Walk Wisely, Be Filled

When I wrote "look carefully how you walk" (Ephesians 5:15), the word for "carefully" carries the sense of exactness, precision — walking as a man picks his way over rough ground, watching each footfall. And "making the best use of the time" (Ephesians 5:16) is, in the tongue I wrote it, more like buying up the time — redeeming it, snatching it back from waste as a merchant seizes a bargain before it slips away, because the days are evil and will not wait. And "be filled with the Spirit" (Ephesians 5:18) is spoken as a command in the present and continuing — not filled once and finished, but go on being filled, again and again.

I take up this same walking-in-wisdom and buying-up-the-time when I write to Colossae: "Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time" (Colossians 4:5). The contrast between drunkenness and the Spirit I set out again to the Thessalonians, that we who belong to the day should be sober (1 Thessalonians 5:6-8). And the singing, the thankfulness, the mutual teaching that the fullness of the Spirit produces — you will find it once more in that same letter to Colossae (Colossians 3:16-17).

These believers in Ephesus were young in the faith and living in a city drunk on its own worship and revelry, given to the temple of Artemis and to every excess. I was not writing to people sealed off from the world but to people surrounded by it, tempted daily to walk as the foolish walk. And I wrote it as a prisoner (Ephesians 3:1), chained, with my own days numbered — so when I say buy up the time, understand that I am a man who knows what it is to have his time taken from him, and to redeem what is left.

You may ask: how can filling be commanded? A cup does not fill itself, and the Spirit is God, not a thing I summon at will. That is rightly seen. But look again at the text — I do not tell you to manufacture the Spirit; I tell you to stop filling yourself with what is not the Spirit ("do not get drunk with wine," Ephesians 5:18) and to give yourself over to what does fill — the word, the singing, the thanks, the yielding to one another (Ephesians 5:19-21). The command is not to conjure God but to open the door and keep it open. Go back and see: everything after that command is what being filled looks like from the inside.