Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Welcome and good morning.

It is so good to come and see you all.

Welcome to you online as well.

We are glad you are here with us today.

We have been going through Ephesians and learning about Practical Advice for Christian Living.

The last couple of weeks Paul has been teaching about this new life we have in Christ and that we are to put off our old self and to put on our new self.

He described a list of things that we are supposed put off an put on.

We are supposed to put off lying and put on speaking truth, to control our anger, not to steal but to do honest work, keep foul language from coming from our mouth but only what builds up others.

We are not to grieve the Spirit and to let all bitterness, anger, wrath, shouting, slander, and malice be removed from us.

Wouldn’t that be nice.

To have all of that junk removed from our lives.

He also taught us to be kind, compassionate and forgiving to each other just as God forgave us in Christ.

We are to remove these unity killers as Pastor Chris put it and to be kind, compassionate, and forgiving.

Shout amen if you would like our lives to be filled with more kindness, how about compassion, or forgiveness.

This where we ended last week.

Turn to Ephesians 5:1 Paul continues.

Paul is linking these two sections together with the therefore.

He tells us to be imitators of God to walk in love and will continue for the majority of the rest of the book to teach the things we should not do and the things we should do.

He will teach on walking in the light, living a consistent life, proper roles for husbands and wives, children and parents.

Let me ask you and honest question.

Do any of you disagree with the lists of standards that Paul provides?

How many of you have heard these before?

Of course we have.

They haven’t changed in 2000 plus years.

Why have we not figured this out yet?

Last weekend I spent 24 hours at Cocolalla bible camp with 96 students who studied the book of Malachi in 24 hours.

They studied for over 8 hours with only 1 total hour of free time other than meals and bed time.

I really encourage you to go and study it yourselves but in the 1st chapter God is warning the priests that they despise his name by bringing defiled sacrifices to the alter.

The priests were not performing the sacrifices they way God wanted them to.

The priests were mediators for God’s people and they new better.

In Leviticus 10 Aaron's sons brought unauthorized fire to the alter and they were consumed by fire from God.

From the first moment God established the priests man failed to obey.

Aaron’s sons paid the ultimate price.

But over 1000 years later to the end of the old testament time period, after having so much evidence on God following through with his promises.

The priest still were not able to follow God’s commands.

Here we sit 2000 years after Paul’s teaching and guess what the church as a whole is still struggling.

We still see the evil things written in Ephesians as alive and even thriving in churches.

Anger, greed, immorality, selfishness, and more.

False teaching abounds and probably more prevalent is false learning or understanding.

We hear the Word of God and make unbiblical conclusions but more common is people are not in the Word but hear ideas from many different places and then combine them into their own god and faith.

I see this reality in the church, in church leaders, in families, in marriages, and in our children.

So, Kyle are telling me there is no hope.

That after all of this time nothing has changed.

From Adam and Eve to today we just cannot be anything more than biblical failures?

Is that what your are saying?

My answer is that depends on each individual person in this room and how the next verse applies to your life.

My hope today is that you will be encouraged, that you will find hope, and you will understand how you can practically live out a life that is biblically validating.

Let us Glory God this morning as we study his Word today.

Let us pray.

I will be teaching on Eph 5:1 I brought granola bars for anyone who get hungry as this verse is going to take awhile to dig through.

Thatcher come here.

Give this to Urie.

The State of Imitation

This verse ties the preceeding section and the next section together.

First notice that Paul ended the last section with be kind, and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you.

We are loved.

This is a special particular love.

Everything we talk about today must be under the umbrella of the fact that we are dearly loved and as we look at what it means as a Christian to imitate God we must do it from a point of a loved child not as a hated enemy.

Be … Imitators of God.

Does this sound optional?

Does this sound like a suggestion?

Is it just a good idea?

No we are to be imitators of God.

The word “Be” also translates to “to Become”

Be: To Become.

To enter or assume a certain state or condition.

We are not just supposed to copy God we are supposed to assume a state of imitation.

Look at an artist.

There is a difference in someone who takes art from a certain artist and analyses it and then copies each stroke so exactly that you cannot tell the difference from the original.

This is different from someone who understands how the artist sees the world.

What is behind the painting.

Why they paint the way they do.

Then then the artist assumes a state of imitation and then produces art that looks like it comes from the original.

It is more than copying it is becoming a person who is in a state of imitation.

There re many Christians that act like Jesus but do not know him.

There are entire religions that have perfected the brush strokes but do not know the artist.

Paul says be in a state of imitation of God.

Pause for a minute and let that sink in.

Our God, the author of our faith, the creator of all, the one who is love, the one who is perfect, the blameless, flawless lamb of God.

Perfection.

Who are we?

We are the fallen, depraved, enemies of God, we are the selfish, corrupt, and sinful.

No matter how well we clean up we cannot stand before God on our own merit and be justified.

God through the words of Paul just said that you can be in a state of imitation of God.

That you do not have to be trapped by the ways of the world but can live the life that Paul is describing in Ephesians.

You can walk in love, kindness, compassion and forgiveness.

Does that give you hope?

It does me?

So the next question we must ask is, What should we be imitating?

In Leviticus 11 God commands Isreal to be holy as he is holy.

When we imitate God we will look different than the rest of the world.

What does this look like?

It looks like Jesus he is our example.

I cannot go through all of the ways that we can imitate Jesus because I would have to start in Genesis 1:1 and continue to the end of Revelation.

There are many ways to classify the attributes or characteristics of Jesus and it would be hard to cover them here but it is worth saying that there are some characteristics of Jesus that we can imitate and there are others that we cannot.

We cannot imitate his divine attributes.

Some of these are:

Eternality - Timeless, Immutability - Unchanging, Omnipotence - All powerful, Omnipresence - Everywhere at once, Omniscience - All knowing.

The only way fully explore the attributes of Jesus that we can imitate is through self study and group study.