Sermon Tone Analysis

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You know the saying, “Time flies when you’re having fun?”
I would agree with that.
There are some days when life is exciting and the moments seem to be gone in a heartbeat.
Really, though, I would have to modify that statement some: time flies, whether you are having fun or not.
With our oldest daughter starting middle school this week, Samantha and I have been reflecting back on the past 12 years or our marriage.
It is almost impossible to believe that much time has passed.
Maybe it is summed up better in a line that appears to have originated from a secular author by the name of Gretchen Rubin:
“The days are long, but the years are short.”
(Gretchen Rubin)
That quote is most often used in the context of parenting, but I don’t think it just applies there.
If you think about any aspect of your life, there were moments when you never thought you would make it, but looking back now, they seem to be a distant memory.
I can look back and laugh at myself for the late nights I spent worrying about who I was going to marry or what I was going to do with my life, because I have seen God answer that in more amazing ways than I could imagine.
The years have indeed passed quickly, and it is with a twinge of sadness that we look back and think of the time that we can’t get back.
In Ephesians, we have a passage that deals directly with this issue.
Open up to , where we are picking up our study this morning.
I am glad to be back in the pulpit this week, although I am incredibly grateful for D.J. bringing the sermon last week.
He continued our series through Ephesians, which we are picking back up this morning.
In this series, we have seen that God is bringing everything back together in Christ.
Sin broke our relationship with God, and Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection enables us to come back into right relationship with God.
When God draws us back to himself, we have seen that he gives us every spiritual blessing in Christ.
There is no division of race or status, but every person who has responded to God’s gift of salvation has been made spiritually alive where they were dead.
In chapter 4, we saw that when God saved us, he uniquely equipped each person in the church to help every other member in the church to grow up in him.
Last week, D.J. presented the hard-hitting truth that if God has brought us back to himself, we must change.
We can’t live the same way we did.
We have to put off the old way of living, thinking, talking, and reacting, and start living the righteous life God called us to live.
Today we are going to pick that concept up as we look again at how we are living.
If you catch nothing else from this morning’s message, let me encourage you to do this one thing: buy back your time.
Although we are going to put it in context, this idea comes straight out of .
The phrase translated “making the most of the time” is literally, “redeeming/buying back the time”.
We are going to look at three reasons why you, as a Christian, need to buy back your time.
We are
If that strikes you as an odd phrase, think about it for a minute: have you ever heard anyone talk about “spending time” with someone?
We use that phrase so often that I doubt we even think about it anymore.
Tied up in that picture is the idea that I have a set amount of time that is like coins in a vault.
Whenever I give myself to something, I am taking money from my time vault and spending it somewhere.
<<coin example>>
So, why should we care how we are spending our time?
Why should we fight to buy it back?
Let’s dive into to find out.
1) You aren’t in the dark anymore.
The first reason you and I need to buy back the time is because we aren’t in the dark anymore.
“these things” actually goes back up to verse 5, so let’s look at it.
If your life is characterized by what the Bible describes as sexual immorality, impurity, or greediness, then you are worshiping a false god.
You may not have a shrine with an altar that you burn incense on, but you are an idolater because your god is pleasure or money or being popular or whatever.
Verse 6 confronts us with the harsh truth we don’t like to face: God is going to punish people who engage in that kind of behavior!
If you are still living apart from Christ, then you need to understand that you are in a very dangerous place, and you need to turn to him today.
What about those of us who know Jesus as our Savior and Lord?
We can’t live like that anymore!
That takes us back to what DJ preached to us last week, doesn’t it?
We used to live like that, and now we have to put all that away.
The picture Paul uses here is of light and darkness, which is a common theme throughout the Bible.
Before you came to know Christ, you stumbled around in the darkness spiritually.
You may have been doing what you thought was best, but once Jesus turned the lights on, you saw what a mess of things you had made.
When Jesus turned on the lights, though, you turned from your sin and turned to following him.
Now, notice that you are lights!
I think of this like glow-in-the-dark stars.
Did any of you have some?
I loved glow-in-the-dark stuff.
Did you ever take something out and shine light on it for like 30 seconds and then cup your hands around it to see it glow?
It would fade quickly, wouldn’t it?
The longer you exposed it to the light, the more it would glow, but it still would eventually go dark.
That’s the picture I have of our light spiritually.
Notice that we are only spiritual lights “in the Lord.”
In other words, you aren’t making the light, you are only reflecting it!
When you get out of the light, you are going to run down and start running into trouble because you aren’t seeing correctly anymore.
Maybe that’s you this morning.
You know you have committed your life to following Jesus, but you aren’t really spending any time with him.
Your life is getting darker and darker, and you aren’t looking like what verse 9 says we should.
This is your wake-up call: start buying back the time!
Do what verse 10 tells us to do: test every aspect of your life to see if it matches up with who God is and what he wants you to do.
That’s going to lead you away from that old way of life, where you did things that you are now completely ashamed of.
As your life is characterized by righteousness, you are going to stop wasting time following your own selfish desires, doing things that don’t please God.
Instead, you are going to invest those moments more and more into works of righteousness.
Take the words to heart in verse 14 - stop sleeping!
Get up and let Christ’s light shine on you to show you where you are off track and how to get back.
That sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it?
Do we really have to?
I mean, isn’t being saved from my sin good enough?
Do I have to change the way I live?
Yes!
That leads us to the second reason why you need to buy back your time:
2) You are commanded to.
None of us really enjoy being told what to do.
We all want to be the captain of our own ships, the master of our fate, right?
As great as that sounds, you were not made to be independent and the god of your own universe.
You were made by a God who is infinitely better, infinitely smarter, infinitely kinder and more loving and more wise than you are, and he has given us commands to obey.
This is one of them.
Look at verses 15-17.
You have to care about how you live because God tells you too.
You can’t claim to know God and have been changed by his love if you aren’t willing to do what he says.
He makes that quite clear in the book of 1 John if you haven’t read it.
It is crystal clear: pay attention to how you live.
Why?
There is an interesting phrase in verse 16 - “because the days are evil.”
This makes sense with what we have been seeing, doesn’t it?
We have talked at length at different times about how the world is chasing after their own desires.
We have seen in this passage that, apart from Christ, people are walking in darkness.
Even those of us who know Christ can still get off track and don’t perfectly live out the Christian life, which is why we are called to put off the old life and put on the new.
If that’s the case, then wouldn’t it be safe to say that the way most of the world spends their time isn’t the way God would want them to?
The days are evil because our world still refuses to submit to Jesus’ authority.
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