Much of Christian life is ordinary enough to resemble walking. It consists of repeated steps in the places where God has put us. Paul uses that familiar action to describe both the old life under sin and the new life given in Christ.
The Word
περιπατέω (peripateō) means to walk. It is also used figuratively for living or conducting one’s life. The figurative use concerns a person’s manner of life, not the distance traveled or the physical ability to walk.
A literal occurrence and a moral exhortation must be distinguished by context. The word itself does not identify a special spiritual technique. It gives ordinary language to the sustained shape of human conduct.
Range of Meaning
The Gospels use the verb for actual walking, including people healed by Jesus. Paul frequently uses it for conduct. Ephesians 2 describes the readers’ former walk in trespasses and their new life of good works prepared by God.
Galatians 5:16 calls believers to walk by the Spirit. Romans 6:4 uses walking language for newness of life in connection with Baptism. The metaphor serves several related arguments without becoming a secret code that means the same thing in every detail.
Where You’ll Meet It
Ephesians describes:
“good works that God prepared beforehand so we can do them.” (Ephesians 2:10, NET)
The NET renders the walking metaphor here as doing the works. The Greek connects the prepared works with the life believers are to walk in. That is the positive counterpart to the former walk described earlier in the chapter.
Verses 8–9 exclude works as the source of salvation or grounds for boasting. Verse 10 then restores them to their proper place as the purpose of God’s creative work in Christ. Excluding works from justification does not exclude them from Christian life.
What Confessional Lutherans Hear
Augsburg Confession VI teaches that faith should produce good fruits and works commanded by God. Those works are not trusted as merits that earn grace. Paul’s sequence gives the same pastoral order: salvation as gift, then the life for which the gift frees us.
Vocation gives that life concrete locations. A parent, employee, friend, citizen, or caregiver usually serves through ordinary responsibilities rather than spectacular religious accomplishments. The neighbor benefits from faithfulness that may attract little public notice.
The prepared works also should not become a demand to discover a hidden, individualized itinerary before acting. God’s commandments and the needs of our callings already identify much that is good. We can serve without decoding every circumstance as a private revelation.
Where People Get It Wrong
A Christian walk can be turned into a progress chart on which assurance rises and falls. Growth and failure are real, but Christ’s righteousness is not recalculated from the latest week’s performance.
Another mistake reserves spiritually meaningful work for activities inside a church building. Paul speaks of a whole manner of life. Honest labor and practical care are not second-class simply because they look ordinary.
So What
Take the next faithful step that your calling places before you. Tell the truth, keep the promise, feed the child, or help the person who cannot manage alone.
When you fail, repent and receive forgiveness. Plēsion identifies the neighbor those works are meant to serve.