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!

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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^©   

Living in Light

 

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

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

Yesterday’s theme “Living in Darkness” made me eager to get to today’s “Living in Light”.  While there are all sorts of shades and degrees of both light and darkness, the character of a person’s life is dominated by one and plagued by the other.  Let me give you an extreme example. 

Dr Billy Graham’s life was lived not only in the light of TV cameras and the public eye, but also the light of Christ.  Adolph Hitler lived in the tormented and twisted darkness.  Light drives darkness away in the same way that darkness can hide the light.

Another “extreme” is assigning light or darkness to the motives of what people choose to do.  It is called judging, and a careful investigation of the meaning of that word, Biblically-speaking, reveals it applies to what’s in the heart of another human being.  And that is God’s purview, not man’s.

In the news currently is the issue of abortion.  Hearing from both sides of this bitter public debate, ongoing for more than half a century, only the naïveté of a child, or an evil agenda could say the issue is clear.  On the one hand, hearing from those who favor allowing abortion at any moment, the ideal of freedom over one’s choices appears preferable, than allowing 9 judges to legislate her choices, when they’ve never even met the woman, nor heard of her circumstances.  On the other hand, a choice to terminate a pregnancy is a choice to kill.  And there are laws against that, with which not many sane persons would disagree.  There are shadows of light and darness, no matter which way we see the dilemma.  And so, we are plagued by either light or darkness in our choices.

To live in the light, as Paul encourages, is not as simple as not telling a joke with coarse filthy language, or being foolish.  The chair I’m sitting on doesn’t do that, but it cannot be called Christian or Godly, simply because it doesn’t tell obscene jokes.  Neither can we be called “Christian” because one attends church.  Living in the light is allowing both heart and hand (allegiance and actions) to be governed by He who has created us.

In short, it is a matter of what we do with that freedom granted us.  Not the freedom of the U.S. Constitution, but the freedom with which Christ opened eternal life to all who will believe.  The true act of living in the light of Christ is the choice of surrendering that freedom in favor of serving He who died for us.

For You Today

Considering the upcoming celebration of our nation’s birth on July 4^th, what determines your highest allegiance…personal freedom, or light?

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

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For other posts on this topic:  Small Package - Big Message and Subway Sermon

[1] Images:  Pixabay.com  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

When the Church Gets It Right

Friday, March 20, 2020

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

In the realm of science vs. religion, the flat earth characterization of Jesus followers as somehow mentally unable to perceive reality isn’t close to truth, even if you travel back to the Dark Ages.  Scholars David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers[1] inform us:  There was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference.^[57]  In the Fake News department, the Church of Jesus Christ gets a lot of ink.  By that I mean there’s a lot of false information about what Christians believe, and how the church is responsible for a culture of “hating”, an undercurrent of bias against Christianity, based upon ignorance of reliable history.

To apply Paul’s instructions to the Ephesian church in modern-day Western culture, it’s time to stop living a Dark Ages mentality.  I say (unashamedly so) Western so-called enlightened culture must begin to get over itself as anything close to healthy. 

Marriage, for instance, has always been held in high regard by Christ followers.  The behavior of those who entered marriage “lightly” and frittered away the holy standards with loose living, low regard for fidelity within marriage, and abstinence outside of marriage, doesn’t negate two-thousand years of the church holding the standard high, so as to preserve the health of family – which preserves the health of communities – which not only honors God, but elevates (and venerates, nobly so) the status and security of all, women, men, and children.  Without that elevation, social, economic, governmental, and institutional breakdown is imminent…always hanging by a thread.

Let’s face it, the church, not a denomination or fringe cult group ready to drink the cool-aid, but the historical, orthodox (if you will) body of Christ, Scriptural, Reasoning, Traditional, and Experiential church of Jesus Christ, which, being full of human beings, sometimes messes it up so bad because they are still living in a fallen world…yes, THAT church does get it right.  We get it right, knowing the truth…we sometimes mess it up doing the truth.

At times, in our human frailty, we are much more the fabled emperor wearing his birthday suit to the parade, rather than the Bride of Christ adorned in splendor!  May I suggest we cut the church a little slack?  Jesus did that with all of us, and also encourages us to go, and sin no more!

For You Today

Stand tall, believer…you’ve a calling and Master to serve today.  And you’ll encounter a lot of people who don’t know you’re out to help, not injure. 

So, go show them otherwise.

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

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Title Image:  via Wikimedia  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

For other posts on Ephesians 5 see Cleaning Up Our Act  or  A Life of Sacrifice

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[1] ^ Lindberg, David C.; Numbers, Ronald L. (1986). "Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science". Church History. Cambridge University