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Walk This Way

Ephesians 5:1-17 • June 19, 2024 • g1294

Pastor Todd Lauderdale teaches a message through Ephesians 5:1-17 titled “Walk This Way.”

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Pastor Todd Lauderdale

June 19, 2024

Sermon Scripture Reference

I’m going to have you join me in the book of Ephesians 5, so if you want to find that spot. If you don’t have a Bible with you, you can find one that is tucked in the pew right in front of you, and find that spot. Tonight I’ve entitled the message, “Walk This Way.” We’re going to be looking at a few statements that are made here in Ephesians 5.

You probably are aware though that every culture, every subculture, has its own uniqueness. There are certain characteristics that make up a certain group of individuals, and oftentimes it affects the lingo that they use—the language, the way that they communicate with each other—and sometimes anybody that is outside of that subculture wouldn’t understand what they were talking about. For example, if you heard the phrase, “chucking a sickie,” you might not understand what that means at all. But I guarantee you if you’re from Australia or any of your friends from Australia would know exactly what “chucking a sickie” is. It’s a reference to calling in sick on a day that you are perfectly healthy simply because you want to take the day off. That’s “chucking a sickie.”

Maybe you’re at a ski resort for the day. You’re sitting in the lodge, and you overhear somebody talking about a guy on the mountain who was “rolling down the windows.” Maybe you have no idea what in the world that means, but it’s in reference to a guy who went off of a jump, lost his balance, he’s desperately trying not to crash, and so he’s “rolling down the windows” (demonstrates by rolling both arms as if rolling down windows) trying to regain his balance.

Maybe you’re on vacation in Canada with your family, and you have a destination in mind you want to get to but don’t know exactly how to get there, so you stop and ask for directions. That friendly Canadian tells you, “It’s only twenty clicks down this road.” Okay, is that five minutes away or is that five hours away? What is “twenty clicks”? In Canada, a “click” is a kilometer, so it’s twenty kilometers away. Of course, we Americans probably still don’t know how far that is. That could be five minutes; it could be five hours. Can you please talk to me in miles? That’s something that we understand, right? Subcultures have their own language.

We as Christians have our own language. Those of you that did not grow up in the church, no doubt when you got saved and started attending a church, you began hearing terms that you had never heard in your life before. I got saved in my teen years, and when I began going to a church I began hearing people talk about things that I had to try and figure out exactly what they were referring to. I was too embarrassed to ask them, so I just waited for more information so I could figure out exactly what in the world they were talking about. Like, having a “quiet time.” The first thing that popped into my mind was when I was a five-year-old in Kindergarten class and the teacher in the middle of the day told us to go grab a mat and roll it out and lie down while she turned the lights off for fifteen minutes.

Maybe you heard the term “spiritual warfare.” You didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it meant something really bad was happening at that moment. Or, “unequally yoked.” What in the world does it mean to be “unequally yoked?” I remember hearing that statement and thinking, What in the world is that? You know, is that you like scrambled eggs and you’re not allowed to date someone who likes them poached? What exactly does it mean to be unequally yoked? There might be some of you in here right now that are saying, “Yeah, exactly. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Well, ask your Christian friend sitting next to you after the service. They’ll probably be able to explain it to you.

One of the other terms that is used within our Christianese is our walk, “How is your walk?” Maybe you don’t have any idea how your walk is because you’re not really sure what they are talking about. We talk about having our, “walk with the Lord.” It’s a term that we use within our Christian subculture to make reference to something that maybe we know what it means, maybe we don’t really know what it refers to, but if somebody asks you, “How is your walk with the Lord?” chances are your response is going to be, “It’s great!.” What exactly makes it great? How do you even know you have a great “walk with the Lord,” especially if you don’t know exactly what walking with the Lord is in reference to?

I will tell you this. There are a couple different aspects to what we are talking about when we call it a “walk with the Lord.” The first is in reference to your relationship with God. Your “walk with the Lord” is your relationship with God. There’s another aspect to it that I think is also important, a reference to your behavior. To tell you the truth, the first should shape the second. In other words, your relationship with God ought to be shaping your behavior. It ought to be having an influence on how you live your life. The Bible has, in many places, descriptive words about our “walk with the Lord.” I won’t go through all of them, but several of them that you will find in the New Testament are these: We are to walk by faith, 2 Corinthians 5; we are to walk in the truth, 3 John 4; we are to walk in good works, Ephesians 2; we are to walk in the Spirit, Galatians 5.

We are here in Ephesians 5. I want you to know that there are three statements in this passage we’re about to read that are all in reference to how we ought to be walking. We’re going to highlight those in our message tonight, and as I read the passage I’m going to read from verses 1-17. I just want you to take note of the three times in this passage where your walk is referenced or how you are to walk is going to be referenced. Follow along with me. I’ll begin in verse 1. It says, “Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma. 3 But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as is fitting for saints; 4 neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks. 5 For this you know, that no fornicator, unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolator, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.”

Verse 6, “Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. 7 Therefore do not be partakers with them. 8 For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light. 9 (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth), 10 finding out what is acceptable to the Lord. 11 And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. 12 For it is shameful even to speak of those things which are done by them in secret. 13 But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light, for whatever makes manifest is light. 14 Therefore He says: ‘Awake, you who sleep, Arise from the dead, And Christ will give you light.’ 15 See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, 16 redeeming the time, because the days are evil. 17 Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is.”

I’m sure you picked up on it, but the three statements that we’re going to be looking at tonight in regards to how we are to walk are first found in verse 2, “And walk in love;” second, found in verse 8, we are to “ . . . walk as children of light;” and third, verse 15, “ . . . that you would walk circumspectly,”—or carefully—“not as fools but as wise.” Before we dive into these three, I think it’s important for us to camp out in verse 1 for a moment because verse 1 really is the kingpin of all three of these. There’s no way that we can do what we are being asked to do unless we understand what verse 1 is telling us to do. It is the high calling in the Christian’s life because we’re told, “Therefore be imitators of God as dear children.”

Why should we walk in these things? Because what is being described for us is the character of God. This is the type of God that we worship. God is love, therefore we are to walk in love, the love that He supplies. God is light, the Bible tells us, therefore we are to walk in the light that He supplies. And, God is all-wise, therefore we are to walk in wisdom, all of the wisdom that He supplies. We’re to be imitators of God, and that’s a unique thing to say to sinful man, to imitate God, the greatness of God. There’s no way in the world that we can thoroughly and accurately imitate our Creator. He is so far beyond us, so it is a high calling that is on our life, but we are to do our best to imitate His attributes. And, because God is love, we are to walk in love; and because God is light, we are to walk in the light; and because God is wise, we are to walk in the wisdom that He supplies. We are to imitate our God.

That word “imitate” in the English language comes from a Greek word which also gives us a few other words that we are familiar with, the word “mimic” and the word “mime.” These words really play into describing exactly what we are being called to do because a mimic is someone who basically copies the behavior of somebody else. I remember when my son was really young. He was probably three or four years old. One day I was out in the front yard mowing the grass. Halfway through my mowing I noticed that there was somebody behind me. He had gone into the garage and got my big goggles and put them on and was pushing around his bubble mower. As I am actually mowing the grass, he’s got bubbles that are coming out of this toy mower that he had just following behind me wherever I went. I thought it was the greatest thing because here was my son mimicking what he saw his dad doing.

When we talk about imitating God, we are to mimic Him. We are to look at His character—what is it that God is like—and we are to imitate the things that we see. When we look at the life of Christ and we see how He treated people, we see how He spoke to people, we see how He even reacted to His enemies, it should have an impact upon the way that we live. We ought to mimic that.

Then, there’s the other word, “mime.” “Mime” is a different word because “mime” is a reference to communicating without using words simply by gestures. I remember years ago being on a mission’s team that went to the Philippines to share the gospel with the Filipino people. There’s a language barrier there—we all spoke English—and we didn’t know their language. Nearly everybody that we were going to be ministering to spoke their language, they did not know English. One of the things that we did in preparation of going to share the Lord with them is that we had a team of high school students that learned a very, very short play that was all done in mime. There were no words to the play at all. All of their communication was going to be by facial expressions, by hand gestures, by just the movements of their body to communicate certain concepts, and you know what? It worked flawlessly because mime is an international language. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are from, you can understand certain things that are acted out in front of you.

Now, when we’re called to be imitators of God, you need to understand that we’re not only mimicking what we see in the character of who our God is, but oftentimes what we are communicating to others is not even with our words. Now, words are important, and sharing the Lord with people with our words is very important, but we also need to understand we are also communicating, whether we are communicating well or not so well, with our actions. When we talk about being imitators of God, it’s not just saying the right things, it is living the right way, the way that God is calling us to live.

That brings us to these three statements that we’re going to take one at a time how we can be imitators of God. The first is found in verse 2 where it says, “And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us.” Now, this is not an unfamiliar concept to any of us. We’re well acquainted with the fact that we are called as followers of Christ to walk in love. Because it is such a common thing that is referred to, it might be easy for us to somewhat dismiss it or check out in this moment as the pastor starts talking about something that you are already very, very familiar with. I’m going to ask that you would not do that because it is true that we talk a lot about loving as Christ loves, but knowing that and doing that are not the same thing. We can know every verse and passage in Scripture and example of what love looks like according to Scripture and not be doing any of those things. You see, it’s not just knowing the right thing to do, it’s actually doing those very things.

There’s a story that has gone around, and I don’t know if this is actually a legend or actually something that happened. The story is about the Apostle John who was the last of the disciples of Jesus. All the others had passed away, and John was very, very old living out his last years in Ephesus. That Ephesian church, when they would meet together, they would bring John in on occasion and want to hear something said from this aged apostle. All of their ears would perk up and want to hear what does the Apostle John want to say to us today. John would simply say, in his broken, aged voice, “Beloved, love one another.”

The next week, he would be brought in again and be given an opportunity to say something to the congregation. He would again say, “Beloved, love one another.” Maybe they dismissed that thinking, Okay, he’s an old man, maybe he forgot that that’s the same message he gave us the last week, but the following week he would again be asked at which he would respond the same way, “Beloved, love one another.” At some point, somebody in that church asked John, “John, could you please give us something else? You’ve told us that several times,” to which his response was, “When you do the first, I will tell you the second.”

We hear a lot about the love of God and that we are to express the love of God, walk in the love of God, but what does that actually look like? Here in this passage, verse 2 in particular, we are drawn to the sacrifice of Christ as so often in Scripture we are when the love of God is referenced. You’ll notice it, it says, “And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us.” In fact, you might even know this, nearly every time that the love of God is referenced in the New Testament, almost every time it will be attached to some reference to Jesus and the cross. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son;” “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us;” “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” Over and over and over again, when God’s love is referenced, they prove the love of God for us by referencing the cross of Christ and the fact that Jesus sacrificed Himself for us. When we talk about walking in love, we can’t escape the fact that the love that God is talking about here to us is it is a sacrificial love. It requires sacrifice on the person who’s going to make the choice to walk in this type of love.

But I will say this, not in every occasion is the love of God attached to the cross of Christ. I want to remind you of a story that is told in John 13. It’s a familiar story to us I’m sure, but it is the night before Jesus was to be crucified. He’s spending time with His disciples, and after they had shared a meal together, it says Jesus, “ . . . laid aside His garments, took a towel and girded Himself. 5 After that, He poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet,” removing their sandals and washing their feet. When He had finished, He turned to them and said, “Do you know what I have done to you?” “ . . . as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” A familiar story, no doubt, but I think most of the time when we think about how Jesus is asking us to love, He’s speaking about how He loved in that moment, and we then apply it to our lives. There’s no wrong in doing that, we ought to. How did Jesus love? He loved by serving His disciples. So, how do we walk in love? We love by serving one another.

The story does not stop there, and I think it’s very important that we see that there are multiple layers to what Jesus is actually showing us here on how we are to love. How are we to love? We are to serve. We also should ask ourselves, “Who are we to love?” I want you to consider for a moment who was there when Jesus washed those feet? There were twelve men there in that upper room, one of them before the night was over was going to deny that he even knew Jesus three times over. Peter was there, and had his feet washed. Did Jesus know what Peter was about to do? He absolutely did. He knew more than Peter knew because Jesus told Peter what was about to happen. Peter denied that it would ever happen, yet Jesus knowing that His best friend was going to deny Him, still washed his feet.

Peter wasn’t even the worst of the bunch because Judas was there, too. Jesus washed Judas’ feet, who also that very night was not only going to deny Jesus, he was going to betray Jesus. He was going to make some moves that were going to get Jesus arrested and ultimately crucified. Did Jesus know that? He absolutely knew that, yet there He was bowing down washing the feet of Judas. It’s not just how Jesus served showing love, it’s who Jesus served, even those that would hurt Him, and hurt Him deeply. Then, we need to consider when Jesus loved. At the beginning of that passage it tells us that the hour of Jesus had come, and what did that hour reference? It referenced the hour that He would be crucified. Jesus knew full well it was only a matter of time, and in fact the next day He would be hanging upon a cross.

If you knew that tomorrow was going to be the worst day of your life, how do you want to be treated by your friends and family tonight? Maybe a back rub, maybe make me my favorite dinner, maybe treat me really well, “Nobody bug me,” that type of a thing. We’re going to be very self-centered. We want to make sure that we’re taken care of because tomorrow is going to be terrible, “You better make tonight great for me.” That’s not Jesus’ heart. Here He was on the brink of going through the worst agony you could imagine, yet even in that moment He chose to serve. What that means for us is that not only are we to love by serving, not only are we to love even those who hurt us, we are also to love even when we don’t feel like it because Jesus did all of that and then turned to His disciples and said, “Do you see what I have done for you? Now, you go do the same. You do it how I did it, you do it to who I did it, and you do it when I did it.” So, we are to walk in love, “ . . . as I love you, that you also love one another.” Let me ask you, how are you doing in your walk? Are you walking in love?

Then, we jump down to verse 8 and get to the second, “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light.” Again, the Bible tells us, “ . . . that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all,” 1 John 1:5. All throughout Scripture you’ll find occasions where light and darkness are contrasted, and they are opposites in Scripture. They have different meanings attributed to them, and we need to understand them, to understand what we are being called to here. When the Bible tells us, “ . . . that God is light,” what does that actually mean? I think verse 9 actually is going to help us with our understanding a little bit. If follows what we just read. It says, “(for the fruit of the Spirit,”—some of your Bibles might say for the fruit of the light—“is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth),” so when we talk about God being light, we need to understand that it has something to do with the goodness of God, the righteousness of God, and the truth of God—God is good, God is right, and God is true.

Let’s camp out on that concept of God being true here for a moment because here in this passage even, what we see is that light reveals truth. Jump down to verse 13 for a moment. It says, “But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light, for whatever makes manifest is light.” I like the way the same verse is said in the New International Version. It says, “But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for it is light that makes everything visible.” That sounds like a no-brainer, but you need to understand what’s being said here. You turn a light on and you can see what is in the room. You turn all the lights off, and no longer can you see what’s in the room, you’re left in the darkness and cluelessness. That’s why when you walk through your house, or maybe somebody else’s house, maybe you can navigate your own house pretty well, you need the lights on because you don’t know where the furniture is, you don’t know where the low-hanging lamp happens to be. You need the light because the light is going to show you the truth, it’s going to reveal the truth to you.

I remember years ago I was at my former church walking around the back side of the building at night. The sun had gone down and most of the building had adequate lighting on the outside, so it was not a problem. Once you turned the corner around the back side of the building, there were no lights back there whatsoever. It was completely dark. It didn’t really bother me because I had been around that building enough to know where I could walk, even if I couldn’t see very accurately. As I turned the corner and went out of the light and into the utter darkness, I’m walking down the pathway and all of the sudden I felt a spider web wrap around my face and this spider that I think was the size of a rat crawled up my face and into my hair. Some of you have the heebie-jeebies because you’ve had that happen to you before. I tell you what, man, I did a dance I’d never done before when that took place. It was something between a Michael Jackson and a Jackie Chan thing . . . and I’m not that afraid of spiders, until they are crawling across my face, I guess, because I just freaked out.

I would’ve never in a million years, if I was in a lighted place and could see that spider web and that bid gnarly dude in the middle of that web decide, “Hey, you know what? I think I’m going to go walk right into that with my face!” Because I could not see it, that is exactly what I did. That is the difference between light and darkness. Light reveals the truth. It shows you what is real; it shows you what is there. Darkness is just the opposite. Darkness hides the truth. It does not reveal to you what is true or what is there, so we are called to walk in the light because God is light.

We have the capacity, even though we are the light of the world, to hide that light. Jesus called His disciples, His followers, the light of the world, Matthew 5, “You are the light of the world,” but He went on to say, “Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lamp stand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.” In other words, He says it’s ridiculous, foolish, if you are going to turn a light on that you put that light underneath something that is going to cover what that light was intended to do, that is, to light up the room. Though we are the light of the world, we have the capacity to decide we’re going to hide that light, we’re going to cover it so it is not seen. Why would we do that? Maybe out of embarrassment, fear, the worry that in some way we will be persecuted for it or we would be looked down upon or rejected, so we decide that we are going to hide the light that is in us rather than show the light.

Let me tell you, we’re living in a time where our world is getting increasingly dark—things aren’t getting better, things are getting worse. God has seemingly been kicked out of schools, kicked out of government, and is being kicked out of just about any public arena that our society can figure out a way to kick Him out. The more that happens, the darker our world is going to get, which, if we are God’s people and we are walking in the light, we ought to shine brighter than we have ever shown before because light in the darkness cannot be hidden.

Right now, if I were to light a candle and stick it up here on this pulpit, you would be able to see it, but it’s not really going to draw a lot of your attention probably because there is adequate light in this entire sanctuary. If all of the lights in this sanctuary were extinguished and then I lit a candle, there’s not a single one of you that would not have your eyes drawn to that candle because it would be the only source in this room that you could see. In fact, you would begin to use the light of that single candle to navigate your way out of here because it is the only thing that is giving you any sort of compass or point of reference to where you are and where you need to get to. And so it is when we are walking in the light.

You’re God’s people, and when you’re in a dark world, you’re going to stick out like a sore thumb when you are walking in the light. There will be people that are going to be repulsed by that light. Jesus even said, “ . . . that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” There will always be that contingent, but understand this there’s going to be others that are drawn to that light. Because you have chosen to walk in the light, they will be drawn to it because you’re the only source that is showing the truth of what is real and what is right and what is good.

Christians, I believe, should be more visible today than they’ve ever been in this country because the darker the world gets, the lighter we should shine. Unfortunately, I think a lot of times the darker the world gets, the dimmer the church gets. We sometimes think that we’re going okay because we’re a little bit lighter than the world is itself. But we’re not called to be a little bit lighter than the world, we are called to, “ . . . walk in the light as He is in the light.” So, how is your walk in the light?

Our final peek is going to be at verse 15 where it says, “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, 16 redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” In my Bible, I’m using the New King James version, it tells us to “walk circumspectly.” If you have another version, it may say, “walk carefully.” It is describing the same concept, and I’ll explain a little bit, but I do like the word “circumspectly,” because it’s a compound word that brings two ideas together. “Circum” means around and “spect” means look. So, circumspectly means you are looking around. It is looking around to be aware of what is going on around you.

My wife and I just last week spent some time going on a hike together, and on this hike we had to cross a couple small rivers, maybe we call them creeks, but they’re full of water. We had to get from one side to the other. Well, how are we going to do that? We began looking for the rocks, the rocks that protruded above the waterline, and began to navigate our way across the creek by walking on these rocks. We had to note some things about these rocks. First, is it high enough where I’m not going to get wet? Secondly, is it stable enough where it’s not going to roll over? To do that, you have to walk circumspectly. You have to look around and figure out where am I going to step next. That’s kind of the concept that is being described here, that you’re walking very carefully through life. Each one of us is having to navigate our lives right now. More and more we’re having to be careful about how we step and where we step, being careful.

The passage goes on and tells us, “ . . . walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise.” I want you to understand the concept that the Bible is ascribing to us when it talks about a fool because we in our culture see a fool as someone who lacks intelligence. But that’s not really the biblical concept of what a fool or who a fool happens to be. In the Bible, foolishness really doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence level at all. It has much more to do with a person’s rejection of God and His instruction because Jesus contrasted the wise builder and the foolish builder. Both of them knew what Jesus said, but the fool did not put it into practice. He knew what was right but did not want to do it. He wanted to live his own way.

The book of Proverbs tells us in many places that the fool thinks that his way is the right way, so it’s not about not knowing, it’s about knowing and choosing your own way instead. We’re told not to walk that way, but we are to walk, “ . . . as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” I’ve already made reference to the days that we happen to be living in, and I think that when Paul mentioned that the days are evil, that was two thousand years ago. If things were bad then, things are bad now, too. If things are going to be this bad, and actually Scripture tells us and prophesied—foretold for us—that in the end times it would be getting worse and worse.

Jesus said in Matthew 24, “ . . . lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold.” Paul said in 2 Timothy, “For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money . . . blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, 3 unloving, unforgiving . . . without self-control . . . lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.” We may be asking ourselves, “Why doesn’t Jesus come back and just stop all this nonsense?” I’ll tell you the reason, because our job’s not done. There’s still a reason that the Lord has us here, and one of those reasons is that we are to redeem the time.

There are a couple of words here that I want to highlight because I think that they are important. The first is the word “redeem,” which simply means to rescue from loss; and the word “time” is not in reference to the unending series of moments of one right after the other, it’s actually a Greek word which referenced a certain segment of time—not just an unending amount of time, but a certain segment of time. You put those two concepts together and you get the idea that each one of us has been given a certain segment of time to be on this planet, the time we are to redeem or rescue from loss. We’re not to waste it; we’re not to lose it. We’re not to whittle it away in things that really don’t matter. When we’re told to, “ . . . walk circumspectly,” or carefully, we are to look around, be observant to what is happening in the world, and redeem the time that each of us has been given by God to make it useful for the purposes of His Kingdom so that those that are in darkness might see the light and as many as God wills would enter into the Kingdom of heaven.

I like the way the NIV translates this, verse 2. It says, “making the most of every opportunity.” Each of us is in that position. If we want to walk carefully, if we want to walk circumspectly, wisely, we need to take advantage of every opportunity that we are given. So, let me ask you, what are you doing with your time?

I would imagine that there are some of us with quite a bit of time on our hands, and when we have a lot of time sometimes we can get all caught up in just doing a whole lot of nothing. Do you remember that game show where a contestant was put into a glass booth and a fan was turned on. All this money is swirling around. They had sixty seconds to grab as much money as they could to shove into their pockets, and however much they were able to grab, that’s what they got to keep, right? So, they are frantic. They’re making use of every moment in that box to grab as much money as they possibly could.

We would consider a person foolish if when the fan went on and the clock started ticking, all they did was stand there and hold their pockets open hoping that something happened to fall inside. We would think, Well, that’s ridiculous. You’re not going to get much that way. Sometimes we do that with our time. We just figure we’ll just live out our life holding our pockets open and whatever falls in, falls in. Redeeming the time is not that. Redeeming the time is understanding God has given me a certain amount of time, I need to make use of that.

Others of us don’t have much time on our hands at all. In fact, our schedule is so packed with things that we are involved in, we feel like we have no time to do much at all. My question is, are you prioritizing the things that actually really matter because we can be busy people, but sometimes our busyness is on the things that really aren’t that important and we’re neglecting the things that are of much more value to the Lord. So, are you walking in wisdom?

I want to share a quick poem with you that an old Baptist minister wrote a long time ago. He titled it, “Just a Minute.”

I have only just a minute,
Only sixty seconds in it.
Forced upon me, can’t refuse it,
Didn’t seek it, didn’t choose it,
But it’s up to me to use it.
I must suffer if I lose it,
Give account if I abuse it,
Just a tiny little minute,
but eternity is in it.

We are living in troubled times, I believe, and our world is in the process of redefining reality. They’re redefining what is good, redefining what is right, redefining what is true. As we wrap this up I want you to look at verse 9 again because it says, “(for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth).” It mentions the very things that it seems that our world is trying to redefine—redefining what is good, redefining what is right, and redefining what is true. But if we are going to walk as believers like God wants us to walk, we will be imitators of God and we will in our generation show His goodness and make sure that it is seen by walking in love, make sure His truth is seen by walking in the light, and making sure His righteousness is seen by walking in wisdom. Amen?

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About Pastor Todd Lauderdale

I was born and raised in Southern California and gave my life to Christ when I was 16 years old after seeing the radical change in a high school friend who had become a Christian only a few months before. My life was transformed, and I have never looked back! I have been a Pastor since 1988, initially serving in middle school and high school ministries. For the last 20 years, my passion has been young adult ministry. Young adulthood is the time of life when people are making life-long decisions, like what they will do for a living, who they will marry, and the kind of person they will be. It is so important that Christ is the foundation on which they stand as they make these major decisions in life. I’m just grateful to God that He has allowed me to teach His Word to these young people!

Sermon Summary

Pastor Todd Lauderdale teaches a message through Ephesians 5:1-17 titled “Walk This Way.”

Pastor Photo

Pastor Todd Lauderdale

June 19, 2024