There was once a major public health crisis in a third world country. The problem was orange soda pop, Orange Fanta. Illiterate mothers saw the billboards for Orange Fanta and thought, “Oh, it must be modern. It must be healthy. It has a nice, pretty color.” When they tasted it they discovered it was nice and sweet. So they stopped breast feeding their infants and gave them soda pop instead. The babies drank it down. It seemed great, at first.
But what happens to infants who are raised on a diet of soda pop, flavored sugar water? They don’t thrive. They don’t gain weight. They don’t build muscle or bone. They are malnourished. And the public health agencies made a major effort to re-educate those poor women. Breast milk is best for babies. Don’t feed them soda pop.
But it isn’t just uneducated, third world people who get seduced by such things. I’m scared that many Christians in established churches in America today are suffering from equal malnutrition because they are living on a diet of spiritual soda pop, a false gospel that tastes sweet and goes down, oh, so easily, but doesn’t provide the essential building blocks for a vital spiritual life. Too often Christians are addicted to the happy thoughts of the gospel, assurances of God’s love and grace, promises that God will shower them with every blessing, while avoiding like the plague the call to sacrificial discipleship, the way of holiness of life. The gospel of Jesus Christ is more than chicken soup for the soul.
I heard a sermon this past week in which the pastor was obviously straining to take every opportunity to tell his hearers how good they were. And I’m sure they were mostly pretty solid citizens. The people he described wouldn’t have any need for God’s grace. But, then, he hardly spoke of God at all. And I’m scared what a constant diet of flattery will do to a congregation. It probably feels good at first. You might become addicted to it. But what motivation is there to strive for holiness when you are told that you are wonderful already? What’s the point of considering what God wants if everything I want is OK?
Flattery will often get you somewhere. It feels good for a while. But a real friend will level with you and tell you the things that are hard to hear as well as the happy thoughts.
This morning’s scripture is a reminder that God has high requirements for those who will follow him. There are moral choices that we must each make, moral choices with eternal consequences, choices which can prevent our entry into God’s kingdom. God’s blessings don’t come in spite of how we live. Most of God’s blessings come as we hear his word and change our lives through simple obedience. And that obedience prepares us for heaven.
Please stand now for the reading of God’s word, Ephesians 5:1-5.
1 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, 2 and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. 3 But fornication and impurity of any kind, or greed, must not even be mentioned among you, as is proper among saints. 4 Entirely out of place is obscene, silly, and vulgar talk; but instead, let there be thanksgiving. 5 Be sure of this, that no fornicator or impure person, or one who is greedy (that is, an idolater), has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.
As so many scriptures do, this passage lays out a choice for us to make, 2 ways of life. The way that we are encouraged to take is described in verse 1 as being imitators of God, in verse 2, as living in love, which is exemplified in the way that Jesus gave himself up for us, and in verse 4, a life of thanksgiving. Those are different ways of describing a love for life, a reverence for all of God’s creation, making choices that are the best for all.
Paul does the work of describing things that just don’t fit into this picture, things Christians just can’t do. He tells us that there are boundaries in life. And that’s not as much fun to talk about, but it’s essential for good spiritual nutrition.
I could be tempted to preach a sermon full of flowery generalizations about loving everybody and then sending you all home, with warm, fuzzy feelings in your hearts, but no understanding in your head of what in the world it means practically. But Paul refuses to do that. And I agree with him that that would be a diet for spiritual malnutrition.
Paul lists 3 types of activities that Christians don’t do and 3 types of speech that Christians don’t use. And when he’s done he says that these are things that can keep you out of God’s kingdom. God is serious about these.
The first thing for Christians to avoid is fornication. That’s a word that you don’t even hear very often anymore. In fact our culture is largely abandoning the Bible’s entire vocabulary for sin. We find it easier to just be tolerant of everything. But we are paying a price for that.
Fornication is a broad word for sexual sins. It means any intimate sexual contact that is outside God’s plan of a man and a woman to be committed to one another in marriage. Fornication is a choice to turn away from God’s plan to pick one person to love and serve and be committed to. It’s a choice to turn away from God’s call to abstain from sexual intimacies even with that person you love until that deep heart commitment has really been tested and solidified and expressed in marriage. Fornication is a choice to use someone else for personal gratification, the opposite of the example of sacrificial love which Jesus showed us.
Is this an old fashioned concept, something that people could do in Paul’s time but impossible in our modern world? Remember that Paul wrote this letter to the church in Ephesus, a city that had very open temple prostitution in Paul’s time. If anything, the sexual morality around the Christians in Ephesus was worse than we face today. He called the Christians to make be radically different from their neighbors.
Is this an irrelevant concept? Does a little playing around really hurt anything?
Because of human promiscuity, this earth is losing millions of people each year to sexually transmitted diseases. We can’t calculate the medical costs, the loss of productivity, the human pain of the victims and their loved ones. That’s relevant to me.
Literally millions of children are living in single parent homes today because they were conceived before the marriage bond was formed. And those single parents often work so hard and sacrifice so much, but everybody loses. And that’s relevant to me. How much better it would have been if they had said, ‘God, we trust your plan so we are going to take our time and really get to know each other and really learn how to love each other and test out our love before we do anything that could bring a child into this world.’
I had to drive on the Tri-State several times this week. There are those billboards for the so-called ‘gentleman’s clubs.’ And I’ve never been in one, but what they advertise on the billboard is that they are places where women are used as objects. No true gentleman would do such a thing.
Then there are those so-called ‘adult bookstores.’ I’m sure that what they offer isn’t adult at all, but an adolescent obsession with female parts and body functions that knows nothing of a man and a woman being totally committed to each other, sharing all of life together, with each giving and each receiving.
And such things aren’t limited to seedy places along the highways. The internet and movie rentals can bring it all right into any home.
God’s rules are very relevant to our world today. Christians are called to a higher standard.
Paul goes on to an even broader word, ‘impurity.’ I’m sure that includes fornication, but I understand it to mean anything that takes God’s wise plan for loving others and corrupting it by selfishness.
And then the third type of forbidden act is ‘greed,’ a life style that puts ‘getting stuff for me’ above everything else, that loves things and uses people.
Is greed a real problem on this earth? Mercury emissions into the environment cause brain damage to children. But the Tribune reported yesterday that mercury emissions in Illinois went up last year, not down. And I don’t know any other reason for that except simple greed. It costs money to put the extra scrubbers on the smokestacks of our coal burning plants for generating electricity. But the companies don’t want to spend the money. And we can’t put all the blame on them because we consumers probably would balk at a price increase to pay for it. So we are hanging on to our money and putting our babies at risk. A recent study concluded that nationwide nearly half a million American children are born each year at risk because of the mercury levels in their mother’s bodies. That’s sick. That kind of thinking has no place in God’s kingdom.
And that is just one of many, many times that we choose money over people. It can come right into good Christian homes as husbands and wives compete over who gets to spend on their hobbies, as parents get so caught up in making money that they just don’t have time or energy left for their kids, as families are so busy accumulating things for themselves that their ears are deaf when God speaks to them about sharing with the needy.
And Paul doesn’t stop with sinful actions. He goes on to include sinful ways of speaking, obscene talk, silly talk, vulgar talk. The words we speak do have an influence on the people who hear them. The words we speak do reflect the real thoughts in our hearts. And it breaks God’s heart when we speak of his beautiful creation in demeaning ways.
Well, I’m not going to try to fully examine six different sins this morning. But I want us each to look inside and ask ourselves if we may have been influenced by a false gospel that has allowed us to tolerate things in our hearts that just cannot be tolerated.
Instead of a deep joy in God’s creation, expressed in thankfulness to God, have we developed ways of speaking that are demeaning of others?
Instead of the example of humble servanthood to others set by our Lord Jesus, have we accepted any elements of exploiting others, through immorality or greed?
And none of us is immune to temptation or occasional lapses. The old saying tells us that you can’t keep the birds from flying over your head. But you can keep them from building a nest in your hair. Have you let anything unworthy take root in your heart?
Then this is the day to get rid anything unworthy. This is the day to respond to God’s love by loving him in return and all of his creation. AMEN
