Latest / The Daily Word / June 9 – Living in the Light
Transcript
- Cory: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good wee hours of the night, whatever time you are joining us. Welcome to the Daily Word Podcast from Lakeshore Christian Fellowship. My name is Corey Barnes, and it's my privilege to pastor our Katapa Campus. And I'm excited to be sitting down with you for another Daily Word episode where we're going to be doing a devotion out of today's New Testament portion of our Life Journal Bible reading plan. Now, today is Ephesians chapter five. And in this chapter, Paul is continuing to explain how our connection with Jesus and his family should affect the way we live our lives. In chapter four, Paul established the idea that we who follow Jesus, the church, are the body of Christ on the earth today. And in chapter five, he starts establishing that if we truly are Jesus' body, then we should be imitating him. He gives some specifics of what it means to follow Jesus ⁓ and it's in this section that I want to read just starting off at this chapter and we're going to see what out to me for this devotion. So we're going to read ⁓ verses one through nine. I'm reading out of the New Living Translation today because I thought it put it very clearly ⁓ plainly. Verse one Imitate God therefore in everything you do, because you are his dear children. Live a life filled with love following the example of Christ. He loved us and offered himself as a sacrifice for us, a pleasing aroma to God. Let there be no sexual immorality, impurity, or greed among you. Such sins have no place amongst God's people. Obscene stories, foolish talks, and coarse jokes. These are not for you. Instead, let there be thankfulness to God. You can be sure that no immoral, impure, or greedy person will inherit the kingdom of Christ and of God. For a greedy person is an idolater, worshiping the things of the world. Don't be fooled by those who try to excuse these sins, for the anger of God will fall on all who disobey him. Don't participate in the things these people do. For once you were full of darkness, but now you have light from the Lord. So live as people of light. For this light within you produces only what is good and right and true. Now, what we can see here is in this little section here, Paul has compared morality and immorality to light and to darkness. And in verse six, he says, Do not be fooled by the people who Excuse these sins. He put it very clear, very black and white. This good, this bad, immorality, sexual impurity, all these things, greed, bad. The opposite of those, good. And he's saying there are going to be people who come along that are going to try to make excuses for these sins, and they're actually gonna try to get you to. To get on their bandwagon and start excusing these sins as well. And that shouldn't be surprising for us, actually, that there would be people that would do that because the world, the world's full of darkness. We're the ones that have the light. They don't have any way of knowing what is right. But but here's here's the thing. What about the people who confess that Jesus Christ is their savior? They confess. To follow the Christian faith, and yet they are the ones that then go excusing these sins. I can think of, I can think of, especially in the area of sexual immorality here in America, there are lots of people who who don't see these lines as black and white and clear as scripture paints them to be. And they try to excuse living life. Contrary to what the Bible teaches, and they try to say that God is okay with it, and they come up with ⁓ good sounding arguments behind why they are excusing those sins that Paul is condemning here. And if we aren't careful, they'll start telling us. Those well-worded ⁓ good-sounding arguments, and those arguments can s seduce us, they can fool us into turning back on what Christ has led us into, and we can slip back into darkness. But Paul makes it really, really clear: don't participate. And what they do. He doesn't say don't love those people. He doesn't say to start throwing rocks at them and getting angry at them and and and start having, you know, arguments and and belligerent ⁓ social media posts with them. He he doesn't say any of that. He just says, Don't participate with them, don't do what they're doing. Instead, you your life Filled with the light that Jesus brought to you. And then we can in living our lives filled with that light, we can pray for them. We can pray for these people. Lord, they they confess to know you. So there's an open door there for you to come in and for you to show your goodness to them, for you to take away any deception, any way that they've been tricked. They've been fooled any way that they aren't living filled with the light, the way that you are revealing yourself to me through through scripture. Lord, I pray that you would reveal that to them and lead them back into light and into right standing and into righteous living and into right believing about scripture. Because once they begin living a life filled with that light, it is that light that will produce what is good and right and true in their lives just like that is doing in our lives. All this is done with a ton of humility. You know, verse ten, I didn't read it, but verse ten goes on to say carefully determine what pleases and The Lord. We have to be careful. We have to study the scriptures. And we have to be filling ourselves with them so that Jesus can speak to us through them. But we can trust Jesus to do that for us. We can trust him that if we continue to walk our lives, filling ourselves with the word, studying it, showing ourselves approved, that he is going to fill us with light and he's going to keep us. Living our life the way that He intends for us to live. Let's pray. Father God, I just thank you. I thank you for all that you have done to set us in relationship with you, to bring us into your family, that you have made the Holy Spirit available to us as our guide and as our counselor to lead us into all truth. I pray that you would guard us from deception, from falling into false teaching and being tricked into sinning. By well s crafted arguments that just don't hold water with scripture. We praise you. We thank you, Lord, that you are continuing to develop us to look more and more and more like Jesus day by day. I'm so thankful for what you're doing in our lives. I'm thankful that you've connected us to a church that preaches the Bible and teaches. What it says. We praise you and we thank you in the name of Jesus. Amen.