Colleen and Nikki talk about Ephesians 5:1-21 which teaches that born-again believers are imitators of God—not for salvation, but because of salvation. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: Welcome back to Ephesians. We’re looking at Ephesians 5:1-21 today. We have just finished looking at Paul’s discussion in chapter 4 of Ephesians where he explains that the Body of Christ is unified by the Holy Spirit, is edified, instructed, and gifted by individuals God gives the church to teach and shepherd and evangelize. Paul has talked about the way a born-again person is to live, not grieving the indwelling Holy Spirit, who, by the way, does not leave us when we sin as born-again people, but He becomes grieved at being brought into our sins when we indulge the flesh instead of trusting God. Now, in the first past of chapter 5, Paul explains to the Body what it means to imitate God. Before we look at these verses, though, I want to remind you that you can ask questions or share your thoughts by emailing us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Go to proclamationmagazine.com, and there you’ll find our links to our online magazine and articles, to our Former Adventist YouTube channel, and to this podcast and the podcast transcripts. You can also subscribe to our weekly Proclamation! email, and you can donate using the donate tab on the homepage. Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram as well. And if you love this podcast, do give us a 5-start review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And now, Nikki, I have a question for you.
Nikki: Okay.
Colleen: It’s kind of amazing how much Adventism we’ve unpacked in this little book, isn’t it. As an Adventist, what did it mean to you to be imitators of God?
Nikki: Well, you know, that takes me back to the character perfection that was expected of us in order to be counted among the 144,000 remnant, and all of the expectation to walk like Christ did, to behave like Him, the “What Would Jesus Do” kind of mentality.
Colleen: Ohh.
Nikki: Yeah, so – and I think I would have brought up the command from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus said, “Be perfect therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” And yeah, I’m pretty sure it would have been about character perfection. What about you?
Colleen: Same thing. Ellen White said that we had to reproduce the character of Christ before He would come again. So it was all about character perfection. I was told, Ellen White said, that our characters were the only thing we would take with us to heaven, and we had to get it together and get them right before we got there, and it really – remembering all this has helped me understand that from my very earliest childhood, very earliest – in fact, I found this written in my baby book that my Mom kept of me, about me when I was two years old, that I prayed, “Dear Jesus, please make me good.” But I was never good, and I knew I was never good. But I felt I had to be or I wouldn’t go to heaven.
Nikki: And I want to point out too that that character perfection, in my head, was pre-salvation character perfection. So Christians listening might hear us talking this way and think, “Well, yeah, we do try to reflect Christ to the world.” But in Adventism it was for salvation, not because we’ve been saved.
Colleen: That’s been one of the biggest shifts in my head that I’ve had the hardest time actually coming to see clearly as I read the New Testament, even after leaving. I intuitively sort of understood it when I was born again, but I see very clearly now that the New Testament commands, and this chapter in particular, is filled with instructions for the church. These are not commands for how to be saved –
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: – as I would have thought it meant in Adventism.
Nikki: Um-hmm, me too.
Colleen: These are things that Paul is speaking to the church, and it’s important to remember again the little formula we had of the indicatives and the imperatives. The indicative is what is, the indicator of the fact from which we take all of these words. The fact is that Paul is writing to born-again believers in the church in Ephesus. The fact is, as it says in verse 1 of this chapter, that his audience is “beloved children,” not people who need to be saved. And that brings me to one more thing about my Adventist understanding. Nikki, what did you understand “God’s children” to be as an Adventist?
Nikki: All of humanity. We were all God’s children. I mean, people say that, “We’re all God’s children.” And in a sense, I mean, we’re image-bearers, yes.
Colleen: Sure.
Nikki: But we’re looking at the Ephesians context. This is about those who are born again, born of God.
Colleen: The Gospel of John in verse 12 of chapter 1 says this, verses 12 and 13: “But to all who did receive Him” – meaning Jesus – “who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” So we are not “God’s children,” biblically speaking, until we trust Jesus and have been born again. And Romans 8 bears this out as well. Paul says in verses 14 to 17, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!'” I love what you said the other week, Nikki, that when you were crying out to God and wondering if you were saved some years ago, you realized you were crying out to Him as to “Father” –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – which you wouldn’t have done as an unbeliever.
Nikki: No.
Colleen: That’s something the Holy Spirit puts in our hearts when we are born of God, and we know He’s our Father. So that’s the context of this chapter. Paul is writing to children of God who are born again. He is not telling people how to stay saved, how to get saved, how to get your act together. He is talking to believers about how to grow into the likeness of Christ as people who are already born of God and indwelt by the Holy Spirit. So as we talked through this passage, Nikki, we decided that it can kind of be divided into sections. It’s 21 verses, so we’re going to read it section by section and talk about the sections.
Nikki: Okay.
Colleen: We’re going to just start by reading the introduction to the chapter. Would you read verses 1 and 2, Nikki, please?
Nikki: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.”
Colleen: So you had some interesting thoughts about this, Nikki, when we were talking. First of all, “Be imitators of God, as beloved children,” and then he tells them how to do that, “Walk in love as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.” Talk to me about what this passage made you remember about some other passages about aromas, fragrant aromas.
Nikki: Yeah, can I first just say that one of the things that jumped out to me for the first time when looking at this is that after it says “be imitators of God,” it tells us how to.
Colleen: Isn’t that interesting?
Nikki: We don’t have to fill all that in with what Ellen White said. The word tells us, “As beloved children, walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God.” So this is sacrificial love, and the sacrifice is to God. Again, it reminds me of what you’ve often said, Colleen, about loving other people for God.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: When I read this, about the sacrifice to God being a fragrant aroma, it made me think of a passage in 2 Corinthians 2:14 through 16, and in this passage Paul says that believers are the fragrance of Christ to God. And then he talks about how – he likens it to this procession, this parade that they used to do after they’ve conquered another kingdom or another village. They would have a parade, and they would take the people that they captured into this parade, and they burned incense and fragrance.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And for those who were the conquerors, this was a fragrance of victory and of conquering and of life, and to the conquered, as they smelled this fragrance, they knew this was a fragrance of death because so often at the end of this parade they would die. Paul says that we are the fragrance of Christ to God and the fragrance of life to those who are being saved and the stench of death to those who are being lost. So as I thought about this, Christ’s sacrifice being a fragrant aroma and us being the fragrance of Christ to God, I don’t know if I can quite articulate how this was new to me, but we are living, we are walking in the fragrance of this sacrifice. Everything about us is true because of who Christ is, and so now the call here from Paul, as he moves us through this chapter, is to live like it. This is our identity, and he’s going to contrast us with the sons of disobedience.
Colleen: What you say about being sons of God, a fragrant aroma, living as Christ because we are in Him and He is an aroma to God, I was thinking, Adventism presented Jesus’ death completely upside down and inside out from the way the Bible presents it. The Bible tells us that Christ’s death was an offering to God for us. Adventism told us that Jesus’ death was a sacrifice, and they used it to guilt us, like “look what Jesus did,” almost like an example, to show you how bad you are, how bad of a sinner you are: He would go to death for you, He would allow you folks to persecute and kill Him to show you, you are bad. But that’s not what the Bible says. The Bible says the law showed us how bad we were.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Christ’s death was an offering to God that was received by God as a fragrant aroma. And when we’re in Him, as you were saying to me earlier, we’re part of that aroma to God. We are part of what ascends to God as an offering from Christ as a result of His death. It’s an amazing inside out picture from what we learned. And I just have to say, as we move into this passage, I was thinking about how differently I see this now from the way I saw it as an Adventist and how important it is to remember we have to read this passage on the basis of the indicatives that he’s writing to born-again people who are secure eternally already, and I wanted to read a passage from a manuscript of Ellen White’s. It’s 13th Manuscript, page 82, and I think this might resonate with some people. “The traits of character you cherish in life will not be changed by death or by the resurrection. You will come up from the grave with the same disposition you manifested in your home and in society. Jesus does not change the character at His coming. The work of transformation must be done now. Our daily lives are determining our destiny. Defects of character must be repented of and overcome through the grace of Christ, and a symmetrical character must be formed while in this” – get this – “probationary state that we may be fitted for the mansions above.” What is wrong with that?
Nikki: That’s just a variation on purgatory.
Colleen: Yes, it is. And she is saying that nothing about our characters will change at the resurrection. She is very clear that we clean ourselves up by keeping the law, by submitting to the law, and that Jesus was only a means to access the law. The Bible tells us the complete opposite. The law was a way to show Israel they needed a Savior. Jesus came to the lost sheep of Israel as their Messiah to fulfill that law and to open up a New Covenant, which also included Gentile believers. It’s completely inside out. Our characters are perfected by Christ after we believe, because He saves us by grace. So as we listen to this, I know how easy it is for these commands in the New Testament to sound like – excuse the word – triggers.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But this is not – the triggers are not what the Bible is teaching. That’s what Ellen White taught us, whether we read her or not.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Did you come out of Adventism with that understanding, Nikki?
Nikki: Yeah, I did. And no, I did not read Ellen.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: But I was, I believe, a fifth generation Adventist on my mother’s side, and yeah, I’m not sure on my Dad’s. Maybe second. But it comes through the family teaching, the family norms, what you hear in school. You don’t actually have to read her to get this stuff.
Colleen: No, you don’t. I often say it comes in with the mother’s milk, and I actually think it starts that early or prenatally even, because our mothers were living that. So, as we go on, the next section that we’re going to look at is verses 3 through 5. Would you read that, please, Nikki?
Nikki: “But sexual immorality or any impurity or greed must not even be mentioned among you, as is proper among saints; and there must be no filthiness or foolish talk, or vulgar joking, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks. For this you know with certainty, that no sexually immoral or impure or greedy person, which amounts to an idolater, has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.”
Colleen: He’s listing sins here, isn’t he?
Nikki: Yeah, this would have been a trigger section for me. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Absolutely. [Laughter.] But what is he actually saying here, in the context? He’s speaking to the church. How can he talk to the church about these sins? You know, and we get this question sometimes: If we have died to sin, how come there are all these commands to avoid sin?
Nikki: And he’s actually telling them that it shouldn’t even be mentioned among them. So it goes beyond avoiding it. It also requires shepherding and church discipline, you know. It requires exposing these sins when they do some up and rooting them out. If we look at these sins, we see that these are unrepentant, practiced, intentional sins. This is not impatience. It’s not, you know, some of that other stuff that just takes time and that God work out in us. This is decisional sin. We read in 1 John 3:9 that those who make a practice of sinning are not born again. This is practiced sin. This is intentional.
Colleen: Paul can write this to the church because there are always people sitting in the pews who are the bad soils, who are not fully committed to the Lord, who are drawn to the gospel, who are drawn to the Body. There is something remarkable and compelling about a true Body of Christ and the love they have for one another. That does not exist in the world, and it’s very compelling to people who are not believers. So he’s saying, if you find yourself habitually committed to some sort of sin that is your lifestyle, you need to take this before the cross of Christ and give this up and entrust it to Him. And also, it’s important to mention, believers do fall into sin sometimes. They do sin. This is not saying our flesh will never sin. But he is saying that the ones who will not inherit the kingdom are those who are committed to the sin and not to the Savior.
Nikki: And there are commands in other parts of Scripture that tell believers to carefully try to pull your brother out of this sin. A true born-again believer who is sinning is not going to be comfortable doing it. Is it in 1 Corinthians 5, Colleen, where it talks about a brother who is in sexual sin? I think Paul tells them to confront him, and if he doesn’t, then hand him over to Satan so that his soul may be saved.
Colleen: That’s right. It’s in 1 Corinthians 5:3-5, and I’ll just read it because it’s a pretty interesting passage we don’t hear very often. “For I, on my part, though absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this, as though I were present.” And the context is he is speaking of a man who is sleeping with his father’s wife. “In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus, I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord Jesus.” It’s such an interesting passage. This actually is a believer he’s speaking of who has allowed himself to become enmeshed in habituated sin, and Paul is saying, I’m going to turn him over to Satan, which apparently in the context means he’s asking that the local church put him out of fellowship into the world, away from the protection of the Body of Christ, so that he will be brought to the point of repentance and his spirit saved in the day of the Lord. Isn’t that just fascinating? It’s so different from the way we thought of these things as Adventists.
Nikki: Well, yeah, so much of this kind of stuff just got moved around, hush-hush, you know, shuffled here to there.
Colleen: Exactly.
Nikki: It helps me to remember that Paul is writing to a congregation, and so it really does make me think of church discipline, and it makes me think of how often we hear these stories in the news of these pastors or these entire ministries –
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: – where suddenly it’s being exposed that there is all of this sexual scandal. And in the ministries where the sin is not called out, it seems to spread. I remember when I first came out of Adventism, I became aware of a particular ministry where all of this was exposed, and they did, like the Adventists that I’ve heard of do, they moved him around, and suddenly you’ve got these people who are doing it and now we’re uncovering more people linked to that ministry who have gotten involved. If it gets rooted out properly and immediately, you’re protecting your church, you’re protecting the sheep from this spread.
Colleen: I think it’s worth mentioning, just because of the day and age in which we live and the political climate and the words that we hear, sexual immorality is any expression of sexuality that goes against the way it’s taught in Scripture.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So I just want to say, issues of gender identity, issues of homosexuality – sin is sin. We are born with tendencies to sin. Everybody is. But it’s how we act on them and how we trust God that really is where the rubber meets the road. And we have to be willing to call sin sin and not excuse it on the basis of human weakness or human tendencies. There are other sins that are genetic or perhaps have congenital causes, such as alcoholism and other things, and yet no one is given the right to indulge their sin at the expense of another person’s rights or at the expense of offending God, who says, “This is how I want you to live.” Yes, there is always redemption for every single person who turns to the Lord, but we still have to call sin sin.
Nikki: And don’t you find that the world tries to identify us by our temptations. You are an alcoholic, you are this, you are your eating disorder –
Colleen: Great point.
Nikki: – and none of that is biblical. Our identity is not in our temptations and our weaknesses. Our identity, if we are believers, is always and only ever in Christ. And we live to make it our aim to please Him.
Colleen: You know, that reminds me of a really interesting thing I read in a book shortly after we came out of Adventism. We were very new. And Richard found a book – you know, I don’t even remember the title of it, but I remember it was by Bob George, who has since gone to be with the Lord, and he was writing in there about him and his wife ministering to a girl, a young woman, who had an eating disorder. And I remember being so struck by something he said in that book. He said, “We told her, ‘You cannot call yourself both a child of God and an anorexic, because that’s two identities. We only have one identity, and when we trust Jesus and are born again, our identity is Christ. All these other things are the things He’s working in to strip us from our false identities and make us trust Him instead of indulging the things we’ve become used to in the flesh.'” That was extremely important for me to read because I had been anorexic before I became a Christian. I had a been severely anorexic, and it was very interesting for me to realize, I can’t indulge myself and call myself an anorexic when I belong to the Lord. That’s my identity.
Nikki: Yeah, and that’s the key word: identity. You know, we’re not denying the struggle with all of these things. We’re not denying that some people struggle with drinking or struggle with anorexia or even with posttraumatic stress. Those things are real, and they’re hard, but it’s like you said, this is where Christ meets us, and this is where He shows us our true identity is actually in Him, and He begins to restore us and redeem all of that.
Colleen: And He does.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: He really does redeem us. It’s amazing. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Well, Nikki, shall we look at the next section? This one’s longer, and this one really had me thinking about my past a lot. Verses 6 to – where did we go? – 14.
Nikki: Okay. “See that no one deceives you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not become partners with them; for you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; walk as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness, and truth), as you try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord. Do not participate in the useless deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them; for it is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret. But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light. For this reason it says, ‘Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.'”
Colleen: There are some hard things in this passage that have been traditionally really hard for me to understand. But I think as we walk through this, it will make some more sense to us. We talked about it quite a bit, Nikki, and saw some things we hadn’t seen before. But I’m particularly struck by this whole thing about not becoming partakers of the things of darkness, but exposing them, and not being deceived by empty words, because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the world and those who are the sons of disobedience. So, Nikki, what are your thoughts about this whole business of letting no one deceive you, because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience, and not being partakers of them?
Nikki: The first thing this brings up in my mind is obviously, God has wrath –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – because just before I left Adventism, I had some mentors who believed that God does not have wrath, a loving God would never direct His wrath at anyone. Well, here we see that the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience, and so we see now that there is this contrast between the children of God and the sons of disobedience. And the other thing that jumped out at me is this command, “See that no one deceives you.” That’s a command. That’s not like “good luck.”
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.] That’s a command, and in order to avoid being deceived, you’ve got to know the truth. That takes commitment to the truth and a willingness to see the truth when you’re confronted with it.
Colleen: I was thinking about this and about deceptive words and not becoming deceived by them and that Paul says, “Because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.” And I was thinking also about Romans 1, from about verses 23 to the end of the chapter, where Paul describes the wrath of God coming upon those who indulge their desires, their depravity, and their perversions. It’s quite an interesting thing that this all starts with deceptive words. We’ve talked about the significance of Jesus being the Word, about the fact that the Bible is called the word of God, that it is alive and active. Well, it’s kind of fascinating to me that words can deceive us as well as bring life. I have to say, I have Adventist evangelism in my mind when I read this. I think about the Christians that I have known. We have friends that – you know, we have a friend right here locally, Steve Pitcher, who was lured into Adventism by deceptive words.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Actually by the permission he gleaned from Walter Martin, who declared Adventism to be Christian, just heterodox. But when he got into Adventism, he began to realize it wasn’t just Christianity with a twist, it was something completely different. But the words were deceptive.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So when Paul’s talking to a congregation like this and saying, “Don’t be partakers of these things, with these empty words,” he’s saying, “Christians will encounter deception.” We live in a world filled with deception, and I still think that because we were once deceived, we could be deceived again. We have to know, as you said, Scripture so well that we can see where the deceptive words go wrong, because it’s not initially obvious, but it lures people into its darkness.
Nikki: Yeah. And can I tell you that as a new believer would have scared me, because in Adventism Scripture was so confusing to me. And then to think, “I’ve got to know Scripture so well that I’m not deceived? That’s going to take forever.” But really, all it means is you read the Bible. You just read. You read one letter at a time in its context. You just begin to read. And the Holy Spirit brings to mind what you need to remember when you’re confronted with deception.
Colleen: Absolutely. You know, that’s one of the things that I did not understand before I became a Christian, that ultimately, it’s not up to me to make sure everything is figured out. When I trust God, the Holy Spirit teaches me.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I can trust Him with the people that I can’t seem to convince, with the ideas I can’t figure out, with the Bible itself. And if you have trusted Jesus and you open up His word and pray that He will show you what He knows you need to know, He absolutely does. And if you’re confused about something, He will clarify it. I have never experienced Him not doing that. Sometimes it takes a while, sometimes He asks us to pursue His word, to compare passages and books with authors and so forth inside the Bible, but He always clarifies His word when we submit to Him.
Nikki: This section here, 6 and 7, for some reason it has made me think about – first, God’s telling us this is not your identity; right? We’re not the sons of disobedience; we’re beloved children. And then he says, “Therefore do not be partners with them.” And it, for some reason, made me think about a kid who is adopted, you know, who grew up without anything, no food, no clothes, and then he gets adopted into a home where they provide all of that for him and they love him, and yet he still has these remnant parts of him that are smuggling away food because – and I don’t want to imply that in our sin we were victims. Obviously, it’s kind of a bad metaphor, but the point being that when your identity changes like that, you don’t continue to behave as you did before. We are now children of God and so we don’t partner and we don’t behave like the sons of disobedience. We have no fellowship with that.
Colleen: It doesn’t mean that we don’t have things still imprinted in our brains that we automatically revert to, but we have the Holy Spirit now, who is revealing our sin to us and who is revealing the grace of God and reminding us of the gospel that has already saved us. It’s a completely different – like we sometimes say, “We work from salvation, not toward it.”
Nikki: And that is a huge difference between Christianity and Adventism. In Adventism, if you are struggling with your sin, you’ve got to struggle harder, you’ve got to believe in yourself, you’ve got to work harder. In Christianity, if you’re struggling with your sin, you remember your identity, you remember who your Father is, what Christ did for you, what’s true of you, and suddenly it loses its power little by little.
Colleen: It does! Verse 8 is really interesting because it says, “You were formerly…” It just literally makes an identification statement, “You were formerly darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; walk as children of light.” What is Paul saying here?
Nikki: He’s talking about their natures.
Colleen: Yes!
Nikki: “You once were children of wrath,” like we read in Ephesians 2, but now we’ve been raised to life with Christ. Our nature now is Christ in us, who is the light.
Colleen: Yes! And we have been literally born of God, as it says in John 1:12. We have been born of God, and we are His children, so we are children of light. We aren’t just walking through this world hoping that God will come and stay with us. He has sealed us, if we have trusted Jesus, and never leaves us. So we carry His presence with us wherever we go. We are to remember that, and it’s back to identity.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: This is our identity.
Nikki: Can I tell you how much I loved it that he says here, “You are light,” so he gives that affirmation of our identity, but then in 10 he says, “As you try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.” Built right into that is the fact that we don’t get it right all the time. We are in the process of knowing what pleases God, of growing and becoming more of who He’s creating us to be. We don’t arrive there and then get to be called children of light. It’s completely of faith. It’s a work of God.
Colleen: Exactly! It’s completely opposite of what Ellen White said, like that quote I read earlier, completely opposite of that.
Nikki: Yeah. And Romans 12:2 supports that we do this, ongoing, over time, by the renewing of our mind so that we can prove what the will of God is.
Colleen: Yes. It’s such a liberating thing to begin to see this right side out instead of upside down. It’s amazing. And then he goes on in this passage. He says, “Don’t participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead expose them; for it is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done in secret.” Well, Nikki, what is he saying here?
Nikki: Well, he’s saying it’s not enough just to have nothing to do with it, but it’s also important to expose it.
Colleen: And I think of Life Assurance Ministries, for an example.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: We’re often asked, “Why don’t you just move on? Why do you keep bashing Adventists? If you didn’t like it, just leave, but you don’t have to keep bashing them.” And I want to say, I know this might feel like bashing if you still contain a core of Adventist identity, but the fact is that if you know the Lord, He asks us to expose the darkness, and I think that when we leave something dark, like Adventism or Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormonism or any false teaching, part of our mandate as believers who’ve been born of God is to expose what was wrong with that so people who are still caught in it will understand why it feels confusing and why they need to leave for the sake of the gospel. We were talking about this earlier, and we’ve seen two kinds of expose. One kind is where people are just kind of mad at Adventism, realize they’ve been lied to, can’t do it, hate Ellen White, and they just get kind of nasty. They talk about Adventism, they do disrespectful memes online, they say hateful things about her that are really counterproductive because they don’t go anywhere helpful. But I think this exposing that Paul is talking about here is being done by the light, not being done from a place of still being in darkness and just mad at the other darkness. If we aren’t presenting the gospel as an alternative, as the mirror that shows how we know that was wrong, then we’re not offering real help to anybody.
Nikki: So I read a commentator on the Greek word here for “expose” that I found really helpful when talking about this dynamic. He says, “Expose” – and I can’t pronounce the Greek word [laughter] –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – “implies not merely the charge but the truth of the charge and further the manifestation of the truth of the charge. More than all this, very often also the acknowledgement, if not outward, yet inward, of its truth on the part of the accused.” So it’s exposing the error with the goal of convicting the one in error of the truth –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and leading them to repentance. So LAM, the way I see it, has kind of a twofold thing going.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: We’re seeking for people to know the gospel, to expose the errors of Adventism to an extent that they can look at it and say, “Woah, this is wrong,” and repent and come to faith.
Colleen: Yes. Yes.
Nikki: And then there’s also this other aspect that is important to us, and that’s just guarding the Body of Christ. We read John say in 2 John that you’re not to let anyone come into your house – and the context there is their church – with a different teaching about Christ from what is taught in Scripture. And not even to give them a greeting, for anyone who gives him a greeting participates in his evil deeds. So when we see the Body of Christ, who have collectively for the most part been deceived by Adventism, extending the right hand of fellowship, we see them both cutting off our family from seeing the errors of Adventism, and we see them inviting these errors into their own congregations and normalizing something that at its root is very wicked.
Colleen: That is a great point, Nikki. I have had so much reaction and have never been able to get traction with anybody that seemed to matter to about this, but in the case of, for example, the music, the Christian music world –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – where a lot of Christians will embrace Adventist artists or Adventists will invite Christian artists into their church to perform, and the excuse always is, “Oh, the Christians can now go in and present the gospel.” What they don’t seem to understand is that the Adventists believe that if a Christian comes in and performs in their church, that is giving them the stamp of approval as a Christian church. They’re not open to evangelism from those things. This is a way of making a public statement, “We’re just like you.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And that’s wrong. We can’t do that with a false teaching.
Nikki: I have to say that I was a part of a church that often brought in Christian artists for our different retreats, and I always felt very proud when they would come. I never, ever felt like they knew something I didn’t know. I just felt very proud of our connection with them.
Colleen: Um-hmm, absolutely. The same way. I don’t think most Christians understand that that pride is the real way Adventists usually feel about partnering with Christians, Christian professionals. It’s like a notch in the gun for them.
Nikki: I just want to say too, for the Christians who do partner and who say, “Well, I’ve always had a great experience with them. They’re really wonderful people. They’re nice people.” This ministry doesn’t exist to discredit the people.
Colleen: No, no.
Nikki: We love the people.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: We’re talking about what their children are being taught on Saturday morning, what their kids are being taught in the academies. When you go to a musical performance for the holidays, you are shouldering their doctrine and holding it up alongside them to the children, who are growing up and looking on at this.
Colleen: And you might not even think you’re doing that, but the fact is, that is the effect.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It normalizes the comingling of Adventism with Christianity so that it makes it even harder to see that it’s a false doctrine, because it’s a little embarrassing if you suddenly wake up and realize you’ve hosted a heretic in your church. People don’t want to admit that.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Well, we move on into the next couple of verses here, where Paul says, “All things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light.” And then he says, again to the church, “For this reason it says, ‘Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.'” This is a passage that we both struggled with because of just the way it’s worded.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Everything that is exposed by the light and becomes visible is light? Well, what does that mean? Is it the same thing as us becoming light in the Lord, being transferred out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son? Is that what this means?
Nikki: [Laughter.] Well, I really wrestled with this, and I was happy to find that a lot of commentators do. I read that this could also be translated that what makes everything visible is light –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – but that doesn’t seem to be the most common translation in the versions that I read and trust and our pastor does.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: So another possibility is that this is more likely referring to sanctification, and so where we have places of darkness that need exposing within the church or within our own hearts, our own lives –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – when the light, the truth of Christ, shines on it, He transforms it, He sanctifies us.
Colleen: I mean, I can even apply that to what we’ve just been saying about fraternizing or partnering with Adventism. The only reason I use Adventism as the example is because that’s what I know. There are other things too that are false teachings that Christians can become deceived by. But if we have found ourselves partnering with Adventists, thinking they are believers just like us, being a little confused about their doctrines but willing to listen to them because they’re friendly and nice, this is one of those things that can be exposed by the light, and God will correct that. And we are called to listen to the Lord and to have our Bibles open and to see if what we’re learning is true because Christians are deceived by false doctrines. If they’re not careful, they can be. Like I mentioned earlier, our friend Steve, who became an Adventist because he was deceived by deceptive teachings and ultimately realized how wrong it was and left, but this is not an impossibility, and we’re warned against that. We tend to think of all the evil realm as being a separate power that opposes God, and indeed it does. However, it is not a separate and equal power, as Adventism basically taught us. Evil is part of creation, and it’s like a subset of creation. Satan is not a dark god and God is the light God. Satan is a creation of God, and he does not have equal but opposite power. When evil is exposed by the light of Christ, it is still part of His toolbox. Even the demons can bring glory to God when God exposes their evil and people see how they’ve been deceived. It’s kind of interesting, Isaiah says that God says, “I create darkness and I create light.” There’s nothing that is not ultimately His and nothing that does not ultimately bring Him glory. When we know Jesus, we can trust Him, and we can know that His word and His Spirit will expose evil, and when evil is exposed, with truth as the means of revelation, truth will shine the light on that evil and bring glory to God. And then there is this passage that seems to be quoting an early Christian hymn, “Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” So if this is an early Christian hymn and Paul is writing this to the church, how are we to understand this verse today, as the church?
Nikki: I wish I had a really solid answer. I was wrestling with this passage, and I actually – I wrote to Kaspars and asked him, “What does this mean?” and we were just talking a little about it, and he pointed out that Paul writes in other parts of Scripture, when he’s writing to the church, he tells them not to sleep.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: If this is talking about sanctification or immature Christians, this is a call to wake up and discern.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Remember the command starts with, “Do not be deceived.” Well, if you’re sleeping, you’re going to be very easily deceived.
Colleen: So we’re going to move into the last part of this section of Ephesians 5. And Nikki, would you read verses 15 to 21, please?
Nikki: “So then, be careful how you walk, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of your time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not get drunk with wine, in which there is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your hearts to the Lord; always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to our God and Father; and subject yourselves to one another in the fear of Christ.”
Colleen: This is really quite a beautiful passage. In thinking of it not as a command to me, who always fails, but as a charge to the church, to the Body of believers, it’s a really amazing thing that Paul is asking us to do. “Walk as wise people, not as unwise people, making the most of your time, because the days are evil.” You had an interesting insight into that earlier, Nikki. Would you share that, please?
Nikki: Yeah. “Making the most of your time” can also mean redeeming the time or rescuing it from loss, and it makes me think about what we just read in the last section.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: When darkness is exposed in our lives and we bring it to the light and we’re transformed by the truth, now we get to redeem the time. And it makes me think of what we do at LAM. We redeem the time we spent in the deception of Adventism by exposing it and reaching back with the truth of Christ and seeking to protect the church.
Colleen: Absolutely. I really see that as being a direct example of one way this can play out inside the Body of Christ. I always loved something I used to hear Elizabeth Inrig say, “God wastes nothing, and He redeems everything we submit to Him.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And I realized that our whole lives are not wasted when we are His. There’s nothing that happens to us He doesn’t redeem and use for His glory. That’s nothing that happens to us. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.] Nothing. I mean, and that takes us back to our conversation earlier, where people are identified by their weaknesses and their sins, but when you submit that to Christ and you let the truth shine on it, God can use that to redeem it for His purposes, as I know He has for you and for me and for so many.
Colleen: It’s such a wonderful thing. Our lives are not out of His control. He is not surprised by what happens to us. He isn’t doing a cleanup run to take care of the disasters that befell us. No. He’s not out there honoring Satan’s freewill. He is out there as our sovereign God. We redeem the time by trusting Him and letting Him bring us His work, which, interestingly enough, redeems our Adventism, in our case. So then he says, “Don’t be foolish, understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord.” So what is he saying here about being filled with the Spirit? This is a phrase that is so often misunderstood and, frankly, misused. Talk to us about what Paul is saying here, Nikki.
Nikki: Well, I’ll tell you what I thought of when I read that verse. Getting drunk with wine seems to be contrasted with the filling of the Spirit. So if you are drunk, you are avoiding reality and out of control.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: But if you’re filled with the Spirit, you have never been more planted in reality, and you are more aware of truth and your next steps, and you’re not out of control. You have the Spirit in you. I used to think that being filled with the Spirit meant getting more and more and more of Him, and the better I was and the more I perfected my character, the more of the Spirit I got, and it was so helpful to me to hear – early on after leaving Adventism, Elizabeth used to teach about this, and she would say, “The Spirit is a person. You don’t get an arm and then a leg and then” – She wasn’t implying that the Holy Spirit had a body.
Colleen: Right. Right.
Nikki: But that He’s a person and you receive Him, you receive all of Him. But this is about being controlled, allowing the Holy Spirit more and more of yourself and the freedom to drive your life.
Colleen: Yes. The problem isn’t getting more of the Spirit. It’s Him having access to more of us.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And it comes from trusting, from trusting Jesus, from trusting His word. And it’s interesting that the way being controlled by the Spirit plays out, and the way Paul is talking about it here, is in the way we minister to one another in the Body. I’ve been really quite struck by how often Paul tells us not just, “These are little individual commands for you,” but this is how the Body is to function. We speak to one another in psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, singing, making melody with your heart to the Lord. What’s consistent about every one of these things he says we speak to each other in?
Nikki: They’re all musical. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Yes! It’s so interesting. And it reminds me again of the fact that our pastor, Gary Inrig, has said, “If you think about the religions of the world, there’s only one religion that sings, that really sings, and it’s Christianity.” Apparently, Old Testament Israel also sang, and the Psalms were their songbook. So Paul is here saying, we minister to one another, we express the power of the Holy Spirit, when we honor God through worshiping Him in song and psalms, and this builds up the Body, and it builds up us in Christ, and it’s a fact that we get all of the Spirit when we’re born again, but as we move through our lives and live our lives and do ministry and do the things He puts in front of us, He equips us and fills us with His power and His perception as He asks us to do things. And here it’s about ministering to one another.
Nikki: It’s pretty incredible that being filled with the Spirit automatically assumes that you’re in relationship with the Body of Christ; you’re not on an island by yourself somewhere. I like the fact that he says speaking to one another in all of these musical ways, because it’s not just singing –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – it’s speaking this to each other at every point of life, and the things that fill the psalms and the hymns and the spiritual songs are truths about God. When we worship Him, we sing back to Him the truths about Him. One of my favorite hymns in the New Testament is “Immortal, invisible, God only wise.” I know that that’s actually the way the hymn is written, probably not a direct quote from Scripture, but I love that, speaking truth about who He is in every part of our life.
Colleen: And then he concludes this idea by saying, “Always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father; and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.” How do we give thanks for all things in the name of Jesus Christ to the Father?
Nikki: I think it has a lot to do with submitting to God’s will.
Colleen: I agree.
Nikki: I think sometimes that’s really hard to do because His will might be discipline or hardship or severe mercy –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – but we thank Him in the name of Christ.
Colleen: And we can’t do this if we’re not already in Christ. We have His name when we are hidden in Him, and He’s the one that gives us the ability to thank Him in all things and to keep our eyes on Him, instead of being consumed by fear or grief or anxiety. When we’re in Him, that’s what enables us to give thanks in His name to our Father, who filters everything that comes to us through His love. Nothing happens to us apart from His permissive love.
Nikki: And it’s always for His purposes.
Colleen: And His glory. And finally, “…and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.” How do we do that?
Nikki: I think that we do it, again, by looking at the Lord. We do this in the Lord. That word “subject” means “under God’s arrangement,” and so you’re submitting to God’s arrangement.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And I find it interesting that this last verse in this part of the chapter is going to launch us into a section on relationships that have order according to God’s will.
Colleen: And the whole idea of subjection is not a negative term. It’s a word that has about it the meaning of agree, agree with. It’s interesting that Paul is not afraid to use that word, which we sort of hate today, and yet in the Body of Christ we look after one another’s needs. We consider one another better than ourselves. It doesn’t mean we hate ourselves, but we are children of God, children of the King, and our brothers and sisters are as well, and we treat each other as children of the King, siblings together in the eternal kingdom of the Father and the Son. So if you don’t know if you’re a born-again child of God, let me just remind you how you can know. The Bible tells us, Ephesians 2:1-3, that we were all born dead, by nature children of wrath, following after the spirits of the age and spirits of the world and the spirits of those who are in charge of the children of disobedience. When you realize this and you realize that Jesus is God, God the Son, who became incarnate in a human body so that He could shed perfect, innocent human blood to pay for all of humanity’s sin and you throw yourself at His mercy and say, “I am a sinner and I cannot fix myself. I need a Savior. Thank you for dying for me.” When you recognize that He was buried and that He was raised on the third day according to Scripture and broke the curse of death that the law levels against everyone who is a sinner and you trust Him, you are born again. He gives you a new heart, a new spirit, and He gives you His Spirit, with whom He seals you for the day of redemption. You become eternally secure and pass out of death into life. If you haven’t done that, we ask you to do that.
Nikki: We’d love to hear from you. If you have questions or comments for us, you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can visit proclamationmagazine.com to sign up for our weekly emails containing online articles and other ministry news. You can also find links there with transcripts for these podcasts that you can share with others. Don’t forget to follow us or like us on Facebook, and join us again next week as we begin to talk about marital relationships.
Colleen: We’ll see you then.
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