Ephesians 5 (Part 1) :1-2 • A Life Pleasing to God

but we're in Ephesians chapter 5 we're gonna take a whopping two verses today and it goes like this 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 sacrificed to God stop there let's pray Heavenly Father just two verses I know but you have packed so much into these verses as far as just the application goes walking this out in daily practice and Lord we just confess to you today that what we're reading here is easy to read and very very hard to do so we pray for your Holy Spirit to enlighten our hearts to have a greater understanding and then also father God to put into practice all that we learn here today be with us we ask in Jesus precious name Amen why was paul writing this particular statement to the church in ephesus you need to understand that the the city of ephesus was considered to be the most accessible city in all of asia because of land and sea ports that were a plenty and what that means is it there was a huge amount of trade that took place in the city of ephesus and that caused the place to just abound in people and whenever there's people you know that come and gather in a particular area you're gonna have all this sin that's going to abound just as much and it did in the city of ephesus not only that but you'll remember that ephesus was the headquarters of the temple of the goddess diana and the people of ephesus were very proud about that and of course that caused the city to even draw in a vast number of worshipers who wanted to come and worship diana well because of all of that all of that influx of people and all that influx of stuff and and sin Paul felt it important to write to the church at Ephesus and warn them against being sucked in to that same lifestyle that they had come out of when they came to know Jesus Christ and and the reason Paul is writing that to them and to you and I is because it's an ever-present danger you know just because we're Christians doesn't mean we can't fall to sin we all know that but just because you're Christians doesn't mean we can't go back and live the life that we lived before we were Christians doesn't make us any less Christians it just makes us disobedient sinful Christians and the very real possibility exists for you and I if we're living close to the edge and the influence of our lives is coming from the world more than coming from the word then we're going to be drawn back it's as simple as that it's a very simple equation where is the greatest influence in your life taking place where's the greatest impact you know who are you hanging with because you know whoever we hang with we have a tendency to kind of adopt their ways adopt their words their actions and so forth so to clarify this warning Paul begins by saying therefore you guys know because we've hit this so many times whenever you see the word therefore that means that Paul is about to make a statement based on something he had previously said and you'll remember what he said in verse or excuse me in chapter 4 is that we are to put off the old man put on the new man that is being made in the image of Christ and live and walk out that reality of the new person that is being created in Christ so therefore since we have said these things in the past now he goes on to say look with me in verse 1 be imitators of God as beloved children I want to let that sink in for it's such an easy thing to read be imitators of God Wow and you kind of read it and you you know if you really think about it for a minute it's almost like you're hit with unbelief Emmitt take god did he just tell me to imitate God isn't that kind of a tall order you know I've I've been really good at imitating other people but imitate God Wow well let's start to think about this and let's begin by remembering what imitate means let me put the definition up on the screen just in case we all need to be reminded it is a verb and it means to take or follow as a model or to copy a person's speech or mannerisms now you and I both know that if you spend a lot of time in the world you're going to imitate the world and and you know that's just the way it is but there's there's another reality here too and that is that if we spend time with the Lord and spend time in his word and soaking in his word and allowing that word to bathe our hearts and so forth it's going to be easier to begin to imitate him all right well if that still sounds a little steep to you this whole idea of imitating God let's read on and see what Paul has in mind when he gives us this exhortation verse 2 he says and walk in love ah this is where he wants us to imitate he says and here he notice these words as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us by the way it was a fragrant offering Paul writes and a sacrifice to God and this is the first way Paul wants us to imitate God and this is actually all we're gonna talk about today we're gonna deal with the other areas of imitation as we go on and deal with the rest of kind of what it means to live a life pleasing to the Lord but he says here that he wants us to imitate God and then he refers to Jesus isn't that interesting and he says as Jesus loved you did you know that this is really a declaration of the deity of Jesus Christ imitate God how by following Jesus and doing what he did isn't that interesting well anyway that's more of an aside than anything else because he says as Christ loved you or us you and I are too imitate that kind of love with others how did Christ loved us he goes on to say and gave himself up for us and that means he loved us sacrificially that's a very key word sacrificially Jesus sacrificed himself in order to show his love for us and Paul is telling you and I to go and do likewise simple right ok let's close in prayer wouldn't it be nice if it was that easy hey imitate God by loving others as Christ loved you there you go Yeah right deal let's go for it now I need to tell you before we move on that Paul is going to use this same idea in his exhortation to husbands loving their wives later on in the chapter and we'll get to that in probably a couple of weeks but for right now this word is given to all of us men and women whatever position of life you're in he is saying to you and I love one another just as Christ loved you and what he has just told us is probably the most challenging thing that we will ever receive in terms of an exhortation from God and the reason it's so challenging I think are is twofold first of all it calls us to do two of the toughest things that we are told to do 1 love even when we don't feel it it's very very hard for us to do and to sacrifice or give up something we value in order to love others and that's really really challenging let me let me let me talk about each one of those things first of all Paul is telling us to love one another in the body of Christ not because we feel love but because we are commanded to love them now of course that flies in the face of everything you and I've learned from the world because we all grew up in the world didn't we for the most part even if you grew up in a Christian home the world seeped in and we learned things from the world and what we learned is that love is a feeling and when the feeling is gone what are you gonna do right what are you gonna do when the feeling is good love is a feeling man you know if you don't feel love anymore what are you gonna do what are you gonna do it's like pastor what do you want me to do you know I don't feel love anymore I don't love you guys just love this person you can I don't love them what happened how am I supposed to follow the command of the Lord to love when I don't love I don't love that person in fact it's more the opposite so what do you what am I supposed to do there's nothing there there's nothing in my heart they'll say they'll say to me pastor you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip how are you supposed to make that happen well those all those arguments come from what we learned in the world love is a feeling God wants you and I to understand that love is a determination of the will that comes from obedience to the God who commands us to love let me reiterate this command as the Apostle John wrote it down for us let me show you this on the screen from first John chapter 3 it says and this is his commandment that's a strong word that we first of all believe in the name of his son Jesus Christ and second of all love one another and here it is again just as he has commanded us so we repeat that command at the beginning and at the end we must love just that way and I don't know if that sounds cold to you I imagine to some people it does because again we've been taught so much that love is a feeling it's a warm gooey gooey and and so when somebody comes along and says I command you to love it's kind of like you know two people getting married you know that it never met one another before their wedding day and the the you know the minister saying to them as they're getting married now I command you to love one another it's like well you pee I mean that sounds like a pretty hard way to start a relationship you know and we're gonna talk about how God can make that love anything but cold in just a bit but I want to talk first about the second thing that we find difficult about loving the way Jesus loved and it has to do with that whole idea of how he loved and that was sacrificially you remember Paul said were to love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us and again we come back to that idea of sacrificial love and if you look up the definition of to sacrifice let me show this one on the screen what is a sacrifice well it's an act of giving up something of value for the sake of something or someone else the act of giving up something that we value to sacrifice to give up something that we value and it has to be something that we value because if we don't really value it it's really not much of a sacrifice you know if I have 14 TVs in my house and somebody needs a television I go yeah you're gonna have one of mine big deal you understand what I'm saying sacrifice is what Jesus did for us and it is what He commands us to do for others as we love them and that is how we show our love through sacrifice Wow now God is really meddling in our lives now isn't he here in the word because not only is he asking me to leave or to love rather when I don't feel love but he's also telling me to give up something that I value in order to do it and that hurts I mean that hurts because I don't really love this person do you know how easy it is to give up things that we care about when we when we adore people we do it we do it just because it's so much fun right I mean yeah when Sue and I were dating I hardly had two nickels to rub together because I worked part-time at a gas station and part-time of the little tiny podunk radio station and I mean I was making peanuts and but I loved giving her gifts anyway you know just buying her things and I just it was so delightful it was so much fun you know now ask me to take that same hard-earned money and spend it on somebody I don't like now it's a different equation isn't it it's a completely different thing but this is what this is kind of what we're talking about as it relates to loving people in a sacrificial kind of a way let me let me remind us all of what Jesus said on this let me show you a passage from Matthew chapter 5 goes like this you have heard that it was said you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy but I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you for if you love those who love you what reward do you have do not even tax collectors do the same what's Jesus talking about here he's talking about showing the kind of love that doesn't come natural he says even tax collectors love people to love them that comes naturally right when I love somebody I love loving them when I don't like somebody I don't love loving them in fact I don't like doing pretty much anything that is nice toward them and what Jesus is saying in that particular passage is you know we need to love those people who we even consider to be our enemies people who are even actively hurting us because it's a sacrifice before we move on I want to address this issue of the apparent coldness of the command to love because on the surface it seems like loving others out of obedience is a pretty inferior kind of love it seems that way doesn't it begin because we're so convinced that love is a certain thing that the world is kind of for us and so we kind of think to ourselves gee loving because I love and loving because I'm commanded which is better we immediately kind of think well certainly it's loving because I love because you see that's you know it's easy may I suggest to you that loving because you've been commanded to love is not inferior at all it is the superior form of love here's kind of what we forget along these lines about love and and and this is why we struggle with the idea of loving because we've been commanded to love we forget about we about putting God in the equation yeah I mean this God comes along and he says to you and I I want you to love this person and we say but lord I don't love him he goes I know that because I can see your heart but I want you to love them anyway and we're like God I don't I'm trying to tell you I don't have love for this person God goes I know that too but I want you to step out in obedience and act lovingly toward this person and what we forget what we forget is that when we set our mind and our will to obey God in love toward others even when we don't feel it I mean in fact we might even be feeling the opposite we forget that God meets us there at the place of our obedience in ways that we can scarcely understand and that's the part we forget how many times have I read for you guys over the years the story of Curry ten Boom when she met her prison guard face to face a dozen and the reason I've read it to you so many times in the past is because it's so apropos and in so many ways of communicating this whole idea of obedience and the result that God has upon our lives when we step out in obedience and so if so I'm going to read it again at the risk of dragging it through the mud because again it is so good and I want to just for those of you that may not know who Corrie ten Boom was she's with the Lord now she was a lovely lady who lived many years ago well I think she probably died in the 70s I'm not sure maybe the 80s she was quite elderly when she you know passed away but um she and her family were arrested for harboring Jews again from the Nazis in Holland in occupied Holland and and they were found out and arrested the night at her that they were arrested her and her sister were carted off one direction her father was carted off another she never saw her father again was the last she saw of him and while they were in a prison camp called ravensbrück her sister Betsy passed away and through a clerical error Corrie was released from ravensbrück and sent home and about a week or so later all of the other women in that particular camp were killed anyway you guys know the World War two ended in 1945 she's telling a story that happened about two years after that and I want to read it to you from her book she says it was in a church in Munich that I saw him a balding heavyset man in a grey overcoat a brown felt hat clutched between his hands people were filing out of the basement room where I had just spoken moving along the rows of wooden chairs to the door at the rear it was 1947 and I had come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives it was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter bombed out land and I gave them my favorite mental picture maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollanders mind I like to think that that's where forgiving sins were thrown when we confess our sins I them God cast them into the deepest ocean gone forever the solemn faces stared back at me not quite daring to believe there were never questions after a talk in Germany in 1947 people simply stood up in silence in silence collected their coats and in silence left the room and that's when I saw him working his way forward against the others one moment I saw the overcoat in the brown hat the next the blue uniform with the visored cap with its swastika and it all came back with a rush that huge room with its harsh overhead lights the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the room the shame of walking naked past this man I could see my sister's frail form ahead of me ribs sharp beneath her parchment skin Betsy and I had been arrested for concealing Jews in our home during the Nazi occupation of Holland this man had been a guard at ravensbrück concentration camp where we were sent now he was in front of me hand thrust out a fine message Fraulein how good it is to know as you say all our sins are at the bottom of the sea and I who had just spoken unforgiveness fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand he would not remember me of course how could he remember one prisoner among those thousands of women but I remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt I was face to face with one of my captors and my blood froze you mentioned Ravens Brook in your talk he was saying I was a guard there but since that time he went on I have become a Christian I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there but I would like to hear it from your lips as well Fraulein again the hand came out will you forgive me and I stood there I whose sins had again and again been forgiven and could not forgive Betsy had died in that place could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking it could not have been many seconds that he stood there hand held out but to me it seemed ours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do for I had to do it I knew that I knew it not only as a commandment of God but as a daily experience since the end of the war I had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives no matter what the physical scars those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids It was as simple and as horrible as that and still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart but forgiveness is not an emotion I knew that - forgiveness is an act of the will and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart help I prayed silently I can lift my hand I can do that much Lord you supply the rest and so mechanically I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me and as I did an incredible thing took place the current started in my shoulder raced down my arm sprang into our joint hands and then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being bringing tears to my eyes I forgive you brother I cried with all my heart for a long moment we grasped each other's hands the former guard and the former prison I had never known God's love so intensely as I did that day in that a lovely story I share it again with you because it demonstrates the two things that I've been talking about that we find so hard about loving others and that is the commandment of love or the commandment to love when there are no feelings associated with it or when those feelings are very negative as in Corey's case and then sacrificing something very dear to us now in Corey's case again she had every probably worldly reason to be bitter toward this man and to hate him with all her heart and nobody would have condemned her nobody you were in Ravens Brook a German concentration camp you have a right to hate every single person who abused you in that place and yet she knew she had a commandment from the Lord and she also knew from helping people in Holland who had been brutalized by the Nazis when you don't forgive you don't heal when you don't choose to love the love of God doesn't flood into your heart and bring healing with it she knew that so she had to be willing to to lay all of that down but that that sacrifice that it took you see Corey had to be willing to sacrifice her justification for bitterness it's one thing to have bitterness she had to be willing to set it aside to lay it down and say Lord I'm gonna I'm gonna obey you instead of nursing that grudge you know what I mean and again nobody would have said that you don't have a right to do it but it was hers to sacrifice and as she even admitted what went through her mind in that in those seconds that flew by was her sister and her sister dying there and does this man think he can wipe all of that away with just an apology see she had to be willing to sacrifice that that's where sacrifice often comes in to lay it all down to let the Lord do a new work in our hearts and believe me people God needs to do a new work in our hearts I even wonder often how many Christians are still captive to the past and captive to feelings of hurt and offense because they are unwilling to sacrifice those things and to lay them down out of obedience to the Lord can I share again with you just for a moment the words of the Apostle John from first John chapter 3 it says we know that we have passed out of death into life because we love the brothers whoever does not love abides in death by this we know love that he laid down his life for us and look at this and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers and that's the sacrifice we're talking about little children let us love not love in Word or talk but in deed and in truth in that a powerful passage he laid down his life for us we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers that's what Cory did that day she laid down her life and that's what he's talking about there he's talking about that sacrifice that's something that we value I value my memory of my sister Cory was thinking I value that and I'm not going to lay that down and they even the bitterness that goes along with it but yet she was willing to be obedient and what love came upon her heart let me end by telling you why this is such an important command that God has given us in his word it's important for you and I to hear this too it was important for the Ephesians and in their day to don't get me wrong but it's important today perhaps even more so because I happen to believe that we are in the final times of the last days I believe we're you know because the last days really began with the inauguration of the church as we see in in Acts chapter 2 as the spirit fell upon the church and and and so forth and the beginning of the the outworking of the growth of the church that began that period of time that we call the last days it's been going on for a long time I happen to believe we're in the final times of the last days and the Apostle Paul told us what would characterize the heart of mankind in the final times of the last days and believe me it's the opposite of what we've been talking about here today let me show you what Paul said because it's given for us in 2nd Timothy chapter 3 and it goes like this but mark this there will be terrible times in the last days people will be lovers of one another no lovers of themselves they will be lovers of money they will be boastful proud abusive disobedient to their parents ungrateful unholy look at this with out love unforgiving slanderous without self-control brutal not lovers of the good treacherous rash conceited and they will be lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God I believe that what we're reading there in 2nd Timothy chapter 3 is a description of the character of the world that you and I are living in right this moment and because that is the fact there is a great danger in our lives just as there was a great danger in Ephesus that the people will be drawn back into that sort of thing it is very common and it happens and we have to be very careful how are we being influenced by whom are we being influenced by whom are we receiving input or from whom I should say who are we imitating this whole thing is about being imitators of you're gonna imitate what you're hanging with you're gonna imitate what is having the greatest impact on your lives and I'm here to tell you that second Timothy tells us what our imitation is going to look like if we're not being in if we're not being influenced by God we're going to be imitating the world and we're gonna be sucked back into that sort of a thing and yet our call is to be completely opposite that of the world in which we live in fact Jesus said that the people of this world would recognize us as his disciples by the love we have one for another because it's it's going to be so contrasting of what's happening in this world you

Channel: Calvary Chapel Ontario

Views: 21,644

Rating: 4.8391962 out of 5

Keywords: Bible, Bible teaching, Thru-the-Bible, verse by verse, Calvary Chapel, Bible study, Christianity, New Testament, Old Testament

Id: yc7evzkriec

Length: 32min 5sec (1925 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 12 2018