Ephesians 5

Imitating God

1 Therefore, pattern your lives after God, as children who are deeply loved by Him,

2 and conduct yourselves in love, following the example of Christ who loved us and offered Himself on our behalf as a sacrificial offering to God, producing a pleasing fragrance.

3 But sexual immorality and every form of moral impurity or greediness must not even be mentioned among you, as befits those who belong to God—

4 likewise, vulgar speech, empty babbling, or crude humor, which are inappropriate, but let thanksgiving characterize your speech instead.

5 For you know with certainty that no person who is sexually immoral, morally impure, or greedy—which amounts to idolatry—possesses any inheritance in the kingdom that belongs to Christ and God.

6 Do not allow anyone to mislead you with hollow reasoning, for God’s wrath falls upon the disobedient because of these very things.

7 Therefore, do not associate yourselves with such people as their partners.

Light in the Lord

8 For at one time you yourselves were darkness, but now you exist as light in the Lord. Conduct yourselves as those who belong to the light

9 (for the light produces fruit that consists of complete goodness, righteousness and truth),

10 carefully examining what brings pleasure to the Lord.

11 Take no part in the barren works that belong to darkness, but instead bring them into the open.

12 For even to speak of what they practice in hiding brings shame.

13 But when anything is brought into the open by the light, it becomes visible and clear, for whatever makes things visible is light.

14 Therefore it says,

“Awaken, you who sleep,

and rise up from among the dead,

and Christ will give you light.”*

15 Pay careful attention, therefore, to how you conduct your lives—not as those lacking wisdom but as those who possess it,

16 seizing every opportunity wisely, for the times are characterized by evil.

17 For this reason, do not lack in understanding, but grasp what the Lord desires.

Results of Being Filled with the Spirit

18 Do not become intoxicated with wine, for that path leads to debauchery; rather, keep being filled with the Spirit,

19 speaking to each other through psalms and hymns and songs inspired by the Spirit, singing and making melodies in your hearts directed to the Lord,

20 continually expressing gratitude to God the Father for everything, doing so in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,

21 yielding to one another in reverent fear of Christ:

22 Wives, yield to your own husbands as an expression of your submission to the Lord,

23 because the husband functions as head over the wife in the same way that Christ functions as head over the church, being Himself the deliverer of the body.

24 Now just as the church places itself under Christ’s authority, so wives should place themselves under their husbands’ authority in all matters.

25 Husbands, demonstrate love toward your wives in the same manner that Christ demonstrated love toward the church and surrendered Himself on her behalf

26 in order to consecrate her, having purified her through the cleansing that comes by water accompanied by the spoken word,

27 so that He could present the church to Himself in splendor, having neither blemish nor wrinkle nor anything of that kind, but rather that she would be consecrated and without defect.

28 Husbands ought to demonstrate love toward their own wives in this same manner, treating them as their own bodies. The man who demonstrates love toward his wife demonstrates love toward himself.

29 For no person has ever despised his own flesh, but rather provides nourishment for it and cares for it tenderly, just as Christ does for the church—

30 because we are parts of His body.

31 “For this cause a man shall depart from his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”*

32 This mystery holds great significance—I am applying it to Christ and the church.

33 In any case, each individual husband among you must love his own wife as he loves himself, and the wife must show reverence for her husband.

Notes

14 The source of this quote is unknown, but there are allusions to several Old Testament texts of Is. 26:19; 51:17; 52:1; 60:1; Mal. 4:2

31 Quoted from Gen. 2:24

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