Pray to Begin
Ask — that the Spirit who first made you “light in the Lord” would fill you afresh as you read, so that this is not merely study but the very filling Paul commands; ask God to teach you what it means to “walk in love” today, in the ordinary rooms and relationships of your life.
Give thanks — for the love that did not wait for you to become lovable: “Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant sacrificial offering to God.” Let gratitude for that self-giving love become the ground you stand on before you are asked to give anything at all.
Yield — every private darkness you would rather keep hidden, and every love that has quietly grown small and self-serving; hand them into the light that “makes everything visible,” and ask the God who loves the church to shape your loves into the likeness of His.
Today’s Passage: Ephesians 5
Chapter 5 gathers up the great theme of the whole 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 along three lines. It is a walk of purity — sexual immorality, impurity, and greed must not even be named among God’s holy people, replaced instead by thanksgiving (5:3–7). It is a walk of light — those who were “once darkness” are “now light in the Lord,” called to bear light’s fruit and even to expose the fruitless works of darkness (5:8–14). And it is a walk of wisdom — careful, Spirit-filled, thankful, singing, 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, astonishingly, a living picture of “Christ and the church.” Everything in the chapter flows from its opening note and returns to it: love that gives itself away, because that is exactly the love that saved us.
As you read, hold this: The whole Christian life is one long walk in love — imitating the God who in Christ gave Himself up for us — and human marriage is a living icon of that greater love between Christ and His church.
Context The world of Ephesians 5
A letter written to be lived. Ephesians divides neatly in two. Chapters 1–3 are almost pure celebration — the riches of who we are in Christ. Chapters 4–6 turn to the “therefore”: because you are all this, now walk this way. The Greek verb peripateō (per-ee-pat-EH-oh), to walk about, is Paul’s favorite image for the whole conduct of life, and it drums through chapter 5 — walk in love (5:2), walk as children of light (5:8), walk… as wise (5:15). Ancient readers heard “walk” as a picture of a whole manner of living, step after ordinary step, in one settled direction.
A city drenched in the wrong loves. Ephesus was famous for the temple of Artemis and for a religious culture in which sexual excess, drunken revelry, and idolatry were woven together and celebrated. When Paul warns against “sexual immorality,” “impurity,” “crude joking,” and drunkenness, he is not scolding an imaginary problem; he is naming the very air his readers had breathed all their lives. To “walk as children of light” in Ephesus was a visible break with the surrounding world.
The Greco-Roman “household code.” Verses 5:22–6:9 belong to a recognizable ancient form. Greek and Roman moralists (Aristotle, the Stoics, and others) wrote household codes — instructions ordering the three basic relationships of a household: husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and slaves. Those codes were almost entirely one-directional: they told the subordinate party (wife, child, slave) to obey the man who ruled the house, and had little or nothing to say to him. Paul takes up this familiar form — and transforms it from the inside. He addresses the subordinate parties as responsible persons in their own right; he frames the whole thing under “submitting to one another” (5:21); and, most radically, he lays the heaviest command not on the wife but on the husband, commanding a love measured by the cross. What a pagan reader expected to be a charter for a master’s authority becomes, in Paul’s hands, a summons to Christlike, self-emptying love.
“Head” and “body” — the letter’s own language. Paul does not reach for the marriage image out of nowhere. From chapter 1 he has called Christ the head and the church His body (1:22–23), and in chapter 4 he pictured the body “growing up into Christ, who is the head” (4:15). So when he calls the husband the “head” of the wife “as Christ is the head of the church,” he is drawing marriage up into the great mystery he has been unfolding all along.
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.
Word study "Imitators" — mimētēs (Ephesians 5:1)
Greek: μιμητής (mimētēs), pronounced mim-ay-TASE; here in the plural mimētai (mim-ay-TIE). Strong’s G3402.
Paul opens the chapter with a word that would have startled his first readers: “Be imitators of God.” Mimētēs — from which we get mimic and mime — means one who copies, who patterns himself on a model. Ancient teachers commonly told students to imitate a great man, a philosopher or a hero. Paul lifts the target infinitely higher: imitate God Himself. But notice 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; a small child copies a father’s walk and words not to earn his place in the family but because he already has it. So the towering command “imitate God” rests on the gentle ground “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; it is to give yourself away in love.
Everything in the chapter is set by these first two verses. Be imitators of God — mimētēs (mim-ay-TASE) — and the imitation is at once defined: walk in love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us. The measure of Christian love is not a warm feeling but a self-giving — Christ “gave Himself up,” handed Himself over, as “a fragrant sacrificial offering,” language drawn straight from the Old Testament altar, where a pleasing aroma rose to God. Real love costs the lover something. 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 — “sexual immorality,” “impurity,” and “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. Note that Paul 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; the thankful heart is content, and the content heart does not need to seize. Paul is blunt about the stakes (“no… greedy person… has any inheritance in the kingdom”) and refuses to let anyone soften it with “empty words.” This is not legalism; it is 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 — they are 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 — it bears “goodness, righteousness, and truth” — whereas darkness produces only “fruitless deeds,” works that come to nothing. The Christian’s task toward that darkness is twofold. First, “have no fellowship” with it — no partnership, no shared life. But second, and more bracingly, “expose” it. Light does not merely avoid the dark; by its nature it shines into the dark and shows things for what they are. There is a gentle logic here: what is done “in secret” keeps its grip precisely by staying hidden, and 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, 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.
Word study "Be filled" — plēroō (Ephesians 5:18)
Greek: πληρόω (plēroō), pronounced play-RO-oh; here the passive imperative plērousthe (play-ROO-sthe). Strong’s G4137.
At the center of the chapter’s call to wisdom stands a single command that powers everything around it: “be filled with the Spirit.” Plēroō means to fill full, to fill up completely — the same root Paul used in chapter 1 for the church as Christ’s fullness (plērōma). Three features of the Greek open the verse up. First, it is passive — literally “be filled,” let yourselves be filled; this is not a fullness we manufacture but one we receive and yield to. Second, it is a present form, meaning keep on being filled — not a single past experience to look back on but a continual, daily filling. Third, it is plural and set against getting “drunk on wine”: Paul draws a deliberate contrast between two ways of being filled and thereby controlled. Wine floods a person and leads to “reckless indiscretion”; the Spirit fills a person and leads to song, thanksgiving, and glad submission to one another. Note that Paul does not describe Spirit-fullness first as private ecstasy but as community — speaking to one another, singing, giving thanks, submitting. The overflow of the Spirit is a people who make music together and prefer one another.
Word study "Submit" — hypotassō (Ephesians 5:21)
Greek: ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō), pronounced hoop-ot-AS-so. Strong’s G5293.
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) plus tassō (to arrange, to order, to draw up in ranks). 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: 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; it is a theological anchor. 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). And note the word Paul never uses here: this is hypotassō, 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.
Paul turns from light to wisdom — “pay careful attention… to how you walk.” The wise life is watchful and deliberate; it treats time as precious, “redeeming the time” (literally buying up the opportunity, as a merchant snaps up a bargain) “because the days are evil.” Against the folly of drifting, Paul sets a positive command that becomes the engine of everything that follows: “be filled with the Spirit” — plēroō (play-RO-oh), a continual, received, corporate filling. And watch what Spirit-fullness looks like in Paul’s description — not chiefly private rapture but a singing, thankful, mutually-serving community. It overflows into worship (“psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs”), into constant thanksgiving “for everything,” and — the hinge into the household passage — into “submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ” (hypotassō, hoop-ot-AS-so). That last line is easy to rush past, but it reframes everything Paul is about to say about marriage. Before he speaks a word to wives or husbands, he lays down a posture required of all Christians: a glad ordering of oneself under others, done “out of reverence for Christ.” The specific instructions that follow are not exceptions to this mutual servanthood; they are 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.
Word study "Head" — kephalē (Ephesians 5:23)
Greek: κεφαλή (kephalē), pronounced kef-al-AY. Strong’s G2776.
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; they are 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 giving Himself up for it. 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; it is a cross to be lifted onto for another’s good.
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 (kef-al-AY), the head–body union: “the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.” But he cannot say head without immediately naming what kind of head 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. The wife’s “submit… in everything” (5:24) is therefore 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.
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; 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; it is purposeful, bent on making the beloved radiant. A husband’s love, then, is meant to be a love that seeks the flourishing and holiness of his wife, never one that diminishes her. Paul adds a second, humbler argument: a man should love his wife “as their own bodies,” because in marriage the two are one flesh — to love her is to love himself; 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: 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.
Word study "Mystery" — mystērion (Ephesians 5:32)
Greek: μυστήριον (mystērion), pronounced moos-TAY-ree-on. Strong’s G3466.
The passage rises to a single word of wonder: “This mystery is profound.” In our speech a mystery is a puzzle we cannot solve; in Paul’s, mystērion means almost the opposite — a secret long hidden in God and now revealed in Christ (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, God 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.
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.” 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 (moos-TAY-ree-on) is that marriage was, from the garden onward, a God-given sign — that the one-flesh union of husband and wife was 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; 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 — tied off in a single, doable sentence. The mystery is cosmic; the practice is a husband’s daily tenderness and a wife’s daily honor, offered “out of reverence for Christ.”
Study notes Going deeper
The old loves must not even be named — the new life replaces them. Paul’s ban on immorality and greed among the saints (5:3–5) is not a stray rule; it is the mirror image of the “put off / put on” logic that runs through his letters. The greedy heart is called idolatry because it worships and clutches what only God can rightly give:
"Put to death, therefore, the components of your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry." Colossians 3:5 (BSB)
In a companion letter Paul lists nearly the identical sins and names greed as idolatry in the same breath — evidence that these two chapters flow from one settled vision of the holy life. The old desires are not merely restrained; they are put to death, and their place is taken by thanksgiving.
Spirit-fullness overflows into shared song. When Paul says the mark of the Spirit’s filling is “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” (5:19), he is describing something he clearly saw as central to church life, for he says the same thing to another congregation in almost the same words:
"Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God." Colossians 3:16 (BSB)
Notice the pairing: in Ephesians the fullness comes from the Spirit; in Colossians from the word of Christ dwelling richly. The Spirit and the Word fill the same people — and the overflow, in both, is a singing, grateful, mutually-teaching community.
The radiant bride is the goal of Christ’s love. Paul says Christ gave Himself up “to present her to Himself as a glorious church, without stain or wrinkle… holy and blameless” (5:27). That presentation is not a metaphor with no future; Scripture promises the wedding day itself:
"Let us rejoice and be glad and give Him the glory. For the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His bride has made herself ready." Revelation 19:7 (BSB)
The love that cleanses the church now is aiming at a wedding feast then. Every Christian marriage that images Christ and the church is a small signpost pointing to that day, when the Bridegroom presents His radiant Bride to Himself forever.
Personal Application
1. Walking in love that costs something. Paul defines the whole Christian life as a walk in love patterned on Christ, who “gave Himself up for us.” Where, in the ordinary traffic of your relationships this week, is love asking you to give yourself up — to spend your time, your comfort, your right to be served — for someone else’s good? What would it look like to let self-giving, not merely warm feeling, be the measure of your love?
2. Bringing things into the light. Paul says the deeds of darkness keep their power by staying “secret,” and that light breaks them simply by making them visible. Is there something you have kept hidden — a habit, a resentment, a compromise — that has quietly grown stronger in the dark? What would change if you brought it honestly into the light, whether before God alone or before a trusted brother or sister in Christ?
3. A love that makes the other radiant. Christ’s love aims to present His church “glorious… holy and blameless” — a love bent on the flourishing of the beloved. Think of the people God has placed nearest you. Is your love for them one that seeks their good and their growth, or one that mostly seeks what they can be to you? How might your love become more like the love that gives itself away in order to make another shine?
Pray to Close
The central truth: the whole Christian life is one long walk in love — imitating the God who in Christ gave Himself up for us — and human marriage is a living icon of that greater love between Christ and His church. We do not love in order to earn our place; we love because we are already “beloved children,” and the Love that saved us now flows out through us.
Praise — the Christ who “loved the church and gave Himself up for her” to make her radiant; adore Him for a love that did not wait for you to be lovely but gave itself to make you holy and blameless in His presence.
Confess — the loves that have grown small and self-serving, the darkness you have preferred to keep hidden, the grasping that gratitude should have crowded out; bring them into the light of the One who forgives and cleanses.
Ask — to be filled with the Spirit today and every day, so that your ordinary walk — in your home, your work, your friendships — becomes a genuine imitation of God: a love that gives itself away “out of reverence for Christ.”
Worship for Today
Here I Am to Worship · Tim Hughes
Ephesians 5 opens with the call to “walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us” (5:2), and turns to those once in darkness now summoned to “walk as children of light” (5:8). This worship ballad meets both notes at once. It adores Christ as the Light of the World who stepped down into our darkness to open blind eyes, and it marvels at the costly, self-giving love that carried Him to the cross. Sing it as the chapter’s own response — light answering Light, love answering Love — the fitting posture of a people learning to walk as those Christ has loved.
Listen: