It Sounds Like Singing

Ordinary Means · An Ephesians Study · No. 9

There may be no more audacious command in the Bible than the one that opens Ephesians 5: Be imitators of God.

Not admirers of God. Not students of God. Imitators. Model your life on His. It would be unbearable presumption — except for the two words Paul attaches: as beloved children. A small child imitates his parents without thinking about it — their gestures, their phrases, the way they hold a fork. He becomes like the people he loves and belongs to. That is the picture. You do not imitate God in order to become His child; you imitate Him because you already are one. Beloved first. Imitation second. (As always with Paul, the gift comes before the command.)

And the imitation has one shape above all: love. Walk in love, Paul says, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. The cross is the measuring stick. Wherever your love does not look like self-giving, it has not reached its mature form yet. But here is the line that lifts the whole thing: Christ's self-giving was a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. That is worship language — the pleasing aroma of the old sacrifices rising to heaven. And Paul means for your love to share in it. The ordinary, unglamorous love you spend on a spouse, a child, a difficult neighbor — taken up by the Spirit, it rises to the Father in the fragrance of Christ's own offering. Your Tuesday acts of love are a kind of worship.

You can walk this way because of what you now are. Paul does not say you are in the light, or headed toward the light. He says: once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Light — at the level of your being, because you are joined to the One who is the Light of the world. So walk as children of light. You do not mainly expose the surrounding darkness by lecturing it; you expose it by shining — by being a visibly different kind of life, in whose presence the dark shows up as what it is. Paul even quotes what was likely an early baptismal hymn: Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

Then comes the chapter's sharpest contrast, and its climax:

Two ways to be filled. Two ways to be altered. The world reaches for wine — for something to blunt the soberness of life. The Christian is filled by Someone else.

And here is the surprise. Ask most people what "filled with the Spirit" looks like, and they reach for the spectacular — ecstasies, drama, the extraordinary. Paul's answer is startlingly ordinary. The Spirit-filled life shows up, he says, as a people addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord, giving thanks always and for everything, and submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Singing. Gratitude. Deference. That is it. The most extraordinary reality in the universe — the Spirit of God filling a human being — shows up not in fireworks but in a congregation that sings, gives thanks, and defers to one another. This is why the Lutheran tradition has always been a singing tradition: Luther put the Gospel into hymns so the people could carry the truth in their own mouths and teach it to each other. When the church sings — even haltingly, even off-key, even the third stanza on a tired Sunday — that is the Spirit's fullness made audible. The ordinary congregation, once again, turns out to be the place where the most uncommon thing of all is quietly happening.

And that last mark — submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ — is the threshold of next week. Paul takes it straight into the household: how it reshapes marriage, parenting, and work, with the love of Christ for His Church as the pattern for all of it. Read Ephesians 5:22–6:9 before then.

Get the book here: [EPHESIANS]