Light and Darkness - Ephesians 5:1-16

5:1-2 - Continuing with his advice for Christlike living, Paul commands his audience to “walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us as offering and a sacrifice to God for sweetsmelling savour.” This could mean loving others as Christ loves them and even loving ourselves as He loves us, which I think is harder sometimes. And it might also be a reminder that Christ suffered all things to save us, so it’s ok to sometimes have to be inconvenienced in order to serve others. This is hard for me because I get too sucked in to other people’s problems and it becomes toxic for me, but I’m working on it. The phrase “sweetsmelling savour” is a reference to the incense and burning smell of alter sacrifices performed in the temple as a part of the law of Moses. Because Christ’s gospel did away with the law of Moses, Paul might be saying that loving ourselves and others is the new “smell” of sacrifice. 5:3-6 - Paul continues listing things that hinder our progress “as (you) becometh saints,” which is filthiness, “foolish talking,” “jesting, which are not convenient,” whoremongering, covetousness, idolatry, and disobedience. The article on this chapter from gospeldoctrine.com quotes Spencer W. Kimball as teaching, “whoever else suffers, every sin is against God… Likewise, every sin is committed against the sinner, for it limited his progress and curtails his development.” If someone commits a sin, the damage done is exponential because it is injurious to the sinner, because it stops progress, injurious to God because He literally suffered the consequences of that sin, and injurious to whoever the sin was committed against, the victim and everything that all that damage entails. Now imagine that we do that damage to ourselves, each other and God several times a day over a lifetime. And I know that we can’t be perfect and that spiritual progression is a journey, but anytime we can consciously make a choice to choose right instead of wrong, then there is a significant portion of pain deflected from many people. And it doesn’t have to even be a big sin that we avoid, it can be small, in fact, it is almost always something small, such as bad mouthing someone (guilty) or being angry (guilty too), I would say that all sins start in our minds before they come to actions so if we can control what we think, we can decrease our sin burden by a significant degree. 5:7-16 - Paul also mentions after listing sinful behaviors, “be not ye therefore partakers with them.” To me, this means that in addition to controlling our thoughts, then we can also control who we spend our time and energy with because people tend to act similarly to the types of people we spend our time with. Paul continues, “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.” He talks about a “light” and “darkness” component to behaviors and what I’m getting from all this is that righteous behaviors bring light and evil behaviors are done in darkness because typically people don’t want others to know. But eventually the light of Christ will bring all things out of the darkness and into the visible world for everyone to see. I don’t necessarily think that this is meant to be voyeuristic, a true disciple of Jesus Christ wouldn’t want to see other people commit sin, I think, I surely wouldn’t. If I’m not going to do it myself then surely I don’t want to watch or learn about someone else doing it. Paul makes the same point saying, “for it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret.” I’ve seen it be a motivation for some people, “well I’ll finally find out what he actually did,” and I can see how that might be appealing at some point, especially to those who have been hurt, but really, there should be no joy or reverie for the sins that others commit, especially when we consider that we ourselves have committed many sins, some of them very grievous. Paul urges us to “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” Perhaps Paul is urging the same thing as ancient Book of Mormon prophets who called for their audience to “awake” and “arise” out of complacency and apathy. He continues, “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise.” I take this to mean living intentionally, making conscientious choices, living purposefully. Paul makes an interesting statement here saying, “the days are evil.” The article says, “Satan has more power to tempt us now that he did in the pre-mortal sphere. He has more power to tempt us now than he will after we die. These are the days when evil has its greatest influence… There is enough evil in every day that we must take life one day at a time to overcome it.” This is kind of encouraging because it really helps us see the significance of this life. It’s so easy to get discouraged and ask ourselves if our obedience really matters or if it makes that big of a difference. But if we remember that this life is so important that Satan never has or never will have more power over us than he does right now, then we can kind of put the importance of keeping the commandments in perspective.