Walking in Light and Wisdom - Bill Shiley

Good morning. Welcome here to everybody.

So we're continuing our study through the book of Ephesians. This is the 13th message on it. I'm not sure how many there'll be. I don't think there'll be 20, but they'll be up in the teens somewhere. We're drawing towards the close, looking at chapter 5. And in the last part of Ephesians, we're looking at the first part.

He tries to open our minds to understand the tremendous mystery that God has created for us to participate in, where God is demonstrating His incredible wisdom by sending Jesus to redeem us. And then, as we follow Him, He brings us together. And working together, we display how good God's way is.

And so, in the last part, He's giving us practical steps and teaching us how to do this, how to participate in this mystery. And today, we'll be talking about the themes of walking in light and wisdom. So a few things to get our minds warmed up a little bit to some topics we'll be talking about.

Who likes hot dogs?

Depends which brand.

What is this? Anybody know what that is? It's jerky. What is the difference between hot dogs and jerky?

Pardon? Water. Water. That's a good point because they put a lot of water in hot dogs.

We could probably sit here and talk for a while about the difference between them. This is not a nutrition message. One big difference between jerky and hot dogs is how you experience them when you eat them. Hot dogs, you just stick them in a bun, squirt some goop on them, and chomp it down and say, "Oh, I'm full."

And jerky, you chew a piece off and then you chew on it. You chew on it and you suck the flavor out of it and you chew on it. You suck the flavor out of it and you chew on it. And you can take a bite-sized piece of jerky and you can chew on it for 20 minutes, depending on how it's been made and what kind it is. And you keep getting flavor out. Eventually, it runs out and then you swallow it and go for the next one. But it's a completely different experience. You have to chew on it in order to get the value out of it. And the more you chew on it, the longer you chew on it, you get more and more and more out of it.

To help you enjoy that a little more personally, we have some jerky here. So Mitch and William are going to pass the bags out and just hand them around and take a piece until it's gone. If you don't want any, you don't have to.

So we'll give you something to chew on physically and literally and also figuratively.

So in the first Psalm, we're given a picture of this ideal man. He's a blessed man. And the Psalm talks about him and gives us pictures of what he's like. But it says the key of it is, the key to his success is that he meditates in God's law all the time.

And that word meditate is the Hebrew word hagah. And that word doesn't mean anything so much as it is a sound. And the sound is referred to by three different creatures that make this sound that's hagah. And the sound is not an H-type sound. It's the sound that a bear makes when he's eating his prey.

So you think of a bear killing something or a lion. They go to eat it and there's this type of sound. It's the sound that a morning dove makes.

It's this low humming type sound. And it's the sound that a human makes when he's thinking over something.

Is that sound? It's the sound of chewing over something, figuratively speaking.

And this is very important because when God speaks to us, often He doesn't just tell us everything spelled out in words. If He did, some of it would be so complicated we would never understand it. But God, often when He speaks to us and shows us what He wants for us, He gives us a picture. And a picture is beautiful because it's something that there are very simple things that the new and the young can get out of it. And there are very deep things that the older and more mature continue to get out of it. And God's design is that we chew on these things. We meditate on them. We sit there and we mull over them.

If you don't like the picture of a bear over its prey, think about a cow chewing its cut or something. But it's like chewing jerky. You chew on it and you think about it and you suck the meaning out of it and you keep on doing this. And you do this your whole life because there's always more and more. There's simple things to start out with, but there's more and more and more. So sometimes we hear people say, "I never got that," or, "Oh, that's too complicated for me." And sometimes some things are. Sometimes it's because nobody teaches them and helps them with that journey of learning to see things in it. But that's part of the value of good liturgy.

These fancy ways we say things all the time, like at a marriage and the graveside, at baptism, is there's deep meaning there. And it's something that, as you go through life, you continue to chew on it. And you get more and more and more out of it.

In the book of Psalms, two of the metaphors or word pictures are the tree. So this ideal man who's blessed, he doesn't walk in the ways of the ungodly, not at all. And he meditates on God's word. And he's like a tree. And this picture of a fruitful tree that gives shade to the animals and fruit for the animals and the people to eat and the birds live in its branches because its roots are by the stream, which is God's word. And it's always meditating. It's always pulling from that. It's contrasted to the picture of chaff. Chaff is the dry, crusty stuff, usually when they thresh grain, that it's worthless. You want to get rid of it and it just blows away.

There's no stability or anything to it. And I could sit here for 15 minutes and try to explain all the details and all of what's in there, but it's not as good as just having the picture there. Am I chaff or am I a tree that's fruitful and stable?

And so these things are meant for us to chew on and continue to look at them. One of the benefits of this is because they pull us towards something. Instead of just a list of things, you say, "Okay, did that." But it sets a goal for us. And we have to love that goal. We have to say, "I want to be the tree in Psalm 1."

And many other things. And so you have to then be creative and think, "So am I being like that? Am I keeping my roots in the water? Am I growing and being a blessing to others?" There's all those things that come out of it. Some more pictures in scripture or metaphors are God is a potter and we're the clay.

And Jesus is the true vine and we are like branches and we're supposed to bear fruit. And Jesus is bread. And God is a shepherd and we are like sheep. And some of the people who follow him are like, or say they're following him, are like goats. And they're going to be separated out in the end.

God is a rock. God's word is a lamp to our feet. And these are things to chew on. There's lots of depth there. And especially the things that talk about our part, the sheep, being clay that the potter can work with, being fruitful branches.

And then applying Jesus being bread, God being a rock, God's word being a lamp. Those are things for us to think about and continue to chew on through our lives and make use of them, make them part of our lives and guide us.

So it's important to chew on God's word, and especially those word pictures, to think about them and continue as we're walking through our lives, living through our day, to think about, "Am I being like this? How am I relating to God? How am I relating to others?"

One of the ones that we're going to look at today is light. This has come up different times through the book of Ephesians. It's probably the most common metaphor or word picture in the Bible is light and darkness and how they interact.

And we could spend all day trying to say, "Well, what is light? What does it mean to be the light of the world, to walk in light that God is light in?" And we can say all kinds of things. But when we get done, we can describe all those things, but we still haven't come up with light. It is something. And so light brings clarity, right? If you can't see things right, you don't know if something is or isn't. So what do you do? You turn a light on or you get a flashlight out. Nowadays, we get our cell phones out and turn the flashlight on. But you get some light so you can know what's going on.

Light brings truth. Then when you know what's going on, you know what's right and what isn't right. For some reason, hooking up trailers is in my head because I was hooking up the one yesterday and something wasn't quite right. And if it's dark, you can't see. You can feel and things like that, but you get your flashlight out and, "Oh, you can see. Oh, that's the problem. The thing is stuck in the wrong place."

So it helps us to know what's going on. It also creates openness. Things hide in the dark, right? Like children, if you're afraid of something at night, what do you do? You turn the light on. And then you can see, "Oh, there's nothing there," right?

And then that creates safety. When there's light, there's safety. You're not worried about things hiding because you can see and you know what's going on. There's order. Things can be straight. Does straight matter if it's dark and nobody can see it?

It probably does, because if it's not straight and you walk off the side of it, then you have a problem. And through that, then there's beauty. Does beauty matter? Does it matter what color you're wearing if it's dark?

No, because nobody can see it anyways. And out of that, there's beauty and warmth and life and productivity or fruitfulness. Those are all things that are possible because of light. I had some metal sitting in my yard for, what was it? It was less than a week, I think. The grass started dying. It wasn't because the metal was smashing. It was because it didn't have any light.

So all these things are packed in here. And these are very deep pictures for us to chew on and think about as we read the instructions about being light, for us to learn. And again, it's something that we have to want. It's not a set of things that we can say, "Oh, well, okay, I'm doing this. I'm not doing that, so I'm probably okay." But it's something you have to want and say, "I want to be like that." And then think, "How can I do things in my life so that I can be that?"

I think one of the exciting things about being light, learning to be light, walking in the light, is when we do that, we are continuing God's work at creation. I think these things are to pull us back to that. We're joining God and making things the beautiful, good way they were from the beginning. Because that's what God started with, is he said, he looked at the disorganization and the chaos and he said, "Let's have light."

And then the camera and the action could start. Another metaphor we're going to look at or a word picture is walking.

We talk about how is your walk of life. Did you know that you can walk while you're sitting in a chair or driving down the road? So it's a picture of life is a journey and we're walking and there's a road that we're walking on. And there's all kinds of things that grow out of that. We're going to talk today about walking in light and walking in wisdom. That doesn't mean literally when we take our steps, but it's helping us to take the world we're used to of walking with our feet and think about how we're living our life.

Another thing that I think is important about this

is because the apostles' writings are not simply moralistic discourses or a talk about you should do this and you shouldn't do that. Or as C.S. Lewis uses the term ought and ought not, you ought to do this and you ought not to do that to give us a sense of obligation about our life. But they're trying to get our eyes lifted and our minds broadened to how good and big the things are that God wants for us to do with our lives, what we were created to be as humans. And so that our heart gets set on that. And then we actually live above commandments. We fulfill all those as well, but we're going beyond those things because we have the picture of what God wants us to be.

And we're pursuing that. And we're using those commandments as guides to keep us going that direction and to show us the way to get started going that direction and also to keep us from wandering off of that course.

So let's read a passage for today. I'm going to be focusing on verses 8 through 21 this morning, but I'm going to back up just a little bit to gain context. "Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things," he's talking about immorality and idolatry and covetousness before, "because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.

Therefore, do not be partakers with them, for you were once darkness." So there's the word picture. "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.'

See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not be drunk with wine in which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of God."

So beginning in verse 8 with, "Walk as children of light."

So again, it doesn't necessarily mean literally when we're taking steps, although if you walk where it's light, it will go better for you. But walk as children of light. Our lifestyle, the way we live our lives, should be like children of light. Well, this is another sort of a metaphor or a word picture. How do you be children of something?

Now, we're children of our parents. That's because we were born by them. But we use this in a broader sense. And I was trying to think about this, and my mind went to the patriotic world and the sons of liberty.

So the sons of liberty, liberty was the cause, and they were here to carry that cause. And they were here. And in my mind, from there, Andre has talked about some of these songs in his lessons about following Jesus in World War I and World War II. The patriotic songs from World War I, there's one, "Johnny, get your gun. Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun."

Put those Germans on the run, on the run, on the run. I can't remember all the words. And the one verse was, "Make your mama proud. Make her proud. Make her proud."

Now, that's in an awful sense. It's people who are brainwashed into thinking that going and killing other people, who are also trying to make their mamas proud, is the way to solve problems. But that idea that children live to honor their parents, they want to make their family have a good name. Justin talked yesterday at the funeral about the Wadells. He always knew that the Wadells were a strong family. And the way they handled their mother's sickness and passing showed that. So you could say they made their father proud. They made their mother proud. They honored her. When we use the term proud like that, we're not supposed to be proud, right? But you have to understand in the South, which thankfully some of the good culture from down there is leaking north.

In the South, when you say you're proud, it doesn't mean that you think you're better than other people, so much as you just have a good feeling about us. It gives you a good feeling. One man said he was never more proud than the day he was baptized.

So he wasn't saying that he thought he was better than everybody else, but he just, "This was really great." So in that sense, they make their parents proud. They make their parents feel good about their children.

I'm getting off my notes here. They have been shaped by them. So you have your parents' DNA. A child of poverty or a child of an educational facility, they refer to them as their alma mater, their life-giving mother. And they bear that influence in their lives.

There are pictures of them. I was thinking about this this morning, and one of my students popped into my mind. She was such a spitting image of her mother. When I would call their house, and she'd answer the phone, I couldn't tell which one was which. She acted. She shrugged her shoulders like her mom.

Everything was, they were just, she was like her mom. So children of parents, they've been shaped by them. They're images, they're little pictures of them. And they live in a way that carries on that family's traits and legacy. They live in a way that makes them proud. So if we are children of light, it means that we've been shaped by the light.

We have started a new life, not walking in darkness and hiding and confusion and the gray area and doing things that are shameful. We've started a different life because we've chosen to step into the light and let our deeds be shown, be made manifest, and cleaned up. And then they carry on the characteristics of light, and they become lights that shine to others, and they live in a way that honors the light.

So we often think the Bible talks about light and about walking in the light, and that's a concept in itself. And that's a little bit this concept of choosing. There's things that I know are good, and they're praiseworthy, and I don't have to worry about, I don't have to be ashamed of them or try to hide them, and I can choose to live that way, or I can choose things that I know are shady. I want everybody to know about this. I know I really shouldn't. It's going to cloud the world instead of brighten it and give life. And so we can choose between the two. But this is bigger than just choosing to step into the light.

Living as a child of the light means that we have chosen to step into the light and begin living that way, so then we become lights, and we give light and warmth, and we make things clear in the world around us.

A verse that kept running through my mind as I was thinking about this is 2 Corinthians 4:2. It says, "We have renounced," or we said, "That's bad. I don't want anything to do with it." We have renounced the hidden things of shame. The King James says, "Dishonesty."

Not walking in craftiness. So sit around and think, "See, let's see if I do this, then I can get away with that." And let's try to make sure that nobody finds, you don't have to sit there and figure out a scheme. You can be open and straightforward about your life. Not walking in craftiness or handling the word of God deceitfully, but by manifestation of the truth. That's that manifest means to show it out in the open. But by showing in the open the truth, commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. Commending means to give it a good report. If I commend somebody for the work, I say, "That was a good job.

I appreciate that." So they're living in a way that everybody can look at them, and the conscience of that person says, "Yeah, that's right. That's the way a person should live." So again, they've put behind the things of darkness and things we should be ashamed of and things we have to hide. And they're being straightforward and open about the way they're living their lives so that when people see it, they say, "Yeah, that's the way that it should be."

There's the words of a song that also kept going through my mind with this, "Don't pretend to be something that you're not. Living life afraid of being caught. There's freedom found when we lay our secrets down at the cross."

When we step into the light and commit ourselves to a life of letting our lives be examined and cleaned and straightened, then we can be born into a new person and become light.

So you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk like children of the light. For the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth. So he puts that in parentheses because this is something that's understood, right? We all know this, that the God Spirit isn't things you have to be ashamed of and you have to hide and things that end up coming around to bite you. It's things that are out in the open and that give life and clarity and help other people find the way.

So walk as children of the light, finding out what is acceptable to the Lord.

How do you find out what's acceptable to the Lord? That's the first question I come up with about it. So you're supposed to find out. How do you find out? This word is a little bit of a weak translation.

The King James says, "Proving."

So there's two different ways you can prove something. You can prove it by putting it to the test so it proves itself. Or you can make a demonstration to prove a point about something.

The Greek word here is dokomazo, which means to test, and then to approve, to discern, to examine, and then to like, to prove it, to try it. So this is like John talks about trying the Spirit. Now, that's not like trying on shoes. I knew a guy that that's what he thought it meant. You're supposed to try different ones out. And he said he tried one and it wasn't a good one. This means to put him to the test. So we look at what Jesus says, and we look at the pictures of how we're supposed to live. We're supposed to live as light. We're supposed to be like clay in the potter's hand. We're supposed to bring forth the fruit of God's Spirit by living, getting our way of life from Jesus.

So we try it and we say, "Does it match that stuff or doesn't it?" And if it doesn't, then we say, "This is not acceptable to the Lord." And we junk it. And if it is something that passed the test, we say, "Yeah, that actually, I know that would be accepted, proving that that would be acceptable to God. It would be what God wants. It would fit with these pictures of what God says I'm supposed to be like. It fits with the clear, simple commands that God gave me." Then those things, we check it. We say, "Yes, this passed the test." And then we say, "That is a good one."

We test it, and then we approve of it if it passes the test.

Here's another place that talks about that, Romans 12:2, "And do not be conformed to this world." So don't be squished into a mold and made to fit and be like the rest of the world. This is the concept of the Gentiles, the people who are doing their own thing and are under the powers of the evil forces in the spirit realm.

We've talked about many times in past messages in Ephesians. So don't let the world be the one shaping you, but be transformed, be changed around by having your mind changed, by having your mind renewed. We talked about that. We step into the light, and we let the light show what the truth is about our lives, and we take care of those things, and then we begin to walk that way, live a life in the open, walking straight the way God says that we're to do. And then we become changed. We start a new life that God gives us. So instead, we're transformed by having our mind made new so that we can prove, we can test these things, and then live them out and say, "This is what we found out.

This is what God wants. This is what it looks like to follow the sermon on the mount. This is what it looks like to have the fruit of God's Spirit in your life, to be gentle and, for some reason, I can't rattle them off right now, loving and patient and all those kinds of things." This is what it looks like. We can test those things, the choices and the things that happen to us in life. We can test them, make sure that we're being obedient to God, we're fulfilling His desires for us, and then demonstrate those things.

Finding out or testing what is acceptable to the Lord and have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. So we talked about that in the last message about not having any part with the works of darkness.

Whenever I think about that, I think about the triplets that were at one church I was at, and their dad said, "There's three of them." So there's one that comes up with the idea, there's one that does it, and one that watches.

And of course, the one that has the idea fuels the one who does it, and the one watching fuels the one who does it. So they're all partakers in it. And we don't want to be either one of those. We don't want to come up with the ideas for these dark things. We don't want to do them, and we don't want to have any sort of good feelings about the people that do them, the things that go on, curiosity and a fascination with it.

And instead, we expose them. We bring God's light to shine into it. We bring godly people into those situations so that it's clear what's going on and what's acceptable to God and what's not. And we call them what they are in our own lives first. And then we also, if we see those things in other people, we let them know and say, "Hey, we bring God's light into it so that they can see this is not God's way.

You're living in darkness. You're living the way of death."

And most importantly is that we are walking in light ourselves so that our lives make those things clear.

It's a shame even to speak of the things that are done by them in secret. I don't mean that that it doesn't mean that we should never talk about them, but it's so bad that even when we have to talk about them, it's embarrassing.

But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light. They're shown to be what they are by the light. Because if something's going to make things clear, if something's going to manifest what's there, it's going to be light.

And so we have the call from God. We talked about this last time. God is inviting us to awake from sleeping in the dark, to arise from the dead, to step into the light, and Christ will give us light and change us and make us light.

So because of this, this time it doesn't say, "Therefore," but it says, "See then." So that means because of this, make sure that you walk circumspectly. What in the world does that mean? Well, I will explain it to you exactly the way my dad explained it to me. Probably, I don't know when I was. It was in my lower teens.

And you know that I like understanding words this way because you can figure out a lot if you learn to take them apart. You'll be wrong sometimes, but the times you're right gets you ahead in life more than the times that you're wrong. So let's talk about the first part, circum.

Well, you hear in there at the beginning, there's circle, right? Which if we just put LE on the end, it means it's circle, right? Which means around.

There's lots of things. A circuit means you start with here and you go around and it comes back to ground. The circus in the old days of the Roman Empire, the circus was a big round thing. And they would have races and they would go around and around and around. Now we call a circus where there's elephants and gymnasts and all that kind of stuff.

So that first part there, circum, means around in a circle.

Spect.

This one might be a little tougher, but it's a little funner as well. What do we call the people in a stadium? They're not fans, but they are spectators. Spectators. Because they're looking, they're watching what's happening down there.

If the glasses there belong to Sherlock Holmes, he might say, "My dear Watson, would you fetch me my spectacles?" Because they're things you use to look.

The guys in white with masks and hairnets there, it might be a little hard for you to see. They're looking at the food. What are they doing? They are inspecting it. They're looking at it to see. So this idea of spect means to look or to watch.

And then LY means, so if you are doing something kindly, you're doing it in the way of being kind. If you're doing it happily, you're doing it in the way of being happy. If you're doing it grouchily, you're doing it in the way of being grouchy. So the LY ending means in the manner of whatever. So let's read it backwards. So to walk circumspectly, we're walking in the manner of looking in a circle.

Well, we know what that's like. When you're driving down the road, you drive circumspectly. In our world, we look and you're always looking in your mirrors, right? And making sure that your load isn't blowing off or somebody's not in your blind spot.

So that's simply what it means to walk circumspectly is a walk looking around, being aware of your surroundings and what's going on.

See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise. So we have this fools and wise thing again. And a few months ago, I preached a message about wisdom, and we met this guy, Simple Sam. And remember we talked about how wisdom is what we would do if we understood how things really worked out in the end. And Simple Sam, he doesn't know how things are going to work out, but he's a fool because he doesn't try to find out, and when he is told, he doesn't want to hear it. He sticks his tongue out at his dad. And so he's doomed to getting injured when the branch falls off. So

wise people understand God's will by walking through life, being aware of their surroundings, and evaluating their choices and lifestyle by whether or not they're walking in the light. Foolish people don't care about that. They go through life just thinking about what they want to do. They're not thinking about how things are going to end out, or they don't know how things really end out. God does. And so they're fooled. They think that things are going to be okay, and they're not.

I'm going to back up there. Well, I'll go this way. So

see then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. So if we're not following these things, thinking about walking in the light and listening to what God says about things, then we're fools.

We're like the John Bunyan refers to in Pilgrim's Progress on conversation about birds that still have they hatched out of the egg, but the shell is still on their heads, and they run all over and run into things. That's what we're like when we don't listen to what God says. We're not looking around and watching and thinking, "Am I being light?" And all those other pictures that God gives us, as well as clear commands about how to live our lives.

So we don't want to be fools, ignorant about where we're going, where things are going to lead. We want to be wise. We want to listen to what God has to say and make sure that we're testing things to make sure that they're what God wants us to be, and we're pursuing what God has told us. And it says the one way to do that then is to redeem the time.

Redeem is not a word that we use very much in our English world, our modern English world.

The English word just simply means to buy something back. And usually, anciently, it was used in referring to captives or prisoners of war or hostages. Somebody was sold into slavery, and someone would buy them back so they wouldn't just go and become a slave and be worked to death. Or usually, prisoners of war, that's what happened to them, or maybe they were just slaughtered.

Those kinds of things. The Greek word brings out the same type of thing to ransom. That's in a kidnapping type of situation. You pay money so the person can be free again, to rescue from loss or to redeem.

And those are good. I don't feel like that really helped me get the concept of redeeming the time because you can't buy back time and stockpile it. It's a different way that you relate to it. So one picture of redeeming, the story of Ruth and Boaz. So Elimelech and Naomi, because of the famine, they went to Moab, and they married Moabite women, which were not supposed to be part of the children of Israel. And all the men died, and Naomi decides to come back. Ruth says, "I want the people of God. I want the God of Israel." And so she came back with them. And there's the whole thing with Boaz. And they get up to where Boaz says, "I want to marry you, but there's a little thing we got to take care of because there's somebody else that's a closer family member that really should have the first rights."

So they go to the gate of the city. They meet with the elders, and Boaz asks this man, he says, "Are you willing to redeem the property of," and I can't remember if it was Mailand or Chilion. He says, "Yeah, I'll redeem it." And he says, "You need to marry Ruth as well." And he says, "Ah, that's a deal breaker. Can't do that." And so Boaz says, "That's fine. I will redeem it, and I will marry Ruth." So if he hadn't done that, the name of Elimelech's house and Mailand and Chilion would have just died in oblivion. Their property would have been split up. Somebody else would have taken it.

If they followed God's laws, I think there were ways to handle that. But otherwise, people, whoever was the biggest bully, would come in and take it, and it would all be lost. Ruth and Naomi would eke out their lives as widows, and when they died, they would die. But Boaz said, "I will redeem it, and I will carry on the family name of Elimelech," and whichever one it was, I think it was Mailand, Ruth's husband, "and I will marry Ruth and bring a family up to that name." So he brought it, gave it its value back instead of it being lost. And that's, I think, the picture that helps me anyways with this concept of redeeming the time is to give it its value back.

You can't save time. And you can argue with me about these because they're technicalities, but I want to help us think a little bit. You can't save time. You can't stockpile it. It runs by, and it's hooked up to a track, and it goes by, and you can't take it off of there. You can't save time. You can't burn time. You can't take time. You can't kill time. You can't make time. You can't give time. You can't spend time. You can't borrow time. You can't beat time.

It goes by. All of us get the same amount every day. And however many days are in our life, that's how much we have. The only thing we can do is give value to those moments as they go by, by the things that we do.

So why do we need to give value to time? Isn't time valuable in itself because God gave it to us? Well, yes, in a sense, it is. But he goes on and he says, "Redeeming the time because the days are evil."

Why are the days evil? God made the day. Is there something wrong with time and day and night that makes it evil? No, it's the things that happen in it. Here's a little riddle for you to help us get this picture a little bit.

Those of you who are Hobbit fans may recognize this. This thing all things devours: birds, beasts, trees, flowers, gnaws iron, bites steel, grinds hard stones to meal, slays kings, ruins towns, and beats high mountain down. The answer is, what is it?

Time. Time.

Time, just in itself, if we just sit here and don't do anything, will anything good happen?

No.

Plants will grow, but then they'll die, and nothing good will—nobody will have enjoyed them. Nobody will have harvested them.

Buildings deteriorate, and children grow up, right? But if they're not trained and they're not kept healthy, then there's problems. Time in itself does naturally—naturally, time doesn't make anything better of itself. We say time will heal, or, "Well, he'll get over it with time." That's not really true. There are things that take time to do, but if we don't engage and start doing things, the child won't just get over it. The dog won't just get over it.

Things will naturally get worse unless we make choices.

The only good that time will have is the value we put into it as it passes. This is probably one of the biggest things that stood out to me as I was studying for this message, is that am I wasting the time? Am I allowing the days to just go by and be evil? They're also evil because most people do evil things in them. And our responsibility is to grab those precious opportunities and put something—if you think about minutes as they go by, put something valuable in them. Now, that doesn't mean that we're always working or always quoting a Bible verse or exhorting somebody or something like that. But even in our downtime, we need time to rest.

Are we spending our downtime wasting time, doing things that's going to make our path, make our light grow dark because we're dabbling in darkness? Or are we making ourselves—are we doing things that actually build us up in our character, recreating instead of recreation? That's a big thing, I think, that in our world today, we have lots of things we like to do. We like to have spare time and recreation and things like that, but we are very poor, generally, at doing things that actually charge us up, actually make us better able to handle work on Monday, better able to handle the responsibilities that we have, better able to engage people again and have meaningful relationships.

Awake you who sleep. Rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light. See then that you walked circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be unwise. So because you know this, that the days are evil, they naturally aren't going to help anything. Most people are putting devaluing the time by doing evil things in it. Don't be unwise. Don't be stupid. And just go ahead and let the days be evil and put evil things in those buckets as they go past. But understand what God wants you to do about it.

Wise people understand God's will by walking through life, being aware of their surroundings, and evaluating their choices and lifestyle by whether or not they are walking as light. They're chewing on those metaphors, chewing on the commandments of God and saying, "Am I being like this? How can I be more like this?"

Chew on the metaphors. Use them as guides to focusing our lives on what is fitting. Lots of things that maybe it's not wrong, but it doesn't fit. It doesn't help me be a light. This way, we give value to the time instead of being part of the erosion of our fallen world. This is how we find God's will for us. And we could talk a lot about discussions people have about how to find God's will. We start with the simple commandments of God. We follow those, and it helps us begin to walk the way of these pictures that God gives us, to being light, to being fruitful vines.

And then we evaluate our life on those things and pursue the things that are fitting and are going to help us. If we don't do that, sad to say, we're fools.

Therefore, so we have that word again that's pointing back this way. I think this one actually goes both directions. So we have the part about being darkness and light and wake from the dead and walk circumspectly, walk looking in a circle and being aware of your surroundings and thinking, "What is acceptable to the Lord?" Testing things and then redeeming the time, giving value to the time because time in itself doesn't really do good, and many people don't do good. And so because of that, we want to be unwise. We want to not be unwise, but understand God's will.

And then also here are some things that are going to help us get started on that. Here's some commandments, some teaching about how to discover God's will and fit our lives to those pictures. So the first one he gives us is, "And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation."

So the scripture does not condemn drinking wine. It actually recommends it in moderation at times. Just like the time isn't bad, it's what happens with the time. Wine itself isn't the problem. It's what people do with it. It's the excess and the drunkenness. And the scriptures very, very heavily condemn drunkenness everywhere, Old Testament, New Testament. And they often is right in those lists of certain things as black and white.

If we're drunk, we don't inherit God's kingdom. He says here, it helps us understand what the problem is with it. He says, "In which is dissipation." Well, that's a word that we don't use very much, so I'll just go ahead since you saw the slide.

Now, I got to wait on that. Dissipation is a word we don't use very much, but if you go back to the root again, if something dissipates, what happens to it? Just kind of goes into nothing or it becomes worthless. And so there's other translations that translate this in some other ways, like in which is excess or in which is degradation.