At the end of an article on how children learn from their parents, Craig Anderson, a researcher from Iowa State University, says: "Kids are basically little learning machines. Whatever the content is in front of them, they're going to pick it up."
[even though I barely knew my father, I’m convinced that my love of travel comes at least partly from following his travels around the world as a sailor]
[anti smoking ad with child pretending to smoke, father sees it and stubs out his cigarette]
[compare with a father coming to Cathy Wever school to pick up his daughter, wearing a sweatshirt that says, “Porn Star.”]
It’s really important that children choose the right role model. It can make a huge difference in how their lives turn out.
In
Ephesians 5.1 Paul says, Be imitators of God,
therefore, as dearly loved children. (v1)
That’s a simple, but profound, sentence. He’s saying three things. 1. Children imitate their parents. 2. We are children of God. 3. So we should imitate God. Remember that the core of this letter is about being “in Christ.” In Christ we have been made into something new. We’re not the same as we were. We’re members of a new family, and as members of that family we should behave like children and seek to be like our heavenly father.
What does it mean to imitate God? We’ve already seen in past messages that it doesn’t mean throwing around planets or doing miraculous deeds. Paul tells us straight out, Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love…
If you go to the Internet and search for definitions of love you’ll get all kinds of strange things. Here are some of the definitions you get: a strong positive emotion of regard and affection / any object of warm affection or devotion / have a great affection or liking for; "I love French food" / a deep feeling of sexual desire and attraction / get pleasure from; "I love cooking" / a score of zero in tennis or squash; "it was 40 love" / sexual activities (often including sexual intercourse) between two people / an American rock group of the 1960s and 1970s. / the feminine Mother aspect of God… the cohesive power of attraction throughout the universes. The 2nd Emanation, the Mother-God Principle contains all Feminine Aspects of God as Personality; it is the Blue Ray of Love or blue color of Principle as the Mother. (miriams-well.org) / energy; it sustains all form and formlessness; our true identity. Love lives in the Heart. It is the Glue of the Universe. It is a Soul quality. (goddirect.org) / the most profoundly integrated state in the universe. It is simultaneously the highest, deepest and most powerful state of consciousness. (yogaatlantic.ca)
You might wonder if it’s even possible to have a conversation when people mean such radically different things by one word. What does it really mean to love? What does it mean to live a life of love?
Once again, Paul doesn’t leave us wondering. His answer is the “Sunday School” answer – Jesus!
Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Jesus defines what love is, and he defines it in a way that is totally different from any of those definitions you can find on the Internet. All those definitions on the web defined love in one of two ways; an emotional feeling (we’ll give the “sexual intercourse” definition the benefit of the doubt and say the people involved have some kind of emotional attachment), or some kind of abstract philosophical concept. That’s what the search threw up. I didn’t edit the list in any way except to delete duplicates or definitions that I thought were so way out I couldn’t read them with a straight face. (I’m not sure how “the 2nd emanation of motherhood” got in there.)
But we are called to live a life of love that is neither an emotion nor a philosophical idea but to live …just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (v2)
If you want to know what love is like, look at Jesus, and you’ll find that love is cross-shaped. Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. In Philippians 2 it says he emptied himself for us. And in Romans 5 it says, But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Love is not a feeling or an idea; it’s something you do. It’s choosing someone else’s higher good, even at the expense of your own.
When Christians live a life of love they live it in the here and now, serving real people, giving themselves up for them. Sometimes, like our Lord, we are called to give up our lives, but more often it means giving up our time, talents, money and comfort for the sake of others.
But serving people is not the ultimate goal of our love. Christ gave himself up for us, but he offered up his giving as an act of worship to his father as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Ultimately, we don’t serve others for their sakes, and we certainly don’t do it for our own sakes, for the positive buzz it gives us when we do something good. Like Jesus, we serve others for God’s sake, as an offering of worship to God.
We can imitate God by living a life of
self-giving love, laying down our lives as an act of worship to God. And we can
imitate God by living in the light. That’s what Paul says in verse 8, Live as children
of light.
Living as children of light means living in the truth, and we need to do both, “live a life of love” and “live as children of light” if we are going to be like God. The first chapter of John’s gospel speaks of Jesus coming to us “full of grace and truth” and we need to keep these in balance in our lives if we are to imitate God.
[Marilyn pointed out to me again this week that I am a “principle centred” person, as opposed to a “person centred” person. A “principle centred” person tends to err on the side of truth and needs to be reminded that even God’s truth without love can hurt people, and that it isn’t enough to just teach people, they need to be served and loved too. A “person centred” person is the opposite. They tend to err on the side of love and need to be reminded that it isn’t enough to just serve people, they need to be taught to live as God would have them live.]
Living as children of light means living in truth.
[East African revival – “walking in the light” it meant being open and honest with your Christian brother or sister, living in truth and rejecting any kind of lying and deception.]
Just as living a life of love results in laying down your life for others as an act of worship to God. So, living as children of light results in our lives bearing the fruit of the light, which Paul describes as all goodness, righteousness and truth. Goodness as opposed to badness. Righteousness as opposed to unrighteousness. Truth as opposed to error or lying. These are the things that result in our lives when we walk in the light, in the truth.
And how do we do that? By finding out what pleases the
Lord. (v10)
It’s really hard to imitate someone if you know nothing about them. When I first started to learn guitar I tried to play like an acoustic blues guitarist called Stefan Grossman. The only way I could do that was by listening to how he played, over and over again, and trying replicate the same sounds on my guitar. I had to study his style of playing and work on making my playing sound like his. I had to imitate him. I had help. I had a book of music that went along with the album I had. But just having the book didn’t do it. Just listening to the album didn’t do it. I had to read the book and practice the skills if I wanted to play like my guitar hero.
Verse 17 says understand what the Lord’s will is. How do we do that? How do we understand what the Lord’s will is? How do we find out what pleases the Lord?
The answer is really quite simple. We study the book (the Bible) to find out what God is like, and then we begin to learn the skills of living in truth.
But I never did learn to play like Stefan Grossman. It was just too hard without a teacher.
Learning to imitate God is hard too, but the good news is that we have a teacher. In fact, each one of us has a personal tutor who comes to live with us when we give our lives to God. He’s called the Holy Spirit and he takes what’s in the book and helps us make it live, just as a music teacher can teach you how to make those squiggles on the page sound like beautiful music. Of course we have to cooperate with the teacher and do what he says, but we don’t have to do it by ourselves. He’ll show us.
One thing I want to make clear is that we don’t imitate God so that he will be kind to us and let us be part of his family. And we don’t imitate him so that he will let us stay in his family, so he won’t kick us out of the house. We imitate God because he’s our Dad and we love him and that’s what kids do.
[gifts from my kids that I remember – Nora Jones CD, Fawlty Towers DVD set – they knew what I liked and their gifts made me happy]
We imitate God by walking in love and truth because we want to make him happy. We can’t make him happy if we don’t know what he likes. That’s why it says find out what pleases the Lord.
It isn’t rocket science. Read the book. Find out what pleases God. Then ask for the Holy Spirit’s help to do it. It really is that simple! It isn’t easy, but it is simple.
Paul gives us two options for role models. One is imitate God . The other is follow the crowd and imitate those he calls “the disobedient” (verse 7), people who don’t understand what God’s will is and don’t seek to do what pleases him.
In verse 17 he calls this “foolish.” Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. (v17) He gives a couple of examples of what he means by foolishness in verse 3 to 5.
The first example of foolishness is what I would call inappropriate desires. In the process he focuses on two things that lie at the heart of our culture; “sex” and “stuff.”
Verse 3 says, But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity…
It’s common to speak of our society as either sexually liberated or sexually obsessed. It depends on where you stand. But compared with the society Paul lived in, ours is tame. Sexual immorality (sex outside of marriage) and impurity (other forms of sexual activity) were so common that there are examples of marriage contracts from this period where the wife’s family explicitly specified that the husband could not have a mistress or a male lover, or the deal was off. In the face of a society that was way more permissive than ours Paul says that part of imitating God is restricting our desire for sex to a monogamous relationship between a man and a woman.
But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people.
The other inappropriate desire he nails is the desire for stuff, otherwise known as “greed.” This is something else that our culture is obsessed with. In fact you could say that our whole economy is based on people spending money they don’t have, to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they don’t even like, and that the advertisers are quite happy to use sex to sell it to us.
Now, I may have just offended some people. But I want you to notice something. Churches tend to fall into two camps; those where it is common to preach about sexual ethics but not about economic ethics, and those where it is common to preach about economic ethics but not about sexual ethics. It’s unusual to find one that does both.
But in the same way that we need to walk in love and truth, imitating God applies to our private lives (what could be more private than our sex lives) and to our public lives (for instance how we spend our money.) We don’t get to choose which part of the verse we apply to our lives.
Paul points to two other things that are marks of not imitating God. One is inappropriate speech. Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving.
The other is what he calls, “living in the dark,” or choosing to ignore the truth that you already know.
Paul says don’t follow the crowd that does these things, literally don’t be “joint partakers” with the disobedient, don’t join them in what they do. He doesn’t say don’t associate with them. He just says, don’t do what they do. In fact in 1 Cor 5.9-10 he explicitly says, “I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.” Unfortunately there are whole denominations of Christians who apparently haven’t read this text and make a point of not associating with “people of the world” any more than they absolutely have to.
Paul’s point is that if we call ourselves Christians then we ought to behave in Christian ways, living in love and truth. This passage is not about trying to get Canada to behave more “Christianly.” It’s about putting our own house in order and seeking ourselves to imitate God and live lives of love, in service to others, and truth, doing what is right.
We can do that. Not by ourselves of course, but with the help of our live-in tutor, the Holy Spirit, we can learn what it is that pleases the Lord, and do it.