Sermon: The Christian Walk: In Love
#1756
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 13-Apr-24; 83 minutes
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transcript:
My wife and I like to take a walk together nearly every day. It was a habit that we started again several years ago. I cannot remember exactly when it was. I know that I was, at the time, combating adrenal fatigue and it was instrumental in getting me back to normal, whatever normal is for me. And I know it has done me a world of good to walk.
Beth walks miles every day in the work that she does. She just gets a ridiculous number of steps every day. I will say, "How many steps did you get today?" And she will say, "16,000" or whatever it is. And it is usually somewhere in that general area 15,000, 16,000. And I will say, "I got mumble, mumble, mumble, "and that is just about how it is. She puts me to shame.
I, however, need to get out in the evening most days because my work has me sitting in front of a computer all day. So I do not walk a lot before we go out in the evening. I usually have around 3,500 steps, 4,000 on a good day. And so we walk usually about two miles and I get it over about 8,000 steps and then just a few more before bedtime.
But walking is a good exercise. It is good for everybody. It is a good destresser. I certainly found that out. It gets the heart rate up a bit. It activates the lymph system; if you are not moving around your lymph system just sits there. It does not have any motor or pump to move things around. And walking stretches the muscles—all those good things. It just is a good, gentle exercise and really helps a lot.
And you know, I think God did not create us to be sedentary. He created us to be active. That does not mean that we must become world class athletes running four-minute miles or anything like that. And neither does it mean that we need to be exercise junkies like some people have become. But simply, that for optimum health, whether it is physical or mental or emotional, and perhaps we can throw spiritual in there as well, we need to keep moving.
Life progresses. Life is programmed toward activity, toward growth, toward production, toward advancement. If we stop moving, we die.
Maybe that is too absolute a statement. But stopping altogether begins the death process. Experts are routinely advising senior citizens (and that is most of us in the church these days), to keep moving to extend their lives. I know that over the past decade or so, doctors encourage surgery patients to get up and walk as soon as they possibly can, keep everything moving, and it helps them heal.
Now, in Scripture, particularly the New King James version that I use, a form of the word "walk" is used 428 times. And that does not even account for other terms of mobility like "go," that is 1,666 times the word go or one of its forms is in Scripture. "Move," the word move itself is 137 times found in the New King James. "Run" 114 times and "crawl" even, is five times. Usually that has to do about the bugs that crawl upon the earth. But hey, the word is there five times.
The first mention, you know how I like to look at first mentions of a word in the Bible since they seem to indicate something special at that point, the first mention of walking in the Bible: anybody know where it is? Genesis 3:8, God walked in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day. So it is presented to us right off the bat as a divine activity. Something God does, an example we can say, that we should emulate God walking.
We are made in His image. He walks and so should we. How much better would it have been if Adam and Eve had been walking with Him? But they were not, they were talking to a snake.
The next mention of walk in Scripture is a companion to the first one, is in Genesis 5:22. Moses relates to us there that Enoch walked with God 365 years. Boy, that really outdoes all of us, does it not? Now, this fact is repeated in verse 24. And in Genesis 6:9, Moses write that Noah also walked with God, and then we finally get into the book of Exodus in chapter 16, verse 4, where God gives Israel manna in the wilderness. And He tells Moses there that His reasons for doing this miraculous act, which He would continue for another 40 years, is a test to Israel whether they will "walk in My law or not." That is, whether they will keep His law about the Sabbath or not. Because manna has everything to do with the Sabbath. It is not just the daily bread, but gathering twice as much on the Preparation Day so they do not have to work gathering it on the Sabbath.
If you remember the instance there in Exodus 16, there were Israelites that went out on the Sabbath to look for manna and there was not any, and God was very angry at them for not listening to Him.
So by the time we get to God leading Israel in the wilderness, we have walking established as an image or a metaphor of a progressive (not meaning Leftist, but meaning making progress), long-standing relationship with God in which keeping His law, or we could put it as faithfulness to His covenant or obeying His voice, however, you want to think of it, plays a major role. In short, our spiritual walk with God is about, when you think of all those different things, walking with God in the Spirit is about loyalty to Him and conduct. Loyalty and conduct.
We could call this, if you will, faith and works. Loyalty being the faith and conduct meaning works. It has been around since the beginning. The same ideas have been there. In the Old Testament, they are cloaked in practicality and in the very practical Hebrew language. And in the New Testament, it is in the very logical, very precise language of the Greeks, where we get a lot of our theology. So in the Old Testament it is practical. And in the New Testament, it tends to be theological, mental. And they go hand-in-hand because we can see an example in one and we can see the doctrine, the teaching about it, in the other.
So with both of these aspects in mind, we are to walk stride-for-stride with God. That is the image that we get from looking at this metaphor. We come to understand that what He wants is complete imitation. And Paul even uses the term "imitate me as I imitate Christ." He wants us, to maybe put it in a more modern term, in sync, synchronized with Him as fully as possible. Since we just had the eclipse, we could use a scientific term. One of my favorite scientific terms in all the world—it is, we are supposed to be in syzygy with Him. Syzygy—the sun, the moon, and the planet Earth were in syzygy to give us the eclipse. It means "in a line" or "aligned." (Why they came up with a word like that for a very simple concept, I do not know.)
But that is how God wants us to be with Him. When He walks we are not just following in His footsteps, not any longer. We are supposed to be walking side-by-side toward the same goal.
Over my next three sermons, counting this one (we will be inclusive), we will be investigating our walk with God through the lens supplied by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 5. We will get there in time. Do not turn there yet. We are going to lay some groundwork, but eventually we will get to Ephesians 5 because there he writes about walking in love, in light, and in wisdom. He makes a very nice outline for us about our walk with God.
We will take these one at a time in my next three sermons. So this one is our Christian walk in love. The next one will be our Christian walk in light and then our Christian walk in wisdom. That will take us through the Days of Unleavened Bread. I will give the next one on the first day and the third one on the last day. So by doing this, we should have a good overall understanding of the major elements of our walk with God and what He expects from us, how we are to do that. And then we can start putting that into practice.
Now, if you want some background on walking with God, I did give a sermon 22 years ago, in 2002. It is called "Our Walk With God," and it gives a lot of details about this biblical metaphor and our life with God. And I know my dad did a series on walking with God and there is plenty there on the website if you want to search out this particular topic.
But before we get to Ephesians, let us go to Romans the sixth chapter. We are going to start in verse 1, go down through verse 4, and then we will skip down to verses 10 through 14. What we have here in Romans 6 is Paul explaining the difference between our former walk and our present walk.
Romans 6:1-4 What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
Romans 6:10-14 For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
This is where we usually come to explain Christian baptism. I am not going to get into that, but we find that baptism, which is really the main subject here, our death of the old man in the waters of baptism, which is a type of the grave, and our resurrection there by being lifted out of the water to live according to the new man, form a dividing line between walking in the flesh, which we once did, and our current walk, which is walking in the Spirit. And we will get to Galatians 5:16 and the rest of that chapter to talk about "do not live in the flesh but walk in the Spirit."
So we have that baptism going into the watery grave and coming out of it as that dividing line between the old life and the new life. Now before, as he goes on to say in verses 15 through the end of the chapter, he talks about that at that point, before baptism, we were slaves of sin. That is, we slavishly followed the dictates of our sinful nature because really, we were not free to resist it. We have been inclined or conditioned in this world to just do whatever our inclinations are. And our inclinations tend to be lustful, they tend to be self-serving. And so we follow them because they feel good to us or they feel liberating—very much a wrong understanding of liberty—or we feel like they are an advantage to us, or many other things that we justify sinning. It is just the way the human mind works, especially influenced by the prince of the power of the air and his proud and self-serving nature.
But once we cross that dividing line, when we are raised up out of that water to a new life, we become slaves of righteousness. We are still slaves. We still owe everything to Christ. He now owns us, spiritually, or maybe I should say lock, stock, and barrel, because of what He did for us. So we are now slaves, but free. We are free. We have been freed from sin's imprisonment through Christ's sacrifice and God's grace. And now we voluntarily present ourselves as servants or slaves of God so that we can do what He says and live His way.
So we were in bondage to sin before and living absolutely miserable lives, although we were not really aware of it because we did not know what we were missing. But once God called us and gave us His Spirit and did all those wonderful things of sacrifice for us so that we could have grace, now we are happy servants of God, free to live a life that is projected to be eternal as long as we stay on the straight and narrow and overcome. We are now slaves of God, but with great potential!
By paying our debt of sin, Christ has set us on a new course. It is a new walk, we could say, a new path. Now that walk, obviously, has the Kingdom of God as its goal. That is the great city on a hill that we are we are striding toward, along with the promise of becoming a full-fledged member of the God Family. We are not going to live there. I mean, not going to just live there. We are going to own it and everything in it and be a vital part of its workings.
But to get from baptism to the Kingdom of God requires us to tread a specific, a particular path. Jesus calls it the narrow way or the constrictive way in Matthew 7:14 in the Sermon on the Mount. We just went over that a few months back. This path that He has set us on is difficult. It is constraining, it is confining. It is like going through those siqs in Petra where they are only as wide as a body and you have to squeeze through.
But it is not just there, it is the whole path where we have to stay on that narrow way all the way to the Kingdom. And this way, of course, is the way of righteousness, the way of right doing—that is what righteousness means—of godly action, of good conduct, and those things produce godly fruit and righteousness, and ultimately holiness. So one cannot arrive at the Kingdom of God any other way. There is only one way and that is the path that Christ Himself leads us on. The one that He forged as our Archegos, the Trailblazer, the Captain of our salvation.
So we have to prove to God through our works, through our faith, that we will forsake all else to imitate His life, which is seen in Christ. And of course, if we are actually walking with God and doing what He says, you know what that means? It means that He is right there beside us the whole way, able to help, willing to help actually, helping all the time through His grace and providence. So, we are never alone on this path. You know when we are alone? When we go off the path. He is still walking the right path. When we get off the path, we find ourselves having to get back on the right path and resume our fellowship with Christ.
Let us go to II Corinthians 5, verses 1 through 8, and bring in something else here. Now, this passage appears in a long section of this epistle in which Paul defends his ministry and he provides his reasons for serving God despite all the troubles and the sufferings that he had to go through. And of course, he is trying to encourage them and help them to understand that everybody does this. His were just magnified because he was an apostle and he was kind of the point of the spear and he was the one that was getting hammered all the time by the enemy. But it is the same way that we go through this life because life is pretty difficult and it gets more difficult when you are a Christian going against the tide of all the other people in this world and all of their ways of doing things.
By the time we get to the end of chapter 4, he had written about, you know, even though all these things are happening that we should not lose heart, we should not become discouraged because our hopes are not in this physical life and not in anything physical. But our hopes are in God, in Christ, in spiritual things, which he says are eternal, rather than the physical things in this life, which are very limited. So he gets then to chapter 5 after trying to encourage them and saying here in this paragraph that not even death should overly concern us because our mortality will be swallowed up by life, that is, eternal life in the resurrection.
II Corinthians 5:1-8 For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven [one of those eternal things], if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. For we who are in this tent [physical] groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who also has given us the Spirit as a guarantee [or a down payment, earnest money, if you will]. Therefore, we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. [There is a gulf there. He is in heaven as a spirit being. We are on earth as a physical being. And so there is a great difference. We are not in the same place, if you will. And then he gets here to the money statement]. For we walk by faith, not by sight. We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.
Now he is not saying we are pleased to die and go to heaven. That is how Protestants and Catholics and whatnot have misinterpreted this. He is talking about dying, of course, but being raised in the resurrection. And so our mindset here is that we would rather be with Him but there are things that he—we—have to learn in this life.
In the case of the apostle Paul, there were things he had to do, the things he had to witness before Nero and others way up in the Roman administration. And so, you know, in other places he talks about, "Well, you know, it looks like I have to stick around a little bit longer because God wants me to do stuff. And I would rather, you know, go because now the next thing I'm going to be aware of is the first resurrection. But you know, God runs our life if we are faithful to Him and he has us do certain things before we die, reach certain goals, accomplish certain things, so we will just leave that in His hands."
And so he says, "I'm confident, I'm going to live confidently in this life because I know that God has my back and that I'm seeking those eternal things, not the physical things of this life."
There in verse 7, we have what I call the money phrase. "We walk by faith, not by sight." That is the essence of the Christian walk with God and Christ to the Kingdom. It is a matter of belief. It is a matter of trust. It is a matter of loyalty. All of those connotations are encompassed by faith, or pistis in Greek. We believe, that is an aspect of faith. We believe what God says. We trust, another aspect of faith. We trust Him to walk with us and fulfill His promises. And we remain faithful, which is another aspect of faith, to the agreement or the covenant that we have made with Him, which entails obeying His voice, overcoming sin, growing in righteousness, producing fruit to sanctification, or to holiness.
So faith really does encompass as one word the major points of walking with God. Like I said, belief, trust, and loyalty, or faithfulness. Those are the things that we need to show Him. We believe Him. We trust Him. We are loyal to Him and will remain loyal to Him.
We are marching through the New Testament here and through Paul's epistles. Let us go to Galatians. I told you we would get here in a certain amount of time. We still have to get to Ephesians. That is after this. But now we go into Galatians 5, verses 16 through 25 here. And what we find is that what makes this possible, what makes our walk with God and our faith in Him, beyond God's calling and His grace and all those things that have already been done for us, is that we have been given God's Spirit. That is the key that unlocks all of this.
Galatians 5:16-17 [Paul writes] I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.
He is talking about a battle here between the flesh and the Spirit. We are to be all on the side of the Spirit, but the flesh and the Spirit going at one another in this conflict makes us choose which we are going to follow. And we often lose when we choose the wrong thing. Actually, we always lose when we choose the wrong thing. And it says there, when we choose the wrong thing, you do not do the things that you wish.
Galatians 5:18-25 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law [meaning we have not done something that contravenes the law and brings on the death penalty]. Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. Against such there is no law [meaning if you practice those things, there is no way God's law is going to come down on you]. And those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.
So in order to walk the way God wants us to walk, we have to make use of the Spirit that He has given us as a down payment, that bit of Spirit, of His own mind, of His own power, that He gives to us for us to use. Without it, walking with God would be impossible. We would be in the same boat we were before our baptism, when we did not have access to the Spirit and we made all kinds of mistakes. Even with it, we struggle against the pulls of our flesh every day. Something will come up that tries to draw us back into the way we used to do things, the way we used to think, the things we used to say. And sometimes we give in—probably more than we would like.
But if we submit to God and allow Him through His Spirit to guide us and empower us, we can live in the Spirit. That is, we can live like God does. Now at a much much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much lower level. But we can have the essence of it happening in our life. It is imperfect. We all know that. None of us has ever lived a perfect day. But we try. If we are living in the Spirit, we are using everything that we have to not make those bad decisions—and live as Jesus Christ did in this world.
And if we do it, if we are successful, if we live in the Spirit, we avoid the curse of the law, the death penalty that comes down upon people when they break it. And this happens. We can avoid it because of God's grace to extend forgiveness. When we stumble, God is not up there on His throne waiting with a big hammer to smash us. God says, "Ok, look. I've called you, I've given you My Spirit. This is the way, walk you in it." And then we try to go down the line, that straight and perfect line to the Kingdom of God and we veer off almost immediately. People tell me after they get baptized, you know, they thought, "Oh, this is going to be great!" And they sin like within the first hour or whatever. And we just have to understand that God knows that.
How many times does He say something to the effect of, He knows our frame. He knows how weak we are. He knows that we are so conditioned by this world and by Satan's thoughts and attitudes that we are going to stumble a lot. And so He gives us grace, He gives us forgiveness. I am sure that there are many times He forgives us of things that we are not even aware that we did that was wrong, but He extends that grace. Because He is like a coach that is trying to get us to win the World Series, let us say, and He is not going to take us off the team or execute us on the field if we make an error. He is going to say, "Ritenbaugh (well, that was what He would say to me), do better next time. Here, let Me hit you some ground balls and we'll try this again."
And so He does not kick me off the team. He extends grace so that next time something like that rolls around (rolls around, there you go. it is a ball being hit out to me), I will field it cleanly and get the guy at first. I have done something right. I have walked in the Spirit and He says, "All right, great! Three outs. Let's change sides and now you can hit. Let's see if you can do this" (extended metaphor there).
But I am just saying that God is on our side. He is trying to produce something. He is not trying to just flatten us every time we sin. He is an encourager. He is one who is trying to cheer us on to the Kingdom. And so He extends grace time and time and time again so that we can actually walk in the Spirit. If He kicked us down every time we sinned, we would just be a little grease ball.
We have to understand that He is with us. He wants us to go down the path to the Kingdom of God as straight as possible. But He knows; He is God. He made us. He is the most observant Person in the universe. He knows how we are and He allows us enough leeway to make strides, to say, "Yeah, I messed up. Let's move forward. I'm not going to do this again." And He wants to see that attitude in us that we believe Him, we trust Him, and we are going to remain faithful to Him.
The true Christian walks by faith, faith in God that He is going to preserve us through all of our mistakes, through the narrow way to the Kingdom. And I will just say it right now. That is why He tells us to endure to the end. It is not necessarily that we are to endure through the Great Tribulation or the afflictions of the world that come down upon us. He wants us to endure in faith, whatever the case, whatever the time, just get to the end, in faith, in growth. That is what He wants to see.
Now in this section that we came through here in Galatians 5, Paul gives us two lists. One is a list of things to avoid and to overcome. And the second list includes things that we should incorporate into our lives and relationships and grow in to produce godly fruit. So those who are in Christ—His people, those who have the Spirit—crucify the flesh. That is, they put to death their carnal inclinations, their fleshly lusts, if you will, and practices.
So we have all those things that we are not to do, that long list of the works of the flesh. And those are just some of them, they are not all of them, but those are the ones people normally fall into, or do not avoid, or run into joyfully because they are evil. Those are the things people did; in another place, as Gentiles walk (we will get to that in a minute), because they love following the tendencies of their flesh. But we are warned that, if we allow ourselves to do those things on a regular basis until they become a practice, a way of life for us, we are not going to be in the Kingdom. He says that very plainly. "Those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God." So avoid these like the plague. They are the plague. They are a terrible spiritual plague.
Look at that list and see if you see yourself in any of them, and make sure you get rid of it. I mean, these are some very bad things. I hope we are not doing those things, but these are kind of like headers and there is a lot of sins that are under them that are not quite as bad, but they qualify in their spirit as these things.
Remember, we went through what Jesus said in there in Matthew 5 about the spirit of the law and all these things. "It's not murder. I didn't do anything but spit on him and kick him and whatever." But Jesus said, If you hate a person, if you say 'Raca,' if you do say these things about them or think these things about them, that is murder in your heart. He said the same thing about fornication. And we could say the same things about, like, sins of the mouth and other such things that maybe the header is blasphemy or running somebody down or what have you, but we do this in ways that may not reach that level but in their spirit they are those sins.
So do not just look at these and say, "Well, I don't murder. I've never committed adultery." But then Paul gets into 'little' things like hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions. Anybody have any selfish ambitions? I know I do. I need to get rid of them. But I am saying just because you do not break the Big Ten in their physical aspects—you do not bow down to idols, you do not take God's name in vain, let us say, or any of the other ones. But there are probably things that are connected to those 'main' sins that you probably do and that is what God wants us to do. He wants us not just to eliminate the big headers, but all the little ones underneath.
Then we get to the to verse 25. "If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit." Now, does that not sound like he is saying the same thing? Well, let me put it in modern terms. Paul says here, if we have God's Spirit, if God has made us alive through Jesus Christ and given us His Spirit, then we should live it out. He is using "live" here in the sense of you have been spiritually made alive. You have been quickened, you have been given that essence of eternal life through the Spirit that He has given you.
Now, this is where Protestants often stop. They say, "Okay, I've been baptized, I've accepted the Lord Jesus Christ. He's my Savior." And then they do not live out the second part of what Paul commands here. They just think that because they are under grace, then the next step is God's Kingdom when they die and they go to heaven, as they think of it. But that is not what Paul is saying. If you have been a made alive through God's Spirit, you are commanded to live it, that is, walk in it. Make your conduct reflect that you have God's Spirit in you.
Let me give you another metaphor. The NFL draft is coming up in a week or so, about two weeks. And every one of those men that are going to be drafted this year have oodles of talent. My son Jarod and I were talking about this around the dinner table the other day and we were telling Beth that one of the differences between like, NFL football and college football, and the reason why some people make it in the NFL and some do not is that everybody who is drafted into the NFL was the best player on his team, or maybe the best of two, maybe the best of five in some places like Alabama and Georgia, and some of the really good teams that have stacked their lineups. So when they get to the NFL, they are playing all the best players from across the country and some in foreign countries as well. The NFL has started bringing in great athletes from other places around the globe.
So, let us think of this in terms of God. Now, I am not saying you are the best Christians that ever were, but He chose you specifically. Let us use the term, He drafted you. He drafted you because you have the talent or a talent that He saw in you. You maybe have not seen it, but He drafted you to play on His team. If you have been drafted by a team into the greatest league that ever was, you should play like it when you play the game.
That is what Paul is saying here. If God has chosen you and given you His Spirit because He knows that He can work with you and that you have what He is looking for, then you better live like it, like you are on His team. That is what Paul is saying. Do not make God lose a draft pick—and you do that by how you play the game. He is not going to fail; I am not saying that. But it is our mindset that we should make Him happy with His choice. How many times does it say in Scripture that our life should please Him? It should please Him that He used one of His draft picks on you and that you came through and you are the star. That is just a mentality, a mindset that we have to have. That because we are so happy to be on His team, we are going to give our all in the game.
Finally, let us get to Ephesians. We will start in chapter 4, verse 17. Now, in this chapter, Paul expounds another metaphor drawn from changing clothing, that is, putting off the old man and putting on the new.
Ephesians 4:17-24 This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to licentiousness [or lewdness], to work all uncleanness with greediness. But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: that you put off concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you should put on the new man which was created according to God, in righteousness and true holiness.
We have a new metaphor here that Paul brings to our understanding so that we can understand what is going on. However, did you notice that he started explaining the new metaphor with the old metaphor of walking? And what he does by doing that, he shows that the two are linked, they are part of the same process. That is only evident. But walking is the overall image of living one's life. You could call it maybe the main metaphor for our life with God.
And it is open to different adjectives, different ways of describing that life. Paul begins to take two major ones. He says, there is the old way, the way that the Gentiles walk. That is one way to look at the walk. It is a wrong way. And he gives us a lot of descriptions about why it is wrong. It is futile. He says they walk in futility. Their minds, the things they think, are futile. They do not lead anywhere. They really do not mean anything. They have no eternal substance. They are like the vanity of vanities. They are like smoke, as the metaphor is, that goes up to the air and dissipates and it is nothing.
Worse, the way the Gentiles walk, there is no relationship with God, no understanding of the truth. And so because there is no relationship, there is no real spiritual understanding. They give in to their fleshly impulses with little to impede their descent into complete corruption. Maybe they have some traditional beliefs, maybe somebody says, you should not be doing that. But really there are very few things out there in our present society that keep people from descending into just horrible evils.
Now, there is another way and that is what he gets to. He turns to the one who is called by God and that person can learn, he could hear Christ and learn His way of living and that is the true way of godly behavior. Christ did not come to give us a bunch of rules and doctrines. He came to teach us a way to live, a way to conduct ourselves, a way to think, the way to speak to other people. And yes, He did tell us things, teach us ways. But the major way He did it was to live it. He said, "Follow Me." That is what He told His 12 disciples and that is what He tells all His disciples. Follow Me, do as I do, speak as I speak, think as I think, relate to other people as I relate to them.
And it is at this point, whether we have chosen the one way or the other. . . Actually, the only one that is really chosen is the way of God. The other one we just kind of get born into and do as natural fleshly beings. But that is where the clothing metaphor kicks in. And the follower of Christ, now with a renewed mind, he does not have a futile mind anymore, it has been renewed by the Holy Spirit, must then put off the corrupt conduct of his life B. C., that is, before his calling, and he must then put on righteous conduct—the conduct of Christ—which is the process of sanctification for becoming holy.
So it is at that point that the clothing metaphor really comes into play because it is this putting off and putting on that we have to continue to do all our lives. I am sorry to say, once we are baptized, we have hardly taken anything off. I mean, we have just got this big pile of clothing on and we are walking through life burdened down by all this clothing, all this bad, corrupt clothing that we need to start shedding. You know that saying "being stripped for action," where somebody is fighting or in battle or whatever, takes off all of the encumbrances, as Hebrews 12:1 says, let us get rid of all the sin that besets us and go into battle, walk God's way. And that is what it is. It is taking off all those things that drag us down and keep us from moving with all the agility and strength that we need, and so live the life of Christ here in this world.
And that is what we have got to do. But anyone who has started this process will testify that it is not easy. Taking off those burdening clothes is not just difficult, but it is agonizing because it is like they have been stitched to our flesh and we almost have to take them out stitch by stitch so that we can keep them off and put on the right clothing, the righteousness of God and His holiness, because our evil, sinful, corrupt habits are rooted deeply in our flesh and in our human nature. That is why we fail, often. We return to sin so often and each time we seek forgiveness and try again. God extends us forgiveness and His grace and we have our resolute that we are going to do it right the next time. We hope we fail less often as we mature spiritually, but we will never live perfectly, righteously, godly in the flesh.
But even so, like I said before, we have to endure to the end, never giving up on pursuing sanctification. By the end of our walk, we should be more like Christ, a lot more like Christ than we were when we first started. But it is a thoroughgoing, excruciating process.
Now, Paul understood the enormity of the task. If you read Romans 7, you know he was exasperated with himself because of his constant failure. What?! The apostle Paul failed?! Well, according to Romans 7, he failed time and time again, and it was so bad that he said, "Who is going to save me from this body of death?" And he said, "Well, thank God! Jesus Christ our Lord" has the power to do that. He realized he could never achieve perfection in his mortal life, but he had to try to imitate Christ's life. That was a burning desire in the apostle Paul. He knew that Christ's sacrifice and help through His providence and God's grace would make up the difference.
So to help us, it is the same man as writing Ephesians that wrote Romans, to help us in this same process, he gives us three basic areas in Ephesians 5 to concentrate on as we endeavor to follow our Savior's example and live the Christian life. And here is the first one. We are going to read Ephesians 5, verses 1 through 7.
Ephesians 5:1-7 Therefore, be followers of God as dear children. And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma. But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as is fitting for saints; neither filthiness nor foolish talking, nor coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks. For this you know, that no fornicator, unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. 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 be partakers with them.
Here, he opens up with this grand statement about imitating God, "Therefore, be followers of God as dear children." Now, let us get that: Be followers of God as dear children. He is our Father and it is our responsibility to listen to and do what He says because He is our Father. Is that not what most kids do? They want, if they are well trained, they should want to please their parents, and in this case, our heavenly Parent—God the Father—has chosen us as His children. And so in response, we should want to follow Him and His Son Jesus Christ because we are His children.
And then the apostle Paul tells us that we do this, we follow God as dear children, when we walk in love. This is the word agape. Then he goes on and says, the finest example of godly love that we can follow is Christ's offering Himself in our stead. He took the death penalty in our stead for all of our sins and He bore them away. And it was that act that opened up the relationship with the Father, and so we could become His dear children.
So that allowed for forgiveness and grace and eternal life and the Kingdom of God and all the promises that we have from God—and all that came about because Christ showed love by sacrificing Himself, by giving His own life for others. And as we say, sacrifice is the essence of godly love. That is the root of love, the root of God's love toward us and the love that we should have for one another.
And Paul says, it is a sweet-smelling aroma to God. He is saying that when God sees one of His children conducting himself in godly love it so pleases Him, like a good roast. I mean, it is wonderful to smell something cooking and it gives a good flavor in your nostrils, and you know that it is producing something good and enjoyable. That is kind of the idea here, that God is feeling great pleasure that this has produced such a wonderful thing. It pleases Him to see His children voluntarily give up their time and energy and talents as living sacrifices, doing this over and over and over again for many people as a way of life.
That is what Paul was talking about in Romans 12:1 where it is our reasonable service to give ourselves as a living sacrifice. It is entirely logical because we are God's children and His greatest Child, Jesus Christ, gave Himself for all humanity. And so what should all the other children do? Follow the first one. So it is entirely logical and reasonable that we should do those things if we are followers of Christ, as dear children.
So he is talking about giving aid and help and sacrificing oneself, both physically and spiritually, for the good of others. It really shows progress in sanctification when we do that. We are really showing that we are becoming holy when we express God's love through sacrifice.
Now, we should read the second paragraph here because once he gives this wonderful two-verse opening to this, he goes off into all these sins. And so we should read this second paragraph here as examples of the opposite of godly love. He is doing a classic teaching method here. He shows us what we should do and then he tells us what we should not do. He gives the positive and then he gives the negative. And so he is telling us here that these sins that he lists here, sexual sins, verbal sins, covetousness—and those cover commandments 7, 9, and 10—are illustrations of rank selfishness, the very opposite of the outgoing concern that we should have as God's dear children. Because all these sins are all for self-gratification, to satisfy the flesh, to make oneself feel superior to others. They are actually means of dominion or domination over others, rather than what God's firstborn Son did, which was that He came in humility and service.
By the time he gets to verse 5, he condenses all of this thought about these negative attributes into one word, idolatry. He says all these things are idolatry. The idol is self. When we partake of these sinful activities, we are worshipping ourselves. We are certainly not worshipping the Father who has called us and given us all these great gifts. We are not hearing His voice, we are not obeying His commandments. We are not keeping His covenant or walking in His way. When we do these things, we are showing no love for Him. We are submitting instead to our flesh and to our human nature. You could say we are bowing at the altar of self-satisfaction, doing everything for me, me, me.
Verses 6 and 7 may seem like a tacked-on piece of advice, but it is very relevant to walking in love. Paul was thinking of real people here when he talks about, "let no one deceive you with empty words." Perhaps he was even thinking about teachers connected with the church who were speaking empty words. Now remember, these were Gentiles in Ephesus (that is Turkey today, Asia Minor), a very corrupt, idolatrous city, very full of Greek philosophy and the ideas of the day. So he said, do not be deceived by people who spout stuff at you, because what they are saying is empty. It is futile, it is vain.
Greek philosophy and the religions of the day were replete with ideas, like hedonism, that permitted satisfaction of bodily urges and self-satisfaction. And they touted them like people today do as "authentic" humanity. This is what we were made to do, we might as well do them. Other philosophies took the opposite view, that the ultimate in human life was denying the body. This was asceticism. Both are futile words, empty words because they are not the Word of God. They come to wrong conclusions.
In the Greco-Roman world, and sadly, also in the church of those days, these ideas coalesced into what we call Gnosticism and it terribly affected the late first and second century churches that were in that area of the world. And Paul calls these ideas empty. They are not going to get you to the Kingdom of God.
Let us go to Jude 17. You might want to keep a finger there in Ephesians. We will go down through verse 21. He says the exact same thing as Paul.
Jude 17-21 But you, beloved, remember the words which were spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ: how they told you that there would be mockers in the last time who would walk according to their own ungodly lusts. These are sensual persons, who cause divisions, not having the Spirit. But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.
That is a great answer to our commentary, if you will, on what Paul says back there in Ephesians 5. It is the same sort of things. These people who are out there speaking, these vain men or what have you, they are just trying to get a following after themselves. They are trying to dissuade you to do something that is not good. Stick with the love of God, stick with what God has taught you, because that is going to lead to eternal life, not the mockers and their words. They are going to lead you off the path.
So what Paul is saying in verses 6 and 7 back in Ephesians 5, is do not be deceived by the meaningless teachings of people who say that you can indulge yourself in these practices and still be right with God. They are baseless, they are futile and empty, and they will bring God's wrath because they break His law. It has not been done away. He still functions, His Kingdom functions through the law, through His commandments. So do not listen to them. Instead, read your Bible. Keep the commandments, do what He says. That is the way you will stay on the path.
That should hit us right between the eyes because the same thing is happening in our society. There are supposed Christians out there, thankfully not too many in God's church, who preach and write books about accepting a culture of sin into the church. Things like fornication, adultery, homosexuality, transgenderism, and other kinds of abominable things. They take God's grace too far because they have jettisoned the law. But God has not. And those sins will bring on His wrath, as Paul said. They call it love, but it is not love in the least. It is actually hatred of God. And when you get down to it, it is hatred of self. The two Great Commandments, your own neighbors. Love your neighbor as yourself. If you have a horrible understanding of yourself, you are going to have a horrible understanding of other people and you will treat everybody terribly, with great sin.
These things are wickedness and evil, condemned throughout the Bible by God Himself. True godly love begins with keeping God's commandment. And then it expands into godly attitudes, actions, perspectives, and sacrifices. As Paul shows in I Corinthians 13, it is never godly love to break a commandment because godly love begins with it, with keeping the commandments.
Let us conclude back a chapter, Ephesians 4, verses 1 through 3. If we know the book of Ephesians, we know that chapter 4, verse 1 begins the practical Christian living section of the epistle. He had talked about doctrine through the first three chapters and then in the last three chapters, he gives a lot of practical advice for us about what to do and how to work with things within the church, what the minister's role is and on and on and on about how we can practically live out God's way.
Ephesians 4:1-3 I, therefore [Notice the "therefore," it is a concluding statement. After he has given all this doctrine, he is saying, okay, what should we get out of this?], the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you [He urges us, he is almost begging us] to [have a] walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
That is how he begins this whole section, which basically is the rest of the epistle, on how we are to live now that all these basic doctrines have been explained, now that we know what is going on, this is how we should live. He saying that because God and Christ have bestowed redemption upon us, begun a relationship with us, opened up the opportunity of being filled with the fullness of God, that is what he says at the end of chapter 3, we should therefore live in a way that is worthy of Them. Like God. Live like God. It is like saying, God has made it possible for you to inherit all things. Act like it! Act like you are the heir of the universe, all that God has to give us.
So how do we do this? Well, that is what verses 2 and 3 are all about. These are the basic elements he mentions and all are aspects of godly love.
1. Be humble. That is, esteem others better than oneself. Paul says that in Philippians 2:3. That is the first thing he mentions. Be humble. Pride is a killer. Start with humility.
2. Be gentle. Or meek, it is the same word that is translated meek elsewhere. Be gentle (or meek) with others. And it has this strange combination of ideas within it. There is kindness and consideration in a gentle and meek person, and there is also this backbone of self-control. So be gentle and meek with others. Be kind, considerate, and self-controlled.
3. Be longsuffering. That is, be patient, with others especially. Be patient even with yourself. Because God's efforts to change people often take a long time to fulfill their purpose. People do not just change like that (*snap). It takes a long time for their heart to be softened and then to start to do the right thing.
4. Bear with others weaknesses, supporting and helping them by expressing a loving attitude of self-sacrifice and affection. That is love.
5. Take the initiative to preserve the church's spiritual unity by living in peace with its members. That is where he says "endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."
So what do we have there? Humility, gentleness, longsuffering, forbearance, and peace. Those are the five things that he wants us, as we go through this section here at the end of Ephesians about how we live now that we know what is right, those are the five attitudes that we have to have: humility, gentleness, longsuffering, forbearance, and peace. By doing so, if we use these in the proper way, we will walk in love and be a pleasing, sweet-smelling aroma to God, like His Son Jesus Christ is.
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