In this country, many church leaders first cut their teeth in how to give a talk, lead a Bible study, disciple individuals, through helping as a member of a team on a youth camp. At these youth camps, many fun activities were put on for the young people to enjoy during the day, and in the evening there would be a tour—a meeting at which some songs would be sung, and the Christian gospel would be run through over the course of the various evenings of the holiday.
The one that I used to help on, the first talk on the first night was often entitled Christianity is Christ, and it was trying to just begin the gospel by saying Christianity is all about the person of Jesus. Somebody who now leads a large church in this country was giving their first ever talk on one of these camps, and their headings were—their talk title was Christianity is Christ. Their talk had three points, and I commend this to you as a summary of introducing the Christian faith to you. If you're here still looking into the Christian faith, this is still, I think, an excellent way to begin to see what it's all about:
- Christianity is a fact, not a fiction. It's not a load of made-up stories; it's anchored in real events that took place 2,000 years ago and at other points in history, and especially the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
- Christianity is a friendship, not a formula. You can't reduce it to a series of do's and don'ts. It is a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus.
- And Christianity is a feast, not a funeral. You walk into some churches sometimes and you think that people must almost think that it's virtuous to look miserable, when actually Christianity is just thunderously good news. And actually, if you truly understand what Jesus has done for you, yes, your life may still be full of pain and difficulty, but there is something joyful and wonderful that transcends even the hardships of life.
It’s a great talk. The trouble was, the leader who gave this talk was so nervous at delivering their first ever talk that they got all three headings the wrong way around. So a bunch of teenagers were gathered for their first night on camp to be told that:
- Christianity is a fiction, not a fact.
- Christianity is a formula, not a friendship.
- And Christianity is a funeral, not a feast.
The innocent will be protected—I will not tell you, even if you ask me later, who that was.
Christianity is a friendship, not a formula—or to change the letters from ‘f’ to ‘r’, a relationship, not a rule book. That’s what we're thinking about this morning. It’s basically, at its foundation, at its heart, a relationship with the person of Jesus Christ as our Lord, our Saviour, and our King.
But a relationship changes the way you live. As we thought last time from chapter 4 verse 1, there is a way to walk worthily in the calling that we have received.
Now here's the thing—you can codify changes of lifestyle into some rules. Rules in life are actually profoundly helpful. Maybe in your house, you have a rule that the washing up that’s been washed up gets dried up and put away, doesn't get left on the drainer. Maybe that can be profoundly helpful because it means you've talked through expectations and you're all going to know, this is how we do things around here. And actually, having a series of rules can be really helpful for distilling down: what is it, what kind of behaviour pleases this other person, and what other behaviour would upset this other person? Rules are actually a good thing, and they're a good thing in our relationship with the Lord Jesus.
But what you cannot do is reduce your relationship with the Lord Jesus to a set of rules. You can never say, "Keep these rules and you're a perfect Christian," because all the rules are is an attempt to codify, distil down, the kinds of changes of lifestyle that would be helpful and honouring to someone who knows and loves the Lord Jesus.
And in this passage that we've been looking at this morning—Ephesians 4:29 through to 5:21—interwoven with each other, you have some descriptions of our relationship with God, and you have the kind of lifestyle that results from that. They're kind of woven into each other, and I'm going to focus, as we look through this this morning, on the relationship and how that's described, and we'll see how it affects the way we live. I'm going to focus on the relationship rather than the rules, because Christianity is a friendship, not a formula. That's what it's about.
You see, it'd be very, very easy for me, preaching on this passage, to just beat us all up. I can guarantee that every one of us can find at least one verse in that passage that makes us feel profoundly guilty. So a really easy way to preach a sermon on this passage would be to work our way through it and just turn the screws at every verse until we all come away feeling about that high and motivated to try and pull our socks up. But that would be a terrible way to preach a passage like this, because we live by grace.
So I, this morning, want the Christians amongst us to see what it means to know God, and therefore what it looks like to live for him. And if you're here this morning, you're not yet convinced that Christianity is true, you're still investigating—thank God you're here—what I want for you is this: I do not want you to think that Christianity is a load of rules to keep. "If I can somehow make myself kind of middle class and respectable and tick lots of boxes on what an upstanding person should look like, then I'll be a good Christian"—I do not want you to come away with that impression.
Instead, I want you to see what it looks like to know God. And I want you to want that, and then to know him. And I want us all then to live like people who do know the God who knows us, and we know him.
So what I'm going to draw out from this passage is seven features of our relationship with God. Now, don’t worry—I don't normally have seven headings. It doesn't mean that this talk will be over twice the usual length. It just means we're going to spend less time on each of them, so don't worry. If you have a chicken in the oven, you will not be eating it blackened—at least, not on my account. If you set the oven for 240 Celsius, do not blame that on me.
Seven headings then as to how our relationship with God works:
1. We are sealed with God's Spirit, so don't grieve him.
We are sealed with God's Spirit, so don't grieve him. This is verse 30: Do not grieve the Holy Spirit, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Echoes here, if you were with us back then, of chapter 1:13–14. God's Spirit is his stamp of ownership that he puts on each and every Christian to say: This one is mine. I own this person.
We're in the middle of the school summer holidays. Some of you are visiting us from Scotland—you're at the end of the summer holidays—my sympathies. But during the school summer holidays, you realise your kids have grown, and their trousers are up to there. So you buy them some long trousers, or they change school, and what do you have to do when new school clothes arrive? You label everything, because you know that a school jumper will be left in the classroom on at least day one or two of the school term. And if you ever want to see that jumper again, it has to have a name in it. So names go in every single thing with schoolchildren going back to school.
Well, the Holy Spirit of God is God's name tag on you and me, if you're a Christian. It says: This person belongs to the living God. Only God’s name tag is personal. It's not a piece of fabric or a piece of sticky tape stuck in—it's a person. That is your name tag. Your name tag is one of the three persons of the Trinity: the Holy Spirit.
Indeed, this is one of the places in the Bible where we see that the Spirit of God is not just some impersonal force—a bit like the Force in Star Wars—that the Spirit of God is a person, a person who can grieve. The person, the Spirit of God, is a he, not an it. And if we let destructive talk come out of our mouths, this says, if we get bitter and angry and negative, then God's Spirit—our name tag—literally weeps. More than weeps—grieves.
You know the difference of weeping and grief, don't you? Weeping is just really upset. Grief is really upset because you have lost someone you love. And the Spirit of God is looking at you with all your foul language or your bad temper, and he's weeping like he's lost someone he loves—because he has. He says, Where has that Christian gone? Who are you, and what have you done with the Christian that I sealed? We are sealed with God's Spirit. Don't grieve him.
2. We are forgiven in Christ, so forgive others.
We are forgiven in Christ, so forgive others. Chapter 4 verse 32: Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. If you're a Christian, you are someone that God has forgiven in the Lord Jesus. Jesus' death and resurrection is how and where that happened. And again, if you want the explanation of that, you look back to Ephesians chapter 2:11–22. We spent three Sundays working our way through those verses—you can watch them on the website if you want to refresh your memory.
But because God has forgiven you, he says, be gentle, be kind, be compassionate—forgive others. You see, when someone fails you, they're just showing the kind of failure that you show—the kind of failure that you show that means that God needs to forgive you. He's saying: see yourself in other people at those moments when they let you down.
Jesus told a parable, didn't he, about a man who was forgiven a debt the size of the GDP of a medium-sized country, and then refused to forgive a fellow servant who owed just a few hundred pounds. The prophet Jonah was angry when God forgave the city of Nineveh, because he had forgotten that God had just forgiven his own stubborn rebellion. Don’t be like Jonah. Don’t be like the man in the parable. In Christ, God has forgiven you—so forgive others. They're just doing what you do.
We're forgiven in Christ—forgive others.
3. We are dearly loved children, so walk in love.
Chapter 5 verse 2: Live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
When Jesus died on the cross to forgive us, it was not a clinical act of duty. In the Garden of Gethsemane—“Yeah, not my will but yours. I know I've got this to do. I'm not really looking forward to it, don't really want to do it, but I'll do my job, it's all right”—no, He did it because it was an act of love. Christ loved us and gave Himself for us, and we are children of God because of that love.
Like in Chapter 1, verses 4 and 5, where it says, “In love He predestined us to adoption to sonship.” Therefore, walk in love; imitate God.
In some families, you can really see when you look at the children who the parents are. So, a child is running around here after the service, drink in their hand, the drink gets spilt, and they don't know what to do. Who are you? Who's your parents? One look and you know instantly which adult to go and find because you can just see the connection.
Now sometimes that is just your mind playing tricks. I know a family who adopted a couple of boys many years ago, and they were forever being told how their boys looked like their mum and dad. Well, that was pure coincidence because there was no genetic connection. But interesting—even with adopted children—you kind of, you think, you kind of expect to see it.
And what he's saying here is: if you are a child of God because of the love of God, show that family likeness so that when someone looks at you, they go, “I can see who your Father is,” because you're showing the kind of love that God the Father shows. And they get, “You're just like your big brother, the Lord Jesus.” That's the aim.
We are dearly loved children, so walk in love.
4. We are rescued from God’s judgement—separate from shameful ways.
We are rescued from God’s judgement—separate from shameful ways. Let's start with verses 5 and 6 of Chapter 5:
“For of this you can be sure: no immoral, impure or greedy person—such a person is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things, God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient.”
God’s judgement is coming on this world. God is angry—justifiably so—when you consider the shameful ways we all live. The problem is not the way that really bad people live. The problem is the way we all live. In fact, our Old Age teaching video reminded us of precisely that, didn’t it? That the problem is the problem in our hearts. So God is profoundly angry, and judgement will come. And unless it had been for God’s loving rescue, we would deserve God’s anger and punishment—every last man, woman and child in this room.
Do not ever believe the lie that sin does not matter. We’ve been rescued from God’s judgement.
Now, most of the sins in verses 3 to 5 are sexual sins—either failing to respect sex as God’s gift for the marriage of one man and one woman, or the joking, humour, obscene way of talking that flows from a lack of respect.
Like that in the news the past couple of weeks, when all that hot weather that they've had in every part of the country—apart from Scarborough—they had horrendous pictures, didn’t they? The grass and wildfires that were spreading across. And remember that little village just to the southeast of London, where you could literally—the house owners—literally on the news, watching from the helicopter as the fires swept through the grasses, and then a terraced row of houses began watching their own homes.
Fortunately, actually, the fire service did a great job at limiting the damage and saving lives. But if you’ve just been brought out of a house that is on fire, what we have as Christians—and all Paul is saying—is: don’t go back into the building that you’ve just been rescued from.
We’re rescued from God’s judgement, so separate from shameful ways.
5. We are brought into God’s light—so walk as children of light.
It’s interesting, this. I think I owe this to one of my life groups, actually—someone spotted this.
So, Chapter 4 verse 18 said that we, as Christians, were in the dark. Now it gets stronger. Chapter 5 verse 8—he says, “You were once darkness.” Not just in it—you were it. But now, “You are light in the Lord.”
Not just that we live differently—it’s that we become something that illuminates the dark corners around us.
And so he says, don’t partner with what he calls in verse 11 the “deeds of darkness.” Why? They are fruitless. They’re barren. They’re lifeless. Instead, he says—verse 8—live as children of light, which leads to all the kinds of lovely things in verse 9: goodness, righteousness, truth.
So you hear a noise in the garden at night—what’s that clattering around in the bins? What on earth is it? Is it a badger? Is it a burglar? Is it a gust of wind? Flick a switch—turn on the outside light—flood the garden with light. No more shadows. You can see what it was that was causing the noise.
One day, Paul says, this whole world will be flooded with light. Nothing will be hidden. Everything will be exposed. Everything will be seen.
So he says, you are in the light now. Live now as those who are already flooded with light. Let the light come flooding into the dark corners of your life and live as those with nothing to be ashamed of—because that is who you are.
We are brought into God’s light. Walk as children of light.
6. We are told God’s plans—so live carefully.
Chapter 5:15–17:
So, verse 15: “Be very careful, then, how you live.”
Why?
“Not as unwise but as wise.”
Verse 17: “Understand what the Lord’s will is.”
Now these are big Ephesians words—that God made known to us the mystery of His will (Chapter 1, verse 9). This is called God’s wisdom (Chapter 1, verse 8). God’s wisdom has been made known to us (Chapter 3, verse 10). And God wants the spiritual powers in the heavenly realms to know God’s wisdom too.
And God’s wisdom—His will, His grand plan—is that one day there will be a future world in which Jesus is over all and in all, united under the good and gracious rule of King Jesus. And we have the most wonderful privilege—we are privy to God’s plans.
Now, God told us the plan. So Paul says: just slow down a little in your life and think. As I face various decisions in my life, various priorities—I know where the universe is heading. So how should I live to go along the grain with God’s wisdom, His will, His plans? What most advances that in my life today?
If you join the army, you will at times be given instructions to carry out. But you will very unlikely be told the overall objective—where it is that your little bit fits in to the objective as a whole. You’ll be told what you need to know to do your bit, and nothing further.
But God does not tell us to follow rules blindly and then add on the end: “Because I say so.” Instead, He’s told us the master plan. Told you where your life fits in.
And this is now: use your nose to think carefully how you live to best advance that.
We’re told God’s plans—so live carefully.
7. We are filled with God’s Spirit—let Him go on filling you.
So, verse 18 says: “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.”
Not because you don’t already have the Spirit—we’ve already learned that if you’re a Christian, you are sealed. Every Christian is filled with God’s Spirit. But just because you’re filled doesn’t mean that you don’t go on needing to be filled continually.
This is something that will go on every day of your life, as the Spirit of God takes control in more and more ways—filling our lives with the Lord Jesus: His love, His ways, and His priorities.
I could try and trick you at this point and talk about verse 18 and the dangers of too much alcohol. “Do not get drunk on wine.” Well, too much alcohol is not good, and this passage actually does tell you not to drink too much wine. And beer and spirits are covered by that—that’s not your let-out clause. So there is that there.
But that’s not why this is here. This is here, actually, as a contrast. So, too much wine affects the way you think, react, speak and live—and not in good ways. Instead, he says, let the influence on how you think, react, speak and live be the Spirit of God. So let that be the influence, and then it will be the Lord Jesus Christ taking control of your life—not the bottle.
So it’s there as a foil. The alcohol is there as a foil to tell you what God’s Spirit should be doing more and more as the days, months, and years pass.
And the next few verses—19, 20, 21—spell out what the Spirit will do as He fills our lives with Jesus:
We will speak with each other in ways that encourage each other with the goodness of God.
We will sing praises to God from the bottom of our hearts—as we’ve done this morning already.
We will grow in gratitude for all that God has done.
And we will yield to one another, rather than use others as ends for our own means—or means for our own ends, or whatever it is.
When you buy a new house, you take possession of it the day you get the keys and move in. But making it yours is a lifetime’s work. Even after you’ve painted the living room to get rid of that hideous avocado green that the previous people thought looked lovely, even after you’ve fixed the garden and dug out all the ragwort and bindweed—it will take you the next 20–30 years, if you keep living there, to put your stamp on it and gradually, gradually, gradually make it yours.
The Spirit of God fills your life. But making His mark—taking possession—is something He’ll be doing for the rest of your days.
Conclusion
What a thing it is to know God. It’s not just a kind of one-dimensional, dull little thing: “I now know God. Isn’t that nice?” No—it’s rich, and it’s wonderful.
So just to remind you:
- You have one of the Persons of the Trinity as God’s name tag over us.
- We are forgiven for everything we have ever done and will do.
- We are adopted as children by God’s great love.
- We are rescued from the judgement of God.
- We are brought into the light.
- We are told God’s plans for the universe.
- And we are filled with and by the Spirit of God.
If you know this God like this, you will never be the same again.
So let’s all take hold of this privilege, if we haven’t done already—and then let’s live like those who do.