclination to rebel against what is not worthy of following. 

One of my friends was very fond of this saying about parenting techniques:  Your children’s learning will be more caught than taught.  You may be familiar with that if you have raised, or are raising kids; you can talk to them till you’re blue-in-the-face, but what they really learn is what they see in your actions. 

So the Apostle was getting at what we all need to learn…telling your children what to do isn’t the same as showing them how you do it.  It hardly needs saying, but do as I say…not as I do is the kind of hypocrisy children can sniff-out in a New York minute…and the smell of it ain’t pretty!  The year I turned 30 I was smoking 3 packs of cigarettes a day.  Public service announcements were just starting to ramp-up then, about how dangerous tobacco was for your health.  I quit that year because I noticed my five-year-old son walking around with a pencil in his hand, imitating Daddy’s habit.

Imitating God (as Paul states it) isn’t about playing God.  Rather, it’s about becoming like Jesus, unselfish, willing to sacrifice for the good of others.  This is the textbook definition of Agape’, God’s covenant love…doing the best for others unconditionally.  Without that we cannot live in the light, shining as goodness and truth; we remain in darkness.

For You Today 

So, whether this means you need to work on cleaning-up some habits, changing some attitudes, or whatever, remember that there are little eyes watching you, learning from you; lead them well.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO

There are about 2,600 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road library. 

Title Image:  Pixabay.com   Images without citation are in public domain.  

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from NLT^©