Priorityliving

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PRIORITY LIVING      EPHESIANS 5:15-17

            One of the great cathedrals in Milan, Italy, has a beautiful triple-door entrance. All three portals are crowned by splendid arches artistically carved with thought-provoking inscriptions. Over one, etched in stone, is a wreath of roses with the words: "All which pleases is but for a moment." Over another is sculpted the outline of a cross accompanied by this engraving: "All which troubles is but for a moment." On the largest doorway - the great central entrance to the main sanctuary - is chiseled the most impressive thought of all: "That which is important is eternal."

            The key to the Christian life is learning to distinguish how to live between these three options. As we continue our series Living Like You Were Dying, things must be prioritized. Let me ask you a series of questions. Where do you spend the majority of your time? Where do you spend the majority of your talents? Where do you spend the majority of your money? In other words, what are the priorities of your life?

            In the passage, we are going to study this morning, I want to exhort and encourage you from God’s Word to priority of living. So take your Bible and turn to the fifth chapter of Ephesians beginning in verse 15 and going through verse 17. From this passage, I want to provide you with three directives for priority living: wise up (15), wake up (16), and watch out (17).

WISE UP – 15

            Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise

            Paul, in this verse, points back to what Christians have been rescued from the domain of darkness and brought into the kingdom of light. Therefore, they ought to be imitators of their heavenly Father. They ought to live wisely in regard to this very truth that they have become a new person in Christ. Yet, there are times Christians do not live as wisely as they should live. So Paul says wise up, Christian, because Christ has saved you and given you the power to live differently.

            So as Christians, we are to observe how we are to walk. In verse 11, Christians are to expose darkness in others, but if we are going to do this faithfully, then we need to make sure our walk is what it needs to be. Have you ever heard the phrase, “Your actions speak so loud, I can’t hear what you are saying?” As parents we say to our kids, “Do as I say and not as I do.” In other words, talk is cheap. Our walk must back up our talk is what Paul is saying here.

            The word walk is found several times in this letter. For example, Paul told the Ephesians to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called (4:1); no longer walk as the Gentiles do (4:17); walk in love (5:1); walk as children of light (5:8); and here walk in wisdom. This word carries the idea of the whole round of activities of an individual’s life.

            The Christian is to walk in newness of life, Rom. 6:4, after the spirit, 8:4, in honesty, 13:13, by faith, 2 Cor. 5:7, in good works, Eph. 2:10, in love, 5:2, in wisdom, Col. 4:5, in truth, 2 John 4, after the commandments of the Lord, v. 6. And, negatively, not after the flesh, Rom. 8:4; not after the manner of men, 1 Cor. 3:3 ; not in craftiness, 2 Cor. 4:2; not by sight, 5:7; not in the vanity of the mind, Eph. 4:17; not disorderly, 2 Thess. 3:6.

            It has to do with our conduct and behavior. A relationship with Christ should make our lives different from our lives before Christ. It ought to have an impact on the way we live because of what we believe.

            Since we are to pay attention to our walk, Paul emphasizes the importance of this by stating how we are to do it. We are to do it carefully, circumspectly. Akribōs (careful) has the basic meaning of accurate and exact, and carries the associated idea of looking, examining, and investigating something with great care. It also carries the idea of alertness. As believers walk through the spiritual mine field of the world, they are to be constantly alert to every danger that Satan puts in their way. That is why Jesus warned that “the gate is small, and the way is narrow that leads to life” (Matt. 7:14).

            We are to be wise rather than unwise. Proverbs 14:12 says, “There is a way which seems right to men, but the end thereof is death.” James 3 also gives a description between wise and unwise living. What this means is that there is a way that leads to eternal life and there is a way to live that leads to eternal death. There are only two ways to really live this life: God’s way or Man’s way. One leads to heaven and the other leads to hell.

            So Paul is saying be wise rather than unwise. Being unwise is reverting back to your days before Christ. It is the idea of being foolish. Paul told Titus all people were once foolish before Christ. Scripture is filled with examples of foolishness such as David taking a census (2 Sam. 24:10). The Galatians were foolish when they fell prey to a heresy. Also, we can play the fool when we put our hearts on the wrong things such as money, fame, prestige, popularity.

            The opposite of wisdom is folly, meaning the short-term self-indulgence which marks out the person who doesn’t think about long-term priorities and goals but lives on a day-to-day basis, asking, “What is the most fun thing to do now?” (James Packer) Running red lights is the No. 1 cause of car crashes in American cities. Annual cost to society: $7 billion in damages, medical bills, and lost work time. The average amount of time saved by running a red light is 50 seconds.

            Wisdom is the ability to take God’s word into the fabric of one’s life. It is living as God intended. This word is pictured of a skilled craftsman who can complete a task with raw materials. Steve Lawson, pastor of Fellowship Church in Mobile, said wisdom is the God given ability to see life from God’s perspective, to size up situations for what they really are, and to select the best solution to achieve the highest end.

WAKE UP – 16

            Making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.

            What Paul is saying is that we ought to live life with a sense of urgency. In other words, it is living for today because we are not certain about tomorrow. Time is shrinking and the influence of the world is increasing in its influence. Folks, we have to understand that this is not a fair fight because the world is only going to get worse.

            By the days are evil Paul may have specifically had in mind the corrupt and debauched living that characterized the city of Ephesus. The Christians there were surrounded by paganism and infiltrated by heresy (see 4:14). Greediness, dishonesty, and immorality were a way of life in Ephesus, a way in which most of the believers had themselves once been involved and to which they were tempted to revert (4:19-32; 5:3-8).

            Less than a hundred years after Paul wrote the Ephesian epistle Rome was persecuting Christians with growing intensity and cruelty. Believers were burned alive, thrown to wild beasts, and brutalized in countless other ways. For the Ephesian church the evil times were going to become more and more evil. Several decades after Paul wrote this epistle, the Lord commended the church at Ephesus for its good works, perseverance, and resistance to false teaching. “But I have this against you,” He continued, “that you have left your first love” (Rev. 2:2, 4). Because the church continued to languish in its devotion to the Lord, its lampstand was removed, as He had warned it would be if the believers there failed to “repent and do the deeds [they] did at first” (v. 5) Sometime during the second century the church in Ephesus disappeared, and there has never been a congregation there since. Because the church at Ephesus did not heed Paul’s advice and the Lord’s own specific warning, it ceased to exist. Instead of helping redeem the evil days in which it existed, the church fell prey to them.

            Things to today are worse than then and Paul warned Timothy that times would get worse in the last days (1 Tim. 3:1-5).

            There we need to make the best use of our time. The word for time does not refer to clock or calendar time. It refers to allocated or fixed seasons in life. God has set boundaries to our lives, and our opportunity for service exists only within those boundaries. Ecclesiastes says that there is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to laugh and a time to mourn, a time to plant and a time to pluck up, a time for war and a time for peace.

A great illustration of this is found in an ancient Greek statue depicted which a man with wings on his feet, a large lock of hair on the front of his head, and no hair at all on the back. Beneath was the inscription: “Who made thee? Lysippus made me. What is thy name? My name is Opportunity. Why hast thou wings on thy feet? That I may fly away swiftly. Why hast thou a great forelock? That men may seize me when I come. Why art thou bald in back? That when I am gone by, none can lay hold of me.”

Exagorazō (making the most of) has the basic meaning of buying, especially of buying back or buying out. It was used of buying a slave in order to set him free; thus the idea of redemption is implied in this verse. We are to redeem, buy up, all the time that we have and devote it to the Lord. The Greek is in the middle voice, indicating that we are to buy the time up for ourselves—for our own use but in the Lord’s service.

There was an article with the eye catching headline: "If You Are 35, You Have 500 Days To Live." The article went on to contend that when you subtract the time you spend sleeping, working, tending to personal matters, eating, traveling, doing chores, attending to personal hygiene, and add in the miscellaneous time stealers, in the next 36 years you will have only 500 days to spend as you wish. Think about how you spend your time.

Another study showed that leisure time declined by 37%. This is time that we have to be with family. It showed we spent 6 months at traffic lights, 1 year searching for things on our desk, 8 months opening junk mail, 2 years returning phone calls, 5 years waiting in line, 3 years in meetings, 45 minutes to 1 hour commuting to work, viewing 600 advertising message a day, 75 interruptions a day, 2000 hours in front of the T.V. a year, and opening 1000 pieces of mail a year.

So Paul says we ought to make the most of our time because once it is gone it is lost. In other words, there are no mulligan, no redo in life. Parents, your children will only be the age they are now once. So what is open today will be gone tomorrow.                                                      Many biblical texts stand as warning beacons to those who think they will always have time to do what they should. When Noah and his family entered the ark and shut the door, the opportunity for any other person to be saved from the flood was gone. The five foolish virgins who let their oil run out before the bridegroom came were shut out from the wedding feast (Matt. 25:8-10). “We must work the works of Him who sent Me, as long as it is day,” Jesus said; “night is coming, when no man can work” (John 9:4). To the unbelieving Pharisees He said, “I go away, and you shall seek Me, and shall die in your sin; where I am going, you cannot come” (John 8:21). After centuries of God’s offering His grace to Israel, Jesus lamented, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling” (Matt. 23:37). Judas, the most tragic example of wasted opportunity, spent three years in the very presence of the Son of God, as one of the inner circle of disciples, yet he betrayed His Lord and forfeited his soul for thirty pieces of silver.                                                When the Puritan Joseph Alleine was studying at Oxford he had many friends, but if their visits interrupted his studying he wouldn’t let them in, saying, “It is better that they should wonder at my rudeness than that I should lose my time; for only a few will take notice of the rudeness, but many may feel my loss of time.” Alleine’s whole life was an illustration of his saying, “Give me a Christian that counts his time more precious than gold”. When the week began he would say, “Another week is now before us, let us spend this week for God”, and each morning, “Now let us live this one day well!” “All the time of his health,” writes his wife, “he did rise constantly at or before four o’clock, and on the Sabbath sooner, if he did wake; he would be much troubled if he heard any smiths, or shoemakers, or such tradesmen, at work at their trades before he was in his duties with God; saying to me after, ‘O how this noise shames me! Doth not my master deserve more than theirs?’ I shudder when I hear Christians talking of “killing time” or “filling in time.” We are not to fill in time, we are to redeem it, making the most of every opportunity!                                                                                                 The great sixteenth-century reformer Philipp Melanchthon kept a record of every wasted moment and took his list to God in confession at the end of each day. It is small wonder that God used him in such great ways.

WATCH OUT – 17                                                                                         Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.                                                                                       Do not be foolish repeats and reinforces Paul’s previous plea for believers not to be unwise, and understand what the will of the Lord is expands and makes more explicit his plea to walk wisely (v. 15). Foolish implies a person who lacks discretion. They are unwise. We derive our English word moron from this Greek word. To put it bluntly in today’s vernacular Paul says don’t be stupid.                               God does not want us to be ignorant of His will. Now, in Scripture God’s will is mentioned in two different ways. One way that God’s will is described is called his decretive will. This means that something that God ordains will come to pass no matter what. Such as the coming of Christ, the conquering of sin, Satan, and death, and the second coming of Christ. There is nothing that can mess this up.                                                                                                                The second way that God’s will is spoken of in Scripture, which is its use here, is God’s revealed will. The first is something of a mystery, but this is something that God wants us to know. This is found in the Bible. This will does not always come to pass because of our disobedience.                                                                           Imagine a man buying a personal computer but never reading the instruction book concerning how it works, and never sending for someone who can give him understanding. There it stands on his desk gathering dust while he fumes at it unable even to switch it on. Imagine a teenage girl buying the latest cell phone complete with a camera yet not discovering how it operates. She never reads the instruction book or asks her friend what are the different functions of all these buttons on the keyboard. How foolish.                                           It is not enough to possess something, you must also know what to do with it. It is not enough to live in God’s world you must know what he wants you to do in his world. What is the Creator’s will for his creatures? He has told us his will, not in the heavens, in cloud formations, and not in nature, in the cries of the seagulls, the wind in the trees or the barking of a dog. He has spoken to us through his servants the prophets in the Bible and in his Son Jesus Christ. The Lord has told us his will.                                                                           There are times when people treat God’s will as a great mystery. We need to remember that God as someone described is not like a cosmic Easter bunny trying to get us to guess where He has hid the eggs. No, God wants us to know what He desires of us and is not in heaven trying to trip us up or trick us when it comes to know it.

            For example, God desires for men and women to be saved. 2 Peter 3:9, God says, that He is not willing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance. God’s will for those who are saved is to be Spirit-filled (Eph. 5:18). God’s will for believers is to be sanctified, which means set apart in purity (1 Thess. 4:3-7). According to 1 Peter 2, God desires for His children to be submissive. And probably one of the most difficult things for a Christian to accept as God’s will is suffering.                                                 The idea of knowing God’s will is not difficult because Paul told the Ephesians they can understand it. This word understand means using our mind to discover God’s will, not a feeling, or a hunch or even guessing. One of the things that salvation benefits us with is the ability to have the mind of Christ. God saved us to renew our minds. And we do this through God’s Word.                                                                                                               Is reading the Bible a necessary part of your day or does it have a low priority in your life? George Mueller, after having read the Bible through one hundred times with increasing delight, made this statement: "I look upon it as a lost day when I have not had a good time over the Word of God. Friends often say, "I have so much to do, so many people to see, I cannot find time for Scripture study.? Perhaps there are not many who have more to do than I.                     For more than half a century I have never known one day when I had not more business than I could get through. For 4 years I have had annually about 30,000 letters, and most of these have passed through my own hands.                                                               "Then, as pastor of a church with 1,200 believers, great has been by care. Besides, I have had charge of five immense orphanages; also, at my publishing depot, the printing and circulating of millions of tracts, books, and Bibles; but I have always made it a rule never to begin work until I have had a good season with God and His Word. The blessing I have received has been wonderful.?                                                                         Jesus is our supreme example for fulfilling the commands of Ephesians 5:15-17. He always functioned according to the divine principles established by His Father: “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner” (John 5:19; cf. v. 30). Second, Jesus knew that His time of earthly ministry was short and would soon be cut off, as seen in frequent sayings such as “My time has not yet come” and “My time has come.” He always functioned according to His limited privilege of time and opportunity, using every moment of His life in His Father’s work. Third, Jesus always functioned according to the His Father’s purposes. “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His work” (John 4:34).                                                  “Therefore,” Peter said, “since Christ has suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same purpose, because he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for the lusts of men, but for the will of God” (1 Pet. 4:1-2).                                                                          During the early days of the Salvation Army, William Booth and his associates were bitterly attacked in the press by religious leaders and government leaders alike. Whenever his son, Bramwell, showed Booth a newspaper attack, the General would reply, “Bramwell, fifty years hence it will matter very little indeed how these people treated us; it will matter a great deal how we dealt with the work of God.”

                                                                                   

                 

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