INTRODUCTION
As most of you know, we have been looking at God’s love for us over the past few months—attempting to deepen our understanding & revelation of His love for each one of us. Well, today, I want us to move into something similar, yet a little different. Yes, I want us to continue learning about God’s amazing love for us, but we are going to take a different approach than most do. What we are going to do is we are going to look at some verses that instruct us how to love each other, and by this, learn how God loves us in the same way. Someone might ask, “How is studying verses that teach us how to love other people going to teach us about God’s love for us?” The answer is simple, but let me answer that question by asking you one: Would God give us a standard for loving others that He Himself is not already walking in? In other words, would God tell us to do something that He is not already doing? The obvious answer to those two questions is – Of course, He wouldn’t! Our Heavenly Father commands us to treat our brothers and sisters a certain way because He wants us to act like Him! He wants us to forgive, to do good, and to have compassion on our fellow man because this is how God treats us. So, in essence, you could say that everything God instructs or commands us to do in His Word can be summarized in one statement— Be like Me. So, what I am entitling this new series is – “Imitators of Love” – because we know God is love, right? So, if we are imitating God, then we are imitating love. MIMICKING THE FATHER I get this title from a verse of the Bible which I believe to be the most concise statement of truth concerning our role and responsibility on the earth. Yes, church, if there was one verse that I believe puts everything that we are called to do for the Lord in a nutshell, it would be Ephesians 5:1, which says, “Therefore, be imitators of God as dear children.” You see, I see this verse as the bullseye of everything that we aim to be as Christians. Why is this? It’s because being imitators of God would encompass everything else we could ever aspire to be in Him. Yes, if we were imitating God, then we would love perfectly. We would bless abundantly. We would do good to all, and our mercy would endure forever. The list could go on and on. So just mimicking the nature of our Heavenly Father would encompass all of the weightier matters of the law and fulfill its righteous requirement. Amen? Now when we see this word “imitators” we think of someone who “mimics, copies, or follows after” someone else. In fact, in the original King James version, this word is used seven times and is always translated as “follower(s).” The apostle Paul liked to use this word in encouraging his churches to “follow” his example and to “imitate” him. Wasn’t Jesus also known for calling His disciples with two words— “Follow me.” Well, what they heard (and probably most of us too) when Jesus invited them to do this was to lay down whatever they were doing and physically follow Him. But I believe Jesus was also saying the same thing that we read here—to follow His example and imitate Him. Let me give you a few other translations of this verse that bring out some of these other ways of describing “imitators”:
So let’s talk a little today about Paul telling us that we need to be imitators of God “as dear children.” The imagery that he is giving us is of a child imitating his or her dad. But notice that Paul says to do it as “dear” children. This word describes children who are “beloved”—which could mean one of two things:
So if the apostle Paul intended my first point – to describe how a child who is dearly loved will tend towards mimicking their parents – then this shows the importance of us receiving what we have been learning over the past few months because the fact that we “be-loved” by God, being His “dear children”, should inspire us to be more like God. Yes, the more we receive God’s love and see how good He is, the more it should inspire us to be more like Him. It will create more of an admiration of Him, and the result will be us striving to replicate our Heavenly Father’s goodness. But if Paul intended to describe how much a parent loves it when their child mimics them, then we can see how this is a way that we can bless the Lord even more. You know, regarding this latter point, all of us parents out there can see how this would be true, right? There are not too many things that can bless a parent more than when their child attempts to mimic them. At a young age, our kids might repeat what we say. Many times, they will want to do what we do vocationally when they grow up. They simply just get interested in what we are interested in because of their love and admiration for us. Then when they grow up, what a joy it is to any parent when their child follows in their footsteps by maybe choosing the school that their parents went to or following the same career path that they did. Now, of course, this is not always the path that our children are to take, but when it comes to our Heavenly Father, following exactly in His footsteps is always the right thing to do. My point is that it pleases any parent to either see their young child doing their best to be like their daddy or seeing their grown-up children making the mature decision to be about their father’s business. So how about the Lord? Do you reckon Father God is pleased when His children begin to imitate Him? I guarantee you that this ministers to His heart as it does to any of us who are parents here. But, you see, the reason why this statement is what I believe to be all of the commandments rolled up into one is because ultimately everything God has told us do in the Word of God is a reflection of what He is already doing. In other words, in all of His commandments and instructions, He is saying, “Sons and daughters, just be like Me.” WALKING AFTER LOVE And if we are going to just be like Him, what will be doing? Well, the apostle Paul goes on to tell us in the following verse when he says, “And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma.” (Ephesians 5:2) So if we are imitating our Father God, then we are imitating love, right? Yes, us walking in love is us imitating God who is love. So based on what we’ve learned about imitating someone, us walking in love would be us “walking after Love”—that is, us following after Love Himself. But not only are we imitating our Heavenly Father when we walk in love, but Paul goes on to describe that we are also imitating His Son, Jesus Christ, who “has loved us and given Himself for us …” And I believe the idea here is that since we have Jesus’ example here on the earth, we can simply look to His example and “copy that.” You see, understanding one simple truth is key to understanding the nature of God—and that truth is that one Jesus gave us in John chapter 14 … In John 14:7-9, Jesus had a conversation with His disciple, Philip, that holds a tremendous truth: Jesus started off by saying, “If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him.” Philip said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? So Jesus shows us that if we have seen Him, we will have seen the Father. This truth is echoed in other New Testament verses as well … Jesus was said by the apostle Paul to be “the image of the invisible God” in Colossians 1:15. Let’s look at this phrase in more detail … Notice, first of all, that God is called “invisible” here. Jesus revealed to us that God is a spirit (See John 4:24). Therefore, being spiritual Himself, He would be invisible to the physical eye. However, Paul calls Jesus here “the image of the invisible God.” The Greek word for “image” is eikon and describes an exact stamp, representation, or manifestation of something or someone. This Greek word is actually where we get our word “icon” from, which is defined similarly. Interestingly enough, this same word for “image” was used over in Romans 1:23, albeit in a negative sense when he said that pagans “changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man …” But in Jesus’ case, the image and glory of the invisible God was perfectly displayed in the life of a Man who is now incorruptible Himself! Glory! Therefore, just as the first Adam was created in the image and likeness of God (See Genesis 1:26), the Last Adam—Jesus Christ—is the perfect image and likeness of His Father. Let me give you a couple of good examples of this word “image”: Sometimes stamps carry an image of a famous person. Likewise, Jesus is the exact “stamp” of the image of God Himself. Again, this is why Jesus said that if you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father (See John 14:9). Another example is of a coin. Just as coins generally bear the image of the head of a sovereign, likewise Jesus bore the image of the Sovereign God. All of this to say that Jesus was, is, and evermore shall be the exact image and representation of the invisible God—the express image of His person (See Hebrews 1:3). Yes, even though God is invisible, and no one can see Him, His only begotten Son came to declare Him … John 1:18 says that no one has seen God at any time, but the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has declared Him. You see, you cannot truly see God’s nature by how He operated in the Old Testament—particularly under the law. That’s right— You do not see God in Moses because heck, not even he saw God’s face & fullness, just a part of Him. Now we see God the Father in God the Son. He (Jesus) has declared Him fully. Amen. So, what does it mean that Jesus “declared Him (God)”? It means that He not only declared Him in Word, but He also declared Him in action. In other words, Jesus’ life—both words and deeds—reveals the true nature of the Father. Therefore, if you have seen Jesus, then you have seen God. Yes, church, Jesus came to the earth to reveal the very nature and characteristics of God to us. Yes, He was God manifest in the flesh (First Timothy 3:16). The lesson then is this: whatever you see Jesus doing or hear Jesus saying in the Gospels is the perfect revelation of the will of God yesterday, today, and forevermore (Hebrews 13:8)! Therefore, Jesus would be the best example we have for imitating God, amen? Absolutely! As Jesus said, “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father”, we might say, “If you have imitated Jesus, you have imitated God.” Now this whole idea Paul presents here of “as Christ also has loved us” is certainly reminiscent of what Jesus taught us in John 13:34 when He said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” What Jesus was giving His disciples here was not a new idea; love was also taught under the Old Covenant as their greatest commandment contained loving God and loving their neighbor. The difference here was that while the law taught loving our neighbor “as we do ourselves”, the New Testament teaches us to love one another “as He has loved us.” Therefore, it’s not a new commandment in that love is a new concept; it’s just a new standard of love where we are loving with His love and not our own. And this example Paul gave of how He has loved us is culminated in how He gave Himself for us as an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma. So the example of love that we are to be walking in can be boiled down to the laying down of our lives for others. But here’s the deal— the Lord did this first! It began with God so loving the world that He gave His only begotten Son (See John 3:16), and then His only begotten Son gave Himself after He got here. Amen! And church, that is exactly the kind of love that we are called to imitate—loving the world enough to give them our very best and loving one another enough to give our very lives for them. This is the example we are to follow, mimic, copy, and imitate as His “dear children.”
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