Pauls's Epistle to the Ephesians
Chapter Seventeen
WISE CHRISTIAN METHOD.

"See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is."- EPH. 5:15-17.

THE fifteenth verse is best connected, not with the immediately preceding context, which is a sort of digression to explain the action of the light, but rather with the eighth verse "walk as children of light." In that character "see that," or rather "how, ye walk circumspectly." See, or take heed, that ye walk carefully, strictly, accurately, according to some exact rule or discipline. And see, or take heed, how you do so. For there is a double admonition here. You are to walk circumspectly, cautiously, methodically, by method and system. But how you are thus to walk is as important a consideration as that you are thus to walk. For the manner of walking by method and rule may be faulty, though the method or rule is right. It may be too stiff, precise, and unaccommodating; like a soldier's monotonous exercise, or a monk's mechanical service. Or it may be too loose and facile, such as the natural conscience is too apt to allow it to be. These indeed are the dangers of methodising the religious life, which is the life of God in the soul of man.

And yet it must be methodised. The Christian walk must be circumspect. It must be not wild and random; made up of experimental runs and dashes in every direction; under influences from everywhere: movements hither and thither at the impulse of any or every wind. It is the walk of one who has looked all round, and, on a survey of the whole, has made up his mind, and formed and fixed his plan; so that ever afterwards he walks on with a clear aim, along a definite route. But he must consider how he is thus to walk. It is a manner of walking that is not natural; and therefore it is not wonderful that it should be delicate and difficult. For a hermit or an ascetic indeed, for one entering a convent and submitting to monastic bondage, the problem may be more easily solved. He has to live by inexorable rule. All his movements, during all the hours of the night and day, are fixed for him and stereotyped, without any liberty on his part to exercise discretion; and without his feeling, or being called to feel, any responsibility for what may be the issue of his wanting such a liberty of discretion. He can live methodically, by rule; walking thus circumspectly; having no liberty of discretion to exercise; having really no choice to make.

It is otherwise with you, when you are called, in this sense of the term, to walk circumspectly. For you it is not so simple a matter to lay down a systematic plan for your inward spiritual life, and to apply it faithfully to the varied and ever-varying circumstances and conditions of your intercourse with the outer world. You cannot indeed walk at all, consistently or safely, unless you walk circumspectly, upon a plan and by rule. But you may err by coming under bondage to the plan or rule, and refusing to relax or modify it when occasion calls for that. Or you may err by not rightly apprehending and estimating the way of applying the plan or rule to unforeseen and unexpected emergencies. Or, most likely of all, you may get so bewildered in the attempt to carry it out, that you quietly lay it aside, and reconcile yourselves to your religious life being a mere affair of impulse and impression; a kind of knotless thread; a fluctuating succession of indefinite frames of mind and courses of conduct, without object and without rule. Hence the need of wisdom (ver. 15, "not as fools, but as wise") wisdom to tell you how to walk circumspectly; wisdom; a wise discretion; to guide you in the practical adaptation of your carefully adjusted and methodical plan of inward spiritual life, to the outward calls and occurrences of the surrounding world. You are to live by rule; the rule of a godly discipline, to be punctually and scrupulously observed. But you are to live thus by rule wisely; in the way of a wise, discreet, prudent, accommodation to your present surroundings, as regards men and things ; not as if you were bound beforehand by a mere stiff and martinet routine; but as being entitled to exercise your own judgment on every case as it comes before you. Nor need this latitude or discretionary liberty cause any fear of abuse. For,
I. It is to be a redeeming of the time; a seizing of the opportunity, out of the evil days in which it is to be exercised (ver 16). II, It is to be always exercised in the way of understanding what the will of the Lord is (ver. 17).

These are surely safe enough guarantees.
I. "Redeeming the time because the days are evil" (ver. 16). The expression is very strong and significant. It is not merely that we are to improve, and make the most of time generally - redeeming the whole and every part of it from a wasteful or evil use, to one that is fruitful, productive of good. The words may be so understood; and so understood, they yield a warrantable sense, and enjoin an important duty. Their special point is the seizing of opportunity. "Buying up the occasion" is the exact thought suggested. You are on the watch and on the look-out for occasions and opportunities. They are precious; they may be rare; especially when "the days are evil." And the difficulty of adjusting your systematic plan of Christian life-discipline and life-rule to their varying demands upon you may be considerable, and often very perplexing. Still it will be good for you to be put to the problem of practically balancing your a priori method, your exact discipline arranged beforehand according to the highest ideal you can form of the Christian character and life, considered, as it were, in the abstract, by bringing in the consideration of a necessary and expedient adaptation to times and seasons and circumstances.

Of course there is a danger here. The tendency is all in the line of facile acquiescence and conformity. You are tempted to relax the circumspectness of your walk in accommodation to the evil days and their evil ways. That is not Paul's idea. What he wants is that you should redeem the time out of the evil days ; that you should lie on the watch for opportunities of good, and seize and grasp them, as if you bought them up eagerly with a great price. He would have you to look out on the temporal as well as look up to the eternal. For, indeed, there is a great difficulty here, for earnest souls; especially in evil days. To keep out of their evil, I may be tempted to isolate myself, to live a lonely life, and try to live it as well as I can; or to shake myself free of evil influences and evil entanglements, not perhaps by retiring to the solitude of the desert, but by cutting off my walk in the streets and my work in the shop from my spiritual experience in the closet and study. That may be my temptation; especially when I find that in going abroad, if I go abroad as a spiritual and upright man, I have to meet and come in close contact, in the church as well as the world, with what wounds and vexes my Christian sense of truth and honour and uprightness.

But let me not yield to the temptation. I may fancy that in some such way, separating my inner life in my closet, or my life in some inner circle of choice saintly society, from my necessary dealings with the outside world, I may walk circumspectly with God and before God; according to some well-arranged plan of devotional and experimental piety. Alas, the likelihood is that I shall very soon find my secret discipline a failure, verging on vague indolent musing; and my exclusive fellowship with a select coterie a cover for half-unconscious hypocrisy. At the best, my personal religion, thus cultivated, will become mystical and ideal, or morbid and fanatical. It is good for me to be driven out from the private monastic cell, and from the fellowship of the monastic cloister; yes, even if I am driven out among the worst of the wrongs and miseries and crimes which characterise and stamp the days as evil.

Yes! For I am driven out to redeem the time; to seize, and buy up, and use the opportunity; to use it as I would use a dearly-bought instrument of power, and turn it to account, and make the most of it. This was Paul's own way "I became all things to all men." It was the safety of Methodism, and the secret of its success, that in its first rise among the knot of men in Oxford who banded themselves together for security in the midst of ungodliness and vice prevailing all around them, they soon learned the lesson of combining the two elements and conditions of a right Christian mode of life; walking circumspectly and redeeming the time; walking circumspectly, strictly by rule, methodically arranging and rigidly observing a definite plan of spiritual life; and yet doing so, not foolishly, as if they were to be the slaves of their own arrangements; but wisely, with a wise common sense, and intensely Christian regard to the evil days on which their lot had fallen, and the urgent need of their redeeming the time, grasping and improving the opportunity. It was this that made Methodism a power; not a new retreat and home for recluse spirits and souls sick of sin and of the world; but a new source of blessed influence in a dry, cold age; a mighty agent for the revival and regeneration of a Christianity that had fallen upon, and, alas, yielded itself up to what were, truly evil days.

It was not that Wesley, and his friends and followers, abandoned their Methodism, their walking circumspectly. Method, and strict adherence to method, is an eminently distinctive feature of the collective body, and of its individual members, to this hour. And certainly at the first there was no relaxation of the exact methodical discipline of the inner private life and brotherly fellowship when that noble band threw themselves out of the lettered leisure of a college into the thickest of the fight in Satan's mightiest strongholds. It fared the better for their private personal and brotherly Methodism that it thus wisely issued in an open and public inroad upon the evil of the days in which they lived. And it fared the better for that inroad, and for the seizing of opportunity in regard to it, that they did not for a moment cease to be methodical; to walk circumspectly; to be systematically living, as well as opportunity-seizing, Christians; systematically living in their spirituality, opportunity-seizing in their activity.

II. "Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is" (ver. 17). This is, I think, another qualification or explanation of the advice to walk circumspectly; not inconsistent, but rather almost identical, with the former. You are to lie open to every intimation of the will of God; and in view of existing circumstances to exercise your understanding, to the best of your power, on the question of present duty, without feeling yourselves tied up by any martinet methodical rule, however good in itself. To meet exigencies and emergencies, calls and occasions, as they arise in God's providence, under the trammels of a servile subjection to any fixed and stereotyped plan or rule laid down beforehand, is to be unwise. Your wisdom is to understand, with reference to the choice you have now to make, and the step you have now to take, what the will of the Lord is. No doubt you will be enabled to understand this all the better if it is the habit of your Christian life to walk circumspectly. Otherwise, indeed, you will assuredly fail. Without fixed principles and a fixed plan, as regards your Christian walk as a whole, you will find yourselves altogether incompetent to decide how you ought to walk in any special instance.

Still the question you have in every instance to ask is, not what your system of circumspect walking would suggest, but what is the will of the Lord. The mariner, out at sea, is helpless and resourceless if he has not studied and mastered the science of navigation, and accustomed himself to the use of chart and compass. In a high wind, on a lee shore, under a strange sky, he is taken all aback if he is not a well-trained, well-disciplined, well-informed, systematic sailor. But he will prove himself a fool if he holds himself so tied to rigid rules, laid down beforehand, that he cannot shift his sails, or turn his helm, to shun a fatal rock, or win a friendly port. He is wise when, availing himself of all the skill and method of his craft, he seeks to understand, at every shifting of the uncertain breeze, what the present aspect of the air and ocean requires. So, "therefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is."

Thus, as I think, there is an important qualification here with reference to the preceding admonition. The word "wherefore," very feebly represents the original. It is rather, Do not, on this account, be unwise; unwise, as I take it, in the application of the principle or practice of living by rule, and the principle or practice of living according to occasion. For there is certainly danger in that direction. And the danger is met when I am told not merely that I am to lie open to the consideration of circumstances, but that I am to be open to that, as understanding what is the will of the Lord. Now put all these conditions together, first a circumspect walk, regulated according to a well and wisely adjusted plan laid down beforehand, on a full and faithful consideration of all that is implied in your being called and consecrated to be children of the light, awakened out of sleep, arising from the dead, lightened by Christ inwardly and so lightened to shine outwardly, giving forth rays of his glory and his grace; then a certain wise pliability and adaptability, on the principle that it is to be your seizing of the opportunity as it presents itself; and your understanding what the will of the Lord is. Surely you have the elements of a safe and blessed, and holy and useful walk.

It is not your walking at random, as it were, under the impulse of casual forces and influences operating from without, or fitful frames and fancies rising within; it is the steady, consistent, careful carrying out of a system upon which you have deliberately made up your mind: the practical realising, not of an ideal floating vaguely and variously before a vacant eye, but of an ideal that has circumspectly lodged itself in an enlightened mind, an awakened soul, a warm and loving heart. Then it is not your walking stiffly, artificially, by rigid unbending rule; turning your Christian life into a martinet's drill or a formalist's routine. It is your walking freely, naturally; alive to the present call or occasion, as well as circumspectly giving heed to your pre-arranged method. It is your lying on the watch, ready to buy up on the spot, to seize with avidity, and make the most of the opportunity of the hour; the means of doing good, the opening for showing light, now at hand. And it is not your following the guidance of your own judgment in thus walking, with a due balance of the systematic and the extempore or occasional. It is your hearing at every successive moment the voice of him according to whose will you have been graciously led to mould and model your plan of life as a whole; and being open to ask, and seek to understand, at every step you take, what is his will here and now.

How complete is the security thus afforded for your walking worthily as children of the light! You consult chiefly for yourselves, walking circumspectly. You consult for your brethren and fellow-men when you grasp the opportunity. You consult for God, when you apprehend what his will is. Surely this is perfeet wisdom, if only you can attain to it. And wherefore should you not, if indeed you are children of the light: beholding, imbibing, absorbing, and shedding forth, the very light of Christ, of him who in his sojourn here was emphatically the light of the world! His was truly a circumspect, orderly, systematic walk; having throughout a definite aim, a definite plan. It was pre-eminently also a seizing of the opportunity; as when, abandoning or postponing his purpose of retirement, he adapted himself to the exigency of the occasion, and weary as he was, and much needing rest, spent the long laborious day in teaching the multitudes, and fed them by miracle as evening closed in. And he was ever ' in the attitude of observing what the will of his Father was ; his meat, as he sat on the stone at Jacob's well, faint and hungry, being to do the will of him that sent him, and finish his work ; and his prayer, when the hour came from which he would fain have been saved, had it been possible, Father, glorify thy name. Not my will but thine be done.

Would that we were, in these respects, more Christlike! How much more brightly and steadily would our light shine! How much more decidedly and strongly would it condemn the works of darkness! How much more effectual would it be to draw out of the darkness the doers of its works and bring them into God's marvellous light! But one word to the children of darkness themselves. You are apt to excuse to yourselves your continuing in the darkness, by pointing to the faint, feeble, unsteady shining of the light in those who profess to be its children. Alas, you may have too good cause to reproach them. But I point you to Christ. It is with him that you have to do. It is to him that you have to look. The imperfect shining of the light in his people is their blame. But it will not be your justification. For the true light has shone, and is shining yet. And this will be your condemnation, that light having come into the world ye have loved darkness rather than light. Come to the light, that your deeds may be made manifest. Come, hearing the gracious assurance, "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
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