Walk in Love, Walk as Children of Light

Scripture: Ephesians 5:1–21

Read Ephesians 5:1–21 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Therefore, be imitators of God as dearly loved children and live in love, just as Christ also loved us and gave himself for us… you were at one time darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live like children of light…

(Ephesians 5:1–2, 8, selected)

Imitators of God

Paul has just told the saints to put on the new man and to forgive one another just as God in Christ also forgave them. He now tells them, in a phrase that has astonished readers for two thousand years, to be imitators of God.

The word imitators in the Greek is mimētai, a word related to our English mimic. The saints are to imitate God. They are to mirror Him. They are to mime His character in their own lives.

This sounds presumptuous at first hearing. How can a creature imitate her Creator? How can a finite person mirror the infinite God? But Paul has been preparing for this moment from the beginning of the letter. The saints have been chosen by God before the foundation of the world (1:4), predestined to adoption as His legal heirs (1:5), made alive together with Christ (2:5), brought into the household and temple of God (2:19–22), and prayed for, that they would be filled up to all the fullness of God (3:19). They are not strangers trying to mimic a foreign king. They are children, learning to look like their Father.

Notice the qualifier Paul attaches: as dearly loved children. The imitation is filial, not slavish. The saints do not imitate God as servants who are anxious about their performance. They imitate Him as His dearly loved children, who naturally and gladly take after the One who loves them. A child imitates her father not because she fears him but because she loves him and because something of his character has already been planted in her by the family she belongs to. The Christian’s imitation of God is the same. The saint takes after her Father because she is His.

The Lutheran tradition has read this with particular care. The imitation of God in Ephesians 5 is not the gospel; it is what flows from the gospel. The Christian does not imitate God in order to become His child. She imitates God because she is already His child. The order matters. Get it backward, and the imitation becomes a treadmill on which the saint can never run fast enough. Get it right, and the imitation becomes the natural breathing of a child who has been given everything she needs by a Father who has loved her first.

And what specifically is to be imitated? Paul names it in verse 2: the saints are to “live in love, just as Christ also loved us and gave himself for us.” The verb is again peripateō, walk; this is the walk in love. The pattern is the cross. Christ’s love is not a sentiment; it is a self-giving. Christ loved by giving Himself: by going to the altar of the cross as “a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God.” The imitation Paul has in mind is the imitation of that love. The saint’s life is to take the shape of Christ’s life. The cross is to leave its mark on the way the Christian loves her neighbor.

This is the walk in love, the first of the two walks Paul will name in this passage. It is rooted in imitation, and the imitation is rooted in the gospel.

What Has No Place Among the Saints

Having named the walk in love, Paul names what does not belong in it.

In verses 3 to 7, he lists the things that have no place among the saints. The list is striking, and it is uncomfortable. Sexual immorality. Impurity of any kind. Greed. Vulgar speech. Foolish talk. Coarse jesting. Idolatry. The list runs through the visible patterns of the pagan world Paul knew, and it pulls no punches.

What is being said here is not merely that these things are bad sins. It is that they have no place in the saints’ walk. They do not belong. They are “not fitting for the saints.” They are not what the saints were made for. Paul does not treat these things as a normal part of Christian life, to be managed and kept within limits. His Greek says they should not even be named among the saints (the NET renders it “among you there must not be”). The Christian’s life is to be marked by such different patterns that these old patterns drop away by lack of recognition.

The reason is given in verses 5 and 6: “no person who is immoral, impure, or greedy (such a person is an idolater) has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.” This is sober language, and Paul speaks it to the saints themselves. He is not threatening the penitent saint who struggles, falls, and returns to the cross. He is warning against settled, unrepentant sin. Those who give themselves over to the patterns of the old man as a settled way of life, against conscience and without repentance, are not walking in faith. Scripture and the Confessions warn that such impenitence grieves the Holy Spirit, that the Spirit can be lost, and that faith can be extinguished (the Augsburg Confession, Article XII; the Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, Article II). The patterns of the pagan walk and the patterns of the Christian walk are not compatible. They cannot coexist as the settled habits of the same person. Where the new man has come, the old man is being laid aside. Where the old man is allowed to rule unopposed, the answer is not to search the heart for proof of faith but to hear the call to repentance and return to Christ’s promise.

The Lutheran tradition has read this with care. It is not a question of whether the saint sometimes sins; she always does. It is a question of where her allegiance lies, what her life is moving toward, what habits the Spirit is laying aside and putting on through Word and Sacrament. The Christian falls. The Christian gets up. The pagan does not get up because she has not been given the new man to stand in. The walk Paul is describing is the walk of the saint who, because of the gospel, can no longer be at home in the patterns she has left behind. She may stumble back into them. But she is not to make her home in them again, and each time she stumbles, the Spirit calls her out of them by the Word of repentance and forgiveness.

Paul ends this section with a sharp instruction: “Let nobody deceive you with empty words.” There were evidently voices in Paul’s day, and there are voices in ours, trying to persuade the saints that the patterns of the pagan walk could be combined with the Christian life. Paul will not have it. The walks are different. The lives are different. The saints are not to be deceived.

We turn now to the second walk.

Walk as Children of Light

In verse 8, Paul names the second walk. He grounds it in identity, not just in imitation.

“You were at one time darkness,” Paul says, “but now you are light in the Lord.” And as light, they are to walk.

Notice the language. Paul does not say the saints once lived in darkness; he says they were darkness. They did not just inhabit a dark place; they were of the dark. Their very being, before Christ, was characterized by what they walked in. And now, just as starkly, they are light. Not just illuminated by light. Light. Their identity has been changed at the level of being. Where they were one thing, they are now another. The change is not external. It is who they are.

This is one of the most striking statements about Christian identity in the New Testament. The Lutheran tradition has read it with attention to the doctrine of regeneration. The saint is not only a sinner who has been declared righteous for Christ’s sake. She is also a sinner who has been re-made. The Spirit who dwells in her has produced a new creature. She is light in the Lord: not in herself, but in Him; not by her own resources, but by the One who has brought her out of darkness and into His marvelous light. The light is His. She is light because she is in Him.

And so the walk follows. “Live like children of light,” Paul says; the verb is again walk. The saints are to walk as what they have been made to be. The walk is not the means by which they become children of light; the walk is the expression of what they already are. This is the Lutheran order again. Identity in Christ first; the walk that flows from it second. The saint walks as a child of light because she is one. She does not walk in order to become one.

What does this walk look like? Paul names three things in verses 9 and 10: “the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness, and truth.” And the saints are to be “trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord,” and to walk in it. The walk as children of light is a walk of moral substance: goodness shown in actions, righteousness in relationships, truth in speech and life. It is also a walk of attention. The Christian who walks as a child of light pays attention to what God has said, what He values, what He wants. She does not drift. She discerns.

Then in verses 11 to 14, Paul gives a striking instruction. The saints are not just to avoid “the unfruitful deeds of darkness.” They are to “expose them.” The Greek word elenchete means to bring to light, to make visible, to reprove. The works of darkness lose their power when they are exposed to the light. Sin grows in secret; it shrivels when the saints refuse to participate in its concealment. This is not a license for prying or harshness. It is a recognition that the saints, as light in the Lord, have a function in the world: their very presence exposes the darkness around them, simply by being what they are.

Paul concludes this section with what looks like an early Christian hymn fragment: “Awake, O sleeper! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you!” It is a call to the sleeper to wake, to the dead to arise, with the promise that Christ will shine on them. The saints, who were once asleep in death, have been woken by Christ. They live in the light He shines on them. They are now to walk in that light, in a world still mostly asleep, as those who have been awakened. The hymn is a small reminder of the great work Christ has done.

Walk Carefully

In verse 15, Paul names a third walk: “consider carefully how you live.” The verb is walk once more, and the Greek word for carefully is akribōs: accurately, attentively, with precision. The Christian life is not to be lived carelessly. The saints are to think about how they walk, to give attention to it, to be deliberate.

Paul names the contrast plainly: “not as unwise but as wise.” The contrast between wisdom and foolishness was a major theme in the Old Testament wisdom literature, especially in Proverbs. Paul picks it up and applies it to the Christian life. The wise saint walks with attention; the foolish saint drifts. The wise saint thinks about her time; the foolish saint wastes it.

And what is wise attention focused on? Paul names two things.

First, “taking advantage of every opportunity.” The Greek phrase is exagorazomenoi ton kairon: literally, buying up the time, which older translations render “redeeming the time.” Kairos in Greek usually points less to abstract clock-time than to the appointed time, the right moment, the opportunity that may not return. Paul says the saints are to make the most of the kairos. They are to recognize that time is a gift, that the days are limited, that what can be done today may not be possible tomorrow. The Christian is not to drift through her days as if they were endless. She is to redeem them: buy them up, use them, make them count for the kingdom.

Paul gives the reason starkly: “because the days are evil.” The age in which the saints live is not a friendly age to the gospel. The current of the world runs against the saint’s walk. To drift is to drift away. The saint who is not deliberate is not standing still; she is being carried in a direction she did not choose. This is sober pastoral realism. The Christian’s days are not safe by default. They must be claimed.

Second, “understanding what the Lord’s will is.” The wise walk is the walk that knows what God wants. The saint is not to guess. She is not to speculate. She is to understand, through the Word, through the Spirit’s illumination by that Word, through the steady teaching of the Church, what the Lord has revealed about how His people are to live. The Lord’s will for His people’s life is not hidden. It has been given. The saint’s task is to take it in and to walk in it.

The Lutheran tradition has insisted on this. The saint is not left to her own moral imagination. The Word has been given. The commandments stand. The wisdom of the Church across the centuries has been preserved in the Confessions. The saint who walks carefully walks in light of all of this. She does not have to invent her ethics. She has to receive them.

Filled With the Spirit

Paul ends the passage with one of the most pastorally rich moments in the letter. He gives the saints a single command, and then he describes what life lived out of that command looks like.

The command is given simply: “be filled by the Spirit.” The saints are to be filled by the Holy Spirit Himself.

Paul sets this command alongside a striking contrast: “do not get drunk with wine, which is debauchery.” The word is asōtia (debauchery, dissipation, the loss of self). The saints are instead to be filled by the Spirit. The contrast is illuminating. There are two ways the human heart seeks fullness: the false way of intoxication, by which the self is overrun by something destructive; and the true way of the Spirit, by which the self is filled by the One who made her. The saint who tries to fill her own emptiness with wine, or with any of the other anesthetics the world offers, is doing in a counterfeit way what the Spirit alone can do truly. Paul does not lecture. He simply names the alternative.

How is the saint filled by the Spirit? Paul does not separate this filling from the means of grace. The Spirit fills the saints through the external Word and the Sacraments, where He has promised to give Christ and His gifts. Congregational song serves this Word, as the saints teach and admonish one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Prayer is faith’s Spirit-worked response, not a substitute for the means by which God promises and gives His grace. The Lutheran tradition has insisted on this against every form of enthusiasm (see the Smalcald Articles, Part III, Article VIII). The Spirit is not given to those who go looking for Him in their feelings. He is given where He has promised to be: at the font, in the pulpit, in the absolution, at the altar, wherever Christ’s Word is spoken to His gathered people. The saint who wants to be filled goes to where the filling happens.

And what does the Spirit-filled life look like? Paul names four things, in a single long sentence that runs through the rest of the passage.

First, the Spirit-filled saints are “speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.” They sing psalms. They sing hymns. They sing spiritual songs. Singing is not an optional addition to the Spirit-filled life. It is one of its native expressions. The saints do not just speak; they sing. The Christian Church across the centuries has been a singing church, and Paul names the reason here. The Lutheran Church has produced an extraordinary body of hymnody for precisely this reason. Luther himself wrote hymns and pressed his Church to sing. The hymn is not another sacrament; at its best it carries the Word, setting the gospel on the lips and in the memory of the saints. The hymnal in the pew is not a concert program. It is the saints, filled by the Spirit, speaking the Word to God and to one another in song.

Second, the saints are “singing and making music in your hearts to the Lord.” The singing is not external only. It is from the heart. The Christian’s worship is not a performance for an audience; it is the response of the inner self to what God has done. When the saint sings the hymn she does not entirely understand, when its words of Scripture catch her by surprise, when those words become her own, that is the Spirit’s work through the Word, filling her, drawing her, lifting her into the worship of God.

Third, the saints give thanks: “always giving thanks to God the Father for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The Spirit-filled saint is a thankful saint. Thanksgiving is the constant disposition of the Christian heart. Paul does not say only for the good things. He says for all things. This is not denial; it is faith. The saint who has been given everything in Christ (chosen, adopted, redeemed, sealed, filled) is a saint who can give thanks even in difficulty, because she knows the gospel runs through all of it. Thanksgiving is not the saint’s mood; it is her posture before God.

Fourth, the Spirit-filled saints are “submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.” The Spirit-filled saint does not insist on her own way. She submits to her fellow saints out of reverence for the Christ they all serve. This last clause is the bridge to the household codes Paul will give in the next section. Mutual submission is the Christian’s social shape. It is what the body of Christ looks like when the Spirit is filling its members. The saint does not lord it over her brother or her sister. She defers, she serves, she yields, because Christ Himself did so for her.

The section ends here. Two walks have been named: the walk in love and the walk as children of light. A third has been named: the careful walk, the wise walk, the walk that redeems the time. And the engine that drives all of these walks has been named: the saints are filled by the Spirit, through the Word and the Sacraments, and out of that filling come the songs, the thanksgivings, the mutual submissions that mark the Christian life as the Christian life.

The saints in Ephesus, hearing this read aloud, would have known what they were called to. So do we. So we walk. So we sing.

For Discussion

1. Paul calls the saints to be imitators of God, as dearly loved children. The imitation is filial, not slavish. Where in your life are you tempted to imitate God as if you had to earn His love rather than as a child who is already loved? How does the order (loved first, imitator second) change the way you think about the Christian life?

2. Paul names sins that have no place among the saints. His Greek says they should not even be named among them, not merely that they should be reduced. What does it mean for a Christian community to be marked by a different set of patterns altogether, by patterns so different that the old ones drop away by lack of recognition?

3. Paul says the saints were darkness and are light. The change is at the level of being, not just behavior. Where do you find this hardest to believe about yourself? How does living out of identity (light) differ from striving for identity (trying to become light)?

4. Paul tells the saints to walk carefully, redeeming the time. The days are evil; drift is dangerous. Where in your week does drift happen most easily? What would it look like to walk that part of your week more carefully?

5. The Spirit-filled life produces singing, thanksgiving, and mutual submission. Which of these three is most natural to you, and which is hardest? What does that tell you about where you most need to be fed by the Word and Sacraments through which the Spirit fills?

6. Paul places drunkenness and Spirit-filling side by side as competing answers to the human heart’s emptiness. Where in your life are you tempted toward false fillings? Where are you neglecting the means of grace through which the true filling comes?

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father, You have made us Your beloved children in Christ. Teach us to imitate You, not as servants who fear Your displeasure, but as children who love their Father. Conform our walking to the love of Christ, who gave Himself for us. Let us walk as children of light, for You have made us light in the Lord. Let no patterns of the old darkness make their home among us. Help us walk carefully through evil days, redeeming the time, understanding Your will. Fill us with Your Holy Spirit, through Your Word, through the waters of our Baptism, through the body and blood of Your Son at the table. And let our lives spill over with psalms, with thanksgiving, with the gentle submission of saints who serve one another for the sake of the Christ they all love. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Looking Ahead

Next session we read one of the most discussed and often most misunderstood sections of the New Testament: Ephesians 5:22–6:9. Paul gives instructions to wives and husbands, to children and parents, to slaves and masters. The genre is ancient (household codes were a common form of moral teaching in the Greco-Roman world), but Paul takes the genre and transfigures it through the gospel. Each pairing is rooted in something the saint has received: wives and husbands stand in a relationship that mirrors Christ and the Church; children obey and honor their parents in the Lord; slaves serve their human masters as slaves of Christ; masters remember that they and their slaves have the same Master in heaven.

The passage on marriage in 5:22–33 is one of the most theologically rich in Paul. Marriage is named as a mystery, and the mystery is Christ and the Church. The Lutheran tradition has read this passage with great care, both for what it teaches about marriage and for what it teaches about Christ’s relation to His bride. We will give it the time it deserves.

Before next session, read Ephesians 5:22–6:9 at least twice. Read it once for sense. Read it a second time noticing how each set of instructions is grounded in the gospel: not in cultural assumption, not in mere social hierarchy, but in what God has done in Christ. The household of the saints takes its shape from the household of God.