Ephesians 5

The “therefore” looks back to the Father’s forgiveness (4:32). Beloved children copy the Father in kindness—not to earn the family, but because they already belong. Wesley hears imitators of God in forgiving and loving, and calls that resemblance more honorable than any pagan hero. Arminian interpreters take the summons as grace-enabled: the Father’s love is sincere, and imitation is a responsible walk under assisting grace, not grim duty.

Children ought to be like their Father. Calvin ties the ethic to adoption already given: if we are the children of God, we ought, as far as possible, to resemble Him in kindness. “Beloved” is God’s verdict before it is our achievement. Imitation is family likeness the Spirit works in those the Father has taken as His own—kindness that looks like the One who named them children, not a ladder into the household.

The walk is love patterned on Christ’s self-gift. He “gave himself up for us”—an offering and a sweet-smelling fragrance pleasing to the Father, both the model and the means of a holy life. Arminian readers preach that sacrifice as sufficient and sincerely offered; those who trust Him are summoned to the same self-giving. Love is a cross-shaped path under assisting grace, not a passing mood or a wage that purchases the cross.

Having called us to imitate God, Paul now calls us to imitate Christ, our true model. His self-offering is the only price by which we are reconciled to God—a sweet savor to the Father. Those He redeemed are bound to His service: walk in the love with which He has embraced us. The fragrant sacrifice grounds both atonement and ethics. Holy perfume spreads when the church loves as it has been loved in the Son.

Wesley: let not any impure love be even named or heard of among you—keep at the utmost distance, as becometh saints. Sexual immorality, impurity, and greedy craving are not live options for holy people. Distance is the point, not prudery but belonging. Grace that made them holy also makes these practices unfitting. The command is no formality: saints can still be drawn if they give vice a place in speech and imagination.

Three vices—sexual immorality, impurity, covetousness—are to be unknown among those called saints. Calvin hears Paul demanding nothing but what becomes saints, and thereby excluding fornicators, the impure, and the covetous from that fellowship. “Saints” is identity before it is performance; what befits the holy excludes the Gentile walk they left. Naming these things as live options already concedes too much to the darkness.

Our words should match our hearts. Wesley treats foolish talking as empty chatter that grows neither faith nor holiness, and jesting as a heathen “half-virtue” that often quenches the Spirit. Filthiness, empty talk, and crude wit are out of place for a Christian. Thanksgiving is the fitting replacement—speech that blesses God instead of cheapening people. Enabling grace trains the tongue; believers remain responsible not to baptize coarseness as “just joking.”

Paul adds speech-sins to the catalogue. Even clever jesting, prized among pagans, sits ill with godliness, because it is so hard to be witty without becoming satirical. Grace—thanksgiving—should flavor conversation. The renewed community’s talk is worshipful, not merely less crude, because those in Christ speak as people who have received everything as gift.

The warning is plain: persistent immorality, impurity, and greedy idolatry shut a person out of the kingdom. Inheritance is in Christ; those who abandon holy walking abandon the inheritance. Arminians take this as a danger addressed to the church, not a hypothetical scare. Empty words that promise safety while the old walk continues must not mute Paul’s “sure.”

Paul alarms them with a certain sentence: these vices shut the kingdom of God. He does not deny pardon to those who have fallen and recovered; he pronounces sentence on the sins themselves. Those who remain fornicators, impure, or covetous have no friendship with God. For the Reformed, the elect will be kept and will not finally live as idolaters. The warning is a means God uses to preserve His people and to unmask empty profession.

Empty words soften sin—“God is not so strict; frailty excuses us.” Wesley: because of these things, as innocent as the heathens esteem them, and as those dealers in vain words would persuade you to think them. Paul forbids that deceit. Wrath comes because of these things, not in spite of them. The warning is for the readers: do not join the disobedient under a gospel that never judges.

Scoffers have always mocked judgment. Paul says the wrath of God comes—ordinarily and finally—on the sons of disobedience. Calvin hears the apostle addressing believers not so much to terrify them about their own standing as to show them, in the ungodly as in a mirror, why they must not share that fellowship. God does not make Himself an object of terror so that His children flee Him, but draws them in a fatherly manner. Wrath is just; the church sees it and stays with the Father.

“Therefore” makes partnership with the disobedient a moral choice with consequence. Do not share their practices or their end. Assisting grace makes separation possible; remaining entangled would be culpable refusal of light already given. Holiness here is corporate as well as personal—who you walk with shapes who you become.

Separation follows identity and judgment. Those rescued from wrath must not yoke themselves to the doomed walk. Partnership is fellowship in works and in ruin. The gospel has already transferred them, so they must not crawl back into the old company as if the old night were still home.

They were darkness—not merely in it—total blindness and ignorance, Wesley says. Now they are light in the Lord. The indicative funds the imperative: walk as children of light, suitably to present knowledge. Grace made the transfer; the walk remains a responsible path they must not refuse. Light is in the Lord; to walk otherwise is to contradict mercy already received.

Darkness names the whole nature of man before regeneration; light names those the Spirit has enlightened. “You ought,” Calvin hears, “to be very different persons from what you formerly were; for out of darkness God hath made you light.” “In the Lord” is decisive: out of Christ, Satan’s night still rules. Walk as children of light because that is what God has made them. The imperative harvests an already-given identity—regeneration before ethics, being before doing.

Light bears fruit: goodness, righteousness, truth—opposite the old unfruitful works. Wesley: the fruit of the light consists in goodness and righteousness and truth, opposite the sins already named. Fruit is evidence of life, grown as believers cooperate with the Spirit. The parenthesis tells children of light what their path looks like in practice. Enabling grace produces what is good, right, and true; they must not resist that growing.

The parenthesis maps the road. Fruit belongs to the light: goodness, righteousness, and truth. Calvin: this is done when they do not live according to their own will, but devote themselves entirely to obedience to God. What God has made light, He also makes fruitful. Character is the harvest of having been brought into the Lord’s brightness.

Try to discern (test, prove) is active wisdom. Pleasing the Lord is learned along the way, not guessed once for all. Sanctifying grace illumines; the church still has to prove in each circumstance what delights Him. Discernment is a moral act under assisting light, not a substitute for it.

The children of light prove what is acceptable to the Lord. Their rule is His will, not impulse or custom. Whoever desires to live in a proper and safe manner, Calvin says, let him resolve to obey God and take His will as the rule. The Spirit renews discernment so that life is tested against the Father’s pleasure—wisdom as the fruit of having already been brought into the light.

Abstaining is not enough. Wesley: reprove them—to avoid them is not enough. Light does not quietly coexist with secret evil. Enabling grace gives courage to refuse partnership and to drag darkness into view—without becoming a gossip about shameful deeds. Reproof is love when it aims at repentance.

No fellowship with darkness’s barren works—no consent, advice, or assistance. “Rather expose them”: drag what hides into the light. Calvin: it is not enough that we do not, of our own accord, undertake anything wicked. Dissimulation is not holiness. The church’s brightness is meant to unmask evil, not merely to stay privately clean. Where God is sinned against openly, silence is not peace.

Some deeds are so degrading that even describing them is out of place. Wesley: in secret—as flying the light. Secretness is part of their shame. Saints need not catalogue vice to reject it. Holiness includes a modest tongue: expose darkness without rehearsing its details for entertainment.

Night has no shame: hidden from human eyes, the ungodly rush into what cannot even be named. Darkness emboldens what daylight would mortify. The point is not prurient detail but why exposure matters. The word of God is a torch; without it, secret sin feels safe.

Light makes things show as they are. Wesley: all things which are reproved are thereby dragged out into the light and shown in their proper colours; nothing but light from heaven can make anything manifest. Reproof is mercy when it unveils sin’s true color and invites repentance. The church that exposes does so as children of light, hoping the visible will become light.

Manifesting is light’s proper work. When the word exposes evil, hidden works stand in public view. Calvin: what Paul enjoins is the proper business of light—to make manifest; they would be unworthy of the name if they did not bring to light what was involved in darkness. Exposure is not cruelty; it is how God grants sight to what had hidden itself.

The gospel itself cries to those still in darkness. Wesley: God saith, in the general tenor of His word, to all who are still in darkness. Awake—from ignorance of God and of thyself, from stupid insensibility; arise from the death of sin; and Christ shall give light—knowledge, holiness, happiness. The call is sincere: sleepers may wake. Grace enables the rising; it does not drag the unwilling. Those who heed the voice find Christ shining on them.

Paul voices Christ’s ordinary gospel message through preachers: raise the dead to life. This does not mean that when we have risen, His light then begins to shine, as if our performances came before His grace. Calvin: when Christ enlightens us, we rise from death to life. Sleepers wake because the Light shines—effectual illumination, not a reward for self-arousal. The summons is the means by which Christ gives life.