The Text: Ephesians 5:1-20
Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. But immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is fitting among saints. Let there be no filthiness, nor silly talk, nor levity, which are not fitting; but instead let there be thanksgiving.
Be sure of this, that no immoral or impure man, or one who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for it is because of these things that the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not associate with them.
For once 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 learn what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is a shame 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 is said, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.”
Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most 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 all your heart, always and for everything giving thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father.
Introduction: Sit, Walk, Stand
Pawson begins with the great milestones of a child’s growth: birth, then talking, and then — perhaps most thrilling of all — the first faltering steps of walking, the parent holding back though longing to hold the child steady. The same is true spiritually. It is thrilling when a soul is born again; it is even more thrilling when that new believer begins to walk. To walk means simply to take one step after another in the right direction. Walking is not spectacular, but it is healthy, and most of us can walk further than we can run.
Pawson references Watchman Nee’s study of Ephesians, titled Sit, Walk, Stand — the three things Paul calls believers to in this letter. In chapter 1, God has made us sit with Christ in the heavenly places; that is where we sit spiritually, even while our bodies remain on earth. Later, in chapter 6, believers are called to stand in the day of battle. But in between, in this passage, the word walk occurs repeatedly — in verse 2, walk in love; in verse 8, walk as children of light; in verse 15, walk not as unwise men but as wise.
Two temptations threaten the Christian at this stage. The first is simply to keep sitting and go nowhere — safe in heaven, perhaps, but making no progress. The second, especially among younger Christians, is the urge to run before learning to walk — to attempt something spectacular for God rather than the steady, unspectacular business of walking forward one step at a time.
Three principles govern a good Christian walk, Pawson says: imitation, illumination, and intoxication.
First Principle: Imitation
Most of what we learn in life, we learn by imitating others. Children imitate their elders; teenagers imitate their contemporaries; we are all, in one way or another, mimics. The Greek word Paul uses here is literally mimic — be mimics of God. The real question is not whether we will imitate someone, but whom. Paul’s instruction is to set our sights on the very highest person we know, and imitate him rather than other people.
The danger of imitating others is that we end up imitating what Paul calls the sons of disobedience — and sooner or later we find ourselves disobeying God simply because others do. Pawson works through two sets of three ugly words Paul uses to describe this drift.
Three Words of Self-Indulgence
Immorality, impurity, and covetousness. Immorality, Pawson explains, literally means sex outside marriage — but its root meaning is to sell, to treat people as things, as commodities to be bought and sold. He notes how much slang for the opposite sex still does exactly this — calling a girl a bird, for instance, reduces her to a creature rather than a person. Impurity needs no definition: it simply means dirt. Covetousness, which Phillips translates as grabbing anything you want, or the itch to get your hands on what belongs to others.
Why does Paul link these three together? Because all three spring from the same root: self-indulgence, the desire to grab, to get, to be greedy for what I want.
Three Words About Talk
Filthiness, silly talk, and levity — which Kenneth Taylor renders as dirty stories, foul talk, and coarse jokes. Paul moves to this second list because most people do not begin by doing these things, but by talking and joking about them first. Long before wrongdoing happens, Pawson notes, it is usually first rehearsed in conversation and laughter — something he recalls clearly from his own schooldays.
Paul warns against being deceived by clever, plausible arguments that these things carry no real cost. Pawson quotes Billy Graham’s observation that the new morality is simply the old immorality dressed up. Two things are affected by this pattern of life: our future, and our Father. For the unbeliever, there is no inheritance in the kingdom of God; for the believer, there is no reward. Either way, something real is lost. And it grieves our Father — it is because of these things, Paul says plainly, that the wrath of God comes on the sons of disobedience.
The Alternative: Imitating God
If we imitate God instead, the outcome is a life of love rather than disobedience. Just as the three words of self-indulgence share the desire to grab and get, imitating God reverses that entirely: no longer getting, but giving; no longer selfishness, but sacrifice. God is not a God who grabs — he is a God who gives, who asks not what he can take but what he can give, even to the point of giving his only Son.
Pawson draws attention to the phrase as beloved children. The more a child is loved, the more that child will naturally imitate the one who loves them — a boy walking beside a father he loves will unconsciously lengthen his stride to match his father’s, just as another boy, wanting to impress an older crowd, will cough through his first cigarette trying to seem grown up. Imitation flows from love. And Paul adds a striking image: walking in love makes a Christian, like Christ, a fragrant offering to God — for God has a sense of smell, and loves a sweet smell.
Second Principle: Illumination
To walk properly, you must walk in the light. Pawson recalls someone who tried walking in the dark the previous night and walked straight through the church’s front door, leaving broken glass as evidence — unhurt, but a vivid reminder that darkness makes for a dangerous path.
Most of us, walking in complete darkness, tend to walk in circles — one leg is usually stronger than the other, and without light to correct our course, we simply go round and round. Pawson tells of a minister in the Shetland Islands who went out in a snowstorm decades earlier and walked in circles for three hours before being found, convinced the whole time that he was heading somewhere.
Paul draws a sharp line between good and light, evil and darkness — and notes, tellingly, that most sin happens at night, because people who do evil prefer darkness to light. Crucially, Paul does not say believers were once in darkness and are now in light — he says they were darkness, and now they are light. Every person, Pawson says, is either making the world a darker place or a lighter one; there is no neutral ground.
Two Things About Darkness
Darkness is unfruitful — it produces nothing; a garden needs light, not darkness, to bring forth fruit. And darkness is unmentionable — its deeds are things too shameful even to speak of, unlike the works of light, which can be freely discussed.
Living at Home in Daylight
Pawson favours the New English Bible’s rendering: live like men who are at home in daylight. Some people, hungover from the night before, can barely face the morning sun and simply endure the daylight hours until darkness returns and they can resume their real life. To be at home in the light is to be fruitful — producing what is good and right and true, just as a plant needs sunlight to bear fruit.
What Light Does to Darkness
Given that light and darkness exist side by side in this world, what is the right relationship between them? Paul gives two instructions: one thing not to do, one thing to do.
First, do not associate with those in darkness — not meaning no contact at all (no one would ever be won to Christ that way), but no regular company, no habitual companionship. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians are blunt: bad company ruins good morals. A Christian may go among the darkness with the best of motives — hoping to win others, to influence them for good — but regular company with darkness leaves a person exposed to more than they can bear. Contact, yes; company, no. And Pawson stresses how much a Christian’s company shapes whether they live in light or darkness — hence the real importance of spending substantial time among other believers.
Second — and here Pawson is careful about translation — rather than rebuke or reprove them (as some older translations render it, leading some Christians into what he considers a misguided ministry of confrontation), the word is expose. Paul is not calling believers to loudly protest or lecture outsiders; he is talking about light reaching the eye, not the ear — about lives, not lips. If something is happening secretly in darkness, the only thing needed is to switch on a light; nothing needs to be said. Pawson quotes the saying, I’d rather light a candle than curse the darkness.
Believers have no light of their own, but light has a peculiar quality: anything it strikes becomes light itself. Pawson illustrates this with the moon — a lifeless ball of rock and dust with no light of its own, yet able to shine brightly on earth simply by reflecting the sun. Some Pacific islanders, he notes, once worshipped the moon rather than the sun, reasoning that the moon appeared exactly when its light was needed at night — never realising the moon’s light was entirely borrowed. Christians are to the sun (Christ) exactly what the moon is to the earth: reflecting a light that is not their own.
Paul quotes what appears to be an early Christian hymn, likely sung at baptisms: “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.” Wake up, don’t remain a sleepy or spiritually dead Christian — let Christ’s light shine on you, and it will reflect into your surroundings, exposing the world’s darkness without a word needing to be said. Pawson’s conclusion: Britain doesn’t need more Christians shouting. It needs more Christians shining.
Third Principle: Intoxication
To walk straight, Pawson says provocatively, you need to get intoxicated — not with alcohol, but with God. Paul’s instruction is precise: do not get drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit. Pawson recalls a preacher named Welsh who opened a sermon on this text with the line: you’ve got to fill a man with something.
He illustrates this with a stubborn baptistery pump that would not work no matter what was tried, until an expert explained that the pump was simply full of air and needed priming with water before it could function properly. People are the same — full of air, in need of being filled with something real before they can truly come alive.
This, Pawson suggests, is exactly why so many turn to drink or drugs: they sense they lack the resources for life within themselves, and reach for some external stimulus to feel filled. In Paul’s day, alcohol was the main available means; in ours, drugs have joined it. Pawson recalls a northern English saying that getting drunk was the quickest way out of a grim industrial city on a Saturday night — an honest, if misguided, attempt to escape oneself.
The Word Is Dissipation
Paul’s word for this — often translated debauchery — is closer to dissipation: wastefulness, throwing life away carelessly and recklessly. Pawson mentions a film about alcoholism titled Lost Weekend — a fitting title, because that is precisely what is lost: time that can never be recovered. The same word, he notes, describes the prodigal son’s riotous living in Luke 15 (misheard, famously, by one Sunday school boy as “righteous living”) — the son wasted his inheritance and, with it, months of his life he could never reclaim.
Wise, Not Foolish
Instead of wasting life this way, Paul calls believers to be wise — to recognise that the days are evil and must be actively rescued for good, redeeming the time as one would buy back something valuable before it is lost. Wisdom also means seeking God’s will: God has planned out each life in exactly the right length to fulfil his purpose for it — long enough to accomplish everything intended, too short to waste any of it.
Filled with the Spirit
Pawson shares, with evident delight, a compliment paid to the church’s new building that week: someone said the atmosphere was just like a public house — full of people, relaxed, happy, singing, in genuine fellowship. Far from being offended, Pawson took it as one of the finest things said about the building all week. He has heard from men who preferred the pub to church precisely because church felt cold, silent, and uncomfortable, everyone facing forward and no one talking. He wants the church to be a public house in the truest sense — a place where, filled with the Spirit rather than wine, tongues are loosened, feelings released, and song comes naturally, without anyone losing control of themselves in the process.
He recalls John Wesley’s ambition: give me a hundred men who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I will set the world on fire — Pawson paraphrasing it as a longing for God-intoxicated men. The tragedy, he suggests, is that many Christians have never truly been drunk with the Lord in this sense, leaving a cold, arid, joyless kind of Christian life that drives people toward the pub in search of the very fellowship the church should offer.
Three Kinds of Song
Paul names three sorts of song available to believers: psalms, the ancient Jewish songs that remain precious to Christians; hymns, Christian songs composed by believers through history; and spiritual songs — a unique category, not composed by human hand at all, but given directly by God, words and music together, through inspiration. Pawson recalls hearing such songs at a cathedral gathering the previous July, and looks forward to the day such spontaneous songs might be sung in his own congregation.
True Christian song must begin deep down — in the heart, not merely the mouth, throat, or lungs — making melody in your heart, as Paul puts it. And it has two directions: to God, but also addressing one another. Pawson points out that many familiar hymns are not, in fact, addressed to God at all, but to fellow believers — when singing “walk in the light, and thou shalt know”, we are not instructing God to walk in the light, but reminding the person standing next to us.
And what should the content of that song be? Paul’s answer: give thanks always and for everything. That, Pawson says, is enough to sing about for a lifetime. He draws a sharp contrast with the popular songs of his own era, saturated with frustration, despair, dissatisfaction, and complaint — songs that speak honestly to the sadness many feel about the world, but which are not, and were never meant to be, the pattern for Christian song. Thanksgiving is.
Pawson closes with a simple, practical observation: it is impossible to be thankful and covetous at the very same moment. The two cannot coexist. So the next time envy or covetousness begins to take hold, he suggests trying something very direct: sing a hymn of thanks, and see what happens. As lips fill with thanksgiving and praise, the wrong things — darkness, disobedience, dissipation — begin, quite naturally, to filter out of the mind.
© David Pawson Ministry CIO
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© David Pawson Ministry — Transcript prepared for Koinonia.nu | koinonia.nu