Be Imitators, Ephesians 4:25-5:2

In this sermon, Pastor Aaron Shamp discusses the themes of Christian morality and how it is lived out in relationships. He emphasizes the importance of rejecting self-centeredness and embracing righteousness in our interactions with others. Pastor Aaron also highlights the need to imitate God and Christ in our actions, following their example of selfless sacrifice. He reminds listeners that Christian morality is not based on personal beliefs or societal standards but on a solid foundation of Christian theology. Ultimately, Pastor Aaron encourages individuals to actively pursue obedience to God and allow the gospel to transform their hearts and communities.

Takeaways

• Christian morality is lived out in relationships and cannot be developed or practiced in isolation.
• Rejecting self-centeredness and embracing righteousness is essential in our interactions with others.
• Christian morality is based on imitating God and Christ, following their example of selfless sacrifice.
• Our obedience to God is motivated by a solid foundation of Christian theology, not personal beliefs or societal standards.
• The gospel has the power to transform our hearts and communities, leading to a distinctly Christian way of living.

Chapters
00:00 Continuing the Series: In God's Household
02:15 Applying the Gospel to Lifestyles and Relationships
10:19 Putting Off and Putting On
20:20 Imitating God and Christ in Our Moral Conduct
27:50 The Transformative Power of the Gospel in Shaping Moral Behavior

Creators & Guests

Host

Aaron Shamp

Lead Pastor of Redeemer City Church

What is Redeemer City Church - Lafayette, LA?

Pastor Aaron Shamp preaches about the Gospel and facets of Christianity at Redeemer City Church. These podcasts are his sermons.

Aaron Shamp (00:00)
So chapter four, verse 25, Paul writes, therefore, putting away lying, speak the truth, each one to his neighbor, because we are members of one another. Be angry and do not sin.

Don't let the sun go down on your anger and don't give the devil an opportunity. Let the thief no longer steal. Instead, he is to do honest work with his own hands so that he has something to share with anyone in need. No foul language should come from your mouth, but only what is good for building up someone in need so that it gives grace to those who hear. And don't grieve God's Holy Spirit. You are sealed by him for the day of redemption.

Let all bitterness, anger, and wrath, shouting and slander, be removed from you, along with malice. And be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ. Therefore, be imitators of God, as dearly loved children, and walk in love as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us. A sacrificial and fragrant offering to God.

So we're continuing this series looking at the letter to the Ephesians. And what we're doing in this series is we are looking at how Paul moves from explaining the gospel in the first half of the book and what God has done to redeem mankind and to restore the world to himself. And then how he moves in chapter four from explaining how what God has done to the gospel makes an actual difference in our lives. It makes a difference in our lifestyles. Christians will look different than the world around them. But this is not something that is

individualistic, like, you know, I'm going to be very pious and holy and that has no effect on my relationships or on my work or my home. No, in fact, Paul's going to apply the gospel to all those things to show how there is a distinctly Christian way to live with our personal ethics, but also a way to form our households, a way to establish our relationships and our marriages and our relationship with our children and our relationships at work and so on.

So in other words, you can look at it this way. God in the gospel has established his household in what Jesus Christ has accomplished on the cross. And now that shapes the way that we form our households and our relationships. We're doing this because at Redeemer we desire to have...

a community of people with distinctly Christian households because we want the gospel to be something not that we just hear on Sundays and then move on from, but we want it to be something that shapes our whole life. Okay? And so that's what we're doing in this series. And we come to this passage here in the end of chapter four, beginning of chapter five, and this passage, along with one that we covered last week, could be its own series in and of itself, right? We could do 15 to 16 weeks just in this passage because...

because it is very, very dense with what Paul is teaching here. Unfortunately, we're not going to go into all the details today because my goal, once again, going back to what I was saying before, is to see the overarching message, to see the flow of it. And so what I'm going to do today, instead of going into a lot of detail about each one of these commands and expectations that Paul gives, I want to help you guys see a couple of themes that holds all of them together. Okay, so that's what we're going to be looking at today, is three themes that holds

this section of verses together and what Paul is commanding here. What he's doing is he's moving from this lofty theological teaching on Christian transformation. That's what we looked at last week, how God has called us to transformation. It was very theological, but now he moves into a very nitty gritty practical teaching on Christian morality, right?

And so we're going to look at the big themes that hold that section together. All right. So let's begin with by looking at the first one here and let's just reflect that it took Paul nearly four full chapters to get to this point.

to get to the point to where he said, here's how you should live. You should not do this. You should do this. You should not do this. You should do this. This is what you ought to strive for. This is your goal, to get down to the really practical, right? It took him nearly four complete chapters. We can say three and a half to three and two thirds, maybe chapters of him going through all this theology, all of these, like I said, very lofty ideas, these very heady ideas that were at times difficult to grasp, just to get down to the, okay, here's what you do with your life.

And I think that we often want to skip all the lofty stuff, all the really heady stuff, just like get down to telling me what to do, right? Show me, give me something that I can use here, right? Now, there's nothing wrong with that. Like we do want to move everything to action, right? But let's just reflect. It took Paul all that time to build a foundation for this teaching to rest upon.

Paul did not want to give us Christian morality as something that just hangs in the air, but he wanted it to be founded upon the foundation, established upon the foundation of a solid Christian theology. And so if I can digress for a moment, I want to point out before I get into the first theme is that morality is always based upon a theology.

Morality will always be based upon a theology. In other words, the way that we will behave is always based upon what we believe. This is why Paul needs to take all that time, spill all those words to lay out clearly what we believe because what we believe will determine how we behave. You see, if you do not have a Christian theology determining your morality, a Christian belief influencing your behavior, you're gonna have something else.

If it's not a Christian theology, it might be a non -Christian theology. It might be a secular theology. If it is not thoroughly Christian belief, then it might be other beliefs. If it is not Christian values and assumptions, then it will be other values and assumptions. We are living in a time.

where for the past several decades and maybe up to a century, people have believed that we can learn, that we can live well without doctrine, that we can build a moral society that is filled with harmony, that is good without all that dogma, without all of the belief. And so, the idea was we're going to take all of that arguing over theology, philosophy, you know, the big questions of life, we're going to take it out of the

public square because all it does is divide. All it does is create arguments and we're just going to be good to one another. This is the experiment that our Western society has been on and that was given to us and that we've been trying to work out. But you see what happens is it's impossible to just remove any belief. If you remove Christian belief, something else is going to take its place.

This is obvious whenever we apply it to Christianity. It's obvious whenever we apply it with the example of other religions and Islamic theology.

will lead to Muslim ethics, right? This is obvious. But the same thing is true with non -theologies, you might say, such as atheism. Atheism will lead to a moralism, because if there is no final judge, if there is no final standard, then everyone can just do whatever is right in their eyes. Or the most powerful person in society will enforce whatever is right in their eyes upon the rest. This is inevitable. This is what happens time and time and time again in every society through our human history.

that has attempted it. In our case, we do not have that...

an atheistic theology that is driving our society as much as another theology called expressive individualism. Expressive individualism is a deification of the self. It doesn't look to big standards outside of the self to determine what is right and wrong and to answer the ultimate questions of life. Instead, it's relativistic. Instead of looking outside of the self, it says look inside of yourself. Look inside yourself and figure out what is most true about you.

and yourself, what is it that makes you you? And then by expressing that individualism that you have, hence the term, right? Then by expressing who you are, it will lead to a good life. It says that whatever you think, whatever you feel, whatever you wanna express is right. You see, that's a theology. It's a deification of the self leading to what? Chaos.

expressive individualism leads to moral chaos because you see in America we no longer have, we're no longer one nation under one God. We're not even a nation under two or three gods. We are a nation under 330, how many are there? Million, almost a billion, 330 million gods.

all these individuals running around trying to figure out what's most true to themselves so they can express it, have others affirm it, and then that is what is the good life, that is what is right, that is what is righteous. Whenever you look around at our society today and you see the divisions, you see the strife, you see the arguing, the chaos, it is because we have embraced a theology that brought us to this point. Therefore, the way to get back to,

You know, the way out of chaos and into clarity is going to be by re -embracing a Christian theology. Because moral chaos and relativism does not produce a harmonious, tolerant society. This is the lie that was sold to us and it does not produce that. Rather, it tends toward social decay. Just look around you for the evidence. And this leads to my first point.

that what we believe will shape our behavior and that how we behave and the morality that we embrace will lead to either a flourishing society or a one of societal decay. The first thing that holds all of the exhortations that Paul gave us in this passage, one of the things that holds them all together is that they are all worked out in relationships. So the first theme is this, Christian morality is lived out in relationships. It is impossible to develop and live out a

a thoroughly Christian ethic, right, to grow in Christian ethics, to grow in Christian morality in isolation. You can't do it.

Right? No matter how good, no matter how holy, no matter how peaceful you might feel as an individual, whenever you're alone in your house or you're alone in your vehicle, as soon as you encounter another human being, all those things are typically threatened. That peace that you have, you know, parents in here, how many of you have ever like woken up before your children and the house is quiet and serene and lovely and you have coffee and so on. And then as soon as one of those little human beings enters into that space, it's all

It's all gone, right? And now it's chaos. That peace that you once felt and just, man, I can feel the presence of God in this passage here. That peace you had, it is now out the window and that peace is threatened as you're trying to deal with this other person. The same thing is true not just with our kids, same thing is true in our church relationships. It's really easy to feel like a great Christian until you have to live it out with other believers.

with other sinful people, with other people who are holding all kinds of incorrect ideas, with people who have baggage, just like you. All of a sudden it gets really difficult. But this is how it works. Christian morality is lived out in relationships.

This is why, look back over the list again, whenever Paul gives us all these exhortations about speaking the truth, about rejecting sinful anger, about all these different things, it's all in the context of relationships. Speak the truth to one another, right? Let the thief no longer steal, but to do honest work with his own hands so that he can share with people who have need. What's the point of not speaking with foul language so that you might instead speak language that builds others up?

Relationships is the context that all of these things are in. John Stott, the great scholar John Stott said, holiness is not a mystical condition experienced in relation to God, but in isolation from human beings. You cannot be good in a vacuum, but only in the real world of people.

Besides, all the qualities enjoined here are aspects of the unity in the church, which it is Paul's primary concern to elucidate and to foster. To this matter, he deliberately gives pride of place to this issue. The evils to be avoided are all destroyers of human harmony.

Paul places this in all of these exhortations because this is how Christian morality is lived out in the context of relationships and because whenever we do not apply Christian morality to our relationships in the church, but we instead allow sin or we allow something else to set the temperature in that group, well then it's gonna lead to breakdown.

Because if you remember at the beginning of chapter four, Paul is very concerned about the unity of the body, the unity of the body. And so we have to live out these things. We have to pursue greater obedience to God because sin is a threat to the community and a threat to the unity of the body. And so whenever we apply this, if we just were to sum up what all of those different exhortations are telling us, we would say that we need to reject self -centeredness.

All of the different things that Paul describes, self -centeredness is at the heart, whether it is lying, right? You lie to protect yourself, to protect something else that you are concerned about being threatened or lost, right? Whether it be your image or covering up something that you did, self -centeredness is at the heart of lying. Self -centeredness is at the heart of stealing. That is obvious. Self -centeredness is almost always at the heart of unrighteous anger.

self -centeredness will threaten the unity of the body. Therefore, as people who are looking to embrace what Paul's talking about, we have to first reject the self -centeredness that is within us that would tempt us to make the people around us serve in our kingdom rather than us all submitting and serving to God's kingdom.

When our attention is shifted to God, then we can reject that self -centeredness that is within us and that would threaten the community. So that's the first one.

The second theme that holds all of these commands together is the aspect that Paul says you were to stop this and you're to start doing this. You're to put off this and put on this. He includes that in all of his exhortations. He doesn't just say stop lying, stop stealing, stop being angry, stop this, stop that. He says stop lying and start speaking the truth. The thief should no longer steal.

but instead work with his own hands. Once again here, we see that growing in Christian virtue is not just avoiding some things, rather it is rejecting, it is forsaking sin and then embracing righteousness. It is embracing and then living out the works of obedience that that sin would keep us from.

So if it is lying, then we now, we put effort into speaking the truth. So Christian morality is putting off and putting on.

We have to keep that in mind. It is so easy for us to start living passive lives. Much of American Christianity is this way, where we live passive lives trying to avoid a couple of big sins, but then at the end of the day, we're not all that good. We may not be all that bad, but we're not all that good either. Friends, we are to be pursuing righteousness. It's like a team. Imagine you have a basketball team, right? And that basketball team, all they ever did was play defense so that no one would ever score a point on them.

But they never played offense. They never went down the court to dunking in the goal, to shooting the goal, to score some points. All they did was play defense. So no one ever scored on them, but they never won either. Guys, it's the same thing if we are just avoiding some besetting sins, but not then pursuing.

where those sins are keeping us from. If it is lying right, pursuing the truth. If it is coveting what others have, which would be at the heart of stealing, then it is instead being grateful for what we have, working hard for what we have so that we can be generous with it. It is rejecting foul language so that we can use language that builds up others, not grieving the spirit, but instead embracing him, putting away anger and wrath and so on.

So we might live in a righteous way. Last week we talked about how Paul used the example of, or he's using language here of like taking off an old set of clothing to put on a new. Once again, that's what he's showing us here in the very practical examples of lying, stealing, and so on, is that we are to take off the old rags, but remember, we need to put on the new garments as well. You need to put on the uniform.

the clothing that is appropriate for the calling that you have been given, which is the clothing that is given to us by Christ. Now, what are we to do with this? We say, okay, so I see here we were to put off sin and to put on works of righteousness, okay? And so, well, what does that leave with me to do here? It's like, hmm, it's not all that complicated. You just gotta do it. You gotta do it.

Activate your will, make a conscious decision that you will obey these commands. Obviously these verses are not comprehensive of all that it means to live as a Christian. They're a great place to start, right? But in whatever commands we are given in this verse and in the rest of the New Testament, whatever God leads us to do, we are to activate our will to do those things, make the decision. When we do this, we are not committing works righteousness.

We often talk about the error of works righteousness and that is good because we can at times be tempted to do good things in order to earn God's favor. But it is not works righteousness. Whenever we motivated by the gospel and motivated by our love for God, desire to put off the works of sins that we might put on the works of righteousness. Look at the motivation. Are you?

trying to do the work of putting off and putting on because you're trying to earn something from God or because you're trying to make your salvation more secure or rather in complete confidence and assurance that your salvation is secure in Jesus Christ, are you joyfully obeying? It is not works righteousness to make this decision. Rather what we're doing is we are building the discipline to work with God and the work that he invites us to which is growing in holiness.

activate your will. So the first thing that is holding all these together is that it shows us how Christian morality is lived out in the context of relationships. The second thing that we have to keep in mind is that it is always a work of putting off the old and putting on the new, rejecting and then embracing. We have to keep this in mind and then make a decision that we will build the discipline to work along with God. But then we come to...

verse one in chapter five. And in verse one in chapter five, Paul says, therefore, building upon and summarizing what he has just said in all those verses before about putting off and putting on, therefore be imitators of God.

as dearly loved children. And in verse two, and walk in love as Christ also loved us and gave himself for us. Whenever he summarizes what we are doing in our relationships and in rejecting and embracing and repenting and obeying in faith, whenever he summarizes it all up together, what is it? What does it mean to do this? To live this way, he says, we are living as imitators of God. We are imitating what we see in him. Most specifically and ultimately, what do we see?

See, we imitate the selfless sacrifice of Christ who gave himself up for us. Paul, he spent three and three quarters of chapters, right, explaining the gospel, and then he brings it back to the gospel again. He says, you see, it always goes back to Jesus. It always goes back to him. So yes, give it all the effort you have to reject sin, repent from idolatry, and embrace.

the gospel, but remember we are doing it as imitators of God. Christian morality is imitating God. That's the third theme.

that holds all these things together. Christian morality is imitating God. Once again, to what I talked about earlier, doctrine and ethics are always combined. Belief and behavior will always dovetail with one another. If you try to separate the theology, if you try to separate the gospel from it, it is no longer Christian morality. You start to veer into works righteousness. But if we hold our efforts at obedience, our repentance,

If we hold it together with the gospel, well then that is being transformed into someone who looks more like Jesus Christ and being an imitator of God. He says, be an imitator of God as dearly loved children. You know, they say that you, whether you like it or not, you turn into your parents.

And isn't that true for those of us in our early 30s? I think that's where you really start to see it, in your early to mid 30s. You hold off on it and you deny it for a while, but then reality sets and you're like, goodness, I am turning into my parents. I'm doing this, I'm saying these things. That was just like, I just said something that I've heard them say a thousand times before. It's true, that's what ends up happening. You turn it to your parents. That's the nature of being a child. You see this so clearly in little children.

And we have so many here at Redeemer and praise God for that, right? You see it so clearly in them how they watch every move you make as a parent. There's always some little eyes on you when you become a parent because they're always watching and they're imitating. That is what's natural for a child to do. Paul says, just like children. In fact, he says, as dearly loved children. Isn't that great? He says, remember, he reminds us of who we are, but he reminds us of the quality.

of who we are, that we are not orphans, but that we are children, that we are not children that God feels kind of put on by, but we're dearly loved. As dearly loved children, set your eyes on Him and imitate Him. Just like the little toddlers around here do, just like you see the fruits of yourself having done over the course of your life. You know,

Our education system is different today, but more so back in ancient times, you learned not just purely through lecture and then behavior, or lecture and then applying what you learned in lecture, but you would learn through imitating a master.

So whether it be a trade that you're trying to learn, you're becoming a Mason, right? And you're learning Masonry or you are becoming a carpenter and you're learning carpentry. You would learn that by following a master of that trade and you would imitate them.

you would follow exactly what they do while you built the skills. At first it was not that great of an imitation, but then it got better to where you could become a much better imitator, but you're still exactly like them. But as you grew and matured, you eventually went from someone who was just kind of pretending to do carpentry to being a carpenter.

You'd do the same thing if you were to become a philosopher. You wouldn't just hear lectures or read books, but you would imitate the master. You would learn their arguments by hearing them and imitating them yourself. Whenever I was learning how to preach, I listened to the masters. I listened to the greatest preachers I could find that I resonated with and I tried to copy them as much as possible without copying, without doing plagiarism, but trying to mimic.

or imitate them while I learned over time. How do you learn how to live like a Christian? You copy the master, Jesus. You copy him. Paul says, be imitators of God as dearly loved children, walk in love. Walk just like the master. Walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself for us. So what this means for us is that we have to always keep this pattern in view.

At no point are we starting to just determine what is right for ourself and do that, right? We reject that, that's obvious. But also, at no point should we start to try to endeavor in moral works without keeping Christ in mind. It is always our eyes are set upon Him when we are following Him, we are mimicking Him, we are imitating Him. And why do we have the privilege of doing this? Well, because,

He loved us and He proved His love for us by giving Himself up for us. So often we, driven by the opposite of love, put ourselves before others and then we expect them to give themselves up for us. But this is not how Christ behaved towards us. Rather in love, He gave Himself up for you and I.

And since he did the opposite of what we always do by putting ourselves before others, or rather he put others for himself, the opposite of what we do, which is self -centeredness, but he lived out love because he did that for us. We have the opportunity now to join in with the Lord in his work, in his work in transforming us as he invites us to take these steps of righteousness and following him. As we take his invitation to build up the body, as we take his invitation to further the kingdom, we have the opportunity and privilege to

to follow him in these things while all doing it in the context of being in Christ. Our theology drives our ethic. Our obedience is motivated not by just a knowledge of an untethered morality hanging out there in the ether, rather, but by a knowledge of God. A way of living, a way of imitating, and a way of living out of morality.

that is established upon that foundation of who God is and what he has actually done in our world and not just whatever we think is right. So, when we look at this passage of all these different commands of lying, telling the truth, avoiding.

sinful anger and and so on. What holds these things together is that they are always lived out in a relationship. Remember this is about building up the body. It's not just about us as an individual. We are always repenting but then following.

We are rejecting but embracing. We are putting off and putting on. We need to dress appropriately for the calling that we have been given. And this is all done in the context of the gospel as we imitate God and Christ in His sacrifice for us. Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you that we have a master to follow, that we have a great example put before us of what it means and what it looks like to live out a Christian lifestyle. Lord, we confess that we cannot do it in our own power, we cannot do it in our own wisdom, we cannot do it in our own strength.

but that as you invite us, we also plead for your help to live these things out. So Lord, would you help us to repent? Would you help us to have faith and to obey?

Let us do all these things as disciples, as imitators of the great master, Jesus Christ, so that our hearts are transformed and as our hearts are transformed, it leads to different actions in our life. So that the gospel would transform our hearts, but that it would transform our homes, our workplaces, our neighborhoods. Let the gospel be the thing that sets the temperature of our community here at Redeemer City Church. And then let that community, let the households we form,

by this gospel be spread out to Acadiana so that it might not just be about one local church but about a kingdom in a region that is spreading, transforming lives, rescuing sinners from condemnation and your glory being spread. We pray all these things in your name, amen.