Exposing the Darkness & Embracing the Light - Ephesians Part 12 - Bill Shiley

But if you're struggling with these kinds of things, you're not going to get over it on your own. Don't—that's a lie. It's empty words. And I know it's hard, but probably every one of us, as far as men in this room, have in some way started with some of these things, and we know what it's like.

And it's through opening up and confessing it and getting help, letting the light—both the light of exposing it so it's not protected in the dark. That's where secret things can lurk and things can run. You don't know what's happening. You can't see what's going on. You have to open it up and expose it and let God's light shine in. That's the way to overcome those things.

I want to start out with a little story this morning. So, six years ago, when I bought my house, we had to clean out the upstairs. The former tenant who was there had left a bunch of stuff there.

And among the stuff was this.

Well, I don't really remember why it got spared, but I put it with stuff that was usable and/or maybe take the goodwill or something and didn't think that much of it.

Sometime later, I got a dog, and in the wintertime, I needed something to take hot water out, to thaw my dog's water out, to say, "Well, I'll use that. You know, it can handle hot water." And so it carried hot water out to my dog. And when I didn't need it for that, it sat on top of the refrigerator and gathered dust. Fast forward a few more years, and a couple of weeks before we got married, my wife-to-be's family came out to visit and help with some household projects. And my mother-in-law-to-be walked in the door.

And mind you, my mother-in-law is a very good mother-in-law. I have no complaints. I couldn't ask for a better mother-in-law in many ways. So this is not a reflection on her, but she walked in the door, and one of the first things I remember her saying was, "Oh, where did you get that lovely blue pitcher?"

Well, I thought, "Lovely blue pitcher." To me, it was just kind of this—in Dutch, they have the term hotgoogie, which means hard-looking. It just kind of got stains and stuff. It's kind of marred and dented and things, and just this weird brown stuff smeared all over it.

And I said, "Oh, that. I just use that to carry water out to the dog." And she said, "You do what?"

And I realized that I needed to make an adjustment on how I viewed this pitcher. And so I changed my picture of this pitcher that it was now a prized piece of pottery that would sit on a shelf of a merchant who displays wares from artisans. And the minimum price tag on anything like this would have at least three digits on it. And it's the kind of thing that good housewives would look at longingly and sigh and walk away because, in the name of good stewardship and household peace, they couldn't justify it. But I had to adjust my view of this pitcher. And what amazed me, though, was that my mom-in-law's view of the pitcher didn't change because of the way I was using it.

I changed in her eyes, and I was scared for a little bit. Maybe she would—not really. I didn't think she would call off the marriage because of that. But she began to call into question my taste and judgment of what was good and beautiful in life.

Well, we did get married, and I don't know if the—I think I've brought the pitcher up a few times. Truth be told, my wife is somewhat of the same opinion. So to make a long story short, this pitcher no longer gets used to water the dog. I bought a $7.99 rubber-made pitcher to do that. And this pitcher now lies in state on top of the cabinet, surrounded by charcuterie boards and baskets and urns and chalices and waits until there's an appropriate service that warrants such a prized piece of pottery.

And anyone who even mentions this pitcher in the context of the family dog will, forthwith and anon, keep company with said beast.

But what impressed me about that, in thinking about some other things in life, is how that's the way it is. When there's something that's valuable and precious, when someone treats it wrongly, it doesn't change the value of the thing itself.

The person keeps shaming themselves and criminal charges against themselves for the way they've treated this valuable thing. And I love these pictures of the way God's world works. But the thing, actually, I think it actually increases in value because now its value is not just what it was originally, but now it must be redeemed. It must be bought back. It must be salvaged and brought again to be respected and valued and fill its wonderful place.

This morning, we're going to talk about some things that are incredibly good that make this pitcher look like a mockery. And there's often lots of things said about the way we treat that thing. And sometimes we get this idea that it's a bad thing because lots of people use it badly and treat it horribly and disgrace it.

But I want us to remember this morning that it's because it's a very good thing, it's to be protected and to treat it wrongly, to abuse it, to make it so that it's not the good thing that it was designed to be. That is the horrible thing.

So I'm going to put the pitcher away.

So read with me from Paul's letter to the Ephesians. We're going to start in the end of chapter 4 just to get some context. "Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.

Therefore, be imitators of God as dear children, and walk in love as Christ also loved us and given himself for us, as Christ also has loved us and given himself for us in offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma. But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you as is fitting for saints. Neither filthiness nor foolish talking nor coarse jesting which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks. For this you know, that no fornicator, unclean person, nor covetous man who is an idolater has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.

Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the children, the sons of disobedience. Therefore, do not be partakers with them, for you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light, for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth, finding out what is acceptable to the Lord. And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them, for it is shameful even to speak of those things which are done by them in secret. But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light, for whatever makes manifest is light.

Therefore, he says, "Awake, you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light."

So we've been learning in this last part of the book of Ephesians about our part in learning to display God's incredible wisdom. And we do that by following King Jesus as he reunites and restores things to be the way God made them. And he's given us commandments, and he's given us his example about how to do that.

And that means that we learn to live together as members of each other in the same body. And in the last message, we learned to admire God like little children and to imitate his love, which is a love that is defined by giving, defined and expressed by what he gives.

The next section, I'm not sure why Paul goes on to talk about the things that he does, why he flips to that, but I wonder if it's because of this term love. Is it because love is a word that we throw around a lot and use for a lot of things?

The things that the world calls love, is it really love? Is it caring for another and being willing to sacrifice for their good? Or is it selfishness? Is it, "I desire this because of what it does for me?"

There's a story. One of the characters says this, "Hue is inclined to—" that's the character that is being referred to. "Hue is inclined to use the word love the way many of us use the word want, often and selfishly."

So I don't know, maybe that's why Paul goes on and talks about immorality and things like that, because he's talking about love and he's saying it's completely the opposite, following Christ's love versus some of the things that the world calls love. So verse 3, then Paul says, "But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not be named among you as is fitting for saints."

So saints in our world tend to be made into some superhuman person. There's only a few of them, and they did extraordinary things and became world famous. And that's a very, very bad idea. Saints simply means people who have been called out and separated from the world. Like we read about in chapter 2, they were dead in trespasses and sins, and by repenting and committing their obedience to Jesus, they were rescued from that, and they were cleansed, and they were made to live heaven's way.

So you either are living heaven's way, you're an obedient child of God who admires God and is walking in love, his way, or else you are part of the world that's walking the way of death and under the dominion of the powers.

It's one way or the other. So you're either a saint or you're a sinner. You're someone who is a child of disobedience, later on, it talks about. So these things are not—they shouldn't even be once connected with us because it doesn't fit with people who are following God to display his wisdom, following him as obedient, loving children.

Paul talks about some ugly things here.

Fornication and uncleanness. Fornication is simply the term for sexual activity, inappropriate physical activity between men and women who aren't married specifically. It's often used in a broader term just to refer to all kinds of immorality. Uncleanness, I don't think we need to elaborate a lot on that. It's something that's not clean. It's dirty. It's behavior that's—when something's unclean, there's something foreign that's on it, and it's hindering the value of the thing or the thing being able to be the good thing that it is, whether it's your pair of pants or whether it's a plate or your hands or a window.

So uncleanness is things in our life in this area of how we handle being a man and being a woman that hinders and corrupts the goodness that God created. So why the big deal about this? There's lots of stuff in the Bible about this thing about sexual immorality and living pure and lots of really strong things about those kinds of sins. Why is it such a big deal?

Well, I want to go back to in the beginning because this whole thing is about God restoring things to the way he made them because sin has corrupted them and brought death and destruction. And we read in the beginning that God made man or humans in his image. In the image of God, he made him. Male and female, he made them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it."

So the reason this is such a big deal is because when God created humans as the crown of his creation, the most important thing, it seems from Psalms, in the universe, that God, among all the stars and everything here on earth, he placed man who was to be his representative. And he did that by making human version one and human version two to work together.

We mirror God's relationship of the Father and the Son and the Spirit, who are different persons with different abilities and different gifts working together in perfect love and harmony. And so God built that picture of himself in human nature as well by not giving either version of human all of his characteristics. Some of them we share as man and woman, but there's certain things that the woman got that the man doesn't have. And there's certain things that the man got that the woman doesn't have that allow us, when we work together, all of God is experienced and represented, and God's work of creating more goodness goes on.

And that's why this thing matters so much, is because the greatest good thing that God created, when we start playing around with it or using it selfishly, it no longer can accomplish what it was supposed to, and God is no longer experienced. And actually, the opposite of all those things happens.

The problem with this whole thing of being a man and being a woman and the different abilities and characteristics and gifts that God has given us is this: is the "I." Is Adam chose, and each of us have chosen, Satan encouraged him to do what is best for you and pursue your dreams and find what you're supposed to be by yourself.

And as humans, when we do that, we make a horrible mess. When we choose to serve the appetites of our bodies, we become enslaved to them. They become a master that takes over. And everything in our world then gets reduced down to the parts of it that please our appetite, and we just disregard the rest. That's all we see out of it.

Being male and female, being made in God's images, male and female is so much more than the ways that our bodies are made different.

It's built into the way we think. Our personalities, our perspectives on the world are vastly different, and it's so good when they work together. We each bring a particular set of skills, a particular set of life skills together to the human family.

When we stand in awe of the gift of being image bearers and the privilege of being a male part of the image and a female part of the image, and we realize that we need to follow God's design in this in order to be part of his goodness, then it can be a good thing. It can be a very good thing. I would argue it is probably the most good and wonderful thing. It's what creates homes and more children, more little images of God. And it's the seedbed of all of life and health as humanity knows it, is when man and woman work together and blend the different gifts that they have so that God's whole character is represented.

There's a little story towards the end of the first of the Chronicles of Narnia, where Diggory goes to this garden. His mother is deathly sick, and he's heard about this apple of youth. And so he's sent to the garden to get this. And at the gate to this little private garden is this little plaque that says this: "Come in by the gold gates or not at all.

Take of my fruit for others or forbear. For those who steal or those who climb my wall shall find their heart's desire and find despair." And I think there's a huge lesson in those words and that picture for us about this whole subject, that it's a good thing that God created. But when we climb the wall, when we try to do things with it that's outside of what God wanted, it's violating it. Or we take it selfishly. We pursue it for ourselves and for what we're getting out of it.

It works. People enjoy moments of pleasure out of those things. Children still get born to those things.

But there's a horrible darkness and death that it's like drinking water, and the more water you drink, the thirstier you get. You experience pleasure, but not fulfillment.

And so we have a world today where people are going around in our world with grins sometimes, but there's pieces of themselves that are missing, and they have these hooks hanging in their hearts and their souls because they've done things that bind them to other people, and it's not God's way. And so our world is just rotted. There's so many of the problems that are in our society and the rage and anger and depression and those things is because people aren't following God's order in the way that they handle this thing. And there's children that are born confused and without security and purpose and training, and there's people that are going around because they've joined themselves to other people and given part of their hearts away in those things.

And they walk around. They look like they're all there, but they're not. Part of their hearts and their souls is missing and detached.

I often stand in horror at what becomes out of these things. And probably part of that is because I'm 43 years old, and I've lived long enough now to start seeing this stuff bear fruit. People that I grew up with and made these kind of choices, now you see what it is. You see it even in the secular world. The people who are big, glamorous people when I was a boy, now they're older, and now their marriages have blown up and become gossip pieces. And we make some horrible things when we play fast and free with this thing and decide to pursue it for ourselves. And we do our own things, invent how it works ourselves.

Makes horrible things. The better something is, the worse its opposite is. So a good dog is a good thing, right? A bad dog is a bad thing.

But in an alley at night, would you rather meet a bad dog or a bad man? I think we'd probably all rather meet a bad dog. Take it a notch higher than a man in power and abilities. An angel, a good angel, is even that much more powerful than a man.

And a bad angel is that much more worse than a bad man. And so that's the way this is. It's because it's such a good thing that God made. When we use it selfishly and do things with it that God said that ought not to be done, it makes terrible messes, a bigger mess than anything else that God created. The other part of this problem is bigger than just me choosing myself, but that when we choose to follow our desires, we are selling ourselves to a master.

And it's a dark master that takes over our lives and pays wages.

Romans chapter 6, the whole chapter really deals with this subject, but verse 16 and then the end of verse 23. To simplify this, I pulled those out. Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one slaves to whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death or of obedience leading to righteousness? For the wages of sin is death. When you work for sin, he owns you and he pays you, and that's death.

If we don't want death, then we've got to serve another master. That's why it's so important young in your lives to choose, "I am going to serve Jesus with my life. I'm going to forsake myself, and I want him to take control of my life."

So going back to Ephesians 5, "This you know that no fornicator or unclean person who is an idolater has—" I'm sorry. "No fornicator, unclean person, nor covetous man who is an idolater has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God." And then he says something, "Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience."

So this thing about the wrath of God, that's often what gets said is that God's going to punish you for that. God doesn't like this, and if you do that, God's going to punish you for it. That's a very bad and a very simplistic picture. Now, there's places in the Bible, I don't understand how this all works, where it says that God is going to bring judgment and God is going to destroy things. But the most of the conversation about God's wrath in Scripture is more about God ceasing to protect us in his mercy from the master that we've chosen and letting it go. The Old Testament, when you read the Old Testament, so many times it says that God turned them over to the gods that they were serving and to the nations that those gods belonged to, that they sold themselves to do wickedness, and so God gave them over.

We read Romans chapter 1, God talks about some of these kinds of sins and how it goes downhill from there, and that finally there comes a point where God turns them over to allow those things to destroy them like they said that they wanted. So the point I want to bring here is it's not so much that God is a spoil sport, but that when we choose to do our own way about these things, that we are giving ourselves over to something that will destroy every part of your life at its core.

And then when we pass the gate of death, that master owns us, and God will—there will be no more mercy or no more kindness that we can experience from him. We will be banished forever from his people.

But backing up, there's the first part I think is very important to note. He says, "Let no one deceive you with empty words." So when you get deceived, you get fooled. You think that it's okay and you're fine, and you're not.

And he says here, "Don't let people fool you with empty words." What they're saying, there's nothing to it. And he's telling you that people are going to try to tell you that it's okay, that it's okay to play around with our sexuality, with how we handle the gift of being a man and being a woman, and do what we want with it and experiment around, and you'll get away with it. It's okay. It's actually kind of cool. And we're more whole, and we don't have all these inhibitions and all these don'ts and I can'ts that all you people have to live with. They're empty words. There's nothing to it.

Because it's because of these things that people experience the destruction, that God turns them over to destruction. You're not going to get away with it. There is redemption, and there is cleansing, and there is freedom if we repent of these things. We'll talk about that towards the end of the message some. But don't be deceived. You're going to lose if we don't follow the things that God has said about this.

Because there's so much at stake. There's something so good and so wonderful that God has given each one of you. The fact that some of you are girls and some of you are boys is a tremendous gift that God has given you. It's something to cherish and to treasure and to protect, not just in yourself, but in the way you treat and look at other people to value them and think, "How does God want me to interact with other people so that things can be the way he made them to be?" Part of that goes back to my last message about wisdom, is learning to listen to God and listen to those who are older so that we can learn about what is the way to life, what is the healthy way to handle these things.

So he ends that sentence with, "Don't be partakers with them. Don't take part. Don't take any part." There was a family one place I lived, and they had triplets. And the dad said one time, "Yeah, they get into a lot of mischief, but it kind of goes like this. There's one who comes up with the idea, there's one who does it, and there's one who stands and watches.

Don't do either of them. Don't come up with ideas. Don't do the stuff. Don't sit there and secretly admire or be a spectator of it." We'll talk some more about how to handle those things later on. Get away from it and fill your heart and fill your life with God's way, with what's pure and what's true, what's real.

If you don't want the wages of sin, you need to sell yourself to a new master. So don't be deceived with empty words because if you serve the master's sin, it will destroy you. He says that people like this, fornicators, unclean people, covetous people, idolaters, they don't have any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. And I don't know what you've grown up being taught, but I kind of came away from things with the impression that God has this party he's making for us, and if you don't please him, he won't let you in.

Well, an inheritance is something that you get from your dad. But as we listen to Jesus, as he comes on the scene and says he's here to restore things, and he invites us to participate in that, and he says that we're here to build a kingdom and that it's our Father's good pleasure to give us that kingdom. So the inheritance that we're getting is what we're building now. And if we don't participate with our Father in building a kingdom of purity and of self-control and of serving, loving like God loves and giving and sacrificing for others, we're not going to get one.

Brother David preached a message about covetousness a while back and brought that up, how that if we're not content here, how are we going to be content? We'd expect to be content in the new heavens and the new earth.

So don't be one of those people who dishonor themselves and others and the precious gift of God, the gift God has given us in man and woman. You will only condemn and destroy yourself. We are only going to reap the inheritance that we have participated in building.

We need to talk some here about appetites and desires. There's good appetites. There's bad appetites. We can control our appetites. We must deny appetites that are wrong. We must control good appetites or they will become bad. We can train our appetites to like what is good. So when we talk about this thing of desires, there's desires that are wrong. Usually, though, I think probably every sin is a perversion or a twisting of a good desire, whether it's our desire to eat, our desire for sleep, our desire for comfort, our desire for security, our desire for recreation or to see amazing things. Those are all good things, but when we pursue them selfishly, they become an obsession and they take over our life and they make big problems.

Again, it's this idea that when we choose to serve our desires, they become a master to us and they bring us into bondage. So just like with all those things, food, sleep, play, there are things that are good if we're temperate, if we control those things and follow the kind of things that God has said to us about it. And it's the same way with sexuality. There's nothing wrong with being attracted to a man or to a woman. That's a good thing that God built into us. Otherwise, why would a man allow his life to be tempered?

Men would never desire to be rounded out by the gentler, more sensitive, creative nature of a woman. We just wouldn't. And vice versa. And so there's lots of good things that come out of it, but we need to control those things and need to make sure that there are things that are pure that are for our desires are controlled and tempered so that there are things that it's the way we desire what God designed, the way God wants us to interact with those things, and that we exercise self-control and we squash, we crucify the wrong desires.

And we can train our appetites to like what is good. This is true in so many areas.

If you keep on eating junk food, you're probably going to continue to have an appetite for it. But if you train yourself to like healthy food, then actually the junk food doesn't taste as good. It still takes discipline. But when we train our lives to appreciate and to love what is good, then the other stuff actually begins to be repulsive to us.

Well, backing up here again, he says, "Fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not be named among you." Maybe you thought, "I forgot about that." We need to look at the whole picture here, and God keeps taking us deeper in our lives to understand what's the root of these things are, what causes these things.

Covetousness is not a word that we use very much anymore. It means marked by or having the characteristics of an inordinate or an out-of-place desire for wealth or possessions, so wanting too much for ourselves or wanting something that is somebody else's, having a craving for a possession. So if somebody's covetous of power, they want it. This is where these kind of things start. And he says, "Don't let that either be once named among us." It shouldn't be something that is connected to us at all.

Lust and covetousness are actually very similar. They both have to do with our strong desires for things that aren't ours or are not appropriate for us. And so if we want to deal with the lust problem, we have to deal with our desires as a whole and bring them into love and to desire the things that we have and the things that are good.

The beginning of lust is when we allow a discontent to stir and desire and a desire for something that's not ours. You can't be children who are admiring, loving, obedient imitators of God and be discontent with what God has given us in life.

And then the part about covetousness is then usually we go around and we start planning about how we can get something, and that takes us down the wrong road. Again, I would highly encourage you to go back and listen to Brother David's message on covetousness. These things, you can't inherit the kingdom of peace and joy and love and the fruit of the Spirit if you're living in envy and unthankfulness and craving and looking at other people as something to consume for ourselves.

These things should not even be named among us. And as I was thinking about this, I just wondered, wow, if we follow these things and there's more of them in this passage that shouldn't be named, how many problems would this just completely get rid of if we start working at the roots of these things?

He says, "They shouldn't be named among us as is fitting for the saints." So again, saints are the people who have been separated. We've been brought out of darkness and redeemed from the way of death so that we can follow Jesus as obedient children and live the way of life and be part of restoring the goodness God created. And so it just doesn't fit. And there's so many things in life that you will come across that if you just say, "Well, is this technically, is there a rule against it or does the Bible say you can't do this and this?" you're going to end up in a lot of problems because you're looking the wrong direction.

Instead of saying, "How can I be more like God and make the world more the way God? How can I handle myself and the things that I have and the way God made me and the people in my life? How can I handle them in a way that is going to make what God wants happen better?"

You're looking the other way and saying, "How can I serve myself? How can I have what I want?" So think about it. Is this fit? And that's what the apostle is trying to call us to, is looking at the big picture of these things and having a love for God and his way that he created and the goodness of it and having a zeal to protect that and to crush anything in our life that doesn't support that.

So let's look at some more things that are not even to be named among us. Neither filthiness nor foolish talking or coarse jesting.

So now he's going not just to the things that happen inside of us, but our talk.

John Chrysostom has a, he goes on a big long thing about this whole thing of coarse talking and jesting and making fun of things by being lighthearted. And he said, "Just as in the former case," so in the end of the last chapter, he took away anger, said, "Don't be involved in clamor and evil speaking and things like that," as a way to solve anger.

So now he says to take away lust, get rid of filthy talking and jesting.

Filthiness, I don't think we need to really, that's pretty obvious. It's something that's dirty, something that's taking something good and polluting it, soiling ourselves by treating it disrespectfully. Foolish talking. Well, foolishness is when we really don't care. We aren't using wisdom. We don't really care about it. We're not thinking about how things should work, how we should do, where things are going to go. We're not thinking about it. We're just doing what feels good to us right now. And often we take advantage of things. We say things that when it plays out later on, we talk about having to eat words with no salt. It's miserable. It doesn't do good things.

A fool doesn't think about where this is going and what am I doing in a bigger picture. And so we often are disrespectful and just do dumb stuff. Jesting. We don't really talk a ton about jesting today. In the old days, they had a jester in the court of the king. And his job was, the king has a lot of heavy, hard, not-so-fun things to deal with when he's having court. There's lots of problems and people are upset. And so the court jester was somebody to lighten the atmosphere by being dumb.

And sometimes he was called the fool. And so kind of his job was to lighten the mood by making humor and usually by making smart remarks that were witty by mocking people or mocking good and holy things or by doing stuff that was so ridiculous for an adult to be doing that, everybody just would just laugh because it was so ridiculous. It was so absurd.

So jesting has the idea of making humor by mocking things and just being uncaring about people and what happens out of it. Coarse jesting. So this is jokes that are insensitive. They're not being sensitive. They're not thinking about treating things properly. And often we talk about dirty jokes, things that are jokes that are disrespecting, especially sexuality and things like that. So these kind of things is where that starts, is where lust and immorality get stirred up. So what kind of things do you like to talk about? What kind of things do you like to read? What kind of things do you like to listen to?

Are they things that make you laugh about things that aren't right? My own journey with music and coming to convictions about what kind of things are good and aren't, this is one thing I discovered with country music, is every country music song, almost exclusively, there's a very, very small, a couple of them that don't do one of three things. Talk about women in a lustful way.

Talk about beer and drinking, which makes us irresponsible and all kinds of problems come out of that. Or just have a bad attitude about your life, about jobs, about things that have happened to you.

What kind of stuff do we conversation do we listen to?

Do we like to tell bathroom jokes? It's not that that part of our body and stuff is bad or something. It's fine to talk about it when you need to, but it should be done respectfully. And there's things that are being kept private, not to just be aired around and blown around and made a joke out of. What about our conversations with the opposite gender? Are they things that are trying to respect that person and make sure that we're keeping things that's going to help us to respect God's boundaries about the way we're to behave together? Or are they things that are pushing it and kind of stirring up the other person to want wrong things or stirring ourselves up?

And this is stuff that, going back to the subject of wisdom, like we don't know how that stuff works out. Even as adults, when people left to their own, they come up with all kinds of things that make problems. And so that's why it's so important that we listen to what God has to say and we align ourselves with what God has to say. And we listen to the people God has put in our lives, parents and older people are there to be an influence to us. Listen to those things because it's not just that they're spoil sports. It's because they know how things work and where things end up and they want us all to be healthy.

So let's work on this level and let's make sure that the conversations that we have, the words we speak and the words that we're listening to and enjoying are things that are going to help us to be pure, help us to value and respect other people and ourselves for the ways that God has created us to bear his image. And they're going to help us work well with that. Well, then he goes on and says, "Instead of fornication and uncleanness and covetousness and filthiness and foolish talking and coarse jesting, give thanks." I said, "What?" I thought it seemed like we just changed the subject here. And that's kind of how I thought about this for a long time.

Thankfulness, these are just some ramblings of mine that were kind of sparked by somebody else's comment about it. Thankfulness is when there's something in the moment that didn't come from me that I don't necessarily deserve or something that surprises me as a gift. And my spirit is lifted with an attitude of appreciation for having been favored.

And that because of this thing that has happened to me, I'm in a position that, wow, it's people, I have been blessed and I'm in a position to be envied or to be desired. I'm in a very good place. I'm pleasantly surprised. That's thankfulness. If I'm not grateful, I expect things. Well, it's about time. I assume that they're going to be given to me. I develop a sense of entitlement that it should be this way. It ought to be this way. It's wrong if it's not. It's owed to me. And I'm wronged if I don't receive it.

And I develop a me-centered worldview. I feed my self-focus. I stir my selfish desires. And they take over and they begin to demand more and more and more. So the antidote he's saying, pretty simple one to lust and covetousness, is to give thanks and to appreciate and be thankful for the things that we do have in life. I'll just say this. I hope you can remember that I'm speaking as a man who was single for 20 some years.

This isn't all easy. And there's very difficult things in this whole thing. But this is true. And that's when a lot of this began to change in my life, is when I instead of dwelling on what I couldn't have and didn't have and the things that made it that way, and I started being thankful and embracing the things that God had given me, the children that God had given me, the ladies in my life that God had given me, and just the privilege of being part of God's family.

So thankfulness is the antidote for lust. And that will make us deal with lots of other things in our lives. Then he goes on and says, "For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light. For the fruit of God's Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth, proving or finding out what is acceptable to God."

He's using this imagery again of darkness and light. And he's going back to the first chapter of the Bible when God took the darkness and he poured light into it. And he brought life and organized things and made order and beauty and goodness. And so he's telling us instead of living in a way that's undoing all that and sending it back into the chaos that it was at creation, to be part of God's team and follow God in making the world a beautiful, productive place.

Some of these we'll probably go back and talk about in the next message because there's a lot more in here, this conversation about walking in the light. But I want to connect a few things to this whole subject of sexuality and purity.

And he says, "And don't have any fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them." So don't have any part with them. And again, it's any part, not just don't do them, but don't have any part. Don't even be a spectator or a secret admirer.

They're unfruitful. They don't bring about life and health and goodness. They do the opposite. They kill and they destroy. And then he says, "But rather expose them." And I've heard this used a lot about Halloween, that we should go around and hold signs up and tell all about how horrible Halloween is and all the things that happen there. And I think that the picture is a lot bigger than this. And I think it's something that starts in our own life. When we're in a place where we're finding these things taking root in our life and we're starting into down the road of lust and things like that, the way to overcome it is to shine the light in.

It's to expose them. And I'm not saying, I'm not promoting here that we get up in front of a huge group and get into all kinds of gritty details. I don't think that's productive. But we need to find a mature Christian and expose these things in our life and invite the light in. That's part of what we do in discipleship. However, whether it's just foolish talking or jesting or things like that, when we see those things start a little bit in our life or we just experience some of it and we're wanting to keep ourselves out of it, we open these things up to our brothers and we shine the light into them. And we call them what they are.

And we make purposeful tracks to go in a different direction.

If a lot of what I'm saying here this morning is born out of my own journey. This is the first time I've preached on a subject like this. And I think back over my life in the confusion and disinformation and bad information. And then in my early adult life, being just through some things that happened, being my eyes opened to a whole world of horrible things that happen when people allow these things to take root in their lives. And then my own battles through the years with this whole thing.

And I want to put a, I want to hope to put some stepping stones in for some people. But if you're struggling with these kinds of things, you're not going to get over it on your own. That's a lie. It's empty words. And I know it's hard, but probably every one of us, as far as men in this room, have in some way started with some of these things and we know what it's like.

And it's through opening up and confessing it and getting help, letting the light, both the light of exposing it so it's not protected in the dark. That's where secret things can lurk and things can rot. You don't know what's happening. You can't see what's going on. You have to open it up and expose it and let God's light shine in. That's the way to overcome those things.

These things are deceitful, so we need to call them what they are. And that starts with in our own lives. But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light for whatever makes manifest is light. I kind of covered that already. Manifest means to show it forth. The way I connected with this term was my grandfather was a trucker. And I remember my dad saying he has a manifest. It's a piece of paper that tells everybody what's in his truck. So when he gets to a checkpoint, he shows them the manifest. And then they know, oh, that's what's in his truck. So whatever makes manifest, it shows it. This is what it is, is light.