Loving Like God

Ephesians 5:1-7

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

This phrase draws our attention to a concept we don’t often consider but we do often encounter. Think about food, for instance. We know about imitation vanilla extract and imitation crab or lobster meat. But did you know that unless your parmesan cheese says, “Made in Italy,” it may also be an imitation? And you might want to check your honey, tea, fruit juice, and ground coffee. What you buy at the store for these may be imitations, too.

Another form of imitation occurs when people imitate other people. Comedians imitate famous people, like politicians, for their standup routines. They do this to build a sense of common understanding and trust with their audience so they’ll relax and laugh more easily. And of course, we all tend to imitate people we admire.

• If we admire a fashion model, movie star, or YouTube influencer, we dress like her.
• If we admire an athlete, we try to play like him and wear his clothing and shoes.
• If we admire a successful businessperson, we follow his or her business model and success strategies and may even dress the same way.

Have you ever imitated someone you admire? Who was it and how did (or do) you imitate them? When I was an undergrad college student, I admired one of my professors. This admiration inspired me to imitate some of his wardrobe choices. For instance, in cold months I wore a sweater under my sport coat, like he did. I also bought shoes like him (and still do) – soft, brown-leather, unstylish walking shoes.

Why do food suppliers sell imitations? To cut costs and increase profits. Why do comedians imitate famous people? To build rapport with their audience. Then why do people like you and me imitate famous personalities? Because we admire them and want to be like them. Why do we imitate successful leaders? So we can be successful, too!

Whatever the case, our tendency to imitate other people should remind us of a far more important case of imitation, an imitation that we should all be doing each day of our lives.

We should imitate God.

Does this surprise you? Do you feel overwhelmed by this challenge? If you don’t feel overwhelmed then you should definitely think again, since imitating God is an impossible task. No one, no matter how sincere, can imitate him perfectly. Yet just because we can’t do this perfectly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. After all, if perfect achievement were our standard for everything, then we’d never do anything, would we?

The word imitate is μιμητής (mimētēs). This may sound familiar because it’s a root for words like mimeograph (an old-school copy machine), mime, and mimic. It means to say and do what another person says and does. Say that with me (then give me thumbs up). “It means to say and do what other person says and does” (thumbs up). If you said and did what I just said and did, then you imitated me!

To ensure we understand his point, Paul explains that we should imitate (mimic) God like a child imitates his father. In my family, my oldest son, Joshua, walks like me, James plays the piano like me, Samuel cheers for the Islanders like me, Noah likes to read and write like me, and my youngest son, Timothy, tries to wear my Crocs around the house.

Those who’ve believed on Christ as God and Savior are placed into God’s family as his children. This assures us of his never-ending love and acceptance, presence and care in our lives. For this we should be thankful. But being God’s children also obligates us to speak and behave like our heavenly Father – to imitate him with our lives. To walk like him, perform like him, cheer for what he likes, communicate like him, and do the sort of things that he would do, even if they’re a little too big for us.

Is that how we’re approaching our Christian lives? Do we view the Christian life as a struggle to observe a bunch of rules from God? Or we do we view it as a daily opportunity to be like him? It’s matter of perspective, isn’t it?

So how are we to imitate God? Not in every way, since we’ll never be able to imitate is incommunicable attributes like omnipotence (have all power), omniscience (know everything), and omnipresence (be everywhere at once). We definitely can’t imitate his immutability (which means he never changes), since to imitate him more and more, we have to change! So, Paul helps us understand our duty to imitate God by narrowing the scope of our instructions.

We should love like God loves.

First of all, this means we should “walk” in love. To “walk” in love stands in contrast to doing “acts” of love. An act of love is a momentary, standalone, occasional act such as sending a card on Valentine’s day, gifting a box of chocolates (or something more expensive), going out to eat, giving a hug, or saying, “I love you.” These are fine and even important things to do sometimes, but they’re not what Paul is talking about.

Walk describes a lifestyle since walking is a continuous pattern of repeated steps that happen one after another. Paul telling us to exhibit God’s love day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, action by action, conversation by conversation, word by word. The world doesn’t live this way.

People of the world, outside of God’s family, live for themselves, mixing in occasional acts and words of love, such as on a date, for Valentine’s Day, and so on. But as God’s children, we have a Father who models love differently – he loves on us all the time. After all, the apostle John tells us that God doesn’t just love us, he “is love” (1 John 4:8).

So, how does God love us all the time? The best illustration of his love is none other than the way that Christ, who is God, loved us when he gave himself as a sacrifice for our sins. In referring to this ultimate example, Paul uses a small phrase that occurs frequently in the New Testament (NT) to describe the nature of Christ’s death, “for us.” When he died on the cross, he showed what extreme love looks like, didn’t he? But he did something more. He didn’t only show us extravagant love, he died “in our place” or “instead of us.”

Every good father knows what he’ll do if his child crosses a street and a car is speeds towards him. He will throw himself in front of the car to shove his child to safety, and that’s what God the Father did for us through Christ. God’s justice for our sins required our death, but as a loving judge, he sent his innocent, perfect Son to take the full blow of our punishment in our place. As children of God, we should love one another in the same, serious, selfless way. But I must forewarn you that:

Godly love is voluntary and costly.

The word “offering” here refers to the voluntary offerings that Israelite people brought to God in the Old Testament (OT), not just because they committed some sins, but because they wanted a closer relationship with God. The word “sacrifice” refers more to the killing and bloodshed, the costly loss of life, that an animal sacrifice required.

Our day-to-day love should resemble God’s love in this twofold way: we should love on a voluntary basis and in a costly way. By voluntary, I mean the kind of love that isn’t forced or coerced and which doesn’t come from a legalistic sense of duty alone, like “because I have to.” It’s a love that goes above and beyond because we want to love the other person, whether they deserve to be loved or not. After all, God didn’t have to send his Son to die for us. He already proved his love enough by creating us and placing us into the Garden of Eden to enjoy his perfect world.

When we rebelled, God had every right and reason to discard us and move on – yet he didn’t. He committed himself to love us even further and this commitment cost him dearly. Godly love is not just voluntary, it’s also expensive. It’s inconvenient and even painful sometimes. To love this way, we must say ‘no’ to ourselves and to what’s rightfully ours.

We live in a culture that insists on exercising our rights at the expense of others. Though we may have a right to do this and the freedom to do so, doing so elevates self over others, which is an ungodly thing to do.

When we love like God, the world will think we’re setting ourselves back and getting the “short end of the stick” or a “raw deal. We may even feel the same way, but that’s what they thought about Christ when he died on the cross. Yet Paul has already reminded us that because Christ loved us this way, he conquered death rather than succumbed to it and has been exalted to the highest place of authority over all things (Eph 4:9-10).

When we love like God, it pleases him like a “sweet-smelling aroma.” It may not impress the world and it may be painful for us, but it please God, and that’s all that matters. Ladies imagine that you show love to your family tomorrow by preparing an outstanding meal. As your family makes their way to the dining room from their various rooms in the house, they smell amazing scents wafting from the kitchen, through the hallways and up the stairwells. The closer your family gets to the dining room, the more amazing the food smells, making their mouths water and exciting them for what they’re about to enjoy.

For you, though, the experience is different. You worked hard for a long while to make this meal and are exhausted. To you, the meal is nothing more than a task completed, a bag full of trash, a sink full of dishes, and a kitchen covered in flour and grease. But it’s also something so much more, an act of love that was voluntary and costly. You could have done something nice for yourself that evening, but you made this meal for the family instead, and to them it’s a marvelous aroma and more. To make this illustration more relevant, many of you mothers do this daily, so it’s a lifestyle of love, not an isolated action.

When we love one another in a voluntary, inconvenient, regular way, it’s a pleasing aroma to God, but when we don’t, he grieves (Eph 5:30). How is it for you these days? Is God pleased with the smells coming from your daily life, or is he repulsed and holding his nose? Are we sacrificing and volunteering ourselves to meet the needs of our spouses, our children, and our church? Or are we loving and coddling ourselves as people who are outside of God’s family and do not know what the love of God is all about?

Now that we’ve established that we are supposed to love like God loves and have gotten a clearer picture of what this love is like, we need to turn our attention to some specific applications of this love.

Godly love sheds ungodly behavior.

Though we know this to be true, we can fail to take it seriously. To us, love is more about what we do rather than what we don’t do. Focusing on what we don’t do may seem like a negative, pessimistic perspective. Yet, let’s not jump so quickly to that conclusion because what we don’t do really matters.

When a husband and wife exchange wedding vows, the wedding officiant often asks whether they are “forsaking all others” to take one another as husband and wife, to which they answer, “I do.” This means they are subtracting other people from their life in certain ways to show devoted love to each other. Most importantly, it means they’ll pursue no other romantic relationships our outlets apart from their spouse.

God desires this kind of single-minded, devoted love from us as his children and we should experience the same from one another as a church, and especially in our families. So, what kind of behavior must we shed to practice godly love in our lives? To imitate God’s love, here are five types of behavior we should abandon once and for all.

• Sexual immorality and impurity
• Greedy materialism
• Obscene, crude behavior
• Foolish talk
• Coarse talk

In the middle of mentioning these things, Paul tells us twice (in both a positive and negative way) that such behavior is “not appropriate” for us because we’re saints, people who’ve been set apart by God for a higher calling. It doesn’t “fit.” It doesn’t “match” who we are as children of God, and this isn’t just true for pastors. It’s true of every Christian.

He also says these things should “not even be named among you.” “You” is plural and refers to a church as a group. The rest of the phrase means that no one outside the church (esp. nonbelievers) should be able to put a label on us or say, “They do these things.” They shouldn’t be able to associate these things with our lives. These should not be things that members of Faith Baptist Church say or do.

It’s very important that we let this sink down deeply into our hearts because when Satan lures us into doing or saying these kinds of things, he tries to intensify the temptation by making us feel like we’re all alone, a lone wolf, and an isolated actor as though we’re by ourselves in a room with no public influence at all. Yet what we say and do is not a private affair. It not only affects the other believers in our church, but it reflects upon them as well.

Outside observers don’t just say, “I know a Christian who says and does bad things.” No, when they know such a Christian, they say, “I know a church who says and does bad things,” because they associate the bad actions of the member with the character of the entire body. So, in that way, when we engage in these kinds of behaviors, we drag our entire church into the resulting reputation.

As far as the watching world is concerned, when you do or say these things, it’s as though the church – the family of God – does or says these things. We live in a day, for instance, when if one police officer commits a horrific act, it’s as though all police officers are bad. If one politician says something terrible, it’s as though his or her entire party says the same thing. We know this isn’t true, but it’s easy to think this way, and the world will do the same thing with the church.

Knowing this, let me encourage us as members of God’s family and the church of Christ to recover a sense of collective identity and spiritual accountability to one another. More importantly, let’s also recover a commitment not to mischaracterize our loving God through our ungodly behavior. Outside observers often point to bad actors within a church as reflections of God himself. If church members do such things, then nonbelievers assume they discredit the goodness of the God they claim to serve. So, as children of God and members of Christ’s body in the church, what behaviors should we shed?

Godly love sheds sexual immorality.

Sexual immorality is a normal form of indulgence for nonbelievers. Though such behavior is wicked and wrong, we shouldn’t be shocked or judgmental when nonbelievers do such things because they’re children of the devil. Many of us know what this is like from our past experiences before Christ. But now we’re children of God who must live differently.

The word fornication is porneia. It refers to sexual immorality, not just to adultery but to all forms of immoral acts. The adjacent word, uncleanness, refers to impurity, which Paul modifies with all. He’s making a broad reference here to all sorts of wrong, sexual behavior from homosexuality to adultery, intimacy before marriage to pornography, prostitution to workplace flirtation, steamy novels to all kinds of experimental behavior. The only good forum for sexual intimacy is between a husband and wife who are lawfully married. All other iterations are immoral, twisted, ungodly, and wrong. That’s why we should shed all forms of this behavior from our lives.

Godly love sheds all of this behavior and leaves it behind, just as ballplayer removes one uniform to put on another when he signs to play for a new team. Sexual immorality and impurity should have no place in our lifestyle and practice as believers. None whatsoever.

Though the world often portrays such behavior as an expression of love (or a quest for love), it is nothing of the sort. Such activity is incredibly selfish, horribly sinful, and extremely hurtful and damaging to the people involved, even if they consent.

If you are struggling to shed this behavior in any form, then please reach out to me so you can receive spiritual guidance, accountability, and support. A casual, gradual approach won’t do. You need radical action and must choose a zero-tolerance policy. This is the only fitting approach for a Christian because it undermines godly love.

Godly love sheds greedy materialism.

This word covetousness refers to a consuming ambition and intense drive that’s insatiable. The goal of this grasping greediness is to acquire more and more money and to experience more of the things that money can buy. Furthermore, a person driven by this motive will take advantage of others to achieve his own ends. He’ll make others poor to become rich, push others down to advance themselves, steal to acquire, and break rules to get ahead.

We understand why nonbelievers may act this way, because what they experience in this temporary life is all they have to hope for, so they live like there’s no tomorrow. But as believers, we have an inheritance in God’s kingdom that will never go away. In Christ, we have all that we need. At the end of all our hard, diligent work and labor, whether God blesses us with a lot of money or not (and sometimes he does), it makes no difference. We know that our ultimate reward and inheritance is in the future, not to mention the fact that knowing God is satisfying a reward all on its own.

Ironically, some parents associate greedy materialism with love and by doing so confuse the so-called American Dream with our calling as Christians. I once heard a preacher tell the story of two hard-working parents who worked regular overtime to provide their son with an upscale house, a top-tier education, and a full-ride college education. On the boy’s sixteenth birthday, he arrived home in the evening to an empty house with a note and set of keys on the kitchen table. It read, “Dear son, we both had to work late tonight, so we won’t be able to have a party. But take the keys and go to the garage for a special surprise. Happy birthday son, and drive safely. Mom and Dad.”

When the son opened the garage door, he was surprised to see a brand-new Porsche sitting there. It was all his, paid for by Mom and Dad. But when his parents arrived home later that evening, they were even more surprised by what they found. The son had returned the keys to the kitchen counter with a note of his own. “Mom and Dad, thanks for the fancy car. It’s nice, but I didn’t want a fancy car. I just wanted you. I’ve had enough. If all this life is about is getting more money and nicer things, I’m done. It’s not worth it.” Sadly, this was his goodbye note. It was too late to make things right.

In the rat race of NYC, we must stop to ask ourselves the question of whether we’re working hard to meet our needs and the needs of others, or whether we’re breaking our backs out of greedy materialism instead. Immorality is wrong, but so is covetousness. If we’re too busy making and spending money that we can’t attend church and spend proper time with our families, then what’s the point? Even more importantly, this kind of lifestyle makes it appear that God is not good, that he doesn’t meet and satisfy our needs, and that he cannot be trusted. If you need help shedding this behavior, please let me know and I would be glad to help you get your life in order as a child of God.

Godly love sheds obscene behavior.

Godly love sheds another type of behavior besides immorality and covetousness, filthiness. This word refers to behavior that disregards moral and social standards of proper behavior. It is the kind of behavior which we might call embarrassing, shameful, indecent, rude, repulsive, or crude.

Such behavior includes things like certain finger and hand gestures that insinuate, mimic, or imply inappropriate things (like “giving the finger,” etc.). It also includes a lot of memes and GIFs that get passed around online and so forth. I won’t go into any more detail than this, but such behavior is entirely inappropriate in the Christian life because it has nothing to do with the love of God and does, in fact, send the opposite message.

Godly love sheds foolish talk.

Foolish talk may also be translated as “silly talk” or “stupid talk.” It’s this kind of pointless conversation that fills talk radio, social media, and late-night sitcoms. The best way to describe what foolish talk entails, though, is not just to define it, but to refer back to the OT book of Proverbs to see what kind of things fools say. According to Proverbs, fools:

• Mock and ridicule others (Prov 1:22)
• Brag about themselves (Prov 1:32)
• Speak loudly and obnoxiously and are demanding (Prov 9:13)
• Say everything that’s on their minds (Prov 10:10)
• Spread slander about others (Prov 10:18)
• Talk with a prideful air or demeanor (Prov 14:3)
• Laugh about things that are sinful and wrong (Prov 14:9)
• Speak without wisdom (Prov 15:2)
• Speak disrespectfully to their parents (Prov 15:20)
• Talk only about their personal perspectives without listening to others (Prov 18:2)
• Say things that provoke arguments and fights (Prov 18:6; 20:3)
• Say whatever they feel like saying (feeling-driven speech) (Prov 29:11)
• Speak quickly without thinking about it first (no patience, no listening, no filter) (Prov 29:20)

This list accurately describes the kind of talk that’s prevalent in American society. Yet it’s not the kind of talk that reflects the love of God or shows love to one another. It reflects a self-centered, egotistical, ignorant perspective that could care less about God and people. As children of God, we must value our words and speak with grace, building up one another with words that encourage the heart and bring us closer to God and one another.

Godly love sheds coarse talk.

The NKJV calls this coarse jesting. It’s a word that refers to twisted humor. Things like double entendre (saying one thing that sounds fine at first, but means something else that’s inappropriate), gutter humor, and so on. It’s important to point out that Paul is not banning all jokes, riddles, and humor – there is a place for good humor, it’s an important part of our lives. Instead, Paul is teaching us to cut out the kind of shrewd, “wink-wink” jokes that the world’s form of humor thrives on, the kind that appeals to our base, sinful nature, not to a genuine, godly appreciation for innocence and morality.

People who live this way have no place in God’s kingdom.

With this point, Paul drives his point home. Believers should shed immorality, covetousness, obscenity, stupidity, and twisted humor because people who actually do and say these things as a lifestyle “have no inheritance in the kingdom of God.” This does not mean that if you did these things last week, you lost your salvation. Instead, it is a sobering reminder that if – over time – you refuse to shed this behavior, then you had never become a child of God in the first place. No matter what you thought you did, you never believed on Christ as God of your life and Savior of your sins.

To strengthen this point even further, Paul reminds us that people who practice these things are not only devoid of God’s love in their lives, but they will suffer the full weight of God’s wrath in the end. This wrath will not be a slap on the wrist, nor will it be a reversible experience. Once a nonbeliever stands before the judgment seat of God, they receive an eternal sentence of punishment in the Lake of Fire that will never end.

This experience of wrath will ensure two things. First, that all the selfish, twisted, ungodly things you did to “love yourself” rather than God and others will receive full and complete justice. Second, that no unchanged, self-loving people enter God’s kingdom, ensuring a perfect, loving kingdom for God’s children forever.

In case you think that’s harsh, Paul reminds us, “Let no one deceive you with empty words.” (In other words, don’t let anyone else tell you differently.) Selfish living and ungodly love are serious offenses to God. Any politician, psychologist, therapist, professor, talk-show host, or so-called “Bible teacher” who says otherwise is talking head to avoid. Anyone who minimizes, downplays, accepts, or tolerates such behavior as a rule of life in the name of “love” is a bad actor themselves who is complicit with the crime.

Paul also warns, “Don’t be partakers with them.” This doesn’t mean “don’t ever be around them, work with them, or be their friend.” After all, how can we rescue such people and show them godly, Christian love if we have no contact with them in regular, everyday life? Instead, Paul teaches us not to participate with them when they do these things. When they talk like this, work like this, and act like this, you should not participate. You can go to school with them but stay away from the late-night party at the frat house. You can work with them during the day, but don’t hang out with them at lunch when all they want to talk about or watch on their phones is obscenity. Let’s be wise, and most of all, let’s love like God loves by shedding these five kinds of behavior and talk from our lives.