Eph 5:10–17 — Find Out What Pleases the Lord

The epistle to the Ephesians is divided into two major sections, chapters 1-3 and chapters 4-6. Frequently these two sections are referred to as the doctrine and the application. This is one valid approach, but not precise enough. A better set of labels would be indicative and imperative. The first three chapters masterfully lay out lays out the cosmic scope of our salvation, the eternal mystery of God’s will, now manifest in Jesus Christ. This is the indicative. It is the statement of fact about what God has done for us objectively in history. We who once were dead in trespasses and sins have now been made alive with Christ. Having been co-raised with him, we are now blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.

The last three chapters then draw out the ethical implications and applications that flow out of this glorious indicative. In view of this great salvation that we have become partakers of in Christ, this is how we ought to live, how we must live. We are obligated by grace to walk worthy of the heavenly calling with which we have been called. Since we have been raised up with Christ, we are to live Christ’s resurrection life. The imperative is not an additional step added to the indicative. It is merely the obligation that the indicative places upon us. This is because of our new state in Christ we are obligated to live in a manner that is consistent with that new state. No one who has been raised with Christ is free to live as if he were still dead in sin. God’s prior work of grace for us necessarily works itself out so that his transforming power is evident in us.

So the twofold structure of Ephesians is based on Paul’s profound theological insight into the nature of salvation faith alone and the necessity of bringing forth the fruit of that faith as the evidence of salvation.

Now I must hasten to add that, in a sense, this bipartite outline is artificial, because the section devoted to the imperative is itself full of the indicative. For example: Eph. 5:8. Therefore, it would be a mistake to think that part two of Ephesians contains only imperative and no indicative. Paul is refuses to issue any ethical directives or exhortations that are not clearly founded on our union with Christ. We must never separate what God demands of us from what he has first done for us. For what he has first done for us is the basis for what he demands of us. To go out and try to keep the imperatives in part two, without fully grasping the indicative in part one, would be moralism.

Now we have been working our way through these imperatives for quite a while now. We have seen the imperatives in chapter 4 concerning the necessity of corporate life together as the body of Christ. Then Paul moved on to talk about the need for moral purity, unlike our former pagan lifestyle. He exhorted us to treat one another as brothers in Christ, to not lie to one another, to not steal from one another, to make sure that our speech is edifying and not destructive of the unity of the body, and to not let sexual immorality be named among us, as is fitting for those who are God’s holy people.

This morning we now come to 5:10-17, a paragraph that stands out from what has gone before. Up to this point, we have been given very concrete and specific commands or imperatives. But now Paul’s exhortations take on a more general flavor. Look at the main verbs, all of which are imperatives:

Verse 10 - find out what is pleasing to the Lord.

Verse 11 - do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead expose them.

Verse 15 - be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise.

Verse 16 - redeem the time because the days are evil.

Verse 17 - don’t be foolish but understand what the will of the Lord is.

In contrast with the rather specific things Paul has called us to do in the preceding context, these commands come across as rather vague. We might even be tempted to skip over this section and move on to something more concrete, such as the detailed instructions concerning Christian marriage in verses 22-33.

But let us not be in too much of a hurry to get to the “really practical stuff.” Let us pause and reflect on what Paul is concerned with here in our text.

To begin, notice that Paul is not setting forth a list of sins to avoid, nor is he giving us a set of positive duties to fulfill. What, then, is Paul doing here? I want to argue this morning that he is setting before us a concern that goes deeper than the level of behavior. Paul is certainly concerned about behavior. He wants us to avoid specific sins. He has made that explicit in the preceding context. But here he takes his pastoral concern one step further, beyond the concern for behavior. Paul’s predominant concern in this section is summarized in verse 10: “finding out what is pleasing to the Lord.” There is something more important than doing God’s will. It is that we develop the capacity to discern God will.

Paul could do all the work for us and tell us what is pleasing to the Lord. He could define what the will of the Lord is in every conceivable situation. But instead he wants us to learn how to think the way he thinks, so that we may discover what God’s will is for ourselves, on our own.

Paul uses a very important verb here. The phrase “finding out” or “trying to learn” translates the Greek word dokimazo. Literally it means “to test or examine something.” But there is more. It means to test or examine something in order to find out its inner qualities, and having tested it, to then evaluate it according to its merit or demerit. Therefore, testing alone does not capture the full meaning of the word. There is also the nuance of evaluation, of approval or disapproval.

For example, in Luke 14:19 this word is used in reference to a man who had just purchased five yoke of oxen and was going to try them out, the ancient equivalent of taking a new car for a test drive. In 1 Corinthians 3, Paul uses the same verb when he says that at the day of judgment, “each man’s work will become evident … and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work.”

In other words, this verb contains the notion of discovering the quality of something by putting it to the test, in practical real-life situations. And this is done with the end in view of being able to come to a conclusion, a judgment. It would be like Consumer Reports saying: “We tested this product in every conceivable situation. We put it through a battery of tests, pushing it to the limits of the manufacturer’s tolerances. It has passed the test. We therefore approve and endorse this product. It has our stamp of approval.”

So we could translate verse 10 as follows: “Put these instructions to the test in your daily life, and having tested them thoroughly, you will discover for yourself that these things are indeed pleasing to the Lord. Thus, you are to test and approve that which is pleasing to the Lord.”

The thought here is fleshed out when we compare it with two other passages that use the same word dokimazo:

Romans 12:2 [NIV] “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is - his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

Philippians 1:9-10 [New Revised Standard] “And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless.”

Notice that there are two ideas here: testing and approving. God wants us to test out his will in concrete situations of our lives. Having tested it we are then in a position to approve of it, to say not only that we are prepared to obey God’s will, but that we wholeheartedly understand why it is God’s will, why it is right and good and beneficial. It is not only our wills that must be in line with God’s will, but our hearts must also approve of his will as pleasing not only to God but to us as well. This two stage process of testing and approving is a learning process by which we come to own God’s will for ourselves, to internalize divine values and priorities into the fabric of our minds, our hearts, and our character.

What Paul is doing here is the spiritual counterpart to the way parents should raise their children. Before they are teenagers, our children do not need to learn how to think for themselves when it comes to moral issues. We don’t expect our six year olds to wrestle with moral dilemmas. We expect them to obey. And we expect obedience, not questioning. When they ask. Why? we use the time-honored argument of parents through the ages: “Because I said so” - an argument that is all the more convincing if we have a wooden spoon in our hand.

But as they grow into their teenage years and begin to make the difficult transition to adulthood, it is vital that we begin to help them think through the reasons behind our instructions. A wise parent will adjust his or her parenting methods to the maturity level of the child. By the time they are 18 and prepared to live on their own, we will hopefully have prepared them to deal with the issues and problems with which they will be confronted in life. The very nature of life, with all its complexity, means that we cannot tell them ahead of time what the right answer is to every question, what the right decision will be for every life situation. Therefore, what we hope to accomplish is to give them the right tools, grounded in a Christian worldview, to enable them to make sound decisions regardless of the problems they may face, including problems that we may have never even contemplated. We want to equip our children with wisdom so they can function as mature adults on their own without lean upon the crutches of the ready made solutions and rules and regulations that were needed in childhood.

This is what Paul is talking about here in our text. He is calling us to Christian maturity. He wants us to learn how to think for ourselves, to make wise ethical decisions grounded in the reality of our union with Christ, to be spiritually discerning mature adults in Christ.

Remember geometry in high school? We were taught various theorems, like the Pythagorean theorem, which states that the sum of the squares of the two sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse. At this point, you probably don’t remember how to prove that theorem. But in geometry class, it was not sufficient to arrive at the right answer. You had to prove the theorem for yourself. And proving it was important, because in the process of proving it you gained a deeper insight into the significance of the theorem itself. In geometry, you see, we weren’t allowed to simply look up the answers in the back of the book. We had to show our work. We had to demonstrate that we had mastered the underlying mathematical principles involved.

So it is in the Christian life. Jesus Christ isn’t satisfied if we have the right practice. He also wants us to understand why the practice is right, why it is pleasing to him.

Verse 17: “Understand what the will of the Lord is.” The verb used here is suniemi, which means to gain insight into something. It is the same word used in Mark 6, where the disciples were afraid when they saw Jesus walking on the water. This incident occurred just after Jesus had multiplied the loaves and the fish, and so the disciples should not have been surprised, but should have understood who Jesus was. But, Mark says in an aside, “they were utterly astonished, for they had not gained any insight from the incident of the loaves, but their heart was hardened” (v. 52).

So we could paraphrase Paul’s command: “Gain insight into what the will of the Lord is. Have a depth of comprehension and insight into what God has done in Christ so that you understand how you ought to walk - so that you understand it for yourself, not merely on my authority as an apostle.”

This requires that we not rest satisfied with having the right answers. We must show our work. We aren’t children who simply submit. We are mature sons of God who have internalized God’s will. We must have the ethical maturity, wisdom, and discernment.

How radical this is! Paul has commanded us to do something that almost seems like an act of rebellion: he has commanded us to subject God’s will to human testing. This is utterly amazing! God doesn’t want us to obey merely because we have to. He wants us to agree.

This indicates that God trusts us, doesn’t it? He is confident that after we have weighed and examined his will, we will arrive at the correct conclusion that his will is good and perfect and right. How can this be? It is only because God knows that he has subdued our heart by grace and given us a mind that is illuminated with his Spirit. He is fully confident that we will agree with him that his will is right, because he is fully confident in the effectiveness of his own work of grace in our lives. When we were outside of Christ, we were “darkened in our understanding” Paul said in 4:18. Our minds were characterized by futility and ignorance. Had we been invited, in that estate of sin, to evaluate God’s will, our rebellious hearts would have been unable to see the wisdom and goodness of his commands. Indeed, the natural man is hostile toward God, for it does not subject itself to the Law of God, and it is not even able to do so (Rom. 8:7). But God, being rich in mercy, brought about a radical change in us, so that our minds now embrace, yea even delight in, the perfection and righteousness of God’s requirements.

Not only does the amazing command in our text to test and approve God’s will presuppose that we now have a new heart by grace, it indicates a redemptive historical shift as well. There was a time when God’s redeemed people were spiritually under age. In the old covenant age, Israel needed a comprehensive list of rules without fully understanding the rationale behind them. This was in the time of the old covenant.

Galatians 4:1-3: “Now I say, as long as the heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave although he is owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by the father. Therefore, also we, while we were children, were held in bondage under the elementary principles of the world.”

It is true that there were some Israelites who were given a special influence of divine grace so that they were able, like the author of Psalm 119, to delight in God’s Law and to be given insight into it. But such was the exception rather than the rule. The expressions of delight in God’s Law found in Psalm 119 are so unheard of within the old covenant, that we are justified in reading this Psalm as a prophetic oracle of the new covenant. Psalm 119 is fulfilled on the lips of Jesus Christ himself, who said that his food is to do the will of him who sent him and to accomplish his work.

The old covenant people of God were subjected to an “unbearable yoke” (Acts 15:10) of a multitude of ceremonies, commandments, and ordinances, all of which were given to confine Israel under the Law until the coming of Christ.

But now that Christ has come, the church has moved past her spiritual infancy. We are no longer children, needing to be hand held with an external code to which we submit in blind obedience. Such an external code Paul calls the weak and beggarly elements, the elementary principles. The training wheels of the Mosaic law have been removed. We are now mature sons. We are now adults.

“But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. This is because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ Therefore, you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God” (Galatians 4:4-7).

What has happened to create this shift from the old covenant to the new? It is nothing less than the revelation, the unveiling of the mystery. Notice that the phrase, “the will of God,” which is used in verse 17 of our text, has been defined previously way back in Ephesians 1, verses 9-10. Paul writes that God “made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth.” Thus, the will of God, in Paul’s vocabulary, must not be understood in merely in moral or ethical terms, but in terms of the great plan of salvation conceived in the counsels of the triune Godhead, and brought to light in these last days in the incarnation, death and exaltation of Christ.

Now you can see why this one word dokimazo signals an amazing shift from the old covenant to the new. In the old covenant, Israel was given a vast number of seemingly arbitrary regulations. For example, the Israelites were commanded not to boil a calf in its mother’s milk. They were forbidden to eat certain foods decreed by sheer fiat to be unclean. As a church under age they simply had to cling to the sovereign word of God, just as Adam in the garden had to obey the seemingly arbitrary command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And this was a valuable and important spiritual lesson, and one that we must also learn. We must learn that God’s word is our ultimate authority, that we must submit all of our reasoning to God’s self-authenticating revelation. There is no room for autonomy in the kingdom of God. God’s will requires no justification beyond the fact that it is God’s will. If it did, then there would be some standard of right and wrong higher than God himself, and God would no longer be God.

But as valuable and important as this lesson is, it is not enough. These are the ABC’s of the kingdom, but we must move on to perfection. And so in the advance of progressive revelation, when we come into the new covenant, we find that God wants us to add to the previous lesson of the old covenant a new lesson that does not negate but builds upon the old. The new lesson here is that although there is no standard higher than God himself, and although his will is self-authenticating merely because it is his will, nevertheless God’s will is never arbitrary but is always founded upon his character. God therefore wants us to appreciate the rightness, the wisdom, the goodness, the pleasantness of his will. For as we do so, our nature, our will, our heart become more and more conformed to God’s own holy, righteous, loving, and good character.

Therefore, as those who are no longer enslaved under the elementary principles of the Mosaic code, as those who are God’s free and mature sons, let us find out what pleases the Lord and so understand what the will of God is for our lives.