Your face can betray your thoughts, but not reliably. A grimace might mean something, or it might mean nothing at all. Years can pass, and you can still wonder what you said wrong in a classroom, only to learn later that the person across from you doesn’t even remember the moment. Actions can be read the same way: sometimes they reveal a person’s heart, yet sometimes people act in ways that contradict what they actually believe. When it comes to our speech, we have a more reliable revelation of the speaker’s mind. It is true that a speaker could be deliberately deceptive, but spoken words remain the clearest window into the soul.
That principle has shaped a series of teaching built around a single theme: what it means to think like a Christian. The idea grows out of Ephesians chapter four, where the apostle Paul describes putting off an old way of living and putting on a new one, a renewal that begins in the mind. Recent messages in this series have focused on speech, on how a transformed mind should shape the way believers talk. Now the focus shifts from words to conduct, from what fills the mouth to what fills a life.
Ephesians five contains a turn. Commentators studying the letter have noted that whenever Paul writes “therefore” followed by the word “walk,” it signals a new section of thought. That shift shows up in verses seven and eight, where the text moves from warning to instruction: readers are told not to become partakers with the disobedient, since they were once darkness but are now light, and should walk accordingly as children of light.
Verse seven sits right at that hinge. It closes one argument and opens another, and it makes a fitting summary for what comes before it: the world has no part with us, and we should have no part with the world.
That admonition sets the direction for our study today. Ephesians 5.5-7 shows us the complete disconnect between believers and the world that surrounds them. Once part of that world, believers must no longer partake of it.
Excluded from the kingdom
Paul named three things that should not even be spoken of among believers: sexual immorality, impurity, and greed. (Eph 5.3) Those same categories return in verse five, but now they describe people rather than words. Anyone whose life is characterized by immorality, impurity, or covetousness, the text says, has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.
This is not a description of a believer who stumbles into sin. It describes someone for whom that sin has become the defining pattern of life, the very shape of their character.
The warning about covetousness receives particular attention. To make coveting the center of one’s life is to worship something other than the Creator. Whatever is coveted becomes an idol, and the person who chases it is trading something of eternal weight for something that cannot last. Esau supplies the classic picture: he traded his birthright, a lifelong inheritance, for a bowl of stew and a few minutes of satisfied hunger.1 That is what covetousness always does. It exchanges what is permanent for what is fleeting, and it never delivers on its promise. The things people chase in that spirit do not satisfy; they only breed more desire. Enough is never enough.
The original language underscores the seriousness of the point. It adds a small but forceful word, “every,” so that the statement reads as sweepingly as possible: every person who is marked by this kind of life, everyone without exception, is excluded. And the phrase translated “you know with certainty” is, in the original wording, a doubled expression built from two related words for knowledge, layered together for emphasis. There is no ambiguity intended. This is a settled, certain fact, not a possibility.
The kingdom in view here is called “the kingdom of Christ and God.” This is the only place in the New Testament where the Kingdom is described this way. That heightens the solemnity. Those excluded have no part in the kingdom because they have no part in the Holy Triune God.
Destined for wrath
The text does not stop at exclusion. Those who live this way are also described as heading toward wrath, the outpouring of God’s anger against sin. That wrath, the passage insists, is aimed squarely at unbelievers, at those who have no place in the kingdom.
However, here the argument turns pointedly toward the reader. The command “let no one deceive you” is not addressed to the world. It is addressed to believers, because believers are the ones capable of being deceived on this point.
And the deception is familiar. It’s the whisper that says this sin, whatever form it takes, doesn’t really hurt anyone. It’s just for fun. Nobody gets hurt. That line has been used to talk people into wrong behavior since long before the New Testament was written; the Greek word behind “deceive” carries that sense of trickery all the way back to Homer. It always means the same thing: to cheat, to mislead, to talk someone into believing something false.
Inside the church, that deception often takes a specific shape. It sounds like liberty. Nobody wants to be called narrow or legalistic, so certain behaviors get excused as freedom rather than named as compromise. That, too, is the lie at work: the claim that worldliness carries no real cost for someone who claims Christ.
But it does. The verb describing God’s wrath in this passage is present tense. It is coming now, not only at some final reckoning. There is an ultimate judgment reserved for those who never turn to God, but there is also a present, visible wrath that seeps into lives here and now. Homes fractured by unfaithfulness. Families gutted by addiction. Communities torn apart by violence rooted in unchecked desire. Those are not unrelated tragedies. They are the wrath of God working itself out in real time, the natural harvest of sin that was never as harmless as it claimed to be.
Far from the saints
That brings the passage to its command: “Therefore, do not become partakers with them.” (Eph 5.7)
“The word means one who is a partner or an accomplice in a plot.”2 The text suggests that by deception, the believer can be drawn into a deep association with someone who is excluded from the kingdom and who is receiving the wrath of God.
The question is simple. Should someone who belongs to Christ become partners with the “immoral or impure person or covetous man” (Eph 5.5) in the very misdeeds that characterize their lives?
This is not a call to abandon all relationships with people who are in the world. Personal separation does not mean cutting people off or refusing all contact with them. It means something more specific: refusing to share their lifestyle or their way of life. Believers are meant to reach into the world to pull people out of destructive patterns, not to be pulled back in themselves.
That distinction matters just as much inside the church as outside it. Sometimes staying faithful means stepping back not from an unbeliever but from another believer who has decided to imitate the world rather than resist it. That’s not rejection of the person. It’s a refusal to be drawn, through close association, back into patterns of life that pull against God. We exercise church discipline for these very reasons.
A word for the present moment
There is a case to be made that much of the church today has quietly set these warnings aside. A great deal of what passes for ordinary Christian life now looks remarkably like the world it is supposed to be distinct from, dressed up in the language of freedom and grace.
But the calling has not changed. To follow Christ is still to be called out of the world into something new, into a life shaped by a different set of loyalties. That calling carries real weight, and it comes with a real choice: to turn away from a life defined by the world’s appetites and toward a life that reflects who God is.
The world, as the text puts it, has no part with us. We, in turn, are called to have no part with the world. Not because people outside the faith are beyond reach, but because the very point of being called out is to go back in, not as partakers, but as witnesses to the glorious gospel of Christ, which frees sinners from their bondage to sin.
Sinners are excluded from the Kingdom, but they can be included if they repent and turn to God. They are very unlikely to turn if Christians turn towards them in full participation with their worldly lifestyles.
Image created with Adobe Express
This article reproduces a sermon preached on July 12, 2026, which you can see here. We used Claude.AI to turn the transcript into the article. Pastor Johnson reviewed, edited, and approved the final form of this article.
- See Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Baker Academic, 2002), 660–61. [↩]
- Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Baker Academic, 2002), 668. [↩]
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