060813 sermon-Be Good
Be Good
Mimicking Illustration
What does it mean when you mimic someone? It means that you do exactly what they do. I have always been fascinated by how some animals will mimic people or other animals. Like Parrots who will start to speak sentences having no idea what they are saying. Or, ducklings which just follow their mother and do what she does. This kind of mimicking comes by instinct and doesn’t require a lot of thinking.
Other ways to mimic are to study someone or something so closely that you become aware of all the intricate details. Then you take that knowledge a replicate it in your own life. This is what voice impressionists do. They study the voice they want to impersonate. Then they look at all the little mannerisms and inflections of the other persons voice and then strive to speak like that person. One person who is really good at this is Tim Milburn if any of you know him. He is the director of campus life at NNU and was the speaker at Sr. High camp this year.
Tim does a really great James Earl Jones voice. I would love to be able to do Darth Vader’s voice like Tim can. Tim has got that voice down so well that if you closed your eyes, you could almost believe you’re listening to Star Wars.
Anyway, mimicking in that way is hard to do. It takes intentionality and practice.
In Ephesians 5:1-2 Paul says that we should be imitators of God. The word which is translated as “imitate” is mimhtaiv. Guess where the English word for “mimic” comes form.
In these verses Paul calls us to be mimickers of God. We are to imitate what God does. This is not something that is going to be done easily. It is not going to come naturally like a duckling copying it mother or a parrot repeating what is said to it.
Mimicking God comes from practice. It can only be done if we are continually trying to seek God and do his will in our lives.
When I started researching the scriptures for today, I didn’t really like the idea of having to preach from this passage at first. Basically what Ephesians 4:25-5:2 is Paul telling us what not to do and then saying, “Oh, by the way, try to act like God.”
However, as I kept rereading the scripture something began to pop out at me. I kind of wonder if Paul wasn’t writing to legalists here.
Legalists are people who have to have everything spelled out for them a lot of the time lack the sense to know what they should do if someone doesn’t specifically tell them what to do. They go by the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law
Worship Leadership/Spiritual Formation Illustration
In Ephesians, I think Paul might start out by telling some legalists, “don’t do this, don’t do this, that’s a bad idea, if you do that you’ll get smote…” But then he gets tire of having to spell everything out. Paul get bored trying to lay out all rules as to how to be a “good Christian.”
In Ephesians 4:32-5:2 he stops telling them what to not do and begins telling to what to do.
Verse 5:1 is the crux of what we need to do. We need to become mimickers of God. We need to do what he has done for us. We need to love, sacrifice, forgive, help, etc…
I think if we could sum up what Paul is saying in this passage it would go something like, “Be Good and do what you’re supposed to do.”
When we follow God and imitate him we can stop worrying about doing the wrong things. However if we choose to not follow God, we will wind up in a lot of trouble.
One of King David’s son’s decided that he didn’t want to follow God anymore. He started rebelling away from David and eventually tried to kill him. This man’s name was Absalom.
Does anyone here know what happened to Absalom?
As he was running away from David’s army, his head go caught in the branches of a tree. He was left hanging there until the soldiers came and killed him there. He was like a human piñata only the batters were using swords.
So, the moral of the story is: imitate God or you might get your head stuck in a tree.
Absalom is an example of a person who chose to not do what was right. He was a liar, a murderer, and adulterer, and quite a few other things. He is in many ways the epitome of what Paul is telling us to avoid in Ephesians.
So, we need to imitate God. Absalom shows us how do not do this, but how do you really become an imitator of God? One thing I really hate is when pastors or bible commentaries or teachers or anyone else tell you to do something but cannot explain what they mean.
I think that in a roundabout way, Jesus may give us the answer to what it means to imitate God in John 6.
In John 6 Jesus starts referring to himself as the bread of life.
Read John 6:51-58
First, this passage raises a bunch of questions for me. One is, “What does Jesus mean by saying we have to eat his flesh and drink his blood?” That sounds kind of gross to me. This is one of those issues that a lot of commentaries conveniently forget to discuss.
What Jesus is saying here is that he can sustain us. I think that the terminology in John is more of a metaphor to say that when we come to God and let him into our lives, he will abide in us just as we can live with him.
Saying that we must eat Christ’s flesh and drink his blood is a way of saying that he can sustain us. We can fully rely on him for what we need. Not only that, but that is what Christ wants us to do.
This is something I have problems with. I don’t like having to be dependant on God. I want to do things myself. I’m pretty good at planning stuff and making things work. I can be pretty self-sufficient. When God calls us to rely on him, that can be scary for me. I want to be in control of my life.
I think that most of my life has been me struggling over this issue. It started with the small step of trusting God with my salvation. The next step was trusting that he knew what he was doing when he called me into ministry. Eventually I got to a place where I felt I could trust God with just about every outcome in my life and in every situation. I felt that I was doing pretty good. Then I realized that I still have problems trusting his timing. So there’s still stuff for me to work on.
We all have our own issues that we need to get over. We all have problems which we need to commit to God. Problems which God wants us to commit to him. Matthew 11:28-30. What is more, we all know this. We know that we can hand our problems over to God. The hard part is actually making the choice to give up our problems and to trust God to sustain and to hold us up.
So getting back to my question from earlier, “how do we imitate God?” We must live with him and abide in him. It’s like the person who does voice impressions. It doesn’t happen without making an effort. We must spend time with God. Through prayer, scripture reading, fellowship with one another and a number of other disciplines.
At first glance the task of imitating God may not sound too hard. Really, how hard can it be? People generally like to pretend we’re God anyway with a lot of the things we do. All imitating God must be is doing what’s right correct?
However, when Paul says that we are to imitate God, the second phrase of that verse is “as dearly loved children.” This phrase is significant of two reasons. First, it is basis on which the command to imitate God is founded. It is because we are dearly loved children that we are expected to share the wealth which God has given us. Because we are loved, we also should love.
The second reason this phrase is significant is because it shows the manner in which we are to imitate God. In other words as we imitate God we are supposed to act like children who are dearly loved.
The love God gives us is a powerful love. It is strong. Nothing can break the love of God. In Romans 8 Paul asks what can bring an end to God’s love. He asks if trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger or sword would be enough. Then, he answers his own question. He says, “For I am convinced that neither life nor death, neither angels nor demons, neither present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
NOTHING can separate us from the love of God in Christ. There is no way in which we can move outside of the love God offers us and that is why it is hard to imitate God. Because a true imitator of God is also called to love in this way. That is how people are to recognize us as Christ’s disciples.
We are to love unconditionally. If I am a true imitator of God, someone should be able to say that “neither life nor death, neither angels nor demons,….can separate us from the love of God that is in Ben.”
However, in all honesty, that is not how I am a lot of the time. I still have some maturing to do, as do we all.
This gets back to what Nate talked about a few weeks ago about unity. The Church is supposed to be one body. We are a unit. There should not be divisions in the Church.
In the fall I am going to be teaching a class on Church History for NFCU. As I have been preparing for that I thought a couple of days ago where the Church of the Nazarene comes from. It occurred to me that we are really a church split off a split off a split off a split. I’m not really sure that this is a good thing.
How can the Church be a unit and imitate God when its people get so caught up on all the little issues in theology that don’t matte a whole lot. How can the Church be fulfilling its purpose when there are people who would call me a heretic for believing in free will when at the same time there are people who believe what I do who would call those who believe in predestination heretics? How can different denominations believe that they each have the best variety of Christianity? They Don’t Nazarenes are not better Christians than Catholics who are not better than Methodists, or Baptists, or Presbyterians, etc…
Division in the Church is not an imitation the love of Christ. What the Church is supposed to be is a place for spiritual growth. It is to be a place where we can come with our own problems and find help. It should be a place where I come and am allowed to find growth in Christ and support for my weaknesses as I support others in their weakness.
I guess my challenge to you today and to myself is that we would actually be imitators of God. That we might actually reflect his love and that we might help others do the same.