Think back with me to the 1600s, a philosopher named Rene
Descartes. He said that humans are race
cogitons, which means thinking things.
So he's arguing that human beings are primarily rational
creatures. And our culture, following after
him, argues that we are primarily thinking rational
beings, and this shapes primarily who we are.
He said famously, I think therefore I am.
And with those words, he was combating a deep skepticism and
responding to it. And he, he, he was thinking to
himself, if everything else is false, this one thing, I know
that because I can think, I know that I exist.
And we go all the way back, 1300 years before him.
We go to the church fathers, we go to Augustine and our
forebears, They, they say more biblically, there's a different
story. We have a different response.
They would say we're not primarily rational creatures.
We're primarily something else. How would you answer that?
I'm not primarily A rational being.
I am, Augustine said, a loving being.
We're not primarily thinkers and rationalizers.
We are lovers. What most fundamentally moves a
human being, if not the mind and the reason we're moved
ultimately by what we love, which is why when Jesus, when
he's restoring the disciples that sinned, he doesn't come to
him three times. Jesus doesn't pull Peter aside
and said, Peter, do you believe in me more than these things?
He says three times, do you love me more than these things?
And you go and think about Jesus calling us to be followers and
disciples. If we were primarily rational
beings, then Christianity would be primarily a religion or a
relationship of the mind. But it's, it's not that way.
True Christian piety doesn't start with what we learn and
what we know with, but with what we love, which is why the Shema
in Deuteronomy 6 says you shall love the Lord your God with all
your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and all your
strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
And Paul's prayer to the Philippians in chapter 1 is not
that their knowledge would abound more and more, their
understanding and belief would abound.
But he says that your love would abound with all knowledge.
And there's our balance given for us.
And if you'll turn to Ephesians 5, we're turning the page into
Ephesians 5 this morning, coming toward the end of the book.
This is a section that is Paul forming the church by reordering
what they love. He's calibrating our loves for
us and therefore shaping the direction of their lives.
And you can see it happen in verses one to seven.
Read it with me. 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
sacrifice to God. But sexual immorality and all
impurity or covetousness, must not even be named among you, as
is proper among Saints. Let there be no filthiness, nor
foolish talk, nor crude joking which are out of place, but
instead let there be Thanksgiving.
For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually
immoral or impure, or who is covetous, that is an idolater,
has no inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and God.
Let no one deceive you with empty words.
For because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons
of disobedience. Therefore do not become
partakers with them. So regarding the section of
vices and of virtues, the medieval theologian Thomas
Aquinas, who's following Augustine, we've already
mentioned 900 years before him, is saying there's an inverse
relationship between law and virtue.
And what that means is the more virtuous that you become, the
more morally excellent and loving and kind and courageous
that you become, the less you need the the law to point at you
telling you what to do and what not to do.
So the more that you become imitators of Christ, the more
that you become Christ like, the less you need the 10
commandments to remind you what is good.
You are a lot unto yourself, you know, oh man, what is good?
So how do we do this? How do we become virtuous
people? And the church and philosophers
have answered, this is how you become morally excellent and
patient and just and humble and kind and courageous.
There's two ways. From the earliest church fathers
to the medieval ages to today, there's two ways you become
virtuous #1 they say is imitation and #2 is repetition
or making it a habit imitation. Look at Ephesians 51.
Therefore be imitators of Christ repetition.
Look at Ephesians 5 two walk in love.
Make these things a daily habit. Imitate Christ commit to the
daily habit of ordering your life around a cross shaped love
and you will become a virtuous person.
This is spiritual progress and and moral virtue.
They come first looking at verse one through imitating Christ.
Look with it with me again at verse one.
It says simply and amazingly, therefore be imitators of God as
beloved children. This is the only place in all of
the 66 books of the Bible that tells you to imitate God.
You've got Paul saying be imitators of me as I imitate
God. But here is the is the one place
that it commands you to imitate God.
And we say what a what a beautiful thought that God has
given you the power and the means and the grace that you
might imitate him. How beautiful is that?
I'll just read a few of these commentators.
William Barclay says this is the highest standard in the world.
You go to Alexander McLaren, the the preacher says this is the
sum of all duty. And Dean Martyn Lloyd Jones says
Paul's supreme argument, the highest level of all in doctrine
and in practice, this is the ultimate ideal that you get to
imitate God, however imperfectly.
So you go down and see this word imitate.
This is the the Greek word mimitates where we get a word
mimic. And in the ancient world, the
word meant quite literally to follow a good role model.
So the scripture saying you've been given the standard of Jesus
Christ, you've been given the the the role model and now
pattern your life after him. And it's a very interesting
thought that when you go to Judaism, they made much of this
idea of imitating God and they they held, what makes it
interesting is that they held a strong emphasis on the otherness
of God. And when we think about God, we
know we've come through Isaiah where it says that he is
transcendent and God is spirit and we worship him in spirit and
in truth, and he dwells in inapproachable light.
He's completely other from us. And so if that's true, and if
God is all powerful and all knowing and he's spirit, how do
we imitate him? In what way do we imitate God?
And the Jews look to passages like Deuteronomy 10/12, which
says, and now Israel, what does the Lord your God require of
you? But to fear the Lord your God,
to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God
with all your heart and with all your soul.
They look to the Holiness code, which is what Paul's quoting
from Leviticus 1912 that says be holy as I am holy.
And the rabbi said if we were to become like Him, we don't become
like Him in his power or in his omnipotence or omniscience.
We become like Him in his mercy and in his compassion.
We become like Him in sharing his love of the poor and the
vulnerable and loving justice and seeking mercy and walking
humbly. And this is what Jesus asks in
Luke 636 when he says be merciful even as your Father is
merciful, because in so doing you imitate God.
So we imitate his character, his his focus on other people, the
lack of emphasis on his self, your your sacrificial love.
This aligns with what we learned last week where we have all of
these moral vices that we are to put away as we put off the old
self. And there's all these moral
virtues that we are to put on as we as we image God and put on
the new self. He says you have to replace
falsehood with truth, replace controlling anger with righteous
anger, replace stealing with generosity, replace language of
cursing with language of blessing, replace animosity with
kindness. And when you do that, you are
imaging God, you are imitating Christ, and you're developing
the virtue and calibrating your love.
The second way we put on virtue comes in verse 2.
It's not just imitating Christ, but he says to use Paul's
language, we are putting on the new self, we're putting on
virtue. It's repetition or it's habit.
That's why he says in verse 2, you can read it with me.
Walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a
fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
And of course, this is how it always is in the gospel.
Before Paul demands anything of you, before he makes any moral
demands on you, he goes back again in the spirit of Ephesians
one to three and he says this is who you are in Christ.
Before he asks anything of you, he says this is what Christ has
done for you. And you see, he grounds your,
your, your commitments in identity and relationship with
God. And in verses one to two, most
specifically, he grounds your identity and relationship in
love. He uses the word love three
times in these two verses. You can see it with me in verses
one to two. It's almost a a gospel in
miniature because in verse 2 it says that Christ loved us.
And you say, well, how much did he love us?
He loved us so much that he, he sacrificed on our behalf.
He loved and so he gave. And this is a pattern that you
see all the way through the New Testament that Christ loves.
And so he gives and our response as we imitate him as we love so
much that we give. It's it's John 316 which we've
already heard. For God so loved the world that
he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him
shall not perish but have everlasting life.
So our identity is is grounded in love.
It's this love that it's it's saying here that that Jesus set
on us before we were ever even born, before he even created us.
He set his love on us. And you look at verse one, it
says be imitators of God as beloved children.
This is describing your state, your identity, your
relationship. You are beloved, He loves you.
You're an object of his love. You've been brought into a
relationship with him. And then the gospel response in
verse 2. So walk in love as it
categorizes your life. This is your gospel response as
a creature of love. Pattern your life after love,
love of God. We call this the the ordo
amoris, the order of loves. We love the Lord our God first,
we love our neighbors second, and then when there's love for
ourselves last. And verse 2 also reminds us with
all of this sacrifice language that love requires sacrifice.
If you truly love someone, you sacrifice yourself for their
interests and for their wholeness.
Martin Luther famously said if you were to truly imitate
Christ, then you must on some level suffer for the sins of
other people and remember that as you go and serve them.
Paul says in Romans 5 that the greatest sacrifice that you can
give, the greatest demonstration of love that you can give, is to
to give yourself, to give your life.
Which is why Romans 55 to 8 God shows his love for us, and that
while we will, we were yet sinners.
Christ died for us. And in the language of Ephesians
4 it says that he gave himself up as a fragrant offering, a
sacrifice. And then beautifully Paul takes
that language of of what Jesus was for us, and he uses it to
describe the same language of what we are to do for other
people. Philippians 418.
I'm well supplied this talking about money having received from
Epaphroditus the gifts you sent a fragrant offering, a sacrifice
acceptable and pleasing to God. Paul says in Romans that you
were to give your life as a living sacrifice which is holy
and acceptable in the sight of God.
Second Corinthians 214 Thanks be to God, who in Christ always
leads in triumphal procession, and through US spreads the
fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere.
So multiple metaphors bringing in multiple senses the the
metaphor of light. You are the light of the world.
So when people see you through your actions and your love and
your mercy, they actually see Jesus Christ in you.
And use a slightly more awkward metaphor, right, of the of the
senses, of the sense of smell. He says in you as you preach and
as you go. You are the aroma of Christ so
that the world smells you. They smell the Saviour, they,
they see something of him in you.
You are the salt of the earth. You are beloved.
And so we imitate Jesus. You are to imitate Jesus and
walk in love. And then you have these two
commandments, imitate Christ, walk in love.
And from that fountain flow all of the seven verses that you
have in front of you. So then after being grounded in
love, after being rooted in love, after been reminding of
the gospel and where your source of virtue comes from, he says
now there's some moral vices that you need to put off.
Now there are some loves that you need to reorder.
And what Paul is going to to give in the verses that follow
as he rebukes his own culture for their sexual immorality and
their greed and their crude talk feels like he's rebuking us
because these sins that were common to the ancient world are,
are so common today. And what Paul's doing is he
doesn't want you to to look at these sins through the lens of
you need to will yourself to do what is right versus willing
yourself not to do what is wrong.
It's it's not the way he's he's looking at this.
He wants you to see these sins through the lens of calibrating
your loves. Think back with me to Augustine.
He defines sin. We define sin frequently as want
of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God.
And in layman's terms, we don't do the things that God tells us
not to when we do the things that he tells us to do.
And when we we violate one of those two rules, then we've
sinned. But Augustine says that is true,
but I want to see it through a different lens.
He says sin is also disordered love.
When your love becomes disordered from God's design,
when it's ordered toward the wrong object, when it's in the
wrong measure, when it's in the wrong order, then you find sin.
And so when our love of the world becomes disordered, and
Augustine says then our hearts become restless.
When your loves are not calibrated according to God's
loves, your hearts become restless because he says our
hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.
Oh, Lord. And so God is love.
And when everything flows from the relationship with God that
he's just described in Ephesians 5, one to two, there is peace,
there is joy, there is blessedness.
So Paul gives 3 areas where the churches love needed to be
recalibrated in ancient Ephesus and in that region.
And the same is true for us and our culture.
Number one, sexual immorality #2 greed and #3 crude joking.
If you'll read verse three with me, we'll start where he starts,
with sexual immorality, he says. But sexual immorality in all
impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as
is proper among the Saints. There's a word in our culture.
The word is erotic, and it's associated with negative
connotations in our culture. But the word comes from one of
the three words for love in the ancient world.
It comes from the word Eros, which is not it's not a bad
word. It's not an evil word.
It actually just indicates a desire or an attraction.
And if you want to read more about this some love, there's a
book downstairs by James KA Smith called you are what you
love. And he says Eros is just a
rightly ordered agape love. When you're when your love of
God is in the right order, then Eros is in its proper place.
Your desires are in their proper place.
There's nothing wrong with desire.
There's nothing wrong with attraction.
The problem, the problem is that our erotic love must be
calibrated. It must be in proper order with
God's love. So sexual immorality, like all
sin, is enjoyment and satisfaction in the wrong
measure or pleasure in the wrong object.
And So what that means for sexual immorality is that we
place too much emphasis on sex, or we place too much emphasis on
pleasure, or we emphasize the wrong objects out of sexual
relationships. Sexual immorality is literally
the word pornea, and it's a word that describes very simply any
sexual activity outside of God's marriage covenant.
That's the shorthand. That's what the word means.
And so under this meaning come all of the vices in the vice
lists that we talked about last week, all the things that the
church is against with respect to sexual relationships.
We, we are against those things. That's what this word is
describing. And remember, even as we said
last week, the church is known in the culture primarily by what
we're against. We want to be known primarily
for what we are for. We're not primarily against
sexual immorality. We are for truth, we are for
love, and we are for mercy. But what that means that we are
also against pornography and adultery and bestiality and
prostitution and pedophilia and homosexuality and premarital
sex. And Paul, when he writes these
things, he knows what is what he's up against in the culture.
He knows what the culture loves. He knows what the church is at
risk of falling into partnership with.
And he knew what their temptations were.
And if you want to know more about it, there's a book
Upstairs in the library by Hubbard.
It's called Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome, and it
shows all of the culture. And you're going to see all the
parallels between our culture and theirs.
And you'll see that theirs, if we can use modern language, was
more progressive than ours. And they, you see that
pedophilia was accepted by much of the culture.
And you see that mistresses were extremely common, and they were
seen by many as necessary for the body, much in the same way
that pornography today is seen as necessary for the body by
many. And there was another church in
town that a friend of mine pastors a few years ago, he put
up on the marquee, or rather somebody else put up on the
marquee for him. It said God hates all sexual
sin. And it listed all of these vices
that we just listed. And the town rioted.
There were there were people knocking down their door.
They got phone calls or social media blew up.
There was threats that were made against the church, and you
might and probably do disagree with with how they stood for the
truth. But what I want you to see from
this illustration is even in this city, even in the Bible
Belt, there was a a war being waged.
The culture and the church have two competing visions of love
and we have two competing visions of belonging.
And So what do we do as the church?
We are the salt of the world, and so we want to exert our
preserving influence to protect marriage and we want to protect
the family because Satan is trying to pull it apart.
And we are for marriage and for family and for children.
And so we say we're not prudish. We get that rap.
We're not prudish at all. We love sexuality when it's
rightly ordered. And we don't hate sex.
As Christians, we love sex, but it has to be according to God's
design. We love it and we enjoy it in
its context. And we're not telling the world
that they don't love or that they can't love.
We're urging them to calibrate their love and to say to love as
God designed. And we're not saying don't love.
We're saying you're, you're substituting A counterfeit and
you're loving a counterfeit. And you would be so much more
blessed if you would put away the counterfeit and enjoy
marriage and family as God designed it.
And we do this and we tell them this.
We want them to be blessed because we love them.
So if you're in this church and you're, you're tempted with with
any of these sins, Paul's asking you to order your loves around
God's pattern rather than the world's pattern.
Make sure your love has the right object and it's in the
right order and it's in the right measure.
And then Paul takes this word pornea and he couples it with a
higher word, a higher umbrella, more encompassing term impurity,
which includes all sexual sins. But then it adds other ideas
like drunkenness and riotous behaviour and crudeness.
And even the use of the word impurity is giving a nod back to
Leviticus 18 to 20, which was Jesus's standard.
And the apostles and the Pharisees, this was their
standard of sexual immorality. That was what they thought of
when they thought about pureness.
And it's it's winking toward that.
And he says that these sins are to be so universally absent from
the church that we're not even to be accused of them.
There must be no hint of it. He says.
They must not even be named among you, as is proper among
the Saints. So the first disordered love,
we, we disorder it sexually. There's sexual immorality.
And then he moves to the second. And this isn't a disordered love
that's outwardly done with our hands and our feet, but this is
an inward disorder of the heart. He moves from the external to
the internal. And he says the second
disordered love is greed. The word is covetousness.
It's the last of the 10 commandments.
It's such a serious thing. It's one of the commandments.
And what this is, is a discontentment for what you have
and a desire for what you do not have.
And so it's it's why he's going to say in a minute that you need
to replace discontentment with Thanksgiving.
Why not be thankful? The cure for this is just to be
thankful with what you have and not to be consistently
discontent with what you don't in our own culture.
Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in 1831.
And he looked around and he said this American experiment is
amazing. It's beautiful.
But he says I have one thing against American culture.
He said money seems to be, quite simply, the only achievement
that Americans respect. So you've got money and you've
got security and you've got comfort, and all of these things
are wonderful desires and they're all good.
But here our love is disordered because covetousness puts love
of possessions over love of God and over love of neighbor and
over the good of our neighbor. And so not being content with
sufficiency, greed always demands more.
Greed is love in the wrong measure.
And so for this reason, if you look down to verse 5, he links
greed with idolatry. This is for you may be sure of
this, that everyone who's sexually immoral or impure or
who is covetous, that is an idolater.
You go to Colossians 35 and it links the same thing with the
same words to idolatry. Put to death what is earthly in
you, sexual immorality, impurity, evil desire and
covetousness, which is idolatry. And it's idolatry when you think
about it through the lens of love, because you're loving
something else more than you're loving God in that moment, which
is why Solomon prays in Proverbs 30.
Give me neither poverty nor riches, only my daily bread.
He goes, I don't want to be in the top 1%.
I don't want to be in the bottom 10%.
Lord, just give me what's needed for today.
Spare my heart from greed. And this is my own pastoral
observation over the years. There's three ways that you can
get rid of greed in your heart. It's perspective, contentment
and giving away and I love Andrew Reed.
He says in the greatest of these is charity.
If you want to keep your heart against greed, if you want to to
save your soul in this way, take the perspective of scripture
that it has on money, that it's dangerous, that it's a wonderful
blessing for other people's, but it's a it's a danger to your
soul and be content with what you have.
This is what John the Baptist preaches as he's there paving
the way for Jesus Christ. He says be content with your
wages, be content with what you have and and give it away.
If you want to be free from the love of money, then give it
away. The greatest of these is
charity. And Paul gives one final
disordered love when he brings up something that's so seemingly
trivial. He talks about how we joke with
one another. And the third, the third
criteria here is how we play quiplash with one another.
It's crude joking. Read verse four with me.
Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk, nor crude joking
which are out of place, but instead let there be
Thanksgiving. Why is this wrong?
Because crude joking is delighting in shock value and
amusement and laughter, a quick laugh over edification and
Thanksgiving. And so Paul doesn't say stop
telling jokes, they're funny. It doesn't say replace crew
joking with silence. He says replace crude jokes with
Thanksgiving. He says rather than make crude
jokes about these things, express thanks for these things.
He doesn't say that the crude jokes aren't funny.
If they weren't funny, then he wouldn't have to tell you not
to. Not to say them, but to put it
in John Stott's words, I love this.
He says, don't joke about sex, give thanks for it.
And he goes on, and he commands them just to work through some
of this language with you. He says no foolish talk, which
is worthless talk, speculative talk, empty and speculative
words. And he moves on.
And he says no crude joking, which is a word that's only used
here in the New Testament. And so there's nothing, there's
nothing for us to compare it to. But if you go to the ancient
world and you see how Aristotle uses it, he says it's quote, the
fondness of laughter characterized by youth.
End Quote. And I've told you this story
before and I think it's so hilarious that my dad, as a as a
school teacher for years and years retiring, he says that if
he could spend any verse, use any verse to describe his time
teaching junior English, it's Ecclesiastes.
Where he says the laughter of fools is like the cackling of
thorns under a pot. Because he says this is his kids
and there's nothing as serious and nothing as weighty.
And they just laugh and it's the laughter of fools.
And he says it's obnoxious. It's like listening to thorns
burn under a pot. First Timothy, 4/12 He says if
you're a youth in the room, if you're a young man in the room
and you want people to respect you, you want people to take you
seriously, you want to be respected and you want respect
where respect is due, he says. Then you set the believers an
example in speech. It's the first on the list.
There's a way the world talks, and then there's the way you're
going to talk. If you want to be respected and
you want to be taken seriously, don't talk like the world talks.
Don't joke like the world jokes. Aristotle sets limits on this
same word, and he gives us the idea of its ancient usage.
He says it incorporates constant joking when seriousness is
called for humor that trivializes important things,
acting like a fool to get laughs.
You're rude, coarse and lack refinement or respect.
And you see that this is in the context of of sexual immorality
and impurity. And so he's he's probably
alluding to dirty or suggestive jokes.
He's saying this is not how you learned Christ and you put it
away. This is not imitating Jesus.
This is not walking in love. The Paul's not saying don't be
funny. He's saying control your humour
and Orient it according to your love of God, and it's
interesting that Thanksgiving and gratitude are given for you
to put in place of crude joking and idle speech.
Sinclair Ferguson says that it's because Thanksgiving is one of
God's remedies for this thing, for these things.
He says rather than coveting what you don't have, you focus
on what you do have and express gratitude for it.
It allows you to see things from God's perspective and from the
light of his Word. He says you should ask, how can
I be thankful for these things? And the moment that you are, you
take a step toward a pure life, a pure life.
And Paul answers a sobering question, what if you don't?
What if you don't imitate Christ and these things?
What if you don't order your loves and you choose to walk in
the world's definitions of love rather than in God's definition
of love? Paul's just unpacked three ways
that you can break free from these desires.
But he doesn't just stop with a description of it.
He moves on to consequences. What are the consequences if you
remain with these disordered loves?
He says it doesn't just lead to a lack of peace and blessing in
this life, it leads to an eternal lack of peace and
blessing in the life to come. Read verse 6 with me.
Let no one deceive you with empty words.
For because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons
of disobedience. So you're saying God's wrath is,
is a real thing and, and hell is a real place and disordered
loves are real. We have real disordered loves
that we struggle with and they exist.
Hell exist and wrath exists because of these things, sexual
immorality and greed and corrupting talk.
And the world's going to bring 1000 arguments and they're going
to get in your ear and they're going to say, this is all the
reasons why the loves of the world are OK.
And I want you to remember what Spurgeon says.
People are going to believe anything if it's put plausibly
before them. We can't listen to the arguments
of the world. You have to be wooded and
grounded in the word. They're going to bring arguments
like this. Some are going to argue that the
scriptures are patriarchal. And so we need to go to war with
them because they're oppressive and restraining.
Other people aren't going to go to war with the word, but
they're going to they're going to deny it and say, you know,
the the word is archaic and it's it's old and it's irrelevant to
the modern age. And they're going to go a couple
lines of thinking in this. They're going to some are going
to say it's a cultural artifact of the sexual standards that
existed 2000 years ago, but those are not relevant for
today. And other people are going to
say we need to reinterpret the word through our enlightened
biological understanding. And neither of those are true.
And for others, they're going to say that we're fine to believe
whatever we think this may be true as long as we keep our
thoughts on money and sex in our own private lives and in our
churches, and we don't allow them out into the public sphere
and into the marketplace. And they don't affect the
culture. Paul says in verse 6, let no one
deceive you with empty words. And this is the great warning.
It's emphasized, and Paul underlines it.
If he had a highlighter of it for your Bible, it would be
highlighted. He says, you may be sure of
this, verse 5, no one who is immoral, no one who is impure,
no one who is covetous will inherit the Kingdom of God.
So there are a lot of things in Scripture that are unclear.
There are some things that are that are so clear a child can
understand. For God so loved the world, He
gave his only begotten son. There's no room for ambiguity in
that. There are things that are
ambiguous. There are things that are
unclear. Scripture's trying to highlight
it and say here, this is not one of those things.
Pay attention. This is true.
You can know that it's true. I'm emphasizing it before you
now, that no idolatus person will inherit the Kingdom of God.
If your love, if you love sexually deviant behaviour, if
you love more money more than you love God, He says your
disordered loves will damn you, and your disordered loves will
shepherd your soul to hell. But what do the scriptures say?
And in response to this, Titus 33.
But we ourselves were once foolish and disobedient.
We were once misled and became slaves to many lusts and
pleasures. Our lives were full of envy and
evil, and we hated each other. But when the goodness and living
kindness of God our Savior appeared, He saved us, not
because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to
His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration, by the renewal of
the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus
Christ our Savior. So when your, when your loves
are disordered, when you come to Jesus Christ, you come to him,
not on the basis of virtue. He builds virtues in you.
You come to Him not on the basis of virtue, but on the basis of
his mercy, and he will give mercy to you, and he will
reorder your loves. And that's why he says here,
imitate Jesus Christ and walk in love.
If you do not know Jesus as your Lord and Savior, if you don't
know the joy and blessing that comes from ordering your life
after him, a cross shaped love. Come and talk to me.
Come and talk to Chris. Come and talk to one of the
pastors. We'll be in this green room
right after the service. I would love to talk to you
about a relationship of love with God the Father and his son.
But as you look and remember again, the first verse,
Ephesians 51. There's a famous book in church
history that was that was titled after Ephesians 51.
It was by Thomas Okempis. It's called The Imitation of
Christ, and the book opens this way.
I want to read to you the whole introduction.
Akempus says what that means from campus.
That's not his actual last name, but Thomas Akempus says he who
follows me walks not in darkness, says the Lord.
By these words of Christ we were advised to imitate His life and
habits, if we wish to be truly enlightened and free from all
blindness of heart. Let our chief effort, therefore,
be to study the life of Jesus Christ.
The teaching of Christ is more excellent than all the advice of
the Saints. And he who has spirit, His
Spirit will find in it a hidden manner.
Now there are many who hear the gospel often, but care little
for it, because they have not the Spirit of Christ.
Yet whoever wishes to understand fully the words of Christ must
try to pattern his whole life onto that Christ.
What good is it to speak learnedly about the Trinity, if
lacking humility, you displease the Trinity?
Indeed, it is not learning that makes a man holy and just, but a
virtuous life makes him pleasing to God.
I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it.
For what would it profit us to know the whole Bible by heart,
in the principles of all the philosophers, if we live without
grace in the love of God? Vanity of vanities and all is
vanity except to love God and to serve Him alone.
This is the greatest wisdom, to seek the Kingdom ahead of heaven
through contempt of the world. It is vanity, therefore, to seek
and trust in riches that perish. It's vanity to court honour, and
to be puffed up with pride. It's vanity to follow the lust
of the body, and to desire things for which severe
punishment later must come. It's vanity to wish for long
life, and to care little about a life well spent.
It's vanity to be concerned with the present only, and not to
make provision for the things to come.
It's vanity to love what passes quickly, and not to look ahead
where eternal joy abides. Often recall the proverb, the
eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with
hearing. Try, moreover, to turn your
heart from the love of things visible and bring yourself to
things invisible. For they who follow their evil
passions stain their consciences and lose the grace of God.
My final reminder to you is remember, you are not first and
foremost a rational creature. You are first and foremost a
loving creature. And it's love that moves your,
your heart and your soul and your desires and your wills.
And so consider and think about your own idols, your own
passions, your vices, and hear Jesus speak these words to you.
Do you love me more than these? Church?
Pray with me, God, we, we want to image you and all of your
communicable attributes. We want it to follow after the
pattern that you've set. We want to love the poor and
God, we know that we cannot do that perfectly and we need you
to to buy your spirit order our loves calibrate our life and our
love so that we can experience blessing and joy and and peace.
And Lord, we want to love you with all our heart and with all
our soul and with all our mind and with all our strength.
But but help us when we fall short and every time we open
these scriptures and every time we sing songs together, Lord,
help us to fall in love just a little bit more with you.
Fall in love just a little bit more with your Son Jesus Christ
whom you sent, and even more in love with this church body.
God, take away from us these idols that are our our hearts
are as the church says the the reformers said they're, they're
idol factories. There's so much impurity and
uncleanness in US and we ask, please, Lord, purge it from us
as we imitate you as we walk in love, Lord, make us pure people
so that we don't even need the 10 commandments to remind us
constantly, Lord, but your spirit convicts us and we walk
in holiness and in love because we love you, because you're
forming Christ in US. Purge these things from us,
Lord, we love you. We ask this in Christ's name.
Amen. Thanks for listening.
To learn more about Heritage Church or if you'd like to
respond to this sermon, visit our website at
www.heritageshawnee.org.