Isaiah 42:1 “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight.”

Jesus is a King, but that is not what the Lord calls him here. He is the Conqueror of sin, and Satan, and death, but that’s not the way he’s introduced, either. He is a Lawgiver and a Judge and many other things. He holds unsurpassed power and authority, but Isaiah says, “Here is my servant.” Here is the one the Lord chose to serve you. Jesus fully agreed with this when he told his disciples, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

It’s not that Jesus lacks power and authority and leadership, but that is not the place to start. Before he became a teacher at our seminary, one professor was the pastor of a multi-cultural congregation in the inner city. At his first meeting with the church council, he invited the men to talk about their ideas for his ministry, and to share any questions or concerns they might have for this white pastor leading a black congregation. After talking about a number of things, one wise old leader at the meeting said, “I have only one question for you: will you love us? Are you going to serve us?”

What we need are those who serve. Sometimes we might think that we want our Savior to be all about fury, death, and damnation. We get so full of zeal for morality and holiness that we want him to come in wrath and power. We want him to cleanse all the filth and all the degenerate producers of that filth away. We think that way because we are just arrogant enough to think that we stand above it all, and we could survive the cleansing fire on our own. There will be a time and place for judgment. But God grant that we aren’t so dull that we approach that day with nothing but our own tote bag of good works and accomplishments, or we will be burned up with the rest.

Jesus did not come to scare you, or to damn you. Here is the One the Lord chose to serve you. He is going to save you. And he has the qualifications to do so.

The Lord calls this servant, “…my chosen one in whom I delight.” Isn’t that the same thing the Father said about Jesus at his baptism? “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” On a thousand fields and courts spread across the country you can find proud papas pleased with the sporting skills their sons display.

But these words here aren’t about skills. The Father isn’t pleased that his Son is competent (though he is in every way). He is pleased that his Son is good: loving, honest, kind, decent, faithful, sober, obedient, self-controlled. Here already he is serving you and me, keeping the commandments we broke, and keeping them perfectly. He does it to repair our tarnished record, to restore our lost credit.

You see, because Jesus pleased his Father, when God pulls the file with your name on it, and looks inside the folder, Jesus’ perfection has completely replaced every record of our crimes. He was not only his Father’s servant. He made himself ours. And his service gives us every reason to delight in him as well.

Ephesians 4: 32-5:2 “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

What does new-life, Christian behavior look like? “kind…compassionate…forgiving.” Notice that Paul does not focus on the kind of behavior that is mainly concerned with my personal purity. These are not the kinds of things we can practice if we withdraw from the world with all of its corrupting influences. We can’t practice these things if we lock ourselves in our rooms. These all have to do with relationships. These all deal with the way we treat others. You can’t be kind, compassionate, or forgiving when you are all alone.

There is no secret, no mystery, to what these words mean. We know what kindness looks like. We see it when someone makes himself useful, when he goes out of his way to help, to relieve suffering, to fill a need.

We know what compassion feels like. We see the pictures of people suffering some tragedy on the news. We listen to a friend tell us about his or her pain or grief. We don’t just sit there like a stone wall. We get a knot in our stomach. A tear wells up in our eye. We are moved to make a donation or offer our help in some way.

We understand what forgiveness is all about. We have received it often enough ourselves. It doesn’t mean that the offense or injury was unreal or acceptable. It was horrible. But we aren’t going to hold it against someone for as long as they live. We are releasing them from living under our anger and judgment. We are setting them free. And in doing so, we are setting ourselves free from the burden and misery of living with a grudge as well.

Our new life has a gracious model to consider: “Just as in Christ God forgave you.” Whether our sin was big or small, God has forgiven it. Whether our sin was mean and malicious, or thoughtless and careless, God has forgiven it. Whether our sin comes from pride, or whether it comes from moral weakness and a lack of discipline, God has forgiven it. Whether our sin was premeditated, or whether it was a passionate outburst, God has forgiven it. Whether our sins are many or few, God has forgiven them all.

This is not a guilt trip to manipulate us into forgiving. It is not even so much a roadmap to follow, or a checklist to work through. It is the gracious gift that God has used to release us, to set us free from his judgment. And when we are free, we are changed, we are transformed, into kind, compassionate, and forgiving people ourselves.

In this, we are children who resemble our Father. “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children.” When you were little, did you like to imitate your parents? When I was a little boy I had a plastic lawnmower and a plastic tool set. When I was a little older my dad would let me make things with the bent nails and scrap wood in his workshop. My cousins who grew up on farms had huge collections of toy tractors and wagons and farm machinery. We were imitating our fathers with our play. We wanted to be like them when we grew up.

You and I are children of the heavenly Father. More than that, we are dearly loved children. He isn’t a neglectful father who starves us for his love. He isn’t an angry and abusive father who beats us into behaving ourselves. He loves us lavishly. He dotes on his children. He is always taking care of us.

So how do dearly loved children imitate their Father? “And live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Love led Jesus to give up his life for us as the full payment for our sins. You and I cannot repeat that sacrifice. That was a “one-time-only” act of love. But God’s love will lead us to give ourselves up for other people in other ways, because that’s what love does. We imitate the gracious model our Father gave us in Christ.

Ephesians 4:25-27 “Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body.”

Someone has said, “When you see the word ‘therefore’ in a sentence, you should ask what it is there for.” That is especially true in Scripture. “Therefore” indicates that we have a conclusion based upon what came before, as is the case here.

What came before was Paul’s reminder that God has made us new. He led us to faith in Jesus. He made Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection to new life our own. He cleansed us of the sin that belongs to our old life. He forgave (and continues to forgive) our offenses. He put a new attitude in our minds. He recreated us inside to be like him: righteous and holy.

That is the basis on which Paul urges a new way of life. Here he starts with honesty: “Put off falsehood…speak truthfully.” In another letter he wrote to his friend Titus, “Cretans are always liars.” It seems that problems with honesty are an old, old problem.

What about us? Are Americans honest people? Seven years ago a bottled tea brand called Honest Tea did an experiment. They set out bottles of tea with no salesperson. Then they put up a sign asking people to leave a dollar if they took a bottle. According to their findings, 92 percent of us were honest enough to leave a dollar.

More carefully controlled studies of our conversations suggest that the average person tells a lie about twice each day. Maybe you have heard about the results of telephone surveys taken to measure America’s church attendance. When asked in surveys, about 45 percent of Americans claim that they attended church each week. When compared with the real attendance records of actual congregations, we find that half of those people were lying. If that many people were physically ill, we would call it an epidemic.

So we stretch the truth once in a while. What’s so serious about that? Consider the people affected by our fibs. “For we are all members of one body.” Lying to anyone is a sin, but lying to a fellow Christian is a little like injuring yourself. We are all different parts of the same body. Would you do something to your own body that would make it more difficult for that part of your body to remain a part of your body? Would you purposely infect one of your own vital organs and risk needing transplant surgery later? Would you cut off an otherwise healthy finger, or hand or arm, or seriously wound it so that you were in danger of losing it?

That’s the effect of lying on the relationships we have with other believers. Few things tear at the fabric that holds relationships together like dishonesty. Consider the damage it does to marriages, families, friendships. The list of those who have been torn apart by lying is sad and long. Why not just amputate a healthy arm or cut out your liver instead?

Our place in the body of believers became a reality only by the miracle of a divine transplant surgery. Ordinarily, our doctors place only a healthy organ into the body of someone who needs it. In the wonder of his grace, our Lord took us, sick and diseased as we were, cleansed and healed us of our sin, and then attached us to the body of Christ. He continues to pour out his grace and forgiveness on us to keep us there. He gives us the privilege of serving that body with whatever humble talents and abilities he has created in us.

Now he reminds us to consider the health of that body as we speak to one another. Let our conversation begin with honesty.

Ephesians 5:8-9 “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness, and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord.”

We all remember that Jesus called himself the Light of the World. Maybe we forget that he called us the light of the world, too. That is his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, where he tells us that you don’t light a lamp and put it under a basket. You put it on a stand so that it can give light to the whole house. That’s you. That’s me. Let your light shine so that people may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.

Here Paul calls us light, too. Light suggests knowledge. We know things other people don’t know because the light makes it possible for us to see what they can’t. What we see is not the secrets of quantum mechanics. What we see is not the next great investment opportunity. We don’t see dead people.

We see that Jesus is the Savior of the world. We see all our sins laid on him at the cross. We see forgiveness and salvation as God’s free gifts. We see the truth of everything Jesus claimed, and the promise of eternal life, confirmed by his resurrection from the dead. If we see Jesus’ power and love so clearly, then we see that we can trust his word completely.

What difference should that kind of seeing make for our lives? “Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness, and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord.” Notice that Paul calls goodness, righteousness, and truth the fruit of the light. He is mixing his metaphors a little bit. We don’t usually think of fruit coming from light. But he is emphasizing the connection between being children of light and behaving God’s way. I used to have three trees that produce fruit in my yard: a fig, a pomegranate, and a pecan. There were no figs on the pomegranate tree, no pomegranates on the pecan. Each kind produces its own thing. When we are children of light, we see what’s good, we see what’s right, and we see what’s true. That, then, is what we produce. These things “grow” from us.

When you bring light into a dark room, what happens to the darkness. Does it mix with the light? Do the two stand side by side? Doesn’t the light make the darkness go away? When we are children of light, we are also incompatible with the darkness. We are in the business of making it go away. Paul explains, “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for it is light that makes everything visible” (Ephesians 5:11-13).

If we live as children of the light, then we expose the sin and evil produced by those in darkness. We see it, we confront it, we point it out. Maybe you are tempted to say, “But that’s judging! I thought we weren’t supposed to judge.” And you are right. It is judging of a sort, the kind of judging we have been called to do. As children of light we can see right and wrong, and we expose it. We identify sin, and we call it that, because we are in the business of driving the darkness away.

But we don’t do this in a loveless, prideful, self-righteous way. It is all about calling other people out of the darkness, waking them up to save them. “This is why it is said: Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Ephesians 4:14). I know of no faster way to wake someone up who is sleeping in a dark room than to turn all the lights on. I know of no other way to wake up those who are sleeping in unbelief than to turn the lights on, to make their sin clear to see, and to make Christ clear to see, so that they can have the light of faith, too.

Letting our light shine is our blessed privilege as children of the light.

Ephesians 5:3-4 “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk, or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving.”

We can identify three behaviors that don’t fit the people who belong to God in this list. First is sexual immorality. “Impurity” falls into the same category. This is a catch-all way of describing every use and abuse of the sexual union. Rather than taking an hour to discuss all those possible sins, why not just remember that we belong to God? He has cleaned us up and given us a purpose, including this part of our lives.

The sum total of the world’s thinking on this topic has to do with personal pleasure. Pleasure is certainly part of God’s blessing, but it is not his purpose. God’s purpose has to do with creating a new generation–producing children. It has to do with cementing a relationship, uniting the unique gifts of a man and a woman to create a stable family–and thus a stable society. This happens only in heterosexual marriages based on life-long commitments. Everything else obscures God’s purpose for sexual union or undercuts it. Everything else is out of place for the people that God has claimed as his own.

Next Paul lists “greed.” Greed is another sin that fails to recognize that God has given us, and our material wealth, a purpose. He gives money and possessions to provide genuine needs, not to create huge stockpiles that may prevent others from having their needs met.

One place we see this illustrated is in some of the “hoarders” shows you see on reality TV. These people collect and collect and can never let anything go. Open the front door of their homes, and every inch of floor space is covered three, four, five feet high with things. You have to climb up on top of the pile to enter the house. You can’t even stand up straight because you are so close to the ceiling.

Who is being served by all this stuff? Who is being served by the junk collecting dust in our storage units? Who is being served by the unopened boxes stuffed into our garages? How many TV’s can we watch? How many cars can we drive? How many rooms can we live in? How many shoes can we wear? Granted, we may need a nest egg to retire someday, but how much money is hoarded when it could be helping someone? As children of God we need to learn how to say, “Enough.” Accumulating huge stockpiles makes no sense when we have a heavenly Father providing for us.

With three terms Paul addresses sins of the mouth: “…obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking.” Why should perversions of sex be funny? Does that kind of humor build our respect and appreciation for God’s good gifts in marriage and family? No, it lays the groundwork for adopting ideas about these things that are in conflict with God’s will. It has to be out of place for members of God’s family.

In place of all this Paul urges “thanksgiving.” Thankful people see the good and wholesome gifts our Lord has given. There is nothing for which we are more thankful than his forgiveness for these very sins. He has not rejected us for misusing our bodies, our possessions, or our mouths. In Jesus, he has cleansed us. He has reclaimed us. He has enlightened our minds and changed our hearts to perceive that his plan and purpose for our behavior is better, and then blessed us to enjoy the pleasant fruits of that way of life.

In his love, God has shown his people a better way. That way does not include a life with no boundaries for sex, wealth, or speech.

Ephesians 5:3 “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people.”

“Don’t do those things,” Paul is saying, “Because that is not who you are.” Being “God’s holy people” may make us different from those who don’t believe in Jesus, but it does not describe some super class of Christians. Paul isn’t writing to the church council, the board of elders, the officers of the women’s group, or the members of the choir. He isn’t addressing people who never sinned in the past, or who will never sin in the future. He’s talking about you and me.

There are basically two ways a person can be clean: don’t get dirty in the first place, or get a good bath. God’s people are holy because God has given them a good bath. We have “washed our robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” The prophet Ananias urged Paul, “Get up, be baptized, and wash your sins away,” three days after Jesus turned Paul’s life around on the road to Damascus. We’ve been baptized and washed our sins away, too. “The blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”

Being holy means that God has set us apart from the rest of the world. He has claimed us as his very own. He picked us up, and brought us home, and cleaned us up because he had an idea about how he could use us. God’s holy people have purpose.

Take a moment to let that sink in a little. Have you ever rescued an item from the curb–maybe a piece of furniture or a small appliance. Over the years we have brought a number of things home like that–a TV stand, a dresser, some patio furniture. All of that stuff was just hours away from spending the rest of its earthly existence at the dump. But we took it home, cleaned it up, and gave it a new life and a new purpose.

Isn’t that a picture of God’s holy people? Destined for the dump, we were rescued, and cleaned, and God gave us a new life and a new purpose. We are God’s holy people. We will live a new life if we will simply be who we are.

1 Corinthians 1:11-14 “My brothers, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is this: One of you says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; still another, ‘I follow Christ.’ Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul? I am thankful that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, so no one can say that you were baptized into my name.”

Wherever you have a popular pastor or preacher, you have the danger of developing a “cult of the personality.” People attach themselves more to a man than they do to their Savior. You may remember the “Crystal Cathedral” and its pastor in California. It had its own television show. Thousands of people attended. Since that pastor retired, that ministry has died. The building has been sold to the Catholic church. It appears to have been a “cult of the personality.”

The church in Corinth was in danger of this. People were choosing their favorite pastors and attaching themselves to a mere man. They were developing competing parties. Paul didn’t want this, and neither did the others. “Is Christ divided?” he asks. “Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul? I am thankful that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, so no one can say that you were baptized into my name.”

One of the reasons that Paul urges us to unite around the same beliefs, is so that we can see the foolishness of elevating one pastor over another. Did Paul, Apollos, and Cephas (Hebrew for Peter) teach something different? Peter has two letters in the New Testament. You can read them for yourself and see that Peter taught the same morals Paul did. He taught the same way of salvation–Christ crucified in payment for all our sins, received by faith and faith alone. What sense could it possibly make to say that you followed one man or the other when they believed and preached exactly the same thing?

A number of years ago a couple with whom I was counseling got upset when I told them that they shouldn’t be sleeping together before they were married. So they made an appointment with my associate because they wanted a different judgment on their lifestyle. Did they get it? There are over 1000 pastors in the church body to which I belong, and I am confident they would get the same response from all of them. We have all agreed on what God says in his law. We are united on the content and meaning of the gospel. That’s a defense against competing parties in our churches.

I skipped over one statement about “following” made by these people in Corinth. “I follow Christ.” On the surface, that would seem to be the right answer. We should all follow Christ. That’s what it means to be a Christian.

But funny that Paul doesn’t complement them for getting their allegiance right. He just goes on to expose the divisions. It seems that these people, too, were forming their own party in the church. Theirs was not based on following a person but on personal pride. They didn’t come to encourage everyone else, “We follow Christ. We all do. Let’s not separate ourselves this way.” No, they said, “I follow Christ,” as if to say, “I’m just a few degrees holier than the rest of you.”

Let’s agree that we are all equally sinners, equally rescued and freed from our sin by our Savior. Then we won’t fall into some of the more recent ways Christians are tempted to put themselves into a class above the rest. “I’m not just a believer,” they say. “I’m going to be a disciple of Jesus.” But you can’t be one without the other. It’s always a package deal. The Bible never distinguishes believers from disciples.

“I’m a born-again Christian,” some people say. But there is no other kind. It’s like saying, “I’m a Christian Christian.” If you are a Christian, you have been born again. If you haven’t been born-again, you aren’t a Christian.

“Jesus is not just my Savior. I have also made him the Lord of my life.” Of course, we don’t make Jesus anything. Every heart he enters as Savior, he also enters as Lord.

We are all helpless sinners saved by the grace of a loving God. If we agree with his word, we won’t be trying to create special parties and classes within God’s church.

Matthew 5:20 “For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

No doubt the people in front of Jesus were surprised when he spoke these words. If someone calls you a Pharisee today, it is an insult. We tend to associate the Pharisees with hypocrisy, religious meanness, loveless legalism. But most people in Jesus’ day did not look at the Pharisees that way.

The Pharisees had a reputation for working harder than anyone at living a godly life. They took morality seriously. They were good citizens. They had family values. No moralists we might know ever worked harder at living a pure and holy life than these men. For Jesus to say to the people: “No. Their level of righteousness still is not good enough. You need to be better than them”– that was hard to accept.

The problem wasn’t so much with the way the Pharisees and teachers of the law lived their lives on the outside (although that also had some problems). The issue had more to do with what was going on inside. True righteousness is always a matter of the heart. The biblical term “righteousness” refers to more than human actions or standards. It always refers us to God’s judgment and standards. It refers to behavior or people that God could look at and say, “Innocent. Not guilty. Perfect.” For this, the Lord is always more concerned with the heart than he is with the hands. Attitudes matter as much as actions. And Jesus’ ministry revealed that the Pharisees had a bad attitude. Their good outward actions were not a reflection of their hearts.

Is that a problem with our own lives sometimes? We can make our lives look good on the outside. We make ourselves look happy and holy, especially when we are with other Christians. But our hearts are a problem. I am sure that you would be no more anxious to show me what your heart looks like than I would be to let you see mine. Jeremiah once described the human heart this way, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” God sees this all the time, that our good actions are not always the reflection of good hearts. That’s a problem, because genuine righteousness is a matter of the heart.

If we are honest with ourselves, we are going to have to look outside ourselves for our righteousness. That is exactly what our Savior wants us to do. Trying harder isn’t going to save us. His words are driving us to look to him for help.

And the help we find is not Jesus showing us some nifty secrets for getting this all under control. His words offer nothing in the way of self-help. Instead, he says, “I will give you a real righteousness, because I will give you the credit for my perfect control of my anger, my mouth, and my hands. When you stand before the judgement seat of God, I will give you a perfect record of love and self-control, because it won’t be yours he sees, but mine. I will wipe away your angry thoughts, your loveless words, even violence and murder, with my blood shed at the cross. I forgave the anger of Joseph’s brothers, the insults of the thief crucified next to me, and the murders committed by Moses, David, and Paul. I will forgive your thoughts and actions, too.”

That is how our righteousness can surpass that of the Pharisees, or that of the moralists we know today. That is how Jesus’ righteousness will cleanse our guilty hearts.

Micah 6:6-8 “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

When people are sorry for their sins and trust him for forgiveness, they are ready to do whatever God asks. No request would be too big.

The suggested offerings here build to a crescendo in ever-increasing value. The whole burnt offering is the one type of offering in Israel which was given up entirely to God. The priest and the bringer of the sacrifice received no part of it as they did with the other sacrifices. Calves were livestock enjoyed by the wealthy of Micah’s time. It was the most expensive animal you could offer. Thousands of rams and ten thousand rivers of oil would stagger the wealth of the richest kings.

Then the penitent person even suggests his own child, and his firstborn at that. Obviously, you can’t put a price on anyone’s life. But what could be more dear than the life of your own child? Even so, when a person has come to realize the horrible fate from which God has saved him, the precious price God paid to do so, and the immeasurable love that moved him to do so, there is nothing he would not do if the Lord asked him. Abraham was ready to make the last sacrifice Micah lists.

But those who understand God’s grace ought to know better than to think they might pay for their own sins. Only one life could be offered for our transgressions. Only one life could pay for the sin of our souls. That sacrifice is one only the Lord himself could provide. His Son, not ours made the payment. What God desires is a response of gratitude, not another sacrifice for sin.

 “He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Far more dear to God than our things, our wealth, or our treasures are ourselves. He wants our hearts and lives. In leading us to repentance and faith, he has already taken them. He then leads us to act justly and to love mercy. In other words, he moves us to love our neighbor. He fills us with the desire to do what is right and show kindness to others wherever we find the opportunity. The life he desires is not a complicated thing.

At the same time, he leads us to walk humbly with him. We learn to follow where he leads rather than try to drag him where we want to go. He teaches us that we need him as our leader, and to love him for that leadership. Like the life he requires, the kind of heart he desires is easy to understand.

Our Christian life is a response, not the cause of God’s grace. As believers in the sacrifice he made for us, let’s embrace the just, merciful, and humble life to which we have been called.