Closing The Loopholes, part 1

"Closing The Loopholes" (part 1)
Ephesians 4:25-32


Today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Ephesian Christians warns against “giving opportunity to the devil.”  The New English Bible translates this phrase by warning us against allowing “no loophole for the devil.”  A loophole can be a small hole in a wall through which an enemy can shoot their weapon.  Just one shot from the enemy can bring us down.  We certainly don’t want to give the devil aim at our lives in any way, little or large.

And a loophole can also be an excuse or an evasion for not doing something we’re supposed to.  One time, a friend of W.C. Fields caught Fields reading the Bible.  “Why, Mr. Fields,” the friend protested, “I didn’t know you were a religious man.  Are you thinking about becoming a believer?”
“Why, no,” Fields replied.  “I’m only looking for loopholes.”

Little loopholes.  Little gaps in our spiritual armor.  Small fissures in our faith.  They either let evil in, or we use them to get out of what we know is the right thing.  Either way, the result is giving evil a sure and certain foothold from which to operate.  With any loophole, evil will exert all the leverage it can against our spiritual life and Christian commitment.

That’s why Paul sternly cautioned the Ephesian believers to be on guard against six specific loopholes that can allow evil into our lives, undermining their Christian faith.

The first loophole is lying.  Lying has been with us from the beginning, when Eve learned from the serpent how to twist the truth into both a bold-faced lie as well as half-truth.  One book I read made a convincing case that original sin is not pride or greed but lying--the misuse of language; attempting to make the truth a lie and a lie the truth.  Every time we participate in lying and half-truths we are passing the original sin along.  Basically, we teach our children how to skim on the truth by doing it in front of them.

So it’s no mystery that this list Paul gives the Ephesians starts off with each believer’s need to close the loophole of lying.  It’s not just a matter of closing it.  Paul says, “Throw it away; give it a heave as far as you can.”

A defendant took the witness stand.  The judge asked him to put up his right hand and answer the following question:  “Do you solemnly swear that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
The defendant replied, “I’ll try anything once.”

What we find out once we start lying is that we have to remember everything we said to each person.  Lies breed like rabbits.  You tell a couple of lies, and all of a sudden you have a bunch of baby lies hopping around all over the place.  It isn’t long that they are totally out of control.  Or, it isn’t long before they are totally in control of you.  You start worrying, “What if my lies are discovered?”  It’s just not a fun way to live.

That’s why throwing off lying is so important in Paul’s mind.  Lying and falsehood have the power to undermine the development and growth of any and all of your relationships.  It totally breaks down trust between people.  And in a recent study I read this week, we lie on average--one way or another--eleven times a day; and that lying even affects your physical health.

Lying as a loophole not only gives evil a chance to destroy an individual, but also the whole church.  Paul says that we are supposed to be “members of one body.”  For one person, one member of the body to start lying infects the whole body of Christ, the church.

You think your lies have only to do with you.  But not so, says Paul.  The only way to keep your lies from infecting you and the body of Christ, says Paul, is to throw lying off; quit, right now, cold turkey; 100%; end it, now.  To do that may mean coming clean with the lies already told.  It may not be fun or easy at first.  But the health and restoration it brings to your relationships will be worth it.


The second loophole that needs to be closed is anger.  It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Paul didn’t write, “Never be angry”?  Instead, Paul wrote, “Be angry, but do not sin.”  I’m assuming that one of the reasons Paul wrote that, being the kind of person he was, was because he got angry a lot.  Paul had anger issues.  Paul was an intense, in your face kind of person.

Maybe Paul recognized that anger is one of those basic, universal, human emotions.  We all get angry.  We all deal with it differently.  One lady had a fender bender accident with her new car.  The neighbor asked her if her husband was upset.  “He didn’t say much,” replied the lady, “but all the smoke alarms in our house went off.”

And then there’s the classic story of Winston Churchill and Lady Astor.  It was well known that they absolutely hated each other.  Their anger at each other was legend.  One time they were both invited to the same gala.  Lady Astor, rather loudly, said to Churchill, “If you were my husband, I’d put poison in your drink.”
To which Churchill, equally loudly replied, “Madam, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

The word that Paul used for anger is the same word we get our English word, “orgy,” from.  Anger is an orgy of emotion.  It’s wild and unrestrained.  It’s the passionate rage that’s out of control, leading to some kind of self-justified revenge or punishment.

One mother was scolding her son, and said, “When that other boy threw rocks at you, why didn’t you come and tell me, instead of throwing rocks back?”
“What good would that do?” asked the son.  “You couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn!”
It’s that kind of rage that takes over that wants to get even and make the other person hurt.

An unhealthy anger serves no purpose.  It has a tendency to mushroom larger and larger.  The old therapeutic strategy was to get people to let out all their anger in ways that hopefully dispelled the explosive cloud.  So therapies like primal scream therapy was born.  People were to go somewhere and just scream all the violence and anger away.

But what reputable therapists found was that “getting out your anger” in these ways just created more anger.  Ventilating anger would throw a person into an irrational and almost evil rage.  People who were getting their anger out in huge bursts were having too much fun being angry, and it wasn’t working.

I think in Paul’s mind, that’s the sin of anger--letting it linger too long, letting it grow to a point that it consumes you.

My daughter, Kristin, when she was in junior high and high school, hardly ever cleaned her room.  It was a total blast area.  The floor was like an archaeological dig.  If you wanted to spend long enough in there, you could dig your way down to the 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade era.  I’d feel guilty walking in there because I just knew, with each step, I was destroying whole countries of dust mites in the carpet.

Once in a while I would explode, when I couldn’t stand it.  We’d go in there and clean it up together, and get it to a point of manageability.  And I’d try and lecture her saying, “Now if there’s a little mess, clean it up before it becomes a pile, and the pile turns into a full blown take over of your room.”  Guess how many times my lecture worked.  But the principle was sound.

That’s the same thing Paul is saying about how Christians should deal with their anger.  “Don’t let the sunset find you nursing your anger,” he said.  In other words, keep it to manageable levels.  Deal with it while it’s small.  Don’t even give it two days.  Take care of it, completely, by the end of the day.  If you don’t, you’ve created a loop hole for evil to get in.  Once in, it will grow to a whole pile of anger, and eventually a full blown take over of your life.  That’s the sin of anger.


The third loophole Paul mentions is greed, including two of greed’s ugly heads.  One ugly head is thievery.  “You shall not steal,” is in God’s top ten list.  Thievery is a form of greed that takes something of someone else’s because you have to have it for your own.

There’s lots of ways to be a thief.  Large corporations cooking their books is a form of robbery.  Or Bernie Madoff, who made off with a lot of people’s money in his ponzi scheme.  But it wasn’t just Madoff--it was also those who put their money with him who were driven by their own greed to get rich quick.

I had a friend who’s apartment was robbed.  Her roommate had an old and shoddy video camera and had been wanting a new one.  She said, “Let’s tell your insurance company my video camera was stolen so I can get a new one.  They’ll never know.  They’re a huge company anyway.”  Had my friend added the video camera to the list of stolen items, that would have been robbery as well.  I was glad when she told me that she didn’t put it on the list.

The other ugly head of greed that Paul mentions is the reluctance or refusal to give your excess wealth to the needy.  Paul said that God’s purpose for giving us the ability to earn an income is not to accumulate as much as we can, but so that we can give to the poor.

If we allow the evil one through this loophole, our lives will become dominated by our consumeristic culture.  The evil of consumerism seeks to program us to believe that more is always better.  Our inability to distinguish between quality of life and quantity of things will turn us into greedy, grasping, uncharitable people.

Comedian Paul Reiser, who used to star in the sitcom, “Mad About You,” has written a couple of funny books.  He admits he’s a consumer sucker.  Here’s one story he told on himself in his first book:

I was in the stereo store, looking at this VCR, CD player, laser disc, pants presser combination thing.  The salesman comes over.  “You know that CD play will hold up to 20 discs at a time.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes-sire e-bob,” he says.  “That’s over 18 hours of music.”
“Okey, dokey,” I say, and he wraps it up.  Then I got home and realized, Wait a second!  I’m not even awake 18 hours.  When would I use this thing to its fullest advantage?  The last four hours of music will actually be keeping me awake.  This is not something I need!

Reiser concluded his thoughts by finally recognizing the truth about compulsive greediness and the never-satisfied attitude that characterizes a culture that has let the evil one through this loophole.  Reiser wrote:

The problem is, they keep coming up with technology nobody asks for.  They believe we want freeze frame, search, and split screen and clocks that make coffee, and cameras that talk to you.  We don’t want that.  You know what I want?  I just want to lie down.  That’s what I really want.  If I could just lie down for a half-hour, I’d be happy.  It seems like I’ve been reading instruction manuals since 1987.  My head is pounding.  I want to write a letter, “Dear China.  STOP!!!  We’re fine.  This is plenty of stuff.  Why don’t you stop with the VCR’s and work on diseases.  Go cure a disease while I go lie down!”

His comments are funny, but it does make you wonder.  If we had bought less stuff and used our excess money for the poor, how many diseases could have been cured by now?  How many hungry children could have been fed?  How many people could have been inoculated with vaccines?  Every financial decision we make is ultimately a decision between greed and helping the poor.

The famous preacher and father of the Methodists, John Wesley, once said, “Work all you can, to make all you can, so you can give all you can.”  I think that’s good advice for how we can close this particular loophole of greed.


There are three more loopholes to come at the end of this 4th chapter in Ephesians, and we will look at them next week.