Thank you, Kelly Jo, and thank you to the worship team. It’s so nice to see you guys. I have not preached up here in four and a half years. I know what you guys are thinking: this guy has not aged one day. And I’m distracted because you also have not aged at all. But let’s push past that and focus in on today’s passage, which is Ephesians 5, verses 8 to 20. And it’s got some beautiful encouragement for us.
Let me start off by showing you this. Do any of you guys have one of these at home? This is the bag with all the batteries and chargers and kind of things that get your devices powered up. Maybe you guys don’t keep yours in a bag; maybe you keep yours in a special drawer. But we have a bunch of good things in our homes: iPads, iPhones, remote controls. But from time to time, they lose their charge. And so we need that cord or we need that battery. We need that specific way to find that charge into that good and useful thing.
What I want to suggest this morning is that God’s Holy Spirit—the Bible tells us that God dwells inside of believers—and I’d like to suggest that in Ephesians 5, Paul is saying that sometimes that loses its charge as well. I’m not saying that God leaves us. I’m not saying that God forsakes us. I’m just saying sometimes your phone battery is like all the bars, and sometimes it’s all the way down to one. Sometimes God’s presence and guidance is so strong in our lives, and sometimes it’s down to one bar or less. Ephesians 5 is a beautiful passage where Paul is going to tell us how we can recharge that.
Let me get started with this. In the last couple of years, I’ve grown really fond of the Book of Ezekiel because it’s the weirdest book in the whole Bible. And that’s not really what I like about it. I love that Jesus quotes the Book of Ezekiel more than any other Old Testament book. I love that Jesus uses something so strange to make sense of who he was and what he came to do. I want to give you a great example of that.
So in Ezekiel 37, this guy is having this vision of all these skeletons coming to life. Let me read to you Ezekiel’s words in Ezekiel 37:7-10: “So I prophesied as I was commanded, and as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and the tendons and the flesh appeared on them, and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say, this is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into the slain that they may live.’ So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them and they came to life and stood on their feet, a vast army.”
So you got this chapter in Ezekiel where the prophet Ezekiel has this vision that one day God is going to breathe breath into these dead things, this army of dead skeletons. And it’s strange. Fast forward to the Book of John in chapter 20. Jesus has risen from the dead and he’s in a room with his disciples.
Listen to John 20:19-22: “On the evening of the first day of the week, when the disciples were together with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them. He said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again, Jesus said, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.’ And with that, he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.'”
Now this is the point of the sermon where I’m going to walk around person to person and just breathe on you. And Covid is behind us, so that’s totally okay, right? But it’s awkward. Why did Jesus do something that caused that awkward moment? Well, he wanted them to reflect on Ezekiel 37. The disciples were good Jewish Old Testament reading people. They knew that story, that one day God was going to breathe his life into dead people and create an army to act out his rule and his reign. And in the upper room after the resurrection, Jesus is saying, “You are now part of that army. You are dead in the valley of your sin, but I am breathing new life into you. And you will now follow me and carry out my rule and my reign.” Isn’t that so beautiful?
And that’s what Paul is talking about today. Because of the Gospel, God’s presence is within us. Jesus doesn’t want us to miss this. He breathed on his disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” But sometimes the Holy Spirit that we have received needs to be charged. It’s a little bit low. Maybe some of you are feeling that way this morning. I’ve got good news for you.
In Ephesians 5, in this letter that Paul has written to this church that’s very much like this one, he’s going to give a couple of quick pointers on things that we do that diminish the power and the influence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. And then he’s going to talk about three things that we can do to charge up the presence and the influence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
So if you haven’t already, please open up your Bibles to Ephesians 5:8-20. Let’s spend the next 20 minutes discussing. You can see the outline in your bulletin. In section one, I just want to talk about the context and the main theme of the letter of Ephesians. In section two, I want to talk about things that Paul points out that diminish the Holy Spirit’s power within us. And then in section three, we’ll go through those first two super quick. In section three, we’ll talk about three things that Paul is giving us that we can do to charge up the Holy Spirit within us. And I’m so encouraged by it. I hope that you are as well.
Alright, section one, let’s talk about Ephesians. Even really well-meaning preachers and teachers can just take one or two details from a Bible passage and give a good sermon on it or a thought-provoking sermon on it, but it might deviate from the main ideas of that book or that letter. We want to be really careful that we’re not doing that.
So let’s talk about how the sub-point that we’re kind of expanding on today really is what the Book of Ephesians is all about. It was a letter written by the Apostle Paul to a young Christian church that he founded. If you want to hear the story of how that church sprung up in the city of Ephesus, you can read about it in Acts 19. It’s a really dynamic story.
Well, Paul’s getting a little older, unlike any of us, and he’s writing this from prison. We know that that imprisonment was about 60-62 AD, so that gives us the date of this letter. That’s significant because it’s about 15 or 18 years after the resurrection. But the activity of God among his people isn’t fading or dying down; it’s charged up more than ever. Churches are springing up all over the ancient world.
I want to point out that Ephesus was a city that’s a lot like Madison. It’s a lot like the region that we live in right now. A couple of similarities: Ephesus was a capital city, so there was a lot of political influence there. Ephesus was in the middle of the Roman and the Greek Empire, so it was just kind of right in the middle of everything, just like Madison is just in the Midwest, right in the middle of our country. And finally, Ephesus was most known as being a center of pagan worship. Not saying that Madison is a center of pagan worship. I’m saying that most of the people that live there don’t have Christian thought and values.
These are all things that Ephesus sort of has in common with Lodi, Sauk City, and Madison. And that’s the context that Paul writes this letter to. My study Bible offered this as a theme for what the whole letter is about: the theme of Ephesians is something like this: the church is meant to be a community where God’s power to reconcile people to himself is experienced and shared in transformational relationships.
All throughout the letter, Paul is like, “You’re a church. The Holy Spirit is within you. You’ve experienced new life in Christ, and now you need to be part of a community that helps others experience new life in Christ.” So that’s what we’re seeing so far. The progression is that. And this is so beautiful. I got this from the Bible Project video on the Book of Ephesians. Chapters one to three are all about the mystery and the power and the beauty of the Gospel. And then chapters four through six are: so what do you do about that?
I think that’s such a beautiful, balanced picture of the Christian life. We’re supposed to think about the beauty of what God has done for us in rescuing us from our sin, giving us his breath, being our conscience, and giving us purpose. That’s the beauty of the Gospel. But then the other side of it is there are three chapters as he explains the implications of this as parents, in marriage, in church life, and as an employee. Again, the Book of Ephesians is about the power and the beauty of the Gospel and then what it should look like acted out in these relationships.
Finally, there’s this great Easter egg. Movies and DVDs have stolen that term when, like, something from one movie appears in another, and they call it an Easter egg, but I’m stealing it back because that comes from the Bible, and we see that right here. So in Ephesians 5:14, Paul is actually quoting Isaiah 26:19, and it’s like a super Easter egg because he’s talking about Easter.
He’s saying this: The prophet Isaiah says, “One day your dead shall live together with my dead body; they shall arise, awake and sing, you who dwell in the dust.” All the way back in the Old Testament, the prophets were like, “Things aren’t great right now, but one day even the dead will rise because of the power of Jesus Christ and his victory over sin and death.” So that’s what this morning’s passage in Ephesians is all about. We have risen from our metaphorical, spiritual, sinful death, and now we’ve got to do something about it. And that’s what this passage is talking about.
So, really quick, let me just highlight three things that Paul points out that really hurts our Holy Spirit charge. God is always with us; he never forsakes us. But sometimes that charge gets low. Paul’s going to explain in this section of the letter at least three things that we do that takes away that charge.
The first one is here in verses 3 through 5. Listen to this: “But amongst you, there must not even be a hint of sexual immorality or any kind of impurity or greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk, or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather Thanksgiving.”
So a couple of these components feel really obvious. You come to church and you get scolded for perverseness and coarse joking, and it’s easy to think to ourselves silently, “Well, they’re not talking to me because I don’t do any of those things; I’m off the hook.” But it’s also talking about other things, like covetousness. And so Paul isn’t saying that God’s helpful presence is lessened just if you’re like a real dirtbag, right? He’s also saying if you do anything that fuels that impulse to be first, to be right, to get it your way, to be in control, that’s also feeding the wrong nature.
A couple of years ago, I listened to this podcast. It was like 10 or 12 episodes, and it was all about the incident with Siegfried and Roy’s tigers. Do you remember those magicians that were in Las Vegas and they did these shows with all the animals and they were really successful and they did it for like 40 years? And then one day, the tiger was like, “I’m not doing this anymore.” He attacked one of the magicians, and that forever shut down the show.
See, the problem was that tiger had two natures inside. He was raised in captivity; he was trained every day to perform all those tricks, but he was also an 800-pound wild animal. He also had a wild nature. One day, despite being a captive tiger for a decade, he woke up and decided that that other nature was going to come to the forefront.
What Paul is saying here is that it’s the same for us. We have two natures inside of us. We have this new nature that God has put within his believers, and he’s going to go on to tell us ways that we can feed that. But he’s also saying every time you try to be right, every time you give in to the impulse of lust in ungodly ways, and every time you try to be first and try to be in control, you’re also feeding that wrong nature. That charge of the Holy Spirit is going to be diminished as you feed the wrong nature.
So those are kind of some overt things that we can do dramatically and notably to kind of diminish that charge. But there’s some other things too, and it’s kind of subtle. Listen to what it says here in verses 15 to 17: “Be very careful then how you live, not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity because the days are evil. Do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.”
In other words, there’s something else that can really take away from that Holy Spirit power in our life. And it’s not necessarily doing outwardly dirtbag-type things; it’s apathy. Paul’s saying the Gospel is so beautiful that God has given us new spiritual life. But if we live days and weeks or months without that impacting the way that we live in relationship with other people, without that impacting our relationships and our church life and our spiritual life, that Holy Spirit charge is going to dwindle. And I’m sure that some of you can relate to that as well.
This is a really swing point here in the passage, and it’s actually really clever. There’s a third thing that Paul points out that can really diminish the Holy Spirit’s power in our life. We’re familiar with it as Wisconsinites, and it’s drunkenness. Listen to what it says here in verse 18: “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit.”
Maybe some of you have a grandpa or an uncle that really could have used that warning a couple of days ago before Thanksgiving. This is really interesting, and I don’t want you to miss what Paul is saying. He’s saying to actually be drunk is a bad thing that will diminish God’s power in your life. But he’s also using it as a metaphor, and he’s also saying, “Don’t come under the control of alcohol. Don’t be characterized by the things that happen when you’re drunk. Instead, be characterized and under the control of the Holy Spirit.”
With that kind of joke, he’s making a transition into how it is that we can now become filled with the Holy Spirit. The best Greek translation for the word “filled” that’s used throughout chapter five wouldn’t make sense directly, but it helps us understand what Paul is saying. We translate it as “be filled,” but all through Ephesians 5, the Greek grammar is saying “be being filled.”
So, so far, Paul has told us how we can be being filled with the things that feed our human nature in the wrong ways: lust, carnality, indifference, and apathy. But now he’s telling us how we can be being filled through the power and the influence of the Holy Spirit. That’s what’s so exciting. The Bible never indicts us and tells us what we do wrong without telling us how we can correct it, without telling us with encouragement and empowerment how we can do it more in line with God’s plan for our life.
That’s what the rest of this passage is really about, and I find it incredibly encouraging. So as we transition here to section three, Paul is saying, “Don’t be filled with the things that feed your carnality and human nature. Be being filled with things that charge up the Holy Spirit.” And he gives us three things.
For those of you really against the idea that Paul would make a joke comparing being drunk to being filled with the Holy Spirit, consider this: what are the most common things that drunk people do? They give rehearsed stories and speeches, they break out in song, and they fight, right? Those are things that drunk people do. Paul is telling us here that the three things that we can do to charge up the Holy Spirit, to be being filled with the Holy Spirit, is to give pre-rehearsed speeches, to sing songs, and not to fight.
I love how he’s so cleverly telling us, “Don’t do this the wrong way. That’s so common. Do this in the beautiful way that God intends.” Alright, here are three things that we can do to charge up the Holy Spirit.
Number one: we can speak to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Listen to Psalm 5:19 instead: “Be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord.”
Now, some of you that grew up playing sports are like, “I don’t like where this is going. It involves singing.” And those of you that grew up in plays and musicals are like, “Yes, the Bible is telling me to just sing all day long, just like in a Bollywood movie or a New York Broadway musical.” I don’t think—if you hear me out—it’s actually saying that we should just be singing all day long, although that’s certainly not a bad thing. I’m certainly not anti-singing.
I think specifically what Paul is telling us here is this: the hymns and the songs and the prayers that we speak in our church services are beautifully true things about God, phrased by artists in encouraging and uplifting ways. Speak those things into the lives of the people around you. Isn’t that beautiful? The first way that we can be charged with the Holy Spirit is to speak the best, truest, beautiful parts of our hymns and our psalms and our songs into the lives of other people.
Paul’s saying the best affirmation that you can give to others is to say praiseworthy things about God. Let me give you two examples of how I think our songs that we sing in church can do this in such powerful ways. Probably my favorite Christmas song is “O Holy Night.” I love how that crescendo hits. Listen to a couple of lines from that song: “Long lay the world in sin and error pining till he appeared and the world felt his worth. A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.”
There are some of you this morning that are just so tired and so spiritually exhausted because of maybe the sin of other people in your life. It’s plagued you; it’s tired you out. What you need to hear is that you can feel a thrill of hope that Jesus is bringing a new era, right? Isn’t that encouraging? Jesus is bringing a new era. That’s what we celebrate here during Advent, and it’s true in our lives, no matter how discouraged we were when we woke up this morning or next Wednesday.
As I speak that spiritual truth from songs into your life, you’re encouraged. And as you speak those things into my life, I’m encouraged as well. Here’s another one: a line from “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” says this: “Light and life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings.” And that line gives me goosebumps. Jesus would have walked around with kind of a Hebrew prayer shawl, and that’s sometimes in the Psalms referred to as the “wings of the teacher.”
I’m not saying Jesus actually had wings, but he had that shawl that would have been referred to by some people as the wings, just kind of metaphorically throughout some of the places in the Old Testament. Do you remember that story in the Gospels where the woman who had been bleeding for many years reaches out and she touches his shawl? She touches Jesus’ wings, and she’s healed.
The reason why that line from “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” can give us goosebumps is because there are likely things in your life that have been lost, that don’t feel whole, that are missing. It’s so encouraging to hear that Jesus Christ has come to bring healing and restoration. You get charged up when you hear that truth, and I get charged up when I hear that truth.
That’s the first thing that Paul is telling us: recharge principle number one. Speak beautiful truths about Jesus from our psalms and our songs to others. They will be charged in the process, and you will be charged in the process.
Let’s talk about number two. It goes on in verses 19 and 20 to say, “Make melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things, to God the Father, in the name of Jesus.” That’s Ephesians 5:19-20. So our second recharge principle is that we’re supposed to live with gratitude to God. That’s the equivalent of how we feel with a new song.
Okay, you guys ever hear a new song on the radio, 10, 25 or wherever, and you’re like, “That song is beautiful. I’m going to be encouraged for the next half hour”? Sometimes a new song can give us that charge. What Paul is specifically saying is, let gratitude be that new song that changes your outlook.
I have a great story of a guy who had a new song that changed his outlook in life. There was this guy who was a janitor in a Nashville recording studio in the early 1960s. All day long, he’s just taking out the garbage and throwing stuff in the dumpster. You know, it’s the south, so people are spitting tobacco, and he’s got to mop all that up. He works in this recording studio, and he’s got a really low job, but he dreams of being a famous songwriter.
So he goes home at night and he’s writing these songs, and he’s recording them on a cassette tape or whatever they had back then, probably some sort of demo tape. He also worked weekends at the National Guard. He was so motivated; he was so encouraged knowing that he had these great songs on this demo tape that one day during his active service in the National Guard, this is a true story, he took a helicopter without signing it out, flew it to Johnny Cash’s house, landed on Johnny Cash’s lawn, went up to his front door, and gave Johnny Cash his demo tapes.
That was Kris Kristofferson, and he became a great American songwriter. He could be a janitor; he could be the lowest of the low because he knew that he had written a great song that was going to change everything. And it did.
What Paul is saying here is that this is how gratitude should function in our lives. As we think about the ways that God has been loving and good to us, it should absolutely transform our outlook, even if the other people around us haven’t heard that song yet.
I want to share one or two specific things that I’m grateful for that I think about when I’m not having the best of times and things aren’t going my way. I hated math growing up, but I remember that sometimes, especially during division problems, you would get the answer like 19 remainder 3 or 8 remainder 1. Do you remember when you do division and there’d be a remainder?
I’ve just been thinking lately that during all my ups and downs, all the high times and low times, God’s grace has always been a remainder in my life. I’ve done good things. I’ve done awful things. But God’s grace has always been there. He’s always been so much more graceful to me than I deserve. So when things are terrible, when circumstances are unchosen, when things are bleak, I can have gratitude in my heart even when other people aren’t hearing that song because God has always shown so much grace to me.
Here’s another one, and it’s a little bit obscure, but I was watching this movie called “The Iron Claw,” and it’s based on a true story of this family of professional wrestlers down in Texas in the 1970s. I don’t know why they made that into a movie, but they did. I was watching it, and it’s a little bit tragic because of the five brothers, four of them died before the age of 25, and there was one that was left.
So he’s depressed his whole life. His brothers were his best friends, his confidants, and four of them are dead. At the end of the movie, after they showed this sad, bleak, depressed life, he’s out in the yard with his sons. They’re really little kids, and they’re throwing the football around, and they’re happy. You know what depression looks like. This guy is just absolutely despondent and depressed.
It’s the end of the movie, and one of his kids comes up to him and he says, “Dad, why are you so sad?” He’s just, you know, he’s a tough, muscular guy from Texas, so he goes, “Just miss my brothers. That’s all.” You can understand why that would bring such a depression. One of his sweet little boys just says, “Don’t worry, Dad. We’ll be your brothers.”
He gets this smile on his face, and he realizes that he doesn’t have to be characterized by depression anymore because God has given him new people to love. That really touched me because I’ve lost people in the last few years as well. But I look around and God has given me other people to love. I think the same is true for you as well.
Recharge principle number two is live with gratitude to God. That’s equivalent to the boldness and the beauty of a song that would change your outlook if other people heard it. You can live with that gratitude that changes your outlook even if other people aren’t hearing that song. That’s absolutely a way that we can charge the presence and the guidance of the Holy Spirit within us.
Here’s the third one as we wrap up. Listen to what it says here in verse 21. It’s pretty straightforward: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” The last thing that Paul is saying is live with unity with your church family.
The first two principles that we’ve been given are things that we can do on our own. They’re very individualistic. But this third one is something that you can only do with the people in this room right now and the people that we’re in first service with. One of the ways that Paul is telling us that we can charge the power and the presence and the voice of the Holy Spirit in our life, just like we charge our devices at home, is to serve and live in unity with our church family.
Sometimes when my kids are fighting, my wife and I look at each other with these tired, dead eyes, and we don’t even have to speak it, but we just kind of silently say to each other, “Why did we have so many kids?” There’s just fighting all the time. I think that each one is actually a 90% great kid, but that means like 40% of the time, one of their 10% bad parts is coming out.
When you factor in my wife and I, that’s another 20%. Even good people have conflict and strife and fighting and tension and shortages. But my wife and I decided to have a big family. We decided to have many kids because we both thought that some of the most important lessons in life are learned through the long, difficult, always ongoing process of having to share and compromise with your siblings.
We both thought that we’re able to get along with people and love others because we grew up with siblings. That is the workbench where you learn how to sacrifice, love, and get along with other people, right? So theoretically, we could have had one kid, and we could have stopped there, and that theoretical kid would play the violin and speak Latin and just charm everybody. But we kept going.
It leads to fighting and chaos, but it also leads to this community where people are learning how to sacrifice and compromise and get along with others. Paul is saying the third way that we charge up the Holy Spirit’s presence in our life is to do that with your church family.
When I was the pastor here, there were many times when I asked somebody to serve as an elder or help out with Awana or be the church treasurer, and they said, “I’ve got to go think and pray about it.” I am not judging; I am not condemning. But the answer would usually be they would come back and say, “The time is just not right right now.”
Paul is saying that church life is an essential component for charging up the Holy Spirit in us. It’s how we learn how to love others, how to get along with others that are different than us, that are older than us, that are younger than us, but all share that new spiritual life in common.
I encourage you guys to celebrate the gift that God has given you of this special church by participating in church life. It’s so easy to be the first one out of here. It’s so easy to say no to any volunteer responsibilities that you’re asked to do. But I’m telling you, the next time you’re asked to do something, pray about it. Follow your heart. But don’t just think about—you’d be doing it for the church. Also consider that you would be doing it for yourself.
Consider that God wants to use that to teach you how to love others and compromise and sacrifice as he continues to refine this beautiful community that celebrates new life with your brothers and sisters that are sitting with you this morning.
So I’d like to invite the worship team to come forward and continue our service. And as they do, let me summarize this. Because of the new life and the power that we have experienced through Jesus Christ, Paul is saying you should be controlled and characterized by the Holy Spirit. There are things you can do that will diminish that, but there are also things that you can do that will charge that up in powerful ways.
The first is to exist in networks that speak true and beautiful things about God to one another. We can find those in Scripture, and we can find those in the songs that we sing in church. Number two: even when other people don’t hear the song that is changing your outlook, you can hear that song. You can know about that song and its gratitude for what God has already done for us.
Finally, you can strive and sacrifice for loving unity within your church family. God will mature you, and God will bless you, and God will grow this faith community in the process.