Scripture
Ephesians 5:8-14
8 For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light 9 (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) 10 and find out what pleases the Lord. 11 Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. 12 It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. 13 But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. 14 This is why it is said:
“Wake up, sleeper,
rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.”
Pulpit Notes
Today is the fourth Sunday of Lent and we continue with Lenten themes as we prepare ourselves to remember and celebrate the death and resurrection of our Saviour Jesus Christ.
Our text this morning has us mediating on the resurrection life, but in a way where we are looking through the binary battle between light and darkness, the world of light and the world of darkness.
The message here is actually a hard sell. It is not one that will resonate with us, given the ways that we have been influenced by the culture around us. Ours is a world steeped in propaganda and propaganda messaging. Many people think of propaganda as the process of making you believe lies. But that is not the true point and goal of propaganda at all.
The real purpose of propaganda is mostly to integrate you into modern life, and to support and reinforce the main messages of modernity. One such message is that human beings are always progressing towards a better future. This progress will cost you nothing. It will largely be achieved through social engineering. You will not have to make any hard moral choices and instead will be free to pursue those things that make you happy. Modernity also tells us that there is no God and that all of our needs can be satisfied through material goods.
As a cornerstone of this, we are told that because we are free to pursue whatever makes us happy, that the things we do privately to seek happiness are our business and we have a right to privacy.
Every day we are bombarded with messages that reinforce these ideas of our fundamental freedoms and the right to do what we please on our own without anyone else meddling in our business.
You do your thing and I will do mine. I will leave you alone if you leave me alone.
This is the message that we want to hear. Propaganda works best when it is reinforcing messages we kind of want to hear anyways. And it is difficult to speak against the things we want to hear with propaganda. This is the other often misunderstood thing about propaganda: is that we want it, even need it, to survive in the world that modernity has built for us. We are isolated individuals freely pursuing our own private lives as we see fit. This is the world we want, and we want to be told that it is a good thing to want this.
We even organize the habits of our church life around this. We struggle to receive elders into our homes for family visits. We don’t want church members to meddle too much in our lives. We like it that the pastor speaks and then we can go away and figure out for ourselves how best to live the Christian life. We don’t want anyone meddling in our lives or trying to disciple us, telling us what to do or what it means to be a good Christian.
This message of Paul’s is one that we are going to struggle with because it really pushes back on the spirit of our age, which, truth be told, is an age of tremendous darkness. Paul nails the dirty little secret that no one wants to really acknowledge about the so-called “right to privacy”:
“…it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.”
The so-called “right to privacy” is little more than the right to sin in secret without anyone finding out what you are doing. I have the right to not have anyone looking into or pointing out my sins. As long as I am not hurting anyone, what I do in private is my business. Right?
Wrong. And most of us know it. But we don’t like it when people point this out to us.
But the good news is that we as Christians, when we are embracing who we are in Christ, don’t live that way. This is not who we are.
“For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.”
The first observation we need to make is that this is a simple binary. You are either dark or light. There are no shades of grey. We like shadows and shades of grey because it allows us to convince ourselves that being partially illuminated is better than nothing.
Paul here is describing two states of being. Note that he didn’t say were we “under darkness” or “in the light.” Rather, he describes this as the condition of our being, our essence. The NIV here is a really good translation of the Greek.
You were once darkness. Your essence, you being was darkness. This was who you are. It’s not like you were a good person trapped in a bad place. Its not like a movie set in a grim, dark world where everything is dark and shadowy and you are good people hiding and huddled away from the forces of darkness just waiting for the hero to come rescue you and bring you to a place of light and goodness where you true nature can now shine.
No. You were darkness. You were part of the problem. You were part of that oppressive blackness that kept everyone prisoner in the darkness of their own deeds. This was the essence of your being. Blackened and dark.
You needed a change of being, of essence.
That change of being has happened because of Jesus. You are now light “in the Lord.” This is a variation of the technical term “in Christ” that I mention all the time. “In Christ” you are light. You have had a fundamental change in your being in your essence.
Just as you are a new creation, just as you have already been raised from the dead, so too you are now light. Not in the light, but light itself.
Verse 14 ties this to the resurrection by quoting what looks like an early Christian saying. Paul is reminding them of something they already know and is fleshing it out more. The resurrected life is the life of light.
We know that who we are “in Christ” is hidden “in Christ” and that the spiritual life is centered around revealing who we are “in Christ.” It is not just spiritual. It is also physical, material. We are light. We are luminous beings who already have our resurrection bodies “in Christ.” Our faith journey is about showing our true luminous nature to the world.
Because you are light in Christ, be who you are, live as children of the light. Paul then describes this much like the fruit of the Spirit. In Galatians 5, Paul tells us that if we live by the Spirit, to keep in step with the Spirit. Be who you are. Be a child of the light, not a child of darkness. “In Christ” you are light. So be light. Be who you are.
Don’t be the person you were. Don’t be the collection of bad decisions you once were making. Don’t be flesh. Don’t be darkness. That is no longer who you are even if all the evidence says otherwise. This is faith. See who you are “in Christ.” “In Christ” you are light. You are a luminous being already raised from the dead.
The fruit of the light is goodness, righteousness and truth. Seek what pleases the Lord. This is a variation of “set your hearts on things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.”
Don’t go back to your old ways. Don’t go back to darkness because this is no longer who you are. Rather, he says, expose the deeds of darkness for it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.
And here we need to confront a common misperception of how the Christian is supposed to relate to the world of darkness out of which he has been rescued by Christ.
First of all, we need to note that we are in a spiritual battle. This is a war between good and evil, light and dark, between God the true King and Satan the usurper king.
So, what is the nature of this battle? Are we supposed to go around pointing out all of the sins of others. Are we supposed to stride into the world of darkness and start speaking out to everyone all the evil things they do?
This is a real battle, a real conflict. But it is not a noisy battle. We have to remember, what is one of the names of the evil one? He is the Accuser. Remember our series on Job, where we looked into the meaning of the name, “Satan.” It means “Accuser.” But specifically, it means someone who spies on people to reveal their secrets, the shameful things they do in private.
What does Paul say here, “It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret.”
There is a subtle thing going on here. We become the things we focus on. If we are continually focused on exposing the shameful things people do in secret, we become infected by these things we focus on. And more importantly we become imitators of Satan himself, the accuser.
Instead, you are to set your minds on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or noteworthy, think about such things.
Live as children of the light. This is not being passive. You are engaged in a battle against darkness, but you do not fight it by focusing on the darkness. You fight this battle by focusing on the light and being luminous beings in a world of darkness.
The world hates the light because their deeds are wicked and they don’t want them exposed. They fear their deeds will be exposed. By being who you are in Christ, your being light, that alone is an offense to the world. The very fact of your goodness, your light nature, will expose the things of the world. You will not have to even speak about them. It is shameful to even mention them.
In our media saturated world there is a great temptation to start talking about evil. Set up a podcast or a Twitch stream and start exposing the world, you know, how terrible our elites are and all the horrible things they are doing. We are going to bring all the dark conspiracies to light. We will expose all the immorality in the world.
The problem with this is that we are playing the enemy’s game and trying to be better at it than Satan himself, the accuser. The more you point the finger at the shameful things of darkness, the more you open yourself to the counter-accusations of hypocrisy.
It is far better to be the light than it is to be accusing others of living in darkness. The light itself is a form of judgement. Calvin put it this way:
“The world neither sees their own baseness, nor do they think it will be seen by God.”
Who we are, the contrast between light and dark, shows, rather than tells about the difference. Being the light says, “You are darkness” far better than words ever could. Without words, without accusation, merely by the strength of our presence we say to the world, “We are the light.”
The discipleship process is different, though.in that part of being in the community of believers is confession, is talking about the sin and darkness that cling to us and inhibit the light. It means letting the light shine one us. It means welcoming having others reflect back to us the things we cannot see or refuse to see in ourselves. But this is happening inside the community of grace, within the body of Christ where everyone together is committed to revealing who they are in Christ. By declaring our faith in Christ, we are saying that we want to live in the light so that our deeds can be seen plainly.
This is why this is the narrow path. It is a hard life. Being the light in a world of darkness is daunting. Christ himself said in John 8:12
“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
You are in the Lord. You are in Christ. You are light. You have and show the light of life. You are now a light shining into a world of darkness. So, shine. Be who you are. Be that luminous resurrected person that you are “in Christ.”
