I was reading this week in the little devotional book “This Day with the Master” by Dennis Kinlaw and I read the devotional for April 27th. I would like to share this with you this morning. In Ephesians 5:1-2 we are told to “be imitators of God as dear children. And walk in love.”
“One day as I was reading through the book of Ephesians, I found myself laughing aloud when I came across Ephesians 5:1, “Be imitators of God.” How can someone like me imitate God? Many of His attributes immediately came into my mind. First of all, He is the omnipotent One. A few in history have tried to be all-powerful, but they have ended up as fools. Second, He is the omniscient One. He knows all things. But when I am in the process of finding an answer to a question, I discover that I have tem more questions, and so my experience is one of exploding ignorance, not knowledge. The more I know, the more I have to learn. Third, He is the omnipresent One. But I am confined to one moment in time and one point in space. How can I imitate Him?
I looked again at the passage: “And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma.” (Ephesians 5:2) My laughter faded when I realized that God wants us to imitate His lifestyle, not His attributes. What Paul was telling the church to imitate was the life of love that issues in self-sacrifice modeled in the Lord Jesus.
Suddenly I found myself confronted not with divine attributes in abstraction, but with the very Cross of Christ. Then I realized that Paul was asking us to imitate the God we see on Calvary, the God who cares more for
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