Beloved Children, Walking in Light

When I say "imitators of God" (Ephesians 5:1), the word carries the sense a child has toward a father whose face he cannot stop watching — not mimicry from a distance, but the copying that comes of belonging. And "walk in love" is no feeling only; the word for walk is the plain word for how you conduct your whole life, step after step, day upon day. Love here is not a mood but a road you take. As for "fruitless deeds of darkness" (Ephesians 5:11), the picture is of works that yield nothing, that produce no harvest — barren, however sweet they seem at the eating.

I strike this same note wherever I write: that you have died and risen, so live as those who belong to the light. "Put off your old self... and put on the new self" (Ephesians 4:22, 24). To the Romans I said it plainly: "Let us walk properly as in the daytime... put on the Lord Jesus Christ" (Romans 13:13-14). And to the Colossians, whom I wrote near this same time: "Put to death therefore what is earthly in you" (Colossians 3:5), and "Let no one deceive you with empty words" (Colossians 2:4) — for empty words are exactly what I warn against here (Ephesians 5:6).

Those who read this were Gentiles, lately called out of a world where sexual immorality and greed and drunkenness were not shameful but ordinary, woven into the very worship of their city. They had walked in that darkness themselves; it was not someone else's sin I named, but their own former life. So I do not scold strangers — I remind sons and daughters of what they were, and of the light they now are (Ephesians 5:8). And I write it chained, in a rented house under guard, where the gospel still runs free though I do not.

A thoughtful reader will ask: does verse five threaten to unravel grace? "No immoral or impure or greedy person has any inheritance in the kingdom" (Ephesians 5:5) — has Paul, of all men, made heaven a wage after all? No. Read what I wrote, and do not lift the sentence off the page alone. I do not say the forgiven still stumble into no sin; I say a person whose settled, unrepenting life is given over to these things shows he was never made new. The tree is known by whether it bears the fruit of darkness or of light. Grace does not leave a man where it found him — it raises the dead (Ephesians 5:14). Go back and read verse eight: you were darkness, now you are light. That change is the whole argument.