The scripture reading for today is Ephesians 5, 8-14. Ephesians 5, 8-14, found on page 919 in the Pew Bible. If you do not have a Bible of your own, you are welcome to take one with you. Please stand for the reading of God's word. For at that time, I'm sorry, for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light, for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true. And try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible. For anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore, it says, "'Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.'" This is the Word of the Lord. Please remain standing. Let us pray. Oh, Father, how powerful that hope is that You've given us, a hope that transcends even fear of the grave. a hope that is indomitable, indestructible, uncorruptible. And Your Word gives shape to that hope. It informs that hope. And so we pray as we direct our attention to This book, the book that has empowered countless lives towards faithfulness and obedience, and we pray that You would do a work like You have in the past in each one of our hearts. Convict us of sin, drive us to the cross, and we ask that Your Spirit would do all of these things, giving us eyes to see, illumining our minds. And we pray that all of this is done to the glorious praise of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is in his name that we pray. Amen. Please be seated. And so we continue in our journey through Ephesians. Last week we began chapter 5. Remember that Ephesians 4, 5, and 6 are all about how one ought to live in light of the grace of God in the gospel. that is particularly exemplified in last week's passage where Paul says, therefore, going back to verse 32 of chapter 4, which describes what we have in terms of the forgiveness of sins, Paul says, therefore be imitators of God, not as a sculptor seeks to imitate his model, but as a child seeks to imitate his father. The child seeks to emulate his dad. He wants to be like him. He is desirous of modeling his life after him. And then Paul says, walk in love. If you're going to summarize these three chapters, I think that would be the phrase, walk in love. The exemplar of walking in love is Jesus Christ. Although all judgment belonged to Him. Although He could have poured out His justice in but a moment. Although His wrath could have consumed us. Just as the floodwaters once consumed the earth, the Lord Jesus was patient and walked in love. Jesus said, the Father judges no one. He's given all judgment over to the Son, and yet even in the face of great injustice, Jesus walked in love. He had a special kind of love for his people, and yet he even loved his neighbor as himself, loving his enemy. Paul says implicitly, be like that. Walk in love. Have a special love for the brethren, the household of God, and love for a neighbor. And this should result in sacrificial living, just as Christ gave Himself up for us. He says, a fragrant offering, remember, hearkening back to those many passages in Leviticus which describe how pleasing burnt offerings are given unto God. Christ is the sum and substance of those types and shadows. The one final and perfect sacrifice that perfects those for whom it was made. And then, you recall, Paul gave us some things to stay away from, two triplets, sexual immorality, impurity, meaning moral filthiness, moral vileness, and covetousness. He says, let that kind of thing not even be named among you, meaning we cannot tolerate it. It cannot be among us. Now, there's something I forgot to mention last week. I didn't really forget, I kind of omitted it because I was rather long-winded. But this, I think, is the standard for the church as such. But we need to have an extra element of grace for those who are coming into the household of God. We ought not expect those who are new to Christ, those who have recently come to understand the gospel and believe, to uphold these standards in the way that we would like them. Rather, there's a learning curve, is there not? It takes time for the Spirit of God to sanctify us. Rather, I think the church as a whole should shun these kinds of sins. these obvious sins, sexual immorality, impurity, covetousness. That's also true about the next triplet, filthiness, foolish talk, crude joking. He says these are out of place, out of place like a finely crafted gold ring in the snout of a pig. It doesn't match. Rather, he says, let there be thanksgiving. It almost implies a kind of unleashing, a giving forth of pent-up thanksgiving. Maybe you've met someone, and I'm sure you have, someone who was always encouraging, always looking at the glass half full. We call those people optimists. What they really are are people who can see things to be grateful for all the time. And if there is any group of people in this earth that should not be pessimistic and ho-hum, it's the Christians. We have more to be thankful for than anyone. Fellowship with God, eternal life, the forgiveness of sins, the righteousness of Christ. Be thankful and express that thanksgiving in your language rather than filthy talk. And then he gives us a bit of a warning. If you practice these things, if you engage in them, if your life is marked by them, you're in idolatry, you'll have no part in the kingdom of God. He says, the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience. It's a present active verb, meaning right now the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven. Just as Paul says in Romans 1, against people who engage in idolatry, he says, do not be partners with idolaters. Don't partner with them. Have nothing to do with this. While the wrath of God will come in its full one day, It is presently being revealed against those who persist in these sins, and don't let anybody tell you that you can practice these things and at the same time be a follower of Christ. There's a pernicious lie going around since Pentecost, really, that says that you can, on the one hand, serve Christ, and on the other hand, live for yourself. You gotta know that's a lie. Paul says, don't let anybody deceive you with their empty talk. make you think that you can serve money and Christ. Don't let anybody deceive you and tell you that you can serve to meet your sexual lusts and serve Christ. No, you can't. You can only serve one master, and if it be Christ, then we must put to death the old man with his corrupt desires. As Paul says in Ephesians 4, we put off the old man. We put him in the trunk, we put a couple into his head, we close the trunk, we put on the new man, which is righteous, godliness, holiness, that which is praiseworthy. That's the Christian life, putting off the old ways and putting on the new ways, a constant pursuit of fighting off the old desires while seeking to engender godliness. but we can't be deceived. And the way that this is going around now, it used to be, I think, the most predominant way that people used to try to get us to serve two masters was the prosperity gospel. 78s, 80s, and 90s, that was sort of the high point of that movement. And what that movement basically argued was that because God loves the Christian, He wants you to be prosperous, healthy, wealthy, great relationships, and so in fact you can be wealthy or desire to be wealthy, to live for material goods, and at the same time be a follower of Christ. That's why the prosperity gospel was so successful. It's a no, you can, in fact, serve two masters. They're really one. People have sort of seen through that heresy now. They've seen through the prosperity gospel for the bankruptcy that it is, but what has taken its place? What is exceptionally popular today is a lighter, softer, more nuanced form of that teaching. And what these men have done is they've taken their cues from the prosperity teachers, but they're not so brash. Instead what they've done is they've plundered the false teachings of pop psychology and they've sort of blended that together with the Christian gospel so that the Christian gospel becomes an accessory to embolden you to chase after your dreams, whatever those are. I'm telling you now, Christ will have none of that. You can't chase after your dreams and be on the biblical program. we got one King, not a million. And we serve one King, not ourselves. Don't be deceived. That's where we ended up this morning. We pick it up here in verse 8. And so look with me there, Ephesians 5.8. Paul writes, "'For at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.'" Look at the language very carefully. "'For at one time you were darkness, now you are light in the Lord.'" Light, darkness, significant biblical metaphors. They are the antithesis to one another. Light, most commonly. associated with revealing things, whereas darkness obscures things. Light is associated with safety, whereas darkness is associated with fear in Scripture. Light is associated with God Himself, with righteousness and holiness. He is the one who dwells in unapproachable light, the Father of lights. But darkness, well, that you know, connotes evil. The evil one is dark. Light is associated with heaven. Darkness, or at least outer darkness, is associated with hell. Paul says, for you at one time were darkness. Notice he does not say, you were in the darkness, or you were of the darkness. No, you were darkness. You were the problem. You were dead in sins and trespasses. You were an enemy of God. You were actively pursuing your own desires. You were corrupt through and through. You were estranged and running from God. You were darkness. That's the first thing we must grasp if we're to become Christians. The first hurdle we've got to get over on the road to redemption is to realize we're the problem. We're the ones who have sinned. It's to take responsibility and to acknowledge before God that we have sinned against Him in terms of what we've done, in terms of what we thought, and by not doing things we should have done. It's to come clean and agree with God that we We have sinned against him in thought, word, and deed. We have sinned against a God who is holy, holy, holy. We're not victims, although we may be, but we're not merely victims. No, we are, we were the darkness. It's helpful to be reminded that every person is both sinner and sufferer. Sometimes we allow the suffering we've endured to obscure the fact that we are sinners, but we are nonetheless sinners. And if we're going to be redeemed, if we will have peace with God, we need to come to grips with the fact and get a realistic viewpoint on our spiritual state. And when we do that, we see there's nothing there. There's no good thing in me. And so we come to God out of our spiritual poverty, and we cast ourselves at His feet. And because of His great grace and provision, we cling to the feet of Christ, the resurrected Lord. That's why at one time we were darkness. were light in the Lord. Light, of course, associated commonly with Jesus. You remember John's gospel, the beginning of John's gospel. John is very keen to use metaphor for Jesus. Consistently, almost in every chapter of John's Gospel, he will use various metaphors to describe different aspects of the Lord, and in chapter 1 he uses two metaphors. The first is the Word. He says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. Because where we would expect Him to say, in the beginning was God, He says, in the beginning was the Word. Why does He call Jesus the Word? It's an obvious allusion to Genesis. Jews would name the books of the Bible by the beginning phrase, and so Genesis, the book of the beginnings, in the beginning. Why does He call Him the Word? It's because Jesus perfectly, finally, comprehensively reveals God to man. Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the exactness of the Father's nature. If you've seen Jesus, you know who the Father is. You know what He's like. He's the Word, who was with God in the beginning, and who is Himself fully divine, exactly like the Father. John then says, all things were made through Him, meaning the Father is the architect, the Son executes His design by the power of the Holy Spirit. All things, all created things were made through the Son of God. And then he says the same thing negatively, and apart from Him was not one thing made that has been made. He's the creator of all things. Then he says, in him was life, and that life was the light of men. Jesus is the life giver, signifying light. Jesus would go on to say that he's the light of the world, and that he in turn makes his people light. Paul undoubtedly drafting on the teaching of Jesus here, recognizing that He is the source of light, hence we are light in the Lord, and because we are in the Lord, because we're in Christ, we too are light. Light doesn't obscure, it reveals. It doesn't cause trouble, it brings about stability. Light exposes. And so he says, his second admonition to walk in a certain way here, he says, walk as children of the light. First it was walk in love, now it's walk as children of the light, meaning walk as descendants of the light, as the progeny of God. That is to live framing out our lives in terms of what Jesus said and taught. to seek to emulate the way He lived. What's interesting about Jesus is that although He walked in love, He never once capitulated to evil. You notice that? You look at the varied events of Jesus' ministry, never once does He soft-pedal, bend, or become complicit in evil things. He calls them as they are. At the same time, He extends mercy to any who would listen. We need to be like that, as children of the light. And then we have in verse 9 what is given here as a parenthetical statement. The reason why is because Paul is now going to mix metaphors, which I've been told you're not supposed to do, but it definitely works here. Look at verse 9, "'For the fruit of light is found in all that is good, right, and true.'" So now, fruit. An agricultural metaphor that would have been very familiar to Paul's original audience mixed with the metaphor of light here. The fruit of that light is all that is good, right, and true. Another triplet, only here it's a good one. We first had sexual morality, impurity, covetousness, foolish talk, filthiness, crude joking. Now, what is good, right, and true? You can summarize the ministry of Jesus, everything Jesus said and did in these terms. He was good, meaning He was benevolent, merciful, compassionate, long-suffering. He was good. He was right. Meaning he is righteous, holiness, pure, undefiled, separate from evil. He was truth. Truth in human flesh. Everything he said was accurate. Everything he said accorded with how things really are. If you're going to be of the light, you're going to be imbibing in what is good, right, and true. And then he says, and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. You know how Jesus lived. You know what He taught. It's here in the New Testament. You've got the balance of the Bible to guide your path. And so, Christian, try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. If I had to tell you the number one question that I've received from different people during my short time in the ministry. It is, what is the will of God? People want to discern what the will of God is for their life. And beginning, oh, back in the late seventies, there was a movement among evangelicals to do just that. A number of books were written that claimed that, in fact, you could discern the will of God. For example, Henry Blackaby's Experiencing God, a runaway bestseller, which expounded the principles of how one can discern the will of God. And I want to tell you that those books, including and especially Blackabee's book, are completely and utterly wrong. The Bible does not tell us how to divine the will of God apart from the will of God that He has already revealed, the things that He's told us to do in the Bible. We call that God's revealed will. Another way of referring to it is His law. The revealed will of God are those commandments he has given, both in Old and New Testaments. Paul would say explicitly, this is the will of God for your life, your sanctification. Or again, this is the will of God for your life, that you abstain from sexual immorality. Those are examples of God's revealed will, and you don't need to try to discern those, you know? Like people say, about something that is plainly taught about in the Bible, I need to pray about that? No, you don't. You don't need to pray about whether or not to watch pornography. Don't. It says it in the book. We have a book, and we know that the Bible precludes that kind of activity. You don't need to pray about whether you should give and support your local church. It's in the book. You don't need to pray about whether or not you should engage in some kind of immoral behavior. You don't need to try to discern whether or not you should do that. When Paul says, discern what that implies is that there is some kind of difficult question that has brought itself before you that you need to think through. And it could either be, Paul could either be talking about something moral or amoral, something that is not necessarily, it doesn't necessarily have a moral connotation. And if we assume for a moment that that's what Paul is talking about, the Bible really doesn't give us answers to those questions. Rather, it gives us a basic approach to answering them. These are questions like, who should I marry? What car should I buy? Where should I go to school? I want to make a midlife career change. Is that a good idea? questions that the Bible does not provide specific answers to. And there's no way to sort of divine the will of God in order to hear from God in order to get that information, because the canon is closed. God is not speaking in that way today. Rather, what He gives us is freedom. under certain circumstances, and so here's the process to make decisions biblically. Number one, you examine what God has said. Whatever this question is, you look at what the Bible says about that question. If, in fact, there is anything the Bible says about that question, And you try to discern from what that text says whether or not you should do that. But if the Bible doesn't say anything about that, then you go to number two. Number two is to seek godly counsel. to go to someone who is spiritually mature and ask them what they think, and not just one, maybe two or three. The Bible says in abundance of counselors, there's wisdom. So if you don't know what school to go to or what you should do in this particular situation, what the wisest route is, ask mature believers. If there's unanimity among their counsel, you probably should listen to them, no matter what that decision is. In all likelihood, you should listen to them. There are some circumstances where hard decisions have to be made. You have to buck what people say, but overall you're generally safer listening to godly people and allowing them to speak into your life and give you that wisdom. But after you've searched the Scriptures and countenanced those, and after you've listened to godly counsel, at that point it's your decision. It's your responsibility to decide. And because you've honored God in that process, God, I believe, will honor you. But these are amoral decisions, decisions that don't directly connote God's revealed will, don't directly affect God's revealed will. There are issues like that that present themselves that are very difficult to parse through, but ultimately it is your decision. God has given you the freedom to make that decision. Whether you should go here or there, beyond seeking godly counsel and examining the Word, it is entirely up to you. It's not wrong either way in terms of what you decide, so you shouldn't act like one is immoral and one isn't, because it's not really a moral question. But I have to tell you, while most commentators Act as though that's kind of the discernment Paul is talking about here. I don't think it is. Look at what he says again in verse 10, try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Now, the adjective that is translated pleasing here is used a number of other times in Paul's letters, and every time it's used other than this, it refers to that which is honorable or glorifying to God. For example, Paul says, brothers, present your bodies as living sacrifices, pleasing to the Lord. What is he saying? Live sacrificially according to the Word of God, like Christ, and honor God. It's a term that connotes the active pursuit of honoring the King. I believe that's what he's referring to here, and so try to discern what is honoring, what is exalting to the Lord. So these aren't amoral issues. These are what we might call worldview issues that we must discern. Discernment is, of course, exceedingly important. There are a number of places in the New Testament which tell us that discernment is one of the marks of a spiritually mature Christian. Chief among those is Hebrews 5, where the writer to the Hebrews tells us that the mature Christian has the powers of his discernment trained with constant practice so that he can distinguish what is true from what is false. You don't have to discern what is obviously true from what is obviously false. Rather, you have to discern what is seemingly true from what is false. Discernment is the ability not to judge between two obviously different things, but to parse through the critical and often convoluted questions of this life and to do so with the skill of understanding, the kind of understanding that you get from careful study of God's Word and participation in the Spirit. Paul is implicitly here in verse 10 pointing out to those issues that we are going to come against that are going to be tough questions that we should, I believe, communally come together to try to discern. And there are going to be, I think, Christians who disagree. That's why he's a little bit light on us here. He says, try to discern them. Be gracious, meaning in your discernment. Try your best to do it. And there's a way, I think, that we can successfully achieve this. When you think about the church's mission, your mission individually and then us communally as light in the world, light exposes. We'll see that in verse 11, where Paul says, That's why the Bible is often called light. It's a light to our path, guidance to our eyes. Other metaphors for Scripture, it's a sword. It is life, the psalmist says. It is to be more valued than fine gold, much fine gold. When you think about the church's mission, therefore, as light, it is to carefully think through the events of this world, the things that are set before us, and not merely sort of stumble through life without reflecting upon anything. There are people like that. who never sort of think beyond what is immediately in front of them. We can't be like that. We don't have the privilege of ignoring what is going on around us, because we're light. And so, there are certain questions that present themselves to the church that will require careful discernment, and we want to give proper attention to those things so that we can honor God. Usually, those things are controversial. Usually. Sometimes, the Spirit of God sucks the controversy out of those things. Other times, not so much. A number of years ago we had a very interesting controversy here at the church, maybe five years ago or so, surrounding the issue of yoga. I realize that yoga has made inroads to Main Street, USA. It is a $45 billion industry in the United States in terms of yoga practitioners, teachers, and then all the associated materials. Yoga has been capitalized, as it were, in the United States and become an industry, and it is exceedingly common. I know that. You know that. There are like twenty yoga joints in Torrington. They're teaching yoga in public schools. It's very, very ubiquitous. And yet, I would argue that upon the basis of the facts, what yoga is, where it has come from, what it seeks to do, it is absolutely incongruous to the Christian life and should not be practiced by any Christian. because yoga is inseparably tied to the Vedic religions, of which Hinduism is arguably the main one. For example, one Hindu authority simply put it like this, yoga did not derive from Hinduism. He says yoga is Hinduism. It is the sacrament of Hinduism along with Tantra, and I won't go into that. Those who practice yoga are, whether knowingly or not, whether intentionally or not, engaging in the sacrament of a Vedic religion. And the most important doctrine of that religion is what is called penantheism, a teaching which blurs the line between the Creator and the creation. It doesn't just blur it, it erases it. What's the first thing you learn in the Bible? That God created the heavens and the earth, meaning that He is not the universe. He's not the creation. Rather, He made the creation. There is a serious distinction between God and what God made. As Christians, we know we cannot confuse that distinction. We cannot throw it out. If you do, you end up in pantheism or pantheism, as Hindus do. Well, in Hinduism, that distinction does not exist. All is God, God is all. Those postures are designed to yoke you with a panentheistic world. That is their purpose. It is not merely physiological benefits that people are after. No, the term yoga means to yoke, and the postures utilized in yoga are intended to yoke you with a panentheistic reality. You can't harmonize that. with Christianity, no matter how hard you try, any more than you can make baptism a dip in the pool. Trying to make yoga something other than what it is, a sacrament of an ungodly religion, is like trying to make the Lord's Supper a snack. You can't. It's not what it is. Even though there are well-meaning Christians, I would argue, many of them well-meaning, that think that you can, in fact, do that, that you can sort of suck the religion out of it and practice this areligious thing, but in reality you can't do that. It is impossible. But it's a difficult question, is it not? Because at face value it would seem just like stretching. But if you're uninformed, if you don't know the background about all that, you could see how one could easily land there. Even a very mature Christian could land in that place and have ostensibly good rationale for being there. That is why I believe discernment is not an individual responsibility solely, but is one that is predominantly to be done within the covenant community of faith. That is why Paul says, try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. It's a plural verb. It's a plural present active verb, meaning you all, you and the church together in community, in dialogue, try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord, so that when we think through these issues, we're doing so with the ballast of other people who have gifts and knowledge and understanding we simply do not have. In this way, we don't make minor issues major issues. In this way, we make sure that we're not just going to ride a hobby horse. We're not just going to grind an axe, but in fact, we are going to honor the Lord with our judgments. When we do that, we take advantage of the fact that Christ has appointed teachers in the church. that he is appointed godly and spiritual leadership in the church, and we leverage all of that together with the gifts we've been given in the body in order that we honor the Lord. And so Paul says, verse 11, take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness. If darkness were a tree, it would be what? A barren tree. A tree with no leaves, with no fruit. A tree that is only good to be thrown into the fire and disposed of. Were light a tree, as Paul's mixing metaphors here, it would be a tree planted by streams of living water, where its fruit is produced consistently in season, like the man of Psalm 1. Be like that, but take no part, he says, have nothing to do with the unfruitful works of darkness." There's a strong antithesis throughout this passage, isn't there, between light and darkness, fruit, barrenness. It's extremes. And in many ways the Christian life is a life of extremes. To be a Christian means to recognize that this world promulgates a godless system, and that you being in the world cannot participate in or be of that godless system. Rather, you have to be discerning. You have to recognize that there are spiritual things going on all around us. You have to be cognizant of the fact that there is no neutrality in this life, neither spiritually, morally or otherwise. Neutrality is purely mythology. And so he says, take no part in those unfruitful works of darkness. And so here's the thing. Our natural proclivity, if we're going to be real honest with ourselves, is to compartmentalize our life. to compartmentalize who we are and to give some areas over to the light, but to keep other areas out of the light, we might suppress them a little bit so that there are really two yous. There's the you who is walking as a child of the light, and there's the you that's really the old man, sort of festering, still trading in the same sins, the same foolish talk, the same covetousness, the same sexual immorality and impurity. But Paul says, take no part, meaning the whole of you, all of you. You can't bifurcate your life. You can't serve darkness and light. Obviously, darkness and light cannot dwell in the same place. What does darkness have to do with light? It has nothing to do with light, which incidentally is why Christians cannot be demon-possessed. How can the Spirit of God be in a man and a demon? It can't. Darkness and light can't occupy the same space, as it were. But so many of us try to do just that, don't we? And what we end up doing is grieving the Spirit of God by clinging to sins that will only hurt us and cause us affliction. But we can't take part in them. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. Expose the unfruitful works of darkness. Meaning know what they are and tell people what they are. Just like the light exposes something hidden. And there are three reasons why as Christians, as the church, we must expose evil wherever we find it. Three important reasons. The first is that it honors God. I was walking my dog, well, walking my son's dog, very late one night this week. It was like 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. The dog had incidentally eaten some amoxicillin and needed to go out quite frequently owing to that. And so, you know, he got up, he was restless, he's crashing out the door, so I went, I brought him outside, and I was in my pajamas, and I didn't even put shoes on, you know, I hooked a leash on him, he just sort of dragged me out, I wasn't even looking, he was just sort of leading me to where he likes to do his business, which, don't tell them, but is in the lawn of the congregational church next door. And so I'm in that lawn and it's a little bit cold out and I'm annoyed. I give one glance around and there's like one car all the way down the street. I could tell it's an Uber because it has that light up sign by some apartments down there. And I see one guy like walking over there. You know, the lights, the traffic lights are flashing. No one's out. So I'm standing in that lawn waiting for him to take care of things and the dog begins to snarl and growl. And he shows his teeth. This is a lab, a happy pup. But he begins to get like aggressive. And I actually never saw him do that before. And I turn and look and there is a guy like two feet behind me. I'm not on a sidewalk, I'm in a lawn. There's no reason to be near me. The dog turns and he's going bonkers at this guy. And the guy sees the dog and sort of keeps walking. I don't know what that guy was going to do. I mean, I would have been one sorry person to mug because I had absolutely nothing on me. He ended up following me a block or so. The dog went ape the entire time. Finally, I went inside my house. I mention that to you because Calvin, the great magisterial reformer said, a dog barks when its master is attacked. If I saw God's truth attacked, were I to remain silent, I would be a coward. Brothers, we cannot be cowards. we must expose the unfruitful works of darkness in this age. You wonder why so many evangelicals have bought into such foolishness like gender ideology, like how could evangelicals fall for this? You know why? Because I don't think their forebears, their parents, and the parents before them were willing to call things as they truly are for fear that they would be maligned in the public square. We call things as they are. We identify things as being evil, specifically, explicitly, unapologetically, because it honors God who is righteous. We expose them. And we should never try to soften that. I'm not suggesting that we be jerks who, you know, are sort of running around pointing out all that is wrong with the world, but when there are false ideas and zeitgeists coming in every few years that are soul damning, we need to expose them for what they are. I mean, how many times have you seen some evangelical celebrity get some platform and be on a TV show or in the news, and they sort of soft-pedal some obvious question like, do you think homosexuality is a sin? And they hem and they haul. The answer is yes, sodomy is evil. It's evil. You think abortion is wrong? Well, you know, no, it's evil. Is God against transgenderism? Yes, it's evil. It's evil. It's not kind of bad. It's not misguided. No, it's evil. It is man suppressing what he knows to be true in order to go after a lie because he wants the deception, because he hates God and loves his sin. You know what transgenderism really is? Because it's, I mean, it's shoved in your face every day. You want to know what it really is? Let me just remove that veneer of a sort of social media glitz, which is as rotten as the day is long, by the way. You know what it really is? It's someone who hates themselves so much that they want to be something they know they can never be. And so they try to put that on, and then fools in the world affirm them in that. It is the acceptance of formalized self-hatred. We must say that's evil. It's not kind of evil. It's not just backward thinking. No, it is wicked. And it's only when we see things as they are, when we see ourselves as we are, that we can find redemption by the grace of God and the Lord Jesus Christ. The second reason why we expose the unfruitful works of darkness is to protect God's people, to warn them, to guide the faithful, and to apply the Word of God in such a way that those Christians who don't know any better, the undiscerning among us, learn real quick that these sorts of things are dangerous and wrong. So we expose them for the sake of the bride of Christ, because we love those people for whom Christ died. We love them. Jesus said, I give you a new commandment, that you love one another just as I have loved you. How much did Christ love his people? That's not the old commandment. It's not love your neighbor as yourself. That's in Leviticus. Love one another as I've loved you, meaning Christian, love your fellow Christian like Christ loved you. How much should he love you? He loved you enough to tell you the truth. He loved you enough to warn you of the wrath to come. He loved you enough to lay his life down for you, to suffer humiliation that belonged to you, to become your sin so that you might be the righteousness of God. Do you love your brethren enough to expose evil as evil? to risk the social discomfort, to risk the mockery of ungodly people and expose things for what they really are. Do you love your brothers and sisters that much? I hope so. The third reason we expose the unfruitful works of darkness is because it is part of our evangelism. The prophetic ministry of the church is to share the gospel of Jesus Christ all the time to every creature. And when we go and say, this is evil, we implicitly call people to peace with God through Christ. As we do that, we must accompany our prophetic description of what is evil in terms of the gospel. You look at the prophets in the Old Testament. They would go in the middle of Jerusalem, which was corrupt as the day is long, right, especially as you get closer to the exile, and they would say, the king is an idolater, and these idols are nothing before God. They wouldn't sugarcoat it, right? And that's why so many of those prophets, what happened to them? They were killed. You ready to die for the truth of God? If you are, many people will be saved. The blood of the martyrs is really the seat of the church. Paul says, verse 12, for it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. Here Paul, I think, is sort of without mentioning it, referring to one of the very common cults in his day in the area of Ephesus, the cult of Demeter. Demeter was said to be a goddess, the sister of Zeus. She was the goddess of fertility and grain and sort of production, and there were a bunch of very secret rituals associated with her worship that were extraordinarily corrupt. Paul says it was shameful what those people do in secret. Here's where we are today. People don't do it in secret anymore. They do it in public. And because they're done in public, there's sort of an air of acceptability now associated with those things. And so as Christians, We have to expose those things as not being acceptable, as not being compatible with life. Verse 13, but when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible. A little bit of an axiom. The light comes in, things become clearly seen. The church begins to speak prophetically, things are seen as they are, and it's unavoidable. When you expose something for what it is, there may be machinations on the other side. People may make up arguments, but the truth is there for all to see. The only way you're going to believe those arguments is if you were committed to believing a lie in the first place. When it's exposed by the light, it becomes visible. For if anything that becomes visible is light, meaning that the prophetic voice of the church will in fact bring forth God's elect into the grace of God for salvation. And so in the last part of verse 14, he says, therefore it says, Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. Notice he says again, therefore it says, this is not, right, that little chiastic form, that little bit of poetry, is not a quotation from the Bible. If it's in poetic form in your copy of the Bible, it should be. It is certainly poetry. It has a sort of ring to it, right? Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. That's not a biblical quotation. That's a quotation from a primitive Christian hymn, probably sung during a baptism, maybe when The Christian, the new convert, was about to go in the waters of baptism. They would sing this hymn. Paul's taken a little snippet of that hymn, and he's used it to describe the ministry of the church in exposing evil. It's not an ending of itself. It's for the purposes of expanding the kingdom of God. It is for the purposes of redemption. A Waco sleeper. The sleepers of the world who don't know what's going on, who are obscured by the darkness of evil, awake and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. It seems sort of silly to ask somebody to rise from the dead, doesn't it? But that's what God does, just as He told Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones. this sort of dusty mass of human remains prophesied to the bones. Son of man prophesied to the bones and tell them to develop a sinew and ligament and muscle and ultimately breath. And out of that vast valley of death came life. The mission hasn't changed. We possess the same mission, preaching to the dead. And out of that death, the Spirit brings life. Let us pray. And now, Father, as we've turned to your Word, we pray that you would bless us as we contemplate these things. And we ask for your mercy upon our lives so that we would be bold with the gospel, eager to be ministers of reconciliation, to be agents of grace. We pray that you would be gracious with us this week to help us with our responsibilities and to embody what Paul has written about here. And we thank you in the name of our King, the Son of God. Amen.