The definition of apathy is, “a lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern. Atrophy is the gradual decline in effectiveness or vigor due to underuse or neglect. I said last week that spiritual apathy is the kind of thing that will happen when you are so paralyzed by shame that you stay in your shame instead of allowing it to motivate you into repentance. Spiritual apathy, if left untreated, will lead to spiritual atrophy. In Ephesians 5:14-21, we are given a four-fold pathway to keep us from spiritual apathy and to rescue us from spiritual atrophy; last week, I showed the first step for that pathway, and it was: “Run to Jesus as your only advocate.”
If you are a Christian, you were once dead and now you are alive in Christ (Eph. 2:1-5). If you are a Christian, you are alive with Jesus through the redemption of His shed blood (1:7). You, Christian, are, forgiven of all your sin, but you have also been, “sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit.... for the day of redemption” (1:13-14; 4:30). Because of God’s great love, rich mercy, and sufficient grace, you are His child and even more staggering (in my opinion), you are His inheritance (see 1:18-19a)! Because of all of this, your awareness of your sin ought not lead to apathy, but to the place and time where your redemption was made possible which is the cross of Christ!
With that being said, I believe Ephesians 5:15-21 is a pathway and plan to keep us from spiritual apathy and if necessary, to lead one out of spiritual atrophy.
Pay Attention to How You Live (v. 15)
In consideration of that reality and hope that is yours in Jesus, the apostle Paul continues: “So then, be careful how you walk, not as unwise people but as wise...” (v. 15). In light of verses 1-14, Paul does not suggest we take care how we walk, but commands it out of the utmost importance. “be careful” is translated from Greek word “blepō” (βλέπω) and it literally means and is most commonly translated, “see” but it can also be translated in the following ways: “beware”, “watch out”, or “look.” Verse 15 is an appeal to pay attention because there are dangers along the way as you “Walk.” A better translation of this verse is: “Watch carefully how you walk, not as unwise people, but as wise...”
Consider the seven ways the word “walk” is used in Ephesians. In Ephesians 2:1-3, the Christian once, “previouslywalked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.” If you are a Christian, you are God’s, “workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them (2:10). Because of the great price of your redemption, you are to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called” (4:1) instead of walking “as the Gentiles also walk... because of the hardness of their heart” (4:17-18). As children of God, you are to “walk in love just as Christ loved you and gave Himself up for us” (5:1-2). You, Christian, are alive with Christ, and because you are alive with Christ, you are “light in the Lord” and no longer in darkness; therefore “walk as children of light” (5:8). This brings us to the final verse where the word “walk” is used in Ephesians: “So then, be careful [watch carefully] how you walk, not as unwise people but as wise” (v. 15).
To watch carefully how you walk is to do so with urgency, care, and wisdom. So how does one walk with wisdom? Proverbs 9:10 tells us what the first step towards wisdom requires: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” According to proverbs, wisdom begins with a fear of the Lord. To have some understanding of who God is will result in an appropriate response to Him, and that appropriate response is one of profound reverence, for this is what the Hebrew word for “fear”[1] means. This is the response of the Seraphim and the prophet of Isaiah while in the presence of Almighty God, “sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted...” while the holy Seraphim covered their face and feet, Isaiah responded: “Woe to me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips” (see Isa. 6:1-5). It was also the response of Job to a better understanding of the nature of God in light of his own suffering: “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear; But now my eye sees You; Therefore I retract, And I repent, sitting on dust and ashes” (Job 42:5-6). Jesus spoke of wisdom in relationship to what we do with His words and our lives:
“Therefore, everyone who hears these words of Mine, and acts on them, will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of Mine, and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and its collapse was great.” (Matt. 7:24-27)
To walk with wisdom is to do so with an appropriate fear for who God is and a motivation to do what His Word requires is the spirit of Psalm 1:1-2, “How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers! But his delight is in the law of the Lord, And in His law he meditates day and night.”
In the verses to follow, Paul provides us with key ways to walk in wisdom: 1) Use your time wisely for what matters, 2) live with an awareness of God’s will for your life, and 3) be intentional about what you consume.
Use your time wisely for what matters (v. 16)
Life is short. The average human life is about 29,000 days. That is all you have... maybe. That is of course if heart disease, cancer, or a fatal accident doesn’t get to you first. Of our 29,000 days, we sleep 9,490 (26yrs) of our 29,000 days away leaving us with only 19,510 days on earth awake. So, how does the average person use his/her average number of days on earth?
- 1,095 days are spent in the bathroom
- 402 days are spent getting dressed
- 365 days are spent looking for things we lost.
- 5 hours a day are spent by the average teen staring at the screen of their computer, phone, and television (that is over 3,100 hours a year spent staring at a screen)
- 5 days a year are spent on our cell phones (if those statistics remain the same, then within my 14-year-old son’s lifetime he will have spent 4,516 days of his life on his phone).
Allow me to put something in perspective. The average age of Meadowbrooke Church is somewhere in the 30’s, which means that if you are 35 years old and if you average about 6.5 hours of sleep a night, and heart disease, cancer, or an accident does not cut those remaining days short, you have about 12,960 days awake left while the average screen time in America is currently 7.3 hours a day which is another 3,942 days of no human interaction that you can scratch off of those remaining 12,960 days left awake and living.
My point is simply this, your time is very limited, so don’t waste it on things that do not matter. The apostle Paul wrote Ephesians 5:16 in a day and age when social media and screen time did not exist, but the danger of wasting one’s life on things that do not matter was still before the Christian. The evil that surrounded the Ephesian Church is the same evil that surrounds us but with different dress. Ephesus had the Temple of Artemis and we have the porn industry. The Hebrews were surrounded by the worship of Molech where infants were laid upon the arms of the idol as a sacrifice, we have Planned Parenthood offering free vasectomies and abortions in their buss outside of the DNC in Chicago and a well-known gourmet hotdog place offering patrons a free hotdog after their procedures on that bus.
How do you keep your soul from spiritual apathy and atrophy? How do we make the most of our time because the days are evil? You do it by taking God-glorifying risks and by making God-exulting sacrifices for what really matters in light of eternity!
Live with an awareness of God’s will for your life (v. 17)
Living in a way that is worthy of your calling and walking wisely as a follower of Jesus while the days are evil requires that you are aware of God’s will for your life and that you live in light of that awareness. So, what is God’s will for your life? It’s simple. We in Ephesians alone we are told that God chose you before the foundation of the world, “that we would be holy and blameless before Him” (1:4). You were created, saved, and redeemed in Christ Jesus, “for good works, which God prepared beforehand” (2:10). Now that you are saved by the blood of Jesus, “you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household... being fitted together... into a holy temple in the Lord” (2:19, 21). Because we now belong to Jesus as the Church, “we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of people” (4:14). As followers of Jesus, we are expected, “to put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth” (4:24). Because you are now a child of God, we are to be “imitators of God, as beloved children” (5:1) because we are now “children of light” (v. 8).
What is the will of God for your life? It is to follow Jesus in such a way that He is first and everything else is second for it is He who said: “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me” (Luke 9:23). What is the will for your life? It is your sanctification: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification; that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor” (1 Thess. 4:3-4). What is the will of God for your life? Here it is: “Therefore, prepare your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance, but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; because it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’” (1 Pet. 1:13-16).
Listen, any person, organization, job promotion, or desire that threatens to move you further away from God’s will for your life... IS NOT GOD’S WILL for your life! If you want to walk in wisdom, you must live with the awareness of what God wants for your life ultimately.
Be intentional about what you consume into your mind, soul, and heart (vv. 18-21)
The word worship comes from the word “worth-ship.” What you give yourself to is what you value, and what you value most is what you ultimately attribute worth to. What you put into your mind, you put into your heart, and what you put into your heart, you feed into your soul.
Early in this series on Ephesians I said, that “you have all of God’s love you will ever need, all of the redemption in Jesus that you will ever need, and all of the Holy Spirit you will ever need.” I followed up that statement with a question, and the question was this: “How much of your heart does God have? How much of your loyalty does Jesus have? How much of your life does the Holy Spirit have? You see, when you believed in Jesus, you were baptized and sealed by the Holy Spirit, but the filling of the Holy Spirit comes when He has more of your heart.
What Paul describes in verses 18-21 has more to do with the culture of your heart than anything else. Anything that you put into your mind will ultimately affect the way you think, and what saturates your mind, will affect what and how you feel about certain things. This is why Paul begins verse 18 with a prohibition: “And do not get drunk with wine...” The point is simply this: Do not fill your stomach with something that will dull your senses, but fill your mind, soul, and heart with the God you were made to know! R.C. Sproul wrote of this verse: “Paul is saying to drink deeply and constantly, keeping ourselves close to the Spirit of God, so that we maximize the means of grace of His presence and of His power in our lives.”[2]
Getting drunk with wine is debauchery. What is debauchery? It is having no control because the wine you have consumed has inhibited you from exercising good reason. It is not just alcohol that can have this effect on your mind, heart, and soul. If Paul was writing a letter to Meadowbrooke, I think it would include a sentence not all that dissimilar from Ephesians 5:18; maybe it would sound something like this: “Do not bow to your phones to be consumed by your screentime but be saturated by the word of God for the good of your mind, heart, and soul!”
Think about it, how can you expect to experience the power of the Holy Spirit in your life if what is filling your mind is ultimately coming through a screen rather than the lenses of Holy Scripture? How do you do this? You do it by consuming God’s Word, you do it by “speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs...” (v. 19), which happens when we gather for worship. If you are consumed by the things of God, you will recognize that all the good that you have is from God (v. 20). When you recognize that your life and all that you have belongs to God, you will submit to the authority of God over your life and to, “one another in the fear of Christ” (v. 21).
The Spirit-filled life is a life governed by the Holy Spirit, and the only way you will be governed by the Holy Spirit is by pursuing the following three things:
- Pursue God by seeking to know Him. Your understanding of who God is will create an appropriate response to Him, which is a deep and abiding reverence for Him and the things and life He wants for you.
- Live the days you have left with a determination not to waste them but to invest them in what matters. You can do this by recognizing that after your days are up, you will live forever and how you live today is an investment for how you will live in heaven.
- Be aware of what you put into your mind, heart, and soul. The more of your heart the Holy Spirit gets, the more of God’s peace and joy you will experience. The more of God’s peace and joy you experience, the more of your purpose in this life you will experience.
One challenge I would like to leave with you. I want you to try something for a solid month, and if you do, I am confident it will help you grow closer to God and the people He has placed in your life. Here is my challenge:
- If you are single, put your phone down 30 minutes before you go to bed and thoughtfully read your Bible for 10-15 minutes (Pick any book in the Bible).
- If you have children, make it a point that anytime you are sharing a meal together, that your phone is off or away from you. Before you eat dinner, thank God for your meal, while you eat dinner check in with each other about what is happening in each family member’s life, and then when diner is over, pick a verse(s) to read before you get up from the table.
