If you try to imitate God’s ways in your own power, you’re going to hurt yourself. You need the power of his Spirit and the resources of his people. You need to be equipped and strengthened and trained. Simply put, it takes time and effort and a community to imitate God. Yes, God gives us everything we need, but he calls us to put his gifts into practice. Dallas Willard put it like this: “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.” You can’t imitate God’s ways without practicing God’s power day by day.

The best imitations don’t pretend to be the real thing; instead, they point to the real thing.

I was reminded of that this summer. I was spending a day with my family at Kentucky Kingdom, at the waterpark. It was one of those perfect days to be at the waterpark. Blue skies, bright sun, hot enough that the water feels great but not so hot that the concrete doesn’t, and they were playing 1980s rock. As I was walking to the waterslides with a couple of my children, “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey started blasting through the speakers with Steve Perry’s amazing vocals, and I felt so much joy that I just joined in at full volume.

And that’s when something surprising happened.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way about the day.

At that same instant, without any coordination, another middle-aged dad walking with his children the opposite direction did the same thing. And I’ll have to say, it wasn’t terrible. I looked over at my daughters, knowing they were surely feeling the same joy. That’s when one of my daughters looked at me and said, “That was the most dad thing ever.”

I’m sure those words were meant as a compliment that expressed how proud she was of my singing, so my reply to her was simply, “You are so welcome.”

But here’s the thing: No matter how great that moment may have been, I know I’m not the real thing. No one will ever confuse me with any great singer—but give me the right summer’s day with the song blasting on the speakers, and I can join in and point to the greatness of the greatest era of music.

The best imitations know their limitations. They don’t pretend to be the real thing; instead, they point to the real thing.

That helps us to understand what Paul is telling the Christians in Ephesus in the text that was read today. “Become imitators of God as beloved children,” Paul writes (5:1).

Which, in one sense, is absolutely absurd.

How can any of us possibly be “imitators of God”?

When God declares, “Let there be light,” light happens. Have you ever walked into a dark room in your house and said, “Let there be light”? Try it, and let me know how well that works for you.

When God tells Moses to lift his staff over the Red Sea, the waters split. Next time you’re on the Big Four Bridge, take a shepherd’s staff with you and see if you can make dry land appear between Indiana and Kentucky.

When God says, “Come forth from the tomb,” dead people come out alive. Try that at Cave Hill cemetery, and let me know if you get Colonel Sanders or Muhammad Ali back.

You can’t do those things because you’re not God.

So how does Paul expect us to “be imitators of God”?

The best imitations know their limitations. They don’t pretend to be the real thing; they live in a way points to the real thing. Paul isn’t telling the Ephesians to imitate God by doing God’s miracles, producing light and life or splitting the seas. He’s calling them to point to God’s glory by participating in God’s ways.

We live in a world that tells us, “Be yourself!” or “Be an original!” But Paul says, “Be an imitation”—an imitation of God. An early church leader named Athanasius of Alexandria once wrote,

For [the Word] himself was made human in order that we might be made divine. (De incarnatione 54.3).

He wasn’t saying that we become God or gain the capacity to do all that God does; he was saying that, because of what Jesus did, we can participate in the very life of God, sharing in his nature and pointing to his glory. That’s what it means to be an imitator of God.

In this text, the apostle Paul unpacks what it looks like to imitate God in four movements: (1) Walk in love. (2) Be grateful. (3) Walk in light. (4) Be known. When we do that, we imitate God—not by pretending to be God but by pointing to the greatness of God.

One of our goals for you in this church is for you to become a resilient apprentice of Jesus Christ, and apprentices are, in the simplest possible terms, people who imitate their master. Part of living as a resilient apprentice is pointing to God by imitating the way Jesus lived in the world—and his way of living begins with walking in love.

1. Walk in Love (Ephesians 5:1–4)

“Be imitators of God, as beloved children,” Paul writes (5:1). That doesn’t mean pretending to be God; it means living in a way that points to God.

But what exactly does this imitation look like in our daily lives? According to Paul, it looks like love.

But this love doesn’t begin with us. “Walk in love,” Paul says, “as Christ loved us” (5:1).

Our imitation of God doesn’t begin with us; it begins with Christ’s love for us. Notice what Paul doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “Be imitators of God so that you can become beloved children.” What he says is, “Be imitators of God, as beloved children”—in other words, “Imitate God on the basis of God’s sure and certain love for you, because that’s what beloved children do.”

If children see or hear something repeatedly, they naturally imitate it. A few months after we adopted one of our children several years ago, she was around eight years old, and she had only been to Sojourn a couple dozen times at most. One night, we were seated at the table for dinner, and my daughter had torn off a piece of bread and she was bouncing it in and out of her soup. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I asked her, “Why are you doing that with your bread?” Her reply was, in a sing-song voice, “I’m dipping it in the wine or the juice, whatever your conscience permits.” She had already picked up what we repeat week by week during communion at Sojourn, and she was imitating what she had heard repeated.

That’s even more true when it comes to what parents say or do repeatedly. In both good ways and not-so-great ways, our children imitate what they see or hear repeatedly from us. Yet children don’t imitate us so that they can become our children; they imitate us because they already are our children. That’s even more true when it comes to our heavenly Father. God the Father constantly and repeatedly loves us in Christ.

If you are a follower of Jesus, you don’t imitate God to earn a place as his child; he already loves you perfectly, and your place in his family is already secure. You imitate God because you already are his child. The foundation of your imitation is not your imperfect attempt to get it right. It’s a perfect love that is already completely yours in Christ. You don’t have to earn this love; if you are a follower of Jesus, this is a love that you already have in full. Imitating God doesn’t cause God to love you more; imitating God shows how well you know the love he’s already given.

And the model for this love is Jesus Christ himself.

“Walk in love,” Paul says, “just as Christ loved us and gave himself for us” (5:2). For the follower of Jesus, the life of Jesus provides the model and the definition of what “love” is.

One widespread definition of love in our world today is a feeling of attraction and affirmation—but attraction and affirmation are not God’s definition of love, according to his word. God’s love is defined by his own character expressed in Jesus, and this love is sacrificial and holy: “Christ… gave himself for us, a sacrifice and offering to God” (5:2). Jesus did not love us through passing attraction or affirmation of who we are; his love was a sacrificial commitment. Jesus went to the cross and took on himself the punishment for the sins of everyone who will trust in him.

Through this sacrificial commitment on the cross, God has given every believer his own holiness and promises to make us whole in his time. And so, when Jesus shapes our understanding of “love,” we see a better definition of love: compassionate and sacrificial commitment to someone’s wholeness and holiness.

That’s Jesus-shaped love.

When we live this way, we’re not pretending to be God, but we are pointing to the goodness and the glory of God.

“‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’” Jesus said, quoting a text from Leviticus (Matthew 22:37–40). When we love our neighbors, we live with a compassionate and sacrificial commitment to their wholeness and holiness—caring for their physical wellbeing and their spiritual wellbeing in a way that points them toward the righteousness of God. It’s also what it looks like to love yourself rightly. Loving yourself isn’t indulging your every desire or affirming your own feelings about yourself. Loving yourself is being compassionate toward yourself and sacrificially committing yourself to your own wholeness and holiness.

Paul calls the Ephesians to “walk” in this type of love—not simply to do something loving from time to time, but to practice this love in every part of our lives. When we imitate God by walking in Jesus-shaped love, there are certain habits and patterns that cannot persist in our lives, because they don’t fit with a compassionate and sacrificial commitment to wholeness and holiness. Paul unpacks these patterns in two sets of three characteristics:

1. “Sexual immorality and any impurity or greed” (5:3): The term that’s translated “sexual immorality” refers to any sexual activity outside the covenant marriage of a man and a woman. For Jewish people who became followers of Jesus, this was something they already knew. For those who weren’t Jewish, especially for men, the notion that sexuality belongs within marriage was unknown. And yet, this was God’s design from the beginning, for our wholeness and our holiness and our flourishing; so, Paul’s calling for Christians is to avoid “sexual immorality”—to live either in a marriage covenant or in singleness and celibacy, which was how Paul himself lived. God is concerned, however, not only with our bodies but also with our minds. Even in the Old Testament, the people of God were commanded to “love the LORD your God with all of your heart and soul and strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5). And so, Paul doesn’t stop with what happens physically. He moves from our bodies to our minds and mentions “impurity” (5:3). That’s Paul’s way of describing sexual immorality in our thoughts and in our fantasies and in pornography. If we move the gift of sexuality out of marriage and into a fantasy in our own minds, we’re not walking in Jesus-shaped love, because we’re not living with compassionate and sacrificial commitment to wholeness and holiness. After looking at how we walk in love with our bodies and in our minds, Paul then turns to the root of sin—not just sexual sin but all sin: “greed” (5:3). The term translated “greed” might also be rendered “covetousness” or even “a refusal to be satisfied.” It’s an attitude that declares, “God, what you have provided in this moment is not enough to satisfy me—I need something more than what you’ve provided.” From the first sin in the Garden of Eden to the sins you’ve already struggled against this morning, every rebellion against God’s design begins when we become convinced that the gifts and pleasures God has provided in this moment are insufficient to satisfy.
2.  “No filthiness or foolish talk or degrading humor” (5:3). The words we say reveal what we desire and the thoughts on which we meditate most. And so, walking in Jesus-shaped love doesn’t just change what we do and think; it also changes how we speak. “Let there be no filthiness or foolish talk and demeaning humor,” Paul says (5:3). When Paul says “filthiness” or “obscene talk” he’s primarily describing finding humor in sexual immorality. Humor isn’t evil; humor and laughter are, in fact, part of God’s good design. God wants us to find joy in our world and to see humor all around us. And yet, if our words are marked by Jesus-shaped love, we will not laugh about actions that sent Jesus to the cross. It’s not just obscene humor that fails to fit who we are as God’s people, though. It’s also “foolish talking or degrading humor,” according to Paul (5:4). “Foolish talk” is empty or boastful talking that builds you up; “degrading humor” is that snarky or sarcastic jab that tears someone else down (5:4). None of these patterns fits with walking in Jesus-shaped love. When we do this, we are distorting the God-designed gift of humor and laughter to tear down and to humiliate people created in God’s image. Commenting on this text in the sixteenth century, the Reformer John Calvin said, “It is possible to joke in a good way, but it is very difficult to be witty without becoming sarcastic…. Paul quite rightly warns against it. None of these things is consistent with being a Christian” (Comm. Eph. 5.4). Think carefully for a moment: After someone spends time with you, what do they remember?

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