Ephesians five, verses 15 through 21.
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 word of the Lord is,
and do not get drunk with wine, for that is the battery.
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.
This church is almost 45 years old.
It's seen God do some incredible things.
There are some incredible seasons and stories we can talk about,
but I don't think it is hyperbole to say that the sermon series that began
this weekend, the one that we're beginning right now,
is one of the most important series in the history of this church,
not just because of what we're going to talk about,
but because of the direction it is charting for us.
One of my kind of mentors from the grave
is a British pastor named Charles Spurgeon.
He was a pastor and writer and preacher in the 19th century,
and one of his quotes that I really love is that Spurgeon said that every pastor
needs to have the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other hand.
And his point was that the job of a pastor
is to preach the truth of God's Word,
and that truth is true always.
All times, all cultures, all people,
regardless of what's going on in the world.
Truth is truth.
You got to preach and teach the Bible, but you teach
and preach those timeless things in a particular time.
When things are going on in the world and you're bringing that universal,
always true truth to bear on that particular time.
And season.
So for Spurgeon, for example, that meant preaching the truth of the gospel
and against slavery, which was dominant in his day,
preaching the Bible to the things happening in the newspaper,
it has increasingly become my conviction and my role here
as lead pastor, that God wants more of that from this church.
Teaching and preaching and singing and reading the Bible,
always without excuse, unapologetically and enthusiastically,
but also bringing that to bear on what's happening in our world
in an increasingly confused and chaotic world, we need to understand
how that universal truth shapes the way we think in our present moment.
This means two things for us as a church.
The first is you're just going to see more of that in podcasts or classes, sermons,
videos, more and more of us trying to help you hold on to truth and live
that truth out in this particular moment,
to regain some of that prophetic edge which says,
in the midst of a confused world, this is what God says is best.
What God says is right, what God wants from us.
The second thing this means is that you really need to be
a premier tonight on February 16th.
That's even why I'm dressed like a traffic cone this morning.
Okay. Because I really want you to be there.
You're going to see some things that are coming for our church,
not just about the immediate future, but then what's the next decade look like?
Really want you to make plans to be there.
This sermon series is in large part
laying the theological groundwork for what you're going to see on the 16th.
So you're learning now to get excited on that day.
But we're going to begin that sermon series here with some urgency.
We're calling the series Every Minute Matters, because when you become convinced
that God wants something from you as a church, you don't walk to that thing.
You run to it.
So if you have a Bible,
would you take it out and open it to Ephesians chapter five, your
your phone, your tablet, whatever device you have in your hands.
Hey, by the way, if you're here and you don't have a Bible or maybe
don't know your way around the Bible, we make Bibles available to you.
There'll be in the pew in front of you, here in this room
or in the back of the room over in East Hall.
They'll also be on the screen behind me.
But if you want to hold something in your hand, read it for yourself.
Grab one of these Bibles and today's reading is on page 919.
And as you're turning,
here's the outline I'm going to use to guide our time together.
Three points. Very simple.
And they go like this I want to teach you that time is not neutral.
Start
swimming and make sure everyone makes it to shore.
Time is not neutral.
Start swimming and make sure everyone makes it to shore.
All right, let me start with the first one.
Time is not neutral.
The writer
of Ephesians five says something really interesting
in the first couple of verses in our passage. Let me read them to you.
This is what it says.
Look careful then, how you walk,
not as unwise but as wise,
making the best use of the time,
because the days are evil.
That's an interesting phrase to me.
The days are evil.
It begs the question, what does he mean by that?
I guess I tend to think of time as neutral,
that the days are not good or bad.
A day is just a day. It becomes a good day.
If you fill it with good things, it becomes a bad day.
If you fill it with bad things, time is neutral.
It's up to us to decide what direction our day takes.
But that is not what the writer is saying.
He says the days are evil and he doesn't anchor
that in something happening in his particular moment.
He doesn't say, well, the days are evil because this political leader is in power,
or this world event is happening, or this catastrophe is taking place
where we could maybe say, well,
okay, the days are evil for him, but not so much for us.
He just says, hey, no matter where you live, no matter when you live,
no matter with whom you live, the days they are evil.
So what does he mean?
Well, when the Bible talks about evil, it really means two things.
This is really important for us.
I want to help you think of them.
So I'm going to say that when the Bible talks about evil, it
means Sauron and Saturday.
Here's what I mean.
Sauron is the bad guy and the Lord of the rings.
And the reason why I pick him is because it's become very popular in our culture
to make sure that when you make a book or a movie or a television show,
you show that the bad guy has reasons for being the bad guy.
They don't think of themselves as evil.
They have their own kind of narrative.
So Thanos, for example, in The Avengers,
he he doesn't think about himself as a genocidal maniac.
He thinks about himself as fixing the overpopulation problem of this planet.
So when he snaps his fingers in half, the people on Earth die.
He thinks he's a hero, not a villain.
And that's how we tend to write bad guys anymore.
But not talking in the Lord of the rings.
Sauron is just evil.
He just wants to oppress and dominate and destroy and kill
anything that gets in his way.
He has no inner monologue, he has no higher purpose.
He's just evil.
And the Bible is full of those kinds of stories.
That's because our world is full of those kinds of things.
Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus will tell the midwives
that if the Hebrew family has a baby boy, they should murder it.
Herod will say the
same thing in Matthew and Luke when he's trying to stamp out the Messiah.
If you find a Jewish child is a boy under the age of two, you need to kill him
so that hopefully I can show I can save myself from the challenge to my authority.
Heyman in the book of Esther, is plotting behind the scenes
to bring about the genocide of the Jewish people.
The world is full of evil.
The Bible is full of evil.
Evil is a reality.
But most of us don't deal with that kind of evil.
Now, some of you do.
Your police officers, your prosecutors, and God bless you.
I can't even imagine.
But for most of us, Sauron is not the kind of evil we encounter.
Instead, it's more the Saturday kind of evil.
Now, here's what I mean by that.
Look at what Jeremiah 213 says.
This is God speaking. Listen to this.
He says, for my people have committed two evils.
They have
forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns
for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.
God says at this particular time his people are evil.
But he doesn't mean Sauron.
He means Saturday.
He says,
they're not coming to me for the things they're supposed to come to me for.
They're going somewhere else.
They're not coming to me for comfort.
They're going somewhere else.
They're not coming to me for provision.
They're going somewhere else.
They're not coming to me
for guidance, for meaning, for purpose, for right, for wrong.
They're going somewhere else.
What he has in mind here is not so much a conscious, oppressive evil,
but a subconscious slow drift away from God.
The kind of drifting that happens on a regular day, on a Saturday.
You see, when the writer of Ephesians five
says the days are evil, what he means is that there is a steady
and slow undercurrent in every culture and in every time and in every place
that takes us slowly away from God.
That left to our own
devices, absent any kind of intentionality
or strategy, we always go to bed further from
God than we were when we woke up in the morning.
It's the steady, slow ebb of of
of culture and it's undercurrent.
In fact, I be so bold as to say this.
The biggest spiritual danger to most of our lives
and most of our families is autopilot.
It's the kind of drifting you do, the kind of living you do,
and you just get up and you you do the morning routine
and you go to you go to work, you go to school, you eat lunch, you
you work in the afternoon, you come home, you fix dinner,
you clean up, put the kids to bed, watch an hour of television and go to bed.
It's just a normal day, but it's a normal day.
The writer says.
That is evil and the evil that he's talking about is the drifting.
You do away from God.
In fact, the biggest spiritual enemy
for most of us might just be Netflix
because of the slow, distracting pull away from God.
This makes me think of when my family growing up
would go to the beach, and I was a really skinny kid.
Like, if I turned sideways, you couldn't see me very skinny.
And so when I would get in the ocean without really trying,
the undercurrent would take me half a mile down the beach,
just to drive my dad crazy because, you know, he's trying to relax.
It's his vacation.
His wife hits him and goes, Where's Zach?
And he looks up and I'm gone.
I mean, I'm gone.
And the thing was, I wasn't trying and it wasn't like a plan I had.
Hey, this summer I'm going to run away from home.
I'll just swim away,
I won't.
I wasn't trying to get away from my family.
I was just trying to have a good time in the ocean.
But the undercurrent was stronger than I was.
And so it would slowly, surely,
gradually pull me away.
Look at what the writer says.
He says the days are evil,
and then he actually names one of the ways the days are evil.
But it's interesting what he chooses.
Look at what he says in verse 18, he says,
and do not get drunk with wine,
for that is debauchery.
Why does he choose that?
Don't get drunk with wine.
Not even drunk, but drunk with wine.
Well, here's what I think he's saying.
Almost no one sets out to get drunk with wine.
You don't go to the grocery store, see your friend
buying a bottle of wine and say, hey man, do we need to talk?
That's just not what wine does.
Wine tends to accompany a celebration, a good meal, a family gathering.
Right?
What he has in mind is that you didn't set out to get drunk.
You just set out to relax.
But relaxing led to drifting.
Friends, how many nights
have you gone to bed saying, how did I do that again?
How many years do you end the year saying I thought I would be further.
How many new years do you begin saying, I've got to get right with God.
I've got to grow spiritually.
I've got to reconnect.
It's because time is not neutral.
Left to our own rhythms, our own autopilots,
we always drift away.
So what do we do?
Well, full disclosure I'm going to really press that ocean metaphor today.
Okay. Be ready for that.
So it's second we start swimming.
We start swimming.
The writer says, if you don't want time to to cause you to drift away from God.
Then you have to be intentional.
You have to be strategic.
Look at what he says. Let's begin in verse 15.
Look at the intentional strategic language.
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 with the will of the Lord is.
Do you hear the intentionality, the strategic thinking?
Look carefully.
Watch how you walk.
Be wise, not unwise.
Understand what the will of the Lord is.
What he's saying is that unless you and I decide to go
towards God, we will drift away.
Neutrality is a myth.
It's intentionality where it's death.
This makes me think of my dad because I guess he got tired of my mom
elbowing him at the beach.
So about the time I was 8 or 9,
as soon as we'd show up to the beach, he would take just me.
None of my siblings.
Just me, take me to the water, turn my back to the ocean.
And he would say, Zach, look at me.
Do you see that building there?
And I would look.
And he said, that's our hotel.
When you're in the water, you must be in front of this hotel.
If at any point you end up to the right of this hotel, you need to go left.
If you're left of this hotel, you need to go right.
Stop playing. Stop having fun.
Get in front of the hotel, then you can go back to having fun.
That was pretty much the talk.
That's exactly the way he gave it.
But the thing
is, I see wisdom in what he was saying.
It's the same wisdom that's here for us in this passage.
Three things that my dad was saying that this writer is saying that you and
I must do, if we don't want time to cause us to drift away from God.
Here's the first one.
You have to feel the current.
Brothers and sisters,
the current of culture is stronger than you.
It will change the way you think.
It will change what you think is good and what you think is bad.
What you think is right and what you think is wrong.
If you're wondering as a culture, how did we get here?
How did we become so confused?
How did we get to the place where we don't know such basic things?
The answer is day by day by day.
Days became weeks.
Weeks become months.
Months become years. Years become decades.
Decades become generational change.
If we're not aware of the current, we will never pursue intentionality.
Brothers and sisters, hear me?
How many friends have we seen drift away?
I've been a pastor for 20 years.
How many families have I seen drift away?
Not because they woke up one morning and said, you know what,
we don't do the whole God thing anymore.
It was just decision by decision.
That's how it works.
You have to feel the current.
The second thing, though, is you have to face the right direction.
My dad said, do you see the hotels act?
This is where you should be without knowing where you should be.
How do you know if you've drifted down the beach?
It's all sand.
What he was saying is this is how you know.
Look, the writer says, understand what the will of the Lord is.
Brothers and sisters, it breaks my heart.
Is a pastor that I know so many people who call themselves Christians,
Christians, followers of Jesus Christ,
but have no idea what Jesus says about sex
or money
or career, or right or wrong, or culture,
or your family, or your decisions.
But how in the world
can you know if you're drifting, if you don't know
where you actually should be?
So the writer is telling us that Jesus Christ, his person and his leadership,
his life is death, his resurrection, his kingship is our hotel on the beach.
He's our reference point.
We know the culture is taking us away from
God when it disagrees with him.
We have to feel its pull.
We have to face him, know who he is, know what he wants.
By the way, if you're here and you're not a Christian and maybe
going to church is part of your new year, new you, awesome.
Glad that you're here.
And I want you to understand that the whole idea of Christianity is this.
That God knows that time drifts you away.
He doesn't expect you to know how to not drift.
So he came to you in the person of Jesus Christ
who lived in our place, showing us what a non drifting life looks like.
We got so mad at him for it. We murdered him.
But that's okay
because that was part of God's plan to rescue us from our sin.
As Jesus took on our guilt, died as our atoning sacrifice, rose
from the dead, ascended into heaven, and promises forgiveness
for everyone who grabs hold of him.
Brothers and sisters, we have to feel the current.
We have to face the right direction.
And then third, you know, we have to force ourselves to move.
This is the whole point of Bible studies,
a podcast of sermons of small groups and circles, and everything we do here
is designed to help you see Jesus, hear
Jesus one Jesus, and move
to Jesus.
Ten minutes
of a quiet time in the morning is not sufficient
for 24 hours of cultural undertow.
It takes intentionality.
It takes movement.
It takes listening and hearing and obeying the voice of Jesus.
Otherwise, there's not a single one of us here in this room
who is incapable of drifting away.
Of course, there's enough there.
And just those two points for all of us.
But the writer won't leave it there, because it's not enough
that you and I would swim against the current.
The third thing he has for us is to say
we have to make sure everyone makes it to shore.
Look at what he says in the passage.
Verse 18.
He turns his attention away from the individual and on to the group.
He starts his one another in verse 18
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.
He says this two really powerful things that he sang.
The first is that no one is strong enough
to face the current of culture alone.
No one
says, hey, Zach, the only way you're going to make it,
even if you feel the current, even if you face the right direction,
even if you force yourself to move the only way you're going to make
it is if you have people around you who are singing to you, teaching you,
waving their hands on the beach, saying, zag, zig zag,
you're drifting away.
You might say, well, I don't want to be judgmental.
Well, let me ask you, if you showed up at my family's at the beach
and you see my dad on the sand going, Zach.
Would you say to him, you're so judgmental,
you should let Zach play in the ocean?
However, he feels?
No, because if I drift away, I die.
What do you think happens
when someone drifts away from God?
You need people still standing on the beach waving their arms.
Is why I'm telling you. I'm so glad you're here this morning.
You understand? I don't get commission.
Like if you show up at a Bible study this week, I don't get a bonus.
But you and I both know you.
We can help you a little bit here, but no one knows you.
Not here.
No one knows if you're drifting, you got to show up
to something else for that.
And you need it.
And I need it and we need it.
And then the second thing he says is that God will hold us accountable,
not only for our own spiritual growth, but for that of those around us.
Don't you see that in the passage?
And listen, everybody in this room is responsible for someone.
Parents.
You have children, spouses you have your spouse,
your coworkers, your neighbors, your friends, your colleagues.
Listen, what God is saying is seek is not just measured by the health
and enthusiasm and excitement and robustness of this one hour a week.
We are measured by how desperately we care
that everyone around us makes it.
And I could apply this to a million groups, but with the men's
summit on the horizon, let me just say this husbands
and fathers.
You will give an account to God,
not simply for whether you made it to shore,
but whether your children and your wife did as well.
Because they live in a culture that has after them.
We have to be saying to them,
face the right direction and move.
And not only that,
we have to do this with urgency.
Because people who drift, die,
and every single minute matters.
Let me pray for us, father God, thank you so much for this warning.
It's not fun to be warned.
But it is loving.
Help us to hear it.
In Jesus name we pray. Amen.