Ephesians

Ephesians 5:3-14 — Live as Children of Light

A college coach in a Christian school once told me of a young man in his school who said, “I’ll follow the school rules in almost everything, but nobody is going to tell me what to do with my sex life.” This attitude used to be an exception. Today it is the rule.

When I was a young man, it was called promiscuity. In the 1960s it was called “the New Morality.” By the 1990s, society had proclaimed that moral absolutes had been replaced by “moral relativism”—you have your morality, I have mine, and no one should ever judge or criticize another person’s moral (or immoral) choices. In keeping with the “nonjudgmental” mood of the times, the word promiscuous was replaced by the nonjudgmental phrase “sexually active.”

Today, living together unmarried is considered normal. Public schools teach sexual techniques in sex ed classes, take teenage girls out of class to get abortions without their parents’ knowledge, and distribute condoms to teens in the belief that, “They’re going to do it anyway.” Gone are the days when the public schools teach values, self-respect, and self-control. Promiscuous sex is a regular topic in our music and on TV sitcoms in the family hour. Sex scandals regularly rock our political institutions and even our churches and Christian ministries. Our media and our society are drenched in illicit sex. Rarely do we see sexual issues addressed in our culture from the viewpoint that sex is God’s gift to be practiced within marriage.

As we consider the sexual overload that bombards our senses, we are tempted to think we have reached unprecedented depths of cultural decay. The truth is that the present state of our society today is strikingly similar to conditions found in the first century A.D., when Paul’s letters were being written. In Romans, Paul describes the sordid and lewd society he lived in:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness…

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. (Romans 1:18,24-32)

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? After two thousand years, these conditions are as rampant as they ever were. Paul has not written a musty document of only historical interest. Inspired by God, he has written a document of truth that blazes its way into our own century, our own society, our own hearts and lives.

Now we come to Paul’s treatment of the issue of sexual morality in Ephesians 5. Please read Ephesians 5:3-14. Paul makes it abundantly clear: Sexual immorality and Christianity do not mix. God’s intention for man is either marriage, with complete faithfulness to the partner, or total abstinence from sex. The Bible allows no third option.