Ephesians 5:15-6:9 - Outline

[Jim Watt]

“*TWO ARE BETTER THAN ONE” MINISTRIES*

*Jim & Marie Watt*

*Tel: 253-517-9195 - Email: jmbetter at gmail.com*

*Web: www.2rbetter.org*

February 25, 2013


 *SEP 9 - EPHESIANS 5:15-6:9 - RELATIONSHIPS IN OUR WALK*


 *1. 5:15-16 (5:15-17, NNT) OUR WALK: ACCORDING TO GOD’S PURPOSES. “Look
therefore carefully how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise; 16 redeeming
the season, because the days are evil.” *Father, we are sons and daughters
of Your Kingdom! We are not of this world. We have been delivered out of
the authority of Satan and translated in the Kingdom of Your dear Son!
*Hallowed
be your :name!*


 *2. 5:18-19 (5:18-21) OUR WALK: BY THE SPIRIT. “And be not drunk with
wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit; 19 speaking to
yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and psalming
with your :heart to the Lord.” *We thank You Father, for the Spirit of life
in Christ Jesus Your Son. We thank You that Your Spirit through Your Son
enables us to sing a new song, the song of the soul set free, the song of
the redeemed. * Your :kingdom come!*


 *3. 5:22-24. OUR WALK: FOR OUR WIVES. “:Wives, be subject to your own
husbands, as to the Lord, 23 because the husband is the wife’s head as also
the Christ is head of the church, himself savior of the body. 24 But as the
church is subject to the Christ, so the wives be also to their husbands in
everything.” *In the Spirit, we submit ourselves one to another in Your
fear, Father, without respect of persons. In divine order, we submit to
this order, and rejoice that wives can portray the love and respect of the
church to Christ. *Your :will be done, As in heaven, so on earth.*


 *4. 5:25-26 (5:25-30) OUR WALK: FOR HUSBANDS. :Husbands, love the wives,
even as the Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for it; 26 that
he might sanctify it, having cleansed it by the washing of the water with
the word.” *O Father, we who are husbands quake at our high calling.
Forgive us as husbands for failing so often to portray the love and self-giv
int of Christ to His church. May our wives too forgive us for falling
short. By Your Grace we resolve to live up to Your purposes. *Our :daily
:bread Give us this day.*


 *5. 5:33 (5:31-33) OUR WALK: AN ANALOGY OF THE CHURCH. “Nevertheless you
love also severally each his own :wife, even as himself: and the wife
seethat she fear the husband.”
*Mutually, we commit ourselves as husbands and wives to *walk* in our order
and responsibility. We marvel how Your standard in the home Father, is just
now being restored. O that present helps were in existence a few decades
ago! *And forgive us our :debts, As we also have forgiven our :debtors.*


 *6. 6:1, 4 (6:1-4) OUR WALK: FOR CHILDREN AND FATHERS. “Children, obey
your :parent in the Lord: for this is right. 4 And, you, the fathers,
provoke not your :children to wrath: but nurture them in the Lord’s
chastening and admonition.” *How we have let the enemy in by the failure
both of children and fathers. Heavenly Father, forgive us our blindness and
disobedience. *And bring us not into temptation.*


 *7. 6:5 (6:5-9) OUR WALK: FOR EMPLOYEES AND EMPLOYERS. “:Bondmen, be
obedient to the lords, according to the flesh, with fear and trembling in
singleness of your :heart, as unto the Christ.” *Employees, apprentices,
modern workers, slaves in other countries - we submit Father, to Your
wisdom in these words. We know it worked in the days of Paul. We know Your
eternal principles still work today. *But deliver us from the evil one!*


 *NOTE**: 5:20-21 (5:18-21) **OUR WALK: AN ETERNAL PRINCIPLE IN
CHRIST. “Thanking
always for all in our Lord Jesus Christ’s name the God and Father; 21
subjecting
yourselves one to another in fear of Christ.” *Father, we accept and obey
these Your words through Paul.


 *C.H. Spurgeon Quotes: “Charismatic in Excess” - *Some, I know, fall into
a very vicious habit, which habit they excuse in themselves - namely, that
of ordering their steps according to impressions. Every now and then I met
with people whom I think to be rather weak in the head, who will journey
from place to place, and will perform follies by the gross under the belief
that they are doing the will of God, because some silly whim of their
diseased brains is imagined to be an inspiration from above.


 *Our Psalm for the Day: 69:10-11 (69, ESV) SAVE ME, O GOD. “When I wept and
humbled my soul with fasting, it became my reproach. 11 I am the talk of
those who sit in the gate, and the drunkards make songs about me.” *Father,
In David You show us David’s greater Son by Your Spirit. You O LORD, show
us David’s Lord! And in Jesus we see prophetically the suffering He endured
on our behalf. You Father, were in Christ reconciling the world to
Yourself. *Hallowed be your :name!*


 In the Forty-First they were golden lilies, dropping sweet-smelling myrrh,
and blooming in the fair gardens which skirt the ivory palaces: in this we
have the lily among thorns, the lily of the valley, fair and beautiful,
blooming in the Garden of Gethsemane. If any inquire, “Of whom speaks the
psalmist this? of himself, or of some other man?” we would reply, “Of
himself and of some other man.” Who that other is, we need not be long in
discovering; it is the Crucified alone Who can say, “In My thirst they gave
Me vinegar to drink.” His footprints all through this sorrowful song have
been pointed out by the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, and therefore we
believe, and are sure, that the Son of man is here. Yet it seems to be the
intention of the Spirit, while He gives us personal types and so shows the
likeness to the firstborn which exists in the heirs of salvation, to set
forth also the disparities between the best of the sons of men and the Son
of God, for there are verses here which we dare not apply to our Lord; we
almost shudder when we see our brethren attempting to do so, as for
instance, verse 5.


 69:1. *Save me, O God.* “He saved others, Himself He cannot save.” With
strong cryings and tears, He offered up prayers and supplications unto Him
that was able to save Him from death, and was heard in that He feared. Thus
David had prayers, and here his Son and Lord utters the same cry. It is
remarkable that such a scene of woe should be presented to us immediately
after the jubilant ascension hymn of the last Psalm, but this only shows
how interwoven are the glories and the sorrows of our ever-blessed
Redeemer. *For the waters are come in unto My soul. *Bodily anguish is not
His first complaint; He begins with the gall which embittered His lips, but
with the mighty griefs which broke into His heart. All the sea outside a
vessel is less to be feared than that which finds its way into the hold. In
all this, He has sympathy with us and is able to succor us when we, like
Peter, beginning to sink, cry to Him, “Lord, save, or we perish.”


 69:3. *My throat is dried. *Few, very few, of His saints follow their Lord
in prayer so far as this. We are, it is to be feared, more likely to be
hoarse with talking frivolities to men than by pleading with God; yet our
sinful nature demands more prayer than His perfect humanity might seems to
need. His prayers should shame us into fervor. *My eyes fail while I wait
for my God.* There are times when we should pray till the throat is dry,
and watch till the eyes grow dim. Only thus can we have fellowship with Him
in His sufferings. What! can we not watch with Him one hour? Does the flesh
shrink back? O cruel flesh, to be so tender of yourself and so ungenerous
to your Lord?


 69:4. *They that hate Me without a cause are more than the hairs of My
head.* “This is the heir, let us kill Him that the inheritance may be
ours,” was the unanimous resolve of all the keepers of the Jewish vineyard;
while the Gentiles outside the walls of the Garden furnished the
instruments for His murder and actually did the deed.


 69:8. *I am become a stranger unto My brethren.* The Jews, His brethren in
race, rejected Him; His family, His brethren by blood, were offended at
Him; His disciples, His brethren in spirit, forsook Him and fled; one of
them sold Him and another denied Him with oaths and cursings. *And an alien
unto My mother’s children. *May none of us ever act as if we were strangers
to Him; never may we treat Him as if He were an alien to us: rather let us
resolve to be crucified with Him, and may grace turn the resolve into fact.


 69:9*. For the zeal of your house has eaten me up. *Zeal for God is so
little understood by men of the world that it always draws down opposition
upon those who are inspired with it; they are always sure to be accused of
sinister motives, or of hypocrisy, or of being out of their senses. When
zeal eats us up, ungodly men seek to eat us up, too, and this was
preeminently the case with our Lord, because His holy jealousy was
preeminent.


 69:10. *When I **wept, and chastened my soul with fasting, that was to my
reproach. *Our Savior wept much in secret for our sins, and no doubt His
private soul-chastenings on our behalf were very frequent. Lone mountains
and desert places saw repeated agonies, which, if they could disclose them,
would astonish us indeed. The emaciation which these exercises sought in
our Lord made Him appear nearly fifty years old when He was but little over
thirty; this which was to His honor was used as a matter of reproach
against Him.


 69:21. *And in My thirst they gave Me vinegar to drink. * A criminal’s
draught was offered to our innocent Lord, a bitter portion to our dying
Master. Sorry entertainment had earth for her King and Savior. How often
have our sins filled the gall-cup of our Redeemer! While we blame the Jews,
let us not excuse ourselves.


 69:29. *But I am poor and sorrowful. *No man was ever poorer or more
sorrowful than Jesus of Nazareth, yet His cry out of the depths was heard,
and He was uplifted to the highest glory. *Let Your salvation, O God, set
me up on high. *O you poor and sorrowful ones, lift up your heads, for as
with your Lord, so shall it be with you. You are trodden down today as the
mire of the streets, but you shall ride upon the high places of the earth
ere long; and even now you are raised up together and made to sit together
in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus.


 69:31. *This also shall please the Lord better than an ox or bullock that
has horns and hoofs. *The *opus operatum, *which our ritualists think so
much of, the Lord puffs at. The horning and hoofing are nothing to Him,
though to Jewish ritualists these were great points, and matters for
critical examination; our modern rabbis are just as precise as to the
mingling of water with their wine, the baking of their wafers, the cut of
their vestments, and the performance of genuflections towards the right
quarter of the compass. O fools, and slow of heart to perceive all the the
Lord has declared. *(From “The Treasury of David” by C.H. Spurgeon,
abridged by D.O. Fuller.”)*



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