Ephesians 5 — Walk in Love, as Christ Loved the Church

Today’s Passage: Ephesians 5

Chapter 5 gathers up the great theme of the letter’s second half into a single verb: walk. Having reminded the Ephesians who they are in Christ, Paul now tells them how to live it out, and he begins with the highest imaginable standard: “Be imitators of God… and walk in love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us.”

From there he traces what such a walk looks like. It is a walk of purity, in which sexual immorality, impurity, and greed must not even be named among God’s people (5:3–7). It is a walk of light, for those who were “once darkness” are “now light in the Lord” (5:8–14). And it is a walk of wisdom, careful and Spirit-filled and “submitting to one another in the fear of Christ” (5:15–21). That last phrase opens the chapter’s most searching passage, marriage (5:22–33), where the wife’s respect and the husband’s self-giving love become a living picture of “Christ and the church.” Everything flows from the opening note and returns to it: a love that gives itself away, because that is the love that saved us.

As you read, hold this: Walk in love, as Christ loved the church.

Ephesians 5:1–7 (BSB)

¹ Be imitators of God, therefore, as beloved children, ² and walk in love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant sacrificial offering to God. ³ But among you, as is proper among the saints, there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed. ⁴ Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk, or crude joking, which are out of character, but rather thanksgiving. ⁵ For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure, or greedy person (that is, an idolater) has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. ⁶ Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things the wrath of God is coming on the sons of disobedience. ⁷ Therefore do not be partakers with them.

Everything in the chapter is set by these first two verses. “Be imitators of God,” Paul says. The Greek is mimētēs, one who copies, who patterns himself on a model. Ancient teachers commonly told students to imitate a great man, but Paul lifts the target infinitely higher: imitate God Himself. Notice, though, how the command is disarmed of all pride and terror by the phrase that follows, “as beloved children.” Children imitate the parent they love and are secure with, and a small child copies a father’s walk not to earn his place in the family but because he already has it. So the towering command to imitate God rests on the gentle ground of being beloved children, and it is instantly given content: the way you imitate God is to “walk in love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us.” To imitate God is not first to perform miracles or wield power but to give yourself away in love. The measure of Christian love is not a warm feeling but a self-giving, for Christ “gave Himself up,” handing Himself over as “a fragrant sacrificial offering,” in language drawn straight from the Old Testament altar.

And precisely because the saints are called to that costly, holy love, Paul draws a sharp line against its counterfeit. The loves of the surrounding culture, its “sexual immorality,” its “impurity,” and its “greed,” are not to have even “a hint” among God’s people; they are to be so foreign that they are not even named as options. Scripture grants two life-giving paths for our sexuality: monogamous marital relations between one man and one woman, or a life of sexual celibacy. Sex is reserved for marriage. Paul is not performing for a culture war; he is naming what holiness looks like in a city that had forgotten it.

Note that he brackets sexual sin and greed together and calls the greedy person “an idolater” (5:5). Both are disordered desire, a grasping to possess what God has not given, a heart bowing to a created thing. In place of the “crude joking” that trivializes these things, Paul prescribes an unexpected medicine: thanksgiving. The cure for grasping is gratitude, for the thankful heart is content, and the content heart does not need to seize. Paul is blunt about the stakes, that “no… greedy person… has any inheritance in the kingdom,” and he refuses to let anyone soften it with “empty words.” This is not legalism but the plain incompatibility of the old darkness with the new light.

Ephesians 5:8–14 (BSB)

⁸ For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light, ⁹ for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness, and truth. ¹⁰ Test and prove what pleases the Lord. ¹¹ Have no fellowship with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. ¹² For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. ¹³ But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that is illuminated becomes a light itself. ¹⁴ So it is said: “Wake up, O sleeper, rise up from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

Notice how absolute Paul’s language is. He does not say the Ephesians once did dark things and now do bright ones; he says “you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” Darkness and light are not merely their behavior but their very identity, then and now. The command flows straight from the new identity: because you are light, “walk as children of light.” And light, Paul says, is fruitful, bearing “goodness, righteousness, and truth,” while darkness produces only “fruitless deeds,” works that come to nothing.

The Christian’s task toward that darkness is twofold. First, to “have no fellowship” with it, no partnership and no shared life; but second, and more bracingly, to “expose” it. Light does not merely avoid the dark. By its nature it shines into the dark and shows things for what they are, and what is done “in secret” keeps its grip precisely by staying hidden, so that the simple act of bringing sin into the light begins to break its power. Paul closes with what many scholars think is a fragment of an early Christian hymn, perhaps sung at baptism: “Wake up, O sleeper, rise up from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” The whole movement from darkness to light is finally a resurrection, a sleeper waking and a dead man rising, and the light that dawns is the face of Christ Himself.

Ephesians 5:15–21 (BSB)

¹⁵ Pay careful attention, then, to how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, ¹⁶ redeeming the time, because the days are evil. ¹⁷ Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. ¹⁸ Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to reckless indiscretion. Instead, be filled with the Spirit. ¹⁹ Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your hearts to the Lord, ²⁰ always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. ²¹ Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Paul turns from light to wisdom, urging us to “pay careful attention… to how you walk.” The wise life treats time as precious, “redeeming the time” (buying up the opportunity) “because the days are evil.” Against the folly of drifting he sets the engine of everything that follows: “Be filled with the Spirit.” And watch what that fullness looks like. It is not chiefly private rapture but a singing, thankful, mutually-serving community, given to worship and to thanksgiving “for everything,” and then, as the hinge into the household, to “ submitting (ὑποτάσσω) hypotassō, pronounced hoop-ot-AS-so. Strong's G5293, to order oneself under, to submit, to arrange under. The word that governs the entire marriage passage arrives first here, in a phrase addressed to everyone: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Hypotassō is originally a military term, hypo (under) joined to tassō (to arrange, to order, to draw up in ranks), and it means to order oneself under, to take one’s place in a God-given arrangement. It is crucial to see two things about how Paul uses it. First, verse 21 makes the opening posture mutual, “one another,” a startling word in a culture of rigid hierarchy, for every Christian is to take a servant’s place toward every other. Second, verse 22 has, in the best Greek manuscripts, no verb of its own: “Wives, [submit] to your husbands” borrows the verb straight from verse 21. This is not an accident of grammar but a theological anchor, for the wife’s particular submission (5:22) is one specific expression of the mutual, Christ-revering ordering that all believers owe one another (5:21). Verse 21 does not cancel verses 22–24; it frames them. And note the word Paul never uses here: this is a free ordering of oneself, not hypakouō, the “obey” he will use of children and slaves. The wife is addressed as a free and honored partner, not a subordinate to be commanded. to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Before he speaks a word to wives or husbands, he lays down a posture required of all Christians, so that the specific instructions that follow are not exceptions to this mutual servanthood but its shape within marriage.

Ephesians 5:22–24 (BSB)

²² Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, His body, of which He is the Savior. ²⁴ Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Now Paul speaks into marriage, and we must let him say what he actually says, neither softening it away nor twisting it into something harsh: “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” Remember the grammar. The verb is borrowed from verse 21, so this is the specific form, within marriage, of the mutual servanthood every believer owes. And note the standard, “as to the Lord,” which both dignifies and limits it. A wife’s submission is an act of reverence offered ultimately to Christ, never a blank surrender to a husband’s sin or cruelty.

Paul grounds the instruction in the kephalē, the head–body union: “The husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.” He cannot say head without immediately naming what kind of head (κεφαλή) kephalē, pronounced kef-al-AY. Strong's G2776, head. Everything in this passage turns on what Paul means by “head.” Kephalē is the ordinary Greek word for the physical head on a body, and that bodily image is exactly the point, because Paul has spent the whole letter calling Christ the head and the church His body (1:22–23; 4:15–16). Head and body are not two competing powers but one living organism, bound together, the head giving life, direction, and nourishment to the body it loves as its own. So when Paul calls the husband the “head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church,” he immediately fills the word with its only true content: “His body, of which He is the Savior.” Christ’s headship over the church is defined by His saving of it, by His giving Himself up for it, and that is the model. Whatever kephalē means for a husband, it is measured entirely by the kind of head Christ is, not one who is served by the body but one who lays down His life to rescue and cherish it. Headship here is not a throne to sit on but a cross to be lifted onto for another’s good. Christ is, “His body, of which He is the Savior.” The headship in view is the headship of a Savior, one who gives Himself for the body, so that the wife’s call to “submit… in everything” (5:24) is not a call to lose herself but to entrust herself, “as to the Lord,” to the loving, saving leadership that Christ models and that verse 25 will require of the husband. Read the two halves together, as Paul wrote them, and the picture is not domination but covenant, an ordered, self-giving union that images Christ and His church. Marriage, as God made it from the beginning, is one man and one woman, and that is the union Paul is about to trace back to the garden.

Ephesians 5:25–30 (BSB)

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her ²⁶ to sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷ and to present her to Himself as a glorious church, without stain or wrinkle or any such blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸ In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ Indeed, no one ever hated his own body, but he nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church. ³⁰ For we are members of His body.

Here the household code is turned on its head. In the world’s codes the heaviest weight fell on the wife, but here Paul spends the most words, and the most demanding words, on the husband. And the command is not rule but love, measured by the cross: “Love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.” This is the same phrase from verse 2 (“gave Himself up”) now aimed straight at the husband. The pattern of headship is not the husband being served but the husband dying, giving himself up for his wife’s good, as Christ gave Himself for the church.

And Paul spells out the aim of Christ’s self-giving so the husband will know what his love is for: to “sanctify” her, to “cleanse” her, to “present her… as a glorious church, without stain or wrinkle… holy and blameless.” Christ’s love is not merely affectionate but purposeful, bent on making the beloved radiant, and a husband’s love, then, is meant to seek the flourishing and holiness of his wife and never to diminish her. Paul adds a second, humbler argument, that a man should love his wife “as their own bodies,” because in marriage the two are one flesh, so that to love her is to love himself, and to nourish and cherish her is the most natural thing in the world, “just as Christ does the church.” Twice in six verses the human marriage is folded back into the divine one, for we are members of His body. The husband’s love is not being invented as a new rule; it is being asked to echo a love the church already lives inside.

Ephesians 5:31–33 (BSB)

³¹ “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” ³² This mystery is profound, but I am speaking about Christ and the church. ³³ Nevertheless, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Paul reaches back to the very first marriage, quoting God’s word at creation: “A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” Adam and Eve, one man and one woman: that is the pattern, from the garden onward. And then comes the sentence that lifts the whole chapter into glory: “This mystery is profound, but I am speaking about Christ and the church.” The mystērion is that marriage was, from the beginning, a God-given sign, the one-flesh union of husband and wife designed to point beyond itself to the union of Christ and His people.

This is the astonishing claim that governs everything Paul has said: earthly marriage is a living icon of a heavenly reality. The husband’s cross-shaped love images Christ’s love for the church, and the wife’s glad, reverent trust images the church’s response to her Savior. Neither is diminished; both are dignified beyond measure by being caught up into the greatest love there is. And so Paul lands the whole soaring passage back down onto the ground of daily life with a plain, tender summary (5:33): “Each one of you… must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” Love and respect, the two threads he has been weaving, are tied off in a single, doable sentence. The mystery (μυστήριον) mystērion, pronounced moos-TAY-ree-on. Strong's G3466, mystery, hidden secret now disclosed. The passage rises to a single word of wonder: “This mystery is profound.” In our speech a mystery is a puzzle we cannot solve, but in Paul’s, mystērion means almost the opposite, a secret long hidden in God and now revealed in Christ, and he has used it this way throughout the letter (1:9; 3:3–6). So when Paul quotes Genesis 2:24, “the two will become one flesh,” and calls it a “profound mystery,” he is not saying marriage is baffling. He is saying that from the very beginning, in the garden, when God made Adam and Eve and joined them as one flesh, He embedded a hidden meaning in marriage, and that meaning has now come to light: “I am speaking about Christ and the church.” Marriage was never merely a human institution or a social arrangement; it was, from creation, designed to signify something greater, the covenant union of the Redeemer and His redeemed. This is why the whole passage carries such weight. When a husband loves and a wife respects, when two become one, they are not only building a home. They are displaying, in ordinary flesh and blood, the deepest secret of the universe: that Christ has bound Himself to His people in unbreakable, self-giving love. is cosmic, but the practice is a husband’s daily tenderness and a wife’s daily honor, offered “out of reverence for Christ.”