Sunday Sermon: What the Will of the Lord Is (Ephesians 5:15-21)

The Will of the Lord Is Revealed in Scripture

You are listening to the teaching ministry of Gabriel Hughes, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on this podcast, we feature 20 minutes of Bible study through a New Testament book.

On Thursday is a study in the Old Testament, and then we answer questions from the listeners on Friday. Each Sunday we are pleased to share our sermon series, presently going through the book of Ephesians.

Here's Pastor Gabe.

Ephesians chapter five, starting in verse 15, the Apostle Paul writing to the church in Ephesus, look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise, making the best use of the time because the days are evil.

Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not get drunk with wine for that is debauchery, but be filled with the spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Let us pray. Heavenly Father, as we open up your word and we read today about understanding what the will of the Lord is, I pray that you would illuminate that to us. We would come to understand your will, not by whatever subjective voice we might hear in our head, and we want to ascribe that to being the voice of God.

But we know that your will has been revealed to us in the pages of scripture. This is where you have spoken to us. This is how we know what your will is for our lives. And may this word be written upon our hearts and we walk in it and do what it says.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name and all God's people said, amen. Thank you. You may be seated. So this past Tuesday, I talked with the high school students at Bible Lunch Tuesday, and I want to encourage you to pray for that ministry.

Word has come to us that the school may be planning on closing lunches to the high schoolers and they would do that this year. We know that that's coming sometime in the future. At the very latest, it would be when they move the high school from this building to the new one that they're constructing on the west end of town.

So we know that sometime in the next couple of years, we would lose that ministry, BLT, anyway. But there's a possibility that could be closed to us even sooner than that if they do decide to close lunches this year.

So be in prayer again for that. For those of you who don't know, Bible Lunch Tuesday is a ministry we do because the high school is just right here. We invite high schoolers to come on over and eat a free lunch on Tuesday and we give them the word of God and we partner with another couple of churches in town that help us do that.

It is a ministry in which we minister to somewhere in the vicinity of 1 ,000 to 2 ,000 students per year. And there have been some years that have been so full, we've ministered to as many as 4 ,000 to 5 ,000 students in a single school year.

And that's nearly the entire number of students over at the high school. So it is a blessing to be able to do this ministry. It was started by Brian Jones about 20 years ago and we have continued doing it ever since.

So it's sad to us that we would have to lose this ministry, but again, pray that those kinds of ministry efforts are able to continue. As I talked to the high schoolers this past Tuesday, what I talked to them about was this verse here in Ephesians 5 .17,.

Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. There were two lunches, both with about an equal number of high school students in each lunch. And the first lunch was a little more responsive than the second lunch.

But I asked the students, can anybody tell me how we know what the will of the Lord is? Lizzie's apparently listening to a whole other sermon over there. How do we know what the will of the Lord is? And one student finally spoke up and said, we read the Bible.

It's exactly right. That is how we understand God's will. One of the things I caution the students on is that you will hear teachers who will stand up and say, here's how you hear God's voice. You sit, you pray, and you meditate, and God's going to speak to you through your mind.

Priscilla Shire, who's a very popular teacher, has a whole session that she does on how you can hear God's voice in your head and know that it is Him talking to you. One of the most popular Christian books ever written.

You see it down at Walmart. You've probably seen it even at a local gas station or truck stop. It's so prevalent. It's almost right there next to the King James Bible. Anytime that you go to some sort of religious section in a small bookstore.

It's a book called Jesus Calling, written by Sarah Young. Sarah Young claims that she sat at her table, and she even says in her testimony at the start of the book, if you look at the introduction of the book, she will say that she prayed regularly and she read her Bible regularly, but that wasn't enough.

That wasn't fulfilling to her. So she would pray and she would meditate and ask God to give her thoughts, and she would write down those thoughts, and she claims that that is Jesus speaking to her. When you read the book and you open it, it is the voice of Jesus speaking to you in first person.

That's the way that she has written Jesus Calling. This is not merely Sarah Young's opinion. She claims to have received the voice of Christ. The problem with that approach is Sarah Young is claiming to write scripture.

If she has heard the voice of Jesus and she has written it down, then she is saying, Jesus has spoken to me, and what he has said is every bit as authoritative as scripture. Another problem with that is that when you look at her words that she's written down in that book and you cross-reference them with what we have in the Bible, you find some contradictions, and the Lord is not going to contradict himself.

So we have to reject any such claims outright of anybody saying, the Lord has spoken to me, and here is what he has said. If someone ever says that to you, God has spoken to me, what should follow is a Bible verse, and if it's not, then what they're giving to you is some sort of subjective voice or vision that did not actually come from God.

God was very serious about this in scripture. In Deuteronomy 18, he says, if anybody comes to you with a word from God, then what they say better come true or they're what? A false prophet. And what does the Old Testament say should happen to a false prophet?

They should be put to death. I think that's why a lot of false prophets today don't really have a whole lot of fear about false prophecy. Though we don't live in some sort of theocracy where we would drag a false teacher out to the parking lot and stone him if he would claim to have a voice from God, which didn't really come from God.

The wages of sin is still death, Romans 6 .23. There will be a judgment for that if a false teacher does not repent of saying things on behalf of God that God did not actually say. When the Bible says, thus saith the Lord, it is the word of God.

And so what we come to understand as we enter into scripture today in Ephesians 5, verses 15 through 21, we look at this to understand what the will of the Lord is. And the will of God has been given to us in the pages of scripture.

I talked with you about this a little bit last week, how in Thessalonians, in 1 Thessalonians 4, and then again in chapter 5, the apostle Paul says, this is the will of Christ for you. The first time he says that you would not walk in sexual immorality.

And then the second time he gets to that in chapter 5, he says, this is the Lord's will for you in Christ Jesus, that you give thanks to God in all things. How do we know what the Lord's will is? It's what's written down in the Bible.

Let's look briefly at verses 15 through 21, and I'll do my exposition of this section and try to keep it concise and short. And then what I want to do after this, here's where I want to go after we digest and dissect these six verses that are in front of us here.

What I want to do is I want to teach you how to read the Bible and give you some basic points, some key things that we need to remember when it comes to reading and understanding what scripture says. Finally, I've been asked to provide a few resources that you could use that would help you in your understanding of scripture, and I provided those on the table in the back.

I'll go through those things with you as well as talk about the 40-day Bible reading plan that Dave has already plugged in our announcements this morning. First of all, let's look at the scripture together in Ephesians 5, verses 15 through 21.

The apostle Paul says, look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise. Remember what we're coming from. The way that we concluded last week was this prophecy, this prophetic utterance that comes from the Old Testament.

Therefore, it says, awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. All of us were once dead in our sins and our transgressions in which we once walked. The apostle Paul talked about that in Ephesians 2.

But in Christ, we have been raised to life. So we must no longer walk in darkness, but we must walk in the light of Christ. And Paul talked a little bit about what that looked like in the verses prior to that when it came to not having any part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.

We are to be children of light walking in the light of God's word, following the instructions that we have been given here. We live in a wicked and perverse generation in which the prince of the power of the air, Satan, is going out with his message and trying to woo you away from the call of God and the Holy Spirit through his word.

And instead, listening to the pattern of this world, instead listening to the messages and the philosophers of this age. And so to understand the difference between the voice of God and the voice of the enemy, we must look carefully then how we walk, not as unwise, but as wise.

And how do we come to that wisdom? We come to that wisdom through the word of God. In the book of Proverbs, we are told that a person who does not seek after wisdom, a person who hates reproof is actually a stupid man.

But the man who loves discipline loves knowledge. Proverbs 1 .7, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. So we keep that in mind when it comes to gaining wisdom.

We come to the word of God. Jumping back to verse 2 in Proverbs 1, to know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight, to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice, and equity, to give prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth.

Let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance. To understand a proverb and a saying, the words of the wise and their riddles. And we know those words have been given to us in the pages of scripture.

At the end of Ecclesiastes, this being Solomon, once again, talking about what man's ultimate priority is. This is in Ecclesiastes chapter 12, I'm on the wrong page here, just a moment. Verse 13, the end of the matter, all has been heard, fear God and keep His commandments.

For this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment with every secret thing, whether good or evil. So what is man's ultimate responsibility? Fear God and obey His commandments.

How do we know what God's commandments are? It's right here in the pages of scripture. And as we had also read in Proverbs chapter 1, fearing the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and wisdom. So look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise.

We gain knowledge and wisdom through the word of God. Verse 16, making the best use of the time because the days are evil. When should you read the Bible? Today, right now. Today is the day that you should open up the pages of scripture and read it.

You have the ESV Bible app open and you've hit the play button and that's the guy reading that back. Isn't that what that is? Yes. That's what I figured. That's wonderful. Thank you. So you could... That's a great illustration, Ms. Julie, because you could read the Bible that way.

You could have a Bible app with somebody reading the Bible to you as you drive in the car. So you're getting the word of God that way. Thank you so much for bringing that up, Julie. It was wonderful. Today is the day that we must open the pages of scripture and read it.

Again, because today is the day that is evil. And there are people in this wicked world who want to lead us in wicked ways under the influence of Satan. Now the apostle Paul instructs Timothy in 2 Timothy 2 .25 that we must correct opponents with gentleness for God may perhaps grant them repentance.

So we must not treat them with the same reviling that they might treat us, but with gentleness for the Lord has dealt with us gently. But the way you come to an understanding of God and His will and salvation that is in Christ Jesus is all according to the word of God.

Romans 1 .16, I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. So we get... Oh, I'm sorry. Verse 16, still in this instruction, making the best use of the time because the days are evil.

What I wanted to share with you here was how I failed to make the best use of the time. I was raised reading the Bible. And many of you know that. Some of you have heard my testimony. From the time that I could read, my dad was giving me reading assignments from the age of five and telling me, what book of the Bible do you want to start in?

And I liked the story of Moses and the burning bush and the parting of the Red Sea. So I said Exodus, little did I know I was picking the spot where we were starting and reading through the rest of the Bible from there on.

I should have picked Revelation. I don't know what I was thinking. But every single day, a part of my morning activities was I woke up in the morning, I got ready for the day, and I was supposed to read one chapter.

I started in Exodus chapter one. That was on a Monday. The next day, Tuesday morning, I read Exodus chapter two. The next day I read Exodus three. On and on that went. By the age of seven, I'd read through the entire Bible.

And then my dad started to teach me how to use Scripture to interpret Scripture. Well, you've read this in the Bible. Where have you seen that before? Well, I remember reading that also in this book. Right.

So then using that to see how the Holy Spirit has worked through men over history to reveal God's will through His prophets and His apostles, knowing that this is not just the word of man, but God worked through men to reveal what the Holy Spirit Himself says.

But a few years after that, I squandered that time that I could have been reading and studying the Bible and learning more from that. I instead indulged in the passions of my flesh, and I almost forgot the Bible entirely.

I was hardly reading it at all until I hit a crisis in my mid-twenties that caused me to fall on my face before God and realize just how much of my life I had been wasting on myself. And though I had been raised so well to know the word of God and even how to read it, I had been equipped with wonderful tools that most of my friends had never been equipped with.

Yet I squandered those opportunities and missed a lot of those years I could have been dedicating to the Lord and understanding His word. I did not go to seminary. My situation is very unique. It is different than most.

I was raised around the Bible, worked at Christian radio stations. I listened to Bible teachers all day long, Adrian Rogers, Chuck Swindoll, John MacArthur, Woodrow Kroll, Erwin Lutzer. These were some of the guys that used to teach me in just the place where I lived.

I listened to it every single day. So it's not that I did not receive any training at all, but when it came to living on my own, I squandered those opportunities that I should have been using and devoting myself to the Lord and to His word.

I'm grateful that He rescued me out of my sin. Myself and Becky and Sonia, just a couple of nights ago, we were talking about how I feared to think about what could have happened to me if I died in that chapter of my life, thinking about the kind of sin that I was living in.

But the Lord was gracious to me and did not let me perish. There's a verse in the Psalms that says, though I take my life into my own hands continually, I will not forget your word. And that spoke volumes to me, realizing that I had taken my life into my own hands.

But those tools that my parents had equipped me with when I was very young still stayed in my heart. Though I wasn't listening to it and I didn't want to follow it, it was still there and it protected me from doing worse things than I probably could have done.

So I'm grateful to the Lord for saving me. Take it from somebody who has wasted time. Make the best use of the time because the days are evil. Today is the day to read the Bible or plug in your Bible app in your car and listen to it while you drive.

Verse 17, therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. If you squander this time, if you do not read the word of God, do you grow in wisdom? No you languish in foolishness.

So do not be foolish. Understand what the will of the Lord is. As I said to you, I think it was either last week or the week before, it's a very common question that I get as a pastor, somebody coming to me and saying, Pastor Gabe, what is God's will for my life?

And oftentimes that question is loaded with flesh. I want to know where God wants me to move. I want to know what God's career is for me. I want to know what my spouse is going to look like, right? You're not going to have those answers for you in the Bible.

Instead, what you need to do is you need to take this word, have it written on your heart, live it according to what God has said, and whatever comes your way, whether that be any opportunity or any place you are going to live, whoever you marry, whatever your kids are like, you give glory to God in all of those things.

You be responsible in all of those areas and all of those avenues to commit yourself fully unto the Lord. My friends, I am fully aware as I stand up here this morning, some of you are in miserable marriages.

Don't think about what your spouse has to do for you. You think about what you need to do to commit yourself unto God. Some of you work horrible jobs and you're looking for a way out, some other job that might be somewhere down the road, something that's better than this.

I'm grateful that we work in a kind of a country where you can examine different job options and pick another job if you don't like the one that you have. But sometimes those opportunities aren't there and the doors are not open for you to be able to move to another place or take another job.

Wherever God has you and whatever He has you doing, be thankful for it. Be grateful to God. Do your best and work for the Lord first and not for men. As it says in Colossians 3, you work for God first.

Be grateful for all that you have. For we have been given salvation in Jesus Christ, the forgiveness of sins. If you have that, my friends, whatever you could have on this earth doesn't even compare to the glory that awaits us in the Lord.

Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what God's will is for you, the way He wants you to walk in holiness, pursuing godliness and righteousness in the present time. Do not get drunk with wine for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit.

I'm actually going to come back to this again, even as we get to talking about wives and husbands and children, obey your parents and the Lord, which is Ephesians 6 .1. Because I want to show you the contrast that exists here, but that will be a little bit later on.

In the meantime, here's what we have, verses 18 and 19. Do not get drunk with wine for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart.

Here is what Paul is saying here. Do not devote yourselves to things that would satisfy your flesh for a season, but then ultimately leave you empty. Devote yourself fully unto Christ, be filled with His Spirit, and you will never be empty.

Do not get drunk with wine for that is debauchery. You lose your senses, you lose your faculties, you devote yourself over to stupidity, but instead be filled with the Spirit, soundness of mind, focus upon the Lord, understanding His will according to the scriptures.

When we read, do not get drunk with wine for that is debauchery, don't be so legalistic to read that as just wine, as long as I'm not drinking wine, drink some hard liquor, that one's okay, at least I'm not getting drunk on wine.

It's any kind of substance that would lead to that, any kind of drug that would numb your senses, any kind of thing that would make you intoxicated. That's what this is speaking against. A friend of mine, his name is Alan, was recently on a podcast sharing his story about how he used to walk the life of a Christian, it looked like a Christian on the outside to everybody, but inside he was abusing drugs and was making it seem like he was this good Christian guy but had these deep, dark secrets in his closet he didn't want anybody to know.

And he said this about his drug addiction, he said, every time you take a substance, you're really just chasing that first high that you got the very first time you tried it and you never actually get there, which is why you need to take more and more of it to try to match the high you got the first time.

And then that doesn't work, so you take more and more and more of it and it still never matches that feeling that you had, that euphoria that came upon you that first time that you had taken this substance and it had dumbed your mind.

None of those things are ever going to satisfy the flesh. There might be a season, a time in which it feels good. Ultimately those things will destroy us if we don't repent of them. So do not get drunk with those temporary things that ultimately lead to no fulfillment.

It leads instead to debauchery. Instead we must be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart. There's a nature to this that is talking about understanding the will of God in community.

We don't just try to understand these things on our own, but as brothers and sisters in the Lord, we're helping one another to understand what the will of the Lord is. As it says in the book of Proverbs, there is wisdom in many counselors.

Does the Bible tell you where you should live and what job you should have and who you should be married to? No, it doesn't say that to you, but you can talk to somebody to give you wisdom and insight and help you to understand what you should do with your life.

There is wisdom with many counselors. We see the community that exists within the church that Paul is laying out before the Ephesians here, and I'm going to talk about that a little bit more in a moment.

Verse 20, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I said to you recently that the reason why we give into sin is because we are unthankful. We're essentially saying to God, what you have for me is not good enough.

I need this other thing in order to be satisfied. And so it is a person with an ungrateful heart that gives into the passions of their flesh. But if we are filled with thanksgiving, we have nothing to fear of those temptations.

We have nothing to fear of anybody who would come our way with a false message from a false prophet or the philosopher of this age. For if we have committed to ourselves the reading of the word of God and have that written upon our hearts, we know exactly what the will of the Lord is, and there's no one that can lead us astray from it.

And we help one another in the body of Christ. We help to protect one another from temptation and from false teaching. We read about that in Ephesians chapter four. So we would not be tossed to and fro by the waves and the winds of every shifting doctrine, but instead we would be sound in our understanding of God's will for our lives, according to his scriptures.

We read this in Philippians 4, 4. Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.

And the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. I so appreciate what Julie shared about her brother this morning. And I hope that you heard it also.

Julie recognizing that her brother is about to die, but did you not hear the thankfulness in the testimony that she shared? That when he goes from this life to be with our Lord in the next, he will have something far, far greater than what he's suffering through now.

Even when we encounter tragedies of this kind, we can still have a thankfulness in our hearts. And when we present our requests to God, we do it not with anxiety, but with thanksgiving. Everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.

And the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. It's in the pages of scripture that we know the peace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Finally, submitting to one another out of reverence to Christ. We should honor and respect and revere each other because we honor and respect and revere our Lord. It is what he has asked of us that you love your neighbor as yourself, for this is the fulfilling of the law.

That is a command from the Bible and it's how we know how we are to live in this way in submission and reverence to one another, out of our submission and reverence to Christ. So there is our exposition of Ephesians chapter five, verses 15 through 21.

And next week when we pick up in our study of Ephesians, we're going to be talking about wives and husbands, that oh so controversial section, wives submit to your own husbands. Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church.

But as we continue to talk today about understanding the will of the Lord, a request that has come up to us over and over again and seems to be more prevalent in recent days than it has been in previous years.

The question has come, how do I read my Bible? This is a question that has been raised with the women's group that meets on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month. It was asked of me that I provide a few resources and I have those on the table in the back and I'll read what those are for you in a moment.

And you're welcome at the end of service to pick up those books and take a look at them. But first I want to give you six keys to reading and understanding the Bible. And these six keys are provided to us by Conrad Mbewe.

He is the pastor of Gowada Baptist Church in Zambia, Africa. And this is also where Vodie Bakum has worked and has been teaching for the last several years. Pastor Conrad gives us six keys to reading and understanding the Bible, spiritual, contextual, Christ-centered, reverent, communal, and repeated.

So when it comes to reading the Bible, these are your six keys to remember. I'll walk through these with you again. Number one, spiritual. Pastor Conrad says, to understand what is written, we must have our eyes opened by the Holy Spirit.

See, anybody can read this Bible. Anybody can pick it up and read it. It's words on a page. And there's a very simple answer to this question, how do I read my Bible? Well, you open it, you start there, and then you go to the right.

And then when you get to the end of that line, you go down to the next line and you read across just like you would read a book. That's how you read your Bible. But we understand that this book is 750 ,000 words.

It's a pretty big book. You can forget parts of it when you get to other parts of it. So how do we richly glean this information and have it written upon our hearts that we may understand what the will of the Lord is?

Anybody can pick up and read black and white words on a page, but it is only by the Spirit of God that we are able to understand those words on the page. Second Peter 121 says that these words were not written by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

In 2 Timothy 3 .16, Paul says all Scripture is breathed out by God. So this is God's Word. And in 1 Timothy 2 .14, the apostle Paul says that the natural person cannot accept the things of the Spirit of God.

They are folly to him and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. And Paul lays out in that same chapter how if we have the Spirit of God, the Spirit tells us the will of God according to what is in Scripture.

Romans 8 .7 says that the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God. So if we're set on the flesh, we cannot understand these words and they have no meaning to us. It would be as significant as any other kind of book or a collection of myths or fables.

That's the way the natural man reads the Bible. But the spiritual man understands this is God's authoritative Word. And it sits over every person, whether they submit to that Word or not. Psalm 119 .18, open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.

In Matthew 21 .22, Jesus says, whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive if you have faith. Do you not understand the Word of God? Ask of God and He will give you understanding. James 1 .5, if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God who gives generously to all without reproach.

And Jesus says again in Luke 11 .10, for everyone who receives, everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and the one who knocks, the door will be opened. So number one, we understand the Bible through spiritual means.

We need to understand that key to understanding the text. Secondly, contextual. Here's what Pastor Conrad says, we also need to have a growing knowledge of the text and the times in which it was written.

Consider the literature that we are reading. When you open up a book of the Bible and read it, what is the form of literature? Like for example, the Psalms or poetry, right? The book of Revelation, that's apocalyptic literature.

You're actually going to read that differently than you might read the Psalms or Genesis or even Matthew. The gospels are all historical, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Right now I'm teaching through Acts on the podcast and also doing that with our youth on Wednesday night.

The book of Acts is what? It's an adventure story. You see these wonderful adventures that are happening as the apostles are going out and sharing the gospel of Christ. There's a sharing of the gospel, there is a miracle that will be performed, there's persecution that comes upon them, and then there's the deliverance of God as he rescues his own out of persecution.