Please rise now for the reading of God's word and turn in your Bibles to Proverbs chapter 2, found on page 617 of the Church Bible. Give all your attention now to the reading of God's holy word, the inspired truth. My son, if you receive my words and treasure my commands within you, so that you incline your ear to wisdom and apply your heart to understanding, yes, if you cry out for discernment and lift up your voice for understanding, if you seek her as silver and search for her as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom, from his mouth comes knowledge and understanding. He stores up sound wisdom for the upright. He is a shield to those who walk uprightly. He guards the paths of justice and preserves the way of his saints. Then you will understand righteousness and justice, equity in every good path, when wisdom enters your heart and knowledge is pleasant to your soul. Discretion will preserve you, understanding will keep you, to deliver you from the evil from the man who speaks. perverse things, from those who leave the paths of uprightness to walk in the ways of darkness, who rejoice in doing evil and delight in the perversity of the wicked, whose ways are crooked, who are devious in their paths, to deliver you from the immoral woman, from the seductress who flatters with her words, who forsakes the companion of her youth and forgets the covenant of her God, for her house leads down to death and her paths to the dead, None who go to her return, nor do they regain the paths of life. So you may walk in the way of goodness, and keep to the paths of righteousness. For the upright will dwell in the land, and the blameless will remain in it. But the wicked will be cut off from the earth, and the unfaithful will be uprooted from it." Now turn in your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 5, starting in verse 8. This is found on page 1149 of the Church Bible, reading to verse 21. Again, hear the truth of God. For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light, for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth. Finding out what is acceptable to the Lord. And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of those things which are done by them in secret. But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light, for whatever makes manifest is light. Therefore he says, Awake you who sleep, arise from the dead and Christ will give you light. See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is, and do not be drunk with wine in which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of God. This ends the reading of God's word and let us remember that all flesh is like grass and all of its glory is like the flower of the grass. The grass withers and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord abides forever. And all of God's people said, amen. Please be seated. Let us go to our God once again in prayer. Our Heavenly Father, again we thank you that we can look to you and your word, that which you have revealed to us, the truth, and we pray that you would feed us from it and strengthen us in the faith. Help us to understand, give us those eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to obey all that we come to this day, all that you provide for us this day from your word in this book of Ephesians. And we thank you that you've given us this great gift to the church, your word, the truth. For we ask it in Christ's name, amen. So for the sake of those who are visiting with us today, we've been working our way through what has been called the Grand Canyon of Scripture, the Queen of the Epistles, the Book of Ephesians. And we've been using a three-word framework for looking at the Book of Ephesians, sit, walk, and stand. Now you could argue that perhaps that three-word framework really is Ephesians in a nutshell. You could even maybe say that it is the Christian life in a nutshell. Sit, walk, stand. Now what I mean by that, of course, is the sit refers to primarily the first three chapters in the book of Ephesians, which is the indicative mood of verbs and statements listed there, where Paul is declaring what we are in Christ, who we are in Christ, because of Christ's finished work. And then Paul shifts in chapter four through the rest of the book to what we would call walk, which would describe our living, our life, our behavior. And our walking comes out of our sitting. We must always remember that. That's Christianity. All other religions have that order reversed. They start with walking so that you could attain to something in terms of sitting or a position in Christ or in whoever they believe in. And then that last word, stand, also comes under the imperative mood of the verbs where we are, this is describing our warfare with the devil. So sit, walk, stand. This is walking by faith, this is fighting the good fight of faith. We understand and believe the truth of God's word and from that bring our thoughts and our choices and thus our lives under the obedience of Christ. We sit, then we can walk, and then we can stand. If we don't get our walking from our sitting, we won't be able to stand against the devil, for he will paralyze us with accusations of hypocrisy. So sit, walk, stand is the biblical sequence. Now you will find this, by the way, throughout the scriptures, not just Paul. But Paul, it's almost very clear, it's clearer perhaps in Paul's epistles that he has this first part of the epistle is that sit position of who we are in Christ. And then the second half of the epistle is the walk part of it, the imperative. So the indicatives and the imperatives. And again, it's a very, if you keep that in the back of your mind when you're reading the scriptures, you can understand what's going on better. Now, Paul and other apostles will kind of blend or braid together, weave together sometimes Indicatives and imperatives. One statement of an indicative, who we are in Christ, and then it'll shift right to an imperative, and then it'll go back to another indicative, and then an imperative, and so on. So it's just a recommended way of keeping that in the back of your mind when you're reading the Bible for greater clarity and understanding. Now Paul has been using this word walk quite often in verses, they're in chapters four and five, at least five times as a matter of fact. He does use other words or phrases that describe our walk, our living, such as putting off the old man and putting on the new man, or doing this and not doing that. Now today we will look at the last wok command or imperative in the book of Ephesians, and that is wok in wisdom. Now, having just read the verses from verses 8 through 21, bringing it up to 15, he lays down there, we were talking about walking in light last week. He then says, though, see then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, in verse 15. Paul is trying to sort of grab our attention by this statement, see then, You know, he's built an argument of what we are in Christ and how we ought to be walking in light. And then he says, see then that you walk circumspectly. Now, circumspectly is not a word that probably most of us use very often, if ever, in our everyday conversations. I know I don't. I don't typically use that word at all. Other words that you might plug in there might be watchful, cautious, careful, prudent, or wise. So what is wisdom? What is not merely the possession of knowledge? Because a man could be a genius but a fool. Lloyd-Jones says that wisdom is the ability to take and use the knowledge we have and apply it to life and living. Now, the book of Proverbs has a lot to say about the wise man and the fool, and I encourage you all to read it in the near future. The fool is governed by feelings, by desires, who acts on impulses, who speaks without thinking. The fool is one who is not governed by thinking or reason. The wise man is one who thinks. He reasons and meditates upon a situation. He also may ask the counsel of others. He will search out a matter, investigate it, consider all the possibilities, and then make a judgment and an evaluation and apply that to the situation in which he finds himself. He is also open to correction. He submits all his thinking to the Word of God. Proverbs 9.10 says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3 that Christ is our wisdom. He also says in Colossians 2 that Christ, that all knowledge, not some, but all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Christ. Therefore, those outside of Christ cannot be truly wise, even though they may have a lot of what might be called street smarts. They are fools in God's view. Now we have access to that infinite wisdom in Christ, and God promises to give it to us if we but ask in faith. He says this in James 1. And then Paul says, redeeming the time. So see then that you walk wisely, not as fools, redeeming the time. So he's going to begin to demonstrate how it is that we walk wisely, what that means. First of all, that we redeem the time, not merely not wasting time, but that we are buying opportunities to use time. buying up the opportunity to walk as light, for witnessing to the grace of God to others. This is a laying up of treasures for ourselves in heaven. We must remember that we are but pilgrims of eternity, just passing through this life. This is not our permanent residence here. I would encourage you to turn in your Bibles to Romans 13 for a moment. This is found on page 1115 of the Church Bible. He says in verse 11, And do this, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep. For now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts." So we must wake up. We must recognize what time it is in human history. And I would say that we are, you know, he says that the days are evil. And I would say that the days are much worse now than they were perhaps in the first century. In my opinion, we are getting closer to the end when Christ will return. And Jesus said that things will get pretty dark before he comes. And hence we must walk wisely and redeem the time that we have that he has given to us. He then says in verse 17, therefore, and as we've pointed out, therefore always signals a conclusion from what he was just talking about. Therefore, he says, do not be unwise. Do not be stupid or foolish are other words you could put in there, but understand what the will of the Lord is. True wisdom is understanding what the will of the Lord is. Now, how do we know what God's will is? of course, by searching and knowing the scriptures. We don't seek for some kind of mystical experience to divine what God's will is. We go to his revelation, which he has given to us, the Bible. And in this present context of wisdom and not acting foolishly, wisdom is knowing the scriptures and applying it to our lives, believing it and obeying it. Now theologians talk about God's will in two different ways. We have God's revealed will, which is the scriptures, of course. But then also we have what might be called his secret will, his providential purpose in all of creation. We see that unfold only in glimpses. We may not know just what exactly his purpose is in any given situation. We still must look to him in his word, trusting him for what we find there in his promises. so that we don't try to divine his will by, you know, things in nature. You know, that's actually forbidden in scriptures. Divination is something, trying to divine God's will or knowledge by doing things with creation, you know, and that's forbidden to us in the scriptures to do that. We are directed to go to his revelation, his word. So then, here are some more specific imperatives about how we are to walk wisely. Verse 18, he says, and do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit. See, being drunk with wine is an example of stupidity or foolishness. Do not be drunk or soaked in wine, filled with wine. Alcohol in large amounts makes one unable to think correctly. It decreases higher thought and judgment. That's why many people who do some very stupid things when they are drunk, right? And we laugh about it, you know, it's part of comedy, you know. But it's really something that the Bible teaches Christians ought not to do. Now, Paul is not against alcohol, and neither is Jesus. Jesus drank wine, Jesus provided wine to a wedding. What's wrong is to be drunk. to be soaked in it, to be under its influence and control, and then we give in to feelings, desires, and temptations, which we wouldn't normally do, but we've lost self-control because of that alcohol. That is excess or dissipation. It's wasteful. Rather, he says, on the positive side, be filled with the Spirit. Now this is not the same as the baptism in the Holy Spirit, which occurs at regeneration and is a one-time event. This command to be filled is to be continually being filled, as it says in the Greek. It is an ongoing activity. James Boyce says it refers to our being so under the Holy Spirit's control and leading that our thoughts and life are entirely taken up with Jesus Christ. Now, I have a caution that I would mention in the extreme charismatic world. There are some that have a very unbiblical idea about this and they push an experience called being drunk in the Spirit. with all the manifestations of physical drunkenness, slurred speech, uncontrollable laughter, stumbling, falling down, and so on. And you can search for this on YouTube or Google and see videos of this with men such as Ken Copeland and others. And it's very appalling, I must say, and I would say utterly blasphemous. That is not what Paul is talking about here at all. Again, this is how we are to walk in wisdom, understanding what the will of the Lord is. Not to be drunk, or to be so-called drunk with the Spirit, but to be filled with the Spirit so that we understand what the will of the Lord is, what his word is for us. And then here's a perfect application of that that he says in verse 19. speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord." Or in Colossians, it says, singing with grace in your heart to the Lord. See, Paul connects being filled with the Spirit with the body of Christ in worship and communicating the truth with one another via psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Paul says, speaking and singing in that fellowship and in that worship, making melody in our hearts to the Lord either in individual or family worship or in collective or public worship like we do on a Sunday morning. And you know, we are commanded to sing to the Lord. In fact, Psalm 98 that I used as a call to worship this morning says that very thing. And I would encourage you to look through, just scan through the book of Psalms and see how many times it says and commands us to sing to the Lord. In fact, those Psalms are really songs. That was Israel's songbook was the Psalms. Those were to be sung in worship. So we are to sing, and we see this command here in Ephesians and a like command in Colossians, but also remember that we will be singing in heaven. In one of the hymns that we just sang in Revelation 15 and also in Revelation 5, we see that, that the saints in heaven are singing around the throne of God, worshiping him. So of course, Christians in this life, we ought to be singing when we gather together as God's people to worship him. But also, we must be mindful of what we're singing. And in the Reformed tradition, in terms of using a hymnal that has hymns that have a lot of content to them. rich in content. And I would encourage you anytime you are singing a hymn to really be mindful of what you are singing. What is being said here? What is this hymn about? What is the scripture verse that it's related to? Usually that's at the top of the hymn page. And then what is that hymn, the theme of that hymn? And look at that content of that hymn. And we try to use the hymns that we sing on a Sunday morning to coincide with the sermon or exhortation text and the scripture that we read. So it's all kind of, you know, blended together around the same theme, if you will. But again, that is our responsibility as individual Christian believers, taking our responsibility in our worship service, that when we come before God, we must, again, remember who we are coming before. And we are coming to sing his praise and to worship him in that singing. And being filled with the Spirit will manifest itself in verse 20, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Thanksgiving, gratitude, always and for all things. That's absolute and complete. Thanksgiving focuses our hearts and our minds on Christ and his finished work. Thanksgiving is the light which drives away the darkness of grumbling and complaining. It drives away pride and boasting. It drives away covetousness. It drives away unloving thoughts, words, and deeds. It brings us back to our seated position, the sit position in Christ, and focuses our minds on Christ and His finished work. And this verse 21, Paul then is going to link all that he's been talking about with all that he will be talking about, which we'll look at starting next week in verse 22 and forward. This word submitting, this is a link going from kind of broad and general to more specific situations, which we'll look at in terms of family and work, those sorts of relationships. So he's been talking about walking in light and in wisdom, knowing and believing the truth, and then living it, obeying it, applying it to our lives. And he uses this word submitting to one another. Now that word submit is not a favorite word for Americans. You know, Americans have a vigorous sense of independence and individualism, if you will. And we don't like the idea, submit? What? You know. And Islam means submission, so that scares us too. It's like, oh, we don't want to deal with that. It has scary connotations. It can mean to yield or surrender oneself to the will and authority of another. It can mean to commit something to the consideration of judgment of another. So it kind of scares us. And the other way that you could say it is being subject to one another. But we are called to do that. Numerous places in the scriptures, even in the New Testament, Romans 13, 1 Peter, where we are called to submit to one another in the Lord. Now the test of submission is not when you agree, but when you disagree. If you agree with everything the person is telling you to do, anybody have a problem with that? That's easy, right? Sure, I'll do that. So when somebody says, do this or do that, and they have the authority to tell us to do this or do that. I'm not just talking about anybody who walks up to you on the street and says, do this, you know, sell your car and give me the money, you know, or whatever it might be. Somebody who you are in a relationship of authority with, you are obligated by God to submit. to obey unless, of course, there's one exception, they are commanding you to do something that is contrary to the will of God revealed in the scriptures. So if your boss at work says, hey, you know, do some stuff with these numbers here so it looks like we have a better deal to offer and whatnot, so you're going to be lying and cheating, it's like, nope. You have to say, sorry, sir, you know, I'm a Christian. I'm not going to lie, cheat, or steal for you because that goes against what I believe the Bible teaches. But you do that in a humble, meek manner. You don't jump on top of the desk and start kicking things and scream out of there, you know. That's what sort of is beginning to happen in our culture. We're getting so full of rage and so full of, you know, if you are offended by anything, you can just blow up and so on. But we disobey, and we bear the consequences then. The boss says, do it. You say, no, I can't. He says, there's the door. You say, thank you. Nice knowing you. And you go look for another job, right? It's hard. It's a difficult situation. And each of us will be tested, I'm sure, in the days ahead in these sorts of things. And this, all of this, is in the fear of God or of Christ. That is in the fear or reverence of Christ. This is that deep filial respect, not a servile fear, but a deep respect that we submit to one another because we are all members of the body of Christ, one another, together. So this general command to submit, again, we'll explore in greater detail as we consider next week in the dynamics of the family and the work environment. Lloyd-Jones says that the main thrust of this passage that we've just considered, to be filled with the Spirit, hold and preach and teach the truth in love, and then personal relationships will be sweet and loving and lovely, and the name of God will be glorified throughout the world. So as we walk wisely, not as fools, as we are not soaked in alcohol, drunk with wine, but filled with the Spirit, we will speak and sing the truth to one another in our worship and our fellowship. and there will be an overarching atmosphere of thanksgiving or thankfulness as we focus on the finished work of Christ. So let us then walk in love, in unity, in light, and wisdom, all to the glory of God. Amen? Amen. Let us pray. Our great God, we do give thanks to you for your word revealed to us through the apostles and prophets of the Old and New Testaments, your word preserved through the ages, given to us, and we have it in our own language that we can read and study. And we thank you that we can hear your voice speaking to us. This is your word, this is what you say to us. Give us those ears to hear and fill us with your Holy Spirit to enable us to overcome our weaknesses, the weakness of our flesh, that we might truly walk in this way because of who we are in Christ, not in order to be accepted by you, but because we already are in the satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ, and we rejoice in that truth. And we commit the rest of this service now as we sing your praise as well to your glory, for we ask it in Christ's name, amen.