Imitators of God
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Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
This morning, we are looking at the pinnacle of what it means to have a new life as a Christian. I’ve shared about having the mind of Christ and last week, we talked about having a new heart that is softened by the Holy Spirit. Now if these two things are true of us, then we are ready to tackle these two incredibly joyous commands that definitively set us apart from this sin filled world.
Be imitators of God, the Father.
Walk in love, like Jesus the Son.
The amazing thing about Christianity is the fact that it can leave theolgians and philosophers debating about its complexities for thousands of years and be the subject of countless books but yet it can be so easily summarized in two simple statements: Imitate the Father and Love like the Son.
Here the apostle Paul is simply telling us that the natural outcome or maybe better put, the supernatural outcome of everything you know about God and the relationship that you have with him comes out in the way that you imitate Him. Imitation of God presupposes two fundamental elements:
First, that you know God as He truly is
Second, you have living relationship with Him
Those of us who are inclined towards moralism, may view this call to imitate God as being burdensome, unrealistic, impossible to achieve but I see it as the highest privilege and the greatest joy. Who are we that we should be called the children of God, the bearers of his image, and to be the evidence of His love in a world full of hate. That is no burden but rather it is the highest honor. This is exactly what David realized as He thought about God.
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
In this Psalm, King David first marvels at who God is, that He created the stars and the heavens with nothing more that the lifting of his fingers. I love the imagery of this universe being the finger work of God because it shows the ease by which He created the world. The fact that creation required so little of His strength, reveals in part, the power and the glory of God. But it also teaches us about the detail and the artistry and the intricacies that he put into the creation of man. Think of what you can do with just your fingers, not a whole lot in terms of brute strength, but if you are an artist or a writer or a creative, you can literally make another world with just your fingers.
This is what David is marvelling at, because within the fingertips of God, there is enough power to create the limitless forces of the heavens but there is also enough love to create you and me, distinct, unique, individual works of art that were meant to be an imitation of their Creator. Who are we that God should be mindful of us or even to care about us but the factf that He made us a little lower than God and crowned us with glory and honor is something that is unfathomable, deserving of praise, gratitude, and wonder. Imitation of God is our highest calling, the noblest pursuit, and the end pupose of our lives.
Earlier in the letter to the Ephesians, in chapter 2:10, the apostle Paul reminds us that we are God’s workmanship, which can be literally translated as His work of art, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared specifically for us so that we would walk in them.
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Not walking in the things that God has prepared for you is a guarantee that you will not find deep fulfillment nor satisfaction in this life because you are not living out God’s intended purpose. I understand that this task seems insurmountable and that progress towards imitating the perfection of God seems painstakingly slow but it should be our greatest joy to make this our life long journey. Some years ago, we did an entire series on the attributes of God and the true purpose of those messages was not to give you more knowledge but to help us to grow in the likeness of our Father in heaven. We know that God’s attributes can be divided into two categories:
Incommunicable - meaning they cannot be copied nor imitated. He is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent - all knowing, all present, and all powerful. He is eternal, without beginning and end. He is sovereign and only He completely understands and controls the destiny of this world. These are characteristics of our Father that we don’t need to worry about copying.
But there is a second category of attributes, the communicable charateristics of God that we are called to mimic. Love, mercy, holiness, peace, and joy are all attributes that we are called to share with God, to name just a few.
And the first step in the right imitation of God is understanding the things that belong to God and those things that He desires to share with us. Here is what I mean. How many of us expend vast amounts of our energy trying to control everything around us? We take our destiny and our future into our own hands and we give very little thought into what God’s sovereign plans might be. We are worried and anxious about this and that because truth be told, we want to be the god of our own lives. Once we begin to question God’s sovereignty and his purpose for us, you are entering into an area that simply does not belong to you. As Mira likes to say when I’m intruding into places that I shouldn’t, “Stay in your own lane!”
Moses says it a little nicer:
“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.
There are things that are revealed to us very clearly about God’s nature, His desires, and His will that should keep us busy and occupied, in a very good way. When’s the last time that you imitated the Father’s love or joined Him in his work or shared about the things He has been teaching you. The life of Jesus teaches us that the highest honor and the greatest glory that we can bring to the Father is simply to imitate Him.
So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.
For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak.
And just as Jesus centered His life on the imitation of His Father, our own imitation of God flows out of our identity as His sons and daughters. For children, imitating their parents comes almost naturally. I have this old picture of me and Jeremiah playing video games together when he was probably less than two years old. I used to love playing games and my children, unfortunately, also picked up this time consuming habit and they also love it. Mira still questions whether or not that was the worst parenting decision ever, exposing our children to games so early. But any parent knows that our children imitate both the good and the bad parts of us.
I remember one of my kids examining a broken toy and throwing it to the side and in disgust saying, “What a piece of crap!” And when you hear things like this, you’re a bit stunned and immediately, you start to think, “Where did my child learn such bad behavior and manners?” and then you humbly realize, “Oh wait, that’s me. They are just imitating, what they see their father doing.” But unlike human examples, God the Father gives us the perfect model to follow. In the areas of life that we so choose to imitate Him, we cannot go wrong because it will eventually lead to both our own good and to His glory. The imitation of God is at the root of human flourishing, the more we become like Him the better off we are. All that is beautiful, all that is pure, all that is right and true comes to us through the Father of lights who is the source of every good and perfect gift and has no shade of turning.
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
In the end, how we live speaks more loudly and more clearly about our relationship with God than anything that we might say we beleive. If we truly understand that God is a good, good Father, we would gladly imitate who He is, what He does, and what He says. But you might be asking yourself, “But I’ve never seen God, how can I imitate someone that seems so distant. How can I consider him to even to be a Father?” This is why an intimate relationship with Jesus makes all the difference because not ony is faith in Christ, the only way to the Father, through Him, you see the very nature and the heart of God. When Phillip made a similiar objection to Jesus regarding his own inability to see the heart of God.
Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
The Gospel of Christ and everything that Jesus suffered for us on the cross was to prove the depth, the height, and the breadth of God’s unconditional love for us. There is nothing greater that the Father could have done to display the full and glorious extent of His infinite love for us than to give us His Son. There is a reason why John 3:16 is so often quoted and displayed in public becasue it is still something to marvel.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
And the apostle John even provides the response that believers should have in relation to this incredible truth.
1 John 3:1 (ESV)
See what kind of love the Father has lavished upon us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are!
But not only did the Father give us His Son, but what we read in this passage is that Jesus was in full agreement and willingly gave himself up for us. This is what is known as the covenant of redemption: that before the creation of man, God the Father and Jesus, the Son came to a sacred agreement, that the Son would willingly lay down his life in love and receive the full reward for that sacrifice.
Some of the rewards that the Father bestowed upon the Son are:
1. That He would deliver him from death and exalt Him to His right hand
2. The Father woud give the Son the Holy Spirit without measure
3. The Son would have the Holy Spirit to give to whom He willed
4. The Father would create a purified Church for His Son
5. Those destined for salvation would never be lost
6. We would form a countless multitude that would enjoy the Kindom of the Son forever
It’s a beautiful covenant but all of it rests on Christ’s love for us and his willingness to give himself up on our behalf. And in the same way that Jesus freely agreed to lay down his life for us, we are also called to walk in that type love. God doesn’t use coercion or force to make us pick up our cross but rather we enter into a sacred agreement with Him to sacrificially love one another because there is nothing more pleasing to the heart of God.
When Paul writes that Jesus gave himself up for us, he is referring to the fact that Jesus actively put aside his possessions, his rights, his power It wasn’t taken from but He voluntarily gave these things up. But not only did Jesus give these things up, He gave up His very life. He gave himself as an offering and a sacrifice.
An offering is something that is given to God as a gift. The greatest gift, the most pleasing and fragrant offering that you can give to God is giving up your life to love others.
But being an offering doesn’t paint the whole picture, like Christ we are meant to be a sacrifice and that word is more specific to laying down our lives to save people from the power of sin. In the Old Testament, a sacrifice always meant the shedding of blood for the atonment of sin. It was a picture of Christ and the suffering that He would have to endure to save us from sin. But what is interesting is that Paul now applies that concept to us as believers.
Colossians 1:24 (ESV)
Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church,
Obviously, our own suffering doesn’t save people from their sin but it does powerfully point people to the love of Christ and it provides convincing proof that Christ gave His life even for them. I’ve shared in the past about Pastor Choi who was a missionary in Dushanbe when Muslim terrorists bombed his church. 10 people were killed at the time and threats were made against his life. It made sense to leave the country at that point but while he was at the airport, he felt the Lord calling him to stay with his people. Upon returning back to the church, he told those left in the church, “If the Lord wills, I will die with you here.”
This past week, I’m sure many of us have been thinking about the unfolding tragedy in Afghanistan and wondering what we can do and honestly, there isn’t much we can do now, sadly that window has closed. And the thought that has been going through my mind is the fact that I had an open opportunity to bring a short term mission team into Kabul and minister to the many new Christians that had recently come to faith in the absence of the Taliban. AMI has connections to a missionary who has been doing ministry in Afghanistan for years. To hear the stories of so many Christians who are trapped in their home and basically waiting for the Taliban to find them and execute them is heart-breaking.
I thought about the invitation to serve the Lord while there was an opening and honestly, I just didn’t think we were ready as a church to make that level of sacrifical commitment. I still don’t think we are ready but one day soon, I would like to think that we could be the type of church, the type of Christians that can share the love of God in the way that it is described in this passage and the way that Christ describes.
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.
I’m certainly not one to recklessly endanger my life or the lives of those in the church but I’ve realized that life in the Bay Area has made me so risk averse that I’ve largely forgotten about the call to lay down our lives out of love for others. There was window of time, the better part of the last decade, where it was reasonably safe to go into Afghanistan and love and encourage our Christian brothers and sisters there but that door has now closed and only God knows when it will open again. My years of being involved in missions and having several friends go out and having a hand in sending out several missionaries through the years has taught me that windows of opportunity and you have to willingly walk through them.
Romans 12:1 (ESV)
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.