At the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Steve Bridges appeared alongside of President George Bush. You’re probably asking, “Who is Steve Bridges?” I could tell you who he is, but instead, let’s watch and see.
[Clip from White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner showing George Bush and Steve Bridges impersonating him appear together]
Over the last seven or eight years, many of us have probably seen a whole lot of people try to imitate George Bush, but that performance by Steve Bridges is by far the best I’ve seen. In fact, if any of us here tried to imitate George Bush, we’d fall way short of his efforts, I’m sure. But did you know that the Bible instructs all of us who are children of God to be imitators? As we enter into chapter 5 of Ephesians this morning, that’s exactly what Paul commands us to do. Let’s read our passage out loud together.
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.
Ephesians 5:1, 2 (NIV)
That’s a pretty tall order, isn’t it? Paul says, that as dearly loved children of God, we are to imitate our heavenly Father. The word translated “imitate” is the word from which we get our English word “mimic” and “mime.” So the picture that Paul gives us here is that we are to mimic, or imitate God in the same way that a child mimics his father.
All of us who are parents can relate to that idea. We have watched, often in horror, as our children try to mimic us. Country singer Rodney Atkins wrote a song titled “Watching You” that causes us to think about just how much our kids try to be like us. Listen to these lyrics:
Drivin’ through town just my boy and me
With a “Happy Meal” in his booster seat
Knowin’ that he couldn’t have the toy ‘til his nuggets were gone.
A green traffic light turned straight to red
I hit my brakes and mumbled under my breath.
His fries went a flyin’, and his orange drink covered his lap
Well, then my four year old said a four letter word
It started with “S” and I was concerned
So I said, “Son, now where’d you learn to talk like that?”
Chorus:
He said, I’ve been watching you, dad ain’t that cool?
I’m your buckaroo, I wanna be like you.
And eat all my food and grow as tall as you are.
We got cowboy boots and camo pants
Yeah, we’re just alike, hey, ain’t we dad
I want to do everything you do.
So I’ve been watching you.
But the idea of us being able to imitate our heavenly Father is something that’s on a whole different level. In our Tuesday morning men’s Bible study, I think we all had the same initial reaction to this command – it’s impossible for any of us to do that. But as I’ve looked at this passage more this week, it’s clear that Paul doesn’t expect us to imitate everything about God. Because He is God and we are not, there is a lot about God we could never even come close to imitating – His omniscience, his omnipotence and omnipresence are just the beginning of that list.
But in this passage, Paul exhorts us to imitate just one characteristic of God - the way He loves. We are to live a life of love, and that love is to be based on God’s demonstration of His love for us in His Son, Jesus. We are to love others in the same way that Jesus loves us and gave Himself up for us. We shouldn’t be surprised at Paul’s command here since it was Jesus Himself that told his disciples the very same thing right before He went to the cross:
"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
John 13:34, 35 (NIV)
Not only did Jesus command His followers to love each other in the same way He had loved them, but He also made it clear that their love for each other would be the measure as to whether they were truly His disciples. In his epistle, John reinforced this same principle:
Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.
1 John 2:6
If we’re going to claim to be followers of Jesus Christ, then we need to follow in His footsteps and live a life of love. And if we’re going to imitate God and live a life of love, then we need to take some time this morning to explore...
HOW TO LOVE OTHERS LIKE JESUS LOVED US:
Like any other attempt to examine the nature of Jesus, we won’t be able to even scratch the surface in our attempt to deal with this topic this morning. But we already spent a bit of time looking at one aspect of Jesus’ love last week when we addressed the topic of forgiveness. In fact, the word “therefore” in verse 1 of chapter 5, takes us back to the previous verse where Paul commanded us to be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other in the same way God has forgiven us in Jesus. So certainly forgiveness is a significant aspect of the love of Christ.
We’re going to look at four additional aspects of the nature of Jesus’ love for us and discuss how we can imitate that kind of love in our relationships with others.
1. I must love others even when it costs me greatly.
I’m not sure that we really consider all that it cost Jesus to love us. We recognize that it cost Him the ultimate, His life. But have you ever sat down and considered what else it cost Jesus to love us? As a start, here are just three ways that it cost Jesus to love us:
• It cost Jesus His glory
Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.
Philippians 2:5-8 (NIV)
We can’t even begin to imagine what this must have been like because none of us are God. But Jesus set aside the glory of heaven for 33 years and came here to this earth and endured scorn and shame from those He had created because he loves us so much.
• It cost Jesus physical pain
The prophet Isaiah described the pain that Jesus would suffer in order to love us:
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
Isaiah 53:5 (NIV)
• It cost Jesus His fellowship with the Father
As bad as all those other things must have hurt Jesus, I think the greatest pain He suffered was that moment on the cross when all the sins of mankind were placed upon Him and as a result, His fellowship with the Father was broken and Jesus cried out:
About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" - which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Matthew 27:46 (NIV)
John wrote about how we need to love others even when it costs us greatly:
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.
1 John 3:16
It cost Jesus His life to love us and, if necessary, we ought to be willing to pay that same price to love others. So I’m embarrassed to think about how many things that fall far short of giving my life have kept me from loving others in my own life.
• Far more times than I’d like to admit, I’ve failed to love others because I wasn’t willing to give up some of my time. Maybe it just wasn’t convenient at the time, or even more likely, I was just selfish with my time and there was something else that I wanted to do more than whatever I could have done to love someone else.
• There have been times when I’ve failed to love others because I wasn’t willing to part with some of the financial resources that God has blessed me with. Some of those times, I really meant well, but just didn’t follow through, but I’m sure that other times, I’ve just been selfish.
• And what about all the times I didn’t love someone else because I was worried about what others would think. I was worried more about the fact that loving the unlovable might cost me my reputation than I was about loving the other person.
If I want to imitate the love of God, then I need to love others even when it costs me greatly.
2. I must love others even when they don’t deserve it
It seems like we’ve looked at Romans 5:8 nearly every week in our journey through Ephesians. And we’re going to look at it again this morning because it tells us a lot about the love of Jesus. But just to make sure we don’t just gloss over this and say, “I’ve heard this before.” We’re also going to read verse 7 along with verse 8 this morning and I’m going to read from the paraphrase of this passage in The Message:
We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him.
Romans 5:7, 8 (Message)
We very clearly see that Jesus did not love us because we were deserving of His love. There was nothing in our lives worth dying for, but Jesus did it anyway because He loves us. Not only that, but as we observe the life of Jesus while He was on this earth, we find that Jesus always loved those who others considered unlovable – the poor, the diseased, the tax collectors and other social outcasts.
So if we want to imitate the love of Christ, then we need to learn to love those who are unlovable. Here is what Jesus told His listeners about that during the Sermon on the Mount:
But I tell you: Love your and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?
Matthew 5:44-47 (NIV)
It’s pretty easy to love those who love us and treat us well, but the real test of our love is how we treat those who mistreat us or those who are different that us. We saw that last week, when we talked about forgiveness. It’s certainly much easier to forgive those who are truly sorry and ask for forgiveness, but we’re required to forgive everyone, whether they deserve our forgiveness or not.
But if we’re going to imitate the love of God, then we have to learn to love those who are hard to love and those who don’t deserve our love. As Jesus made quite clear, anyone can love those that love us. That’s so simple that even an IRS agent can do that. And it’s not too hard to love those that are like us, either. That’s so simple that even the pagans can do that.
In some respects, I struggle with this principle more when dealing with people in the church than with people outside the body. When I think about loving people outside the body, I don’t seem to think as much about whether the person needs my love or not. Since they are not yet followers of Jesus Christ, I find it much easier to “cut them some slack”.
But I guess within the church, I have this expectation that people should “know better.” So it’s really pretty easy for me to love the people in the body who are always encouraging me and others and who are always willing to pitch in and do whatever they can do to help. It’s easy to love those who are faithful to minister here week after week. In other words, it’s easy to love those that live up to my expectations of how a believer should act.
But it’s a lot harder to love those who are always criticizing and complaining without ever offering to be part of the solution. It’s really difficult to love those who work behind the scenes to undermine our church leadership. It’s far easier to think that those who don’t measure up to my expectations of how they ought to act within the body of Christ aren’t really worthy of my love.
But the fact is, no matter how much I’d like to think differently, I’m a pretty hard person to love, too. But God loves me anyway, even though I don’t deserve it. So, if I want to imitate His love, then I must love everyone, especially those who don’t deserve it.
3. I must love others with actions, not just with words or emotions
God could have just told us how much He loves us, but throughout the Scriptures, God has not only declared His love for us, He has demonstrated it through His actions. God rescued His people from slavery in Egypt. He provided for them in the wilderness and the, in spite of their rebellion, brought them into the Promised Land. He sent prophets to bring them His word and to warn them of the consequences of their behavior.
But God’s ultimate act of love was one that He had planned from before the beginning of time and which is described in this well-known verse:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16 (NIV)
For God so loved that he what? [wait for response] That’s right, He gave, He took action that demonstrated His love toward us.
Unfortunately, in our culture today, we have completely perverted the whole concept of love. Nowhere is this more evident in many of the so-called love songs that have been written in our lifetime. This week, I discovered several different lists of the “100 greatest love songs” and here is a sampling of the songs included on those lists:
• Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me – Gloria Estefan
• That’s What I Like About You – Trisha Yearwood
• First Time Ever I Saw Your Face – Roberta Flack
• You Make Loving Fun – Fleetwood Mac
• Sugar, Sugar – The Archies
• Feelings – Morris Albert
There were also several song titles on the lists that I really didn’t feel were appropriate for me to include. But even with just this short list we can begin to get a pretty good idea how our culture defines love. At best, it’s an emotional attachment between two people and at its worst, it’s seen as merely a physical attraction.
But God’s love for us goes far beyond just mere words or emotion. And therefore, if we are going to imitate God’s love, then our love must transcend the world’s concept of love as John makes quite clear:
Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
1 John 3:18
In his book, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote these insightful words:
The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
True Christian love is more than just an emotion. It is a choice that we make to put the well-being of the other person ahead of our own. And that takes more than just words; it requires action on our part. James drove that point home to his readers:
Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?
James 2:15, 16 (NIV)
If I want to imitate God’s love then I must be willing to take whatever action is required to meet the needs of others, regardless of my feelings for that other person.
4. My love must be freely given.
In a sense, this is the essence of God’s love for us in Christ. That’s’ why Paul writes that “Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
There is very clearly a reference here to the Old Testament sacrifice system. As described primarily in Leviticus, God prescribed five different types of sacrifices that His people were to make to Him. Three of these sacrifices – the burnt offering, the grain offering and the fellowship (or peace) offering - were made as a voluntary act of worship to God. The other two sacrifices – the sin offering and the guilt offering – were offerings that were required whenever the people sinned.
Except for a single exception in Leviticus 4:31, the voluntary offerings are always described as “an aroma pleasing to the Lord” and the required offerings are never described in that same way. The fact that the voluntary sacrifices were described in that way makes sense since they were voluntary sacrifices which denoted thanksgiving and devotion to God and God would have been pleased with that. On the other hand, the required sacrifices came about as the result of sin and therefore God would have not have been pleased with the reason for the sacrifices.
So when Paul describes the death of Jesus as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God, he is reinforcing the idea that Jesus voluntarily gave up His life for us. That is further emphasized when Paul writes that Jesus “gave himself up for us.” This shouldn’t surprise us at all since Jesus made that same point with His own words:
The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life - only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father."
John 10:17, 18 (NIV)
The greatest act of love in the history of mankind was not coerced or forced. Even though the Jewish leaders and the Roman authorities condemned Jesus and nailed Him to the cross at the behest of the mobs of the people who shouted “crucify him”, Jesus willingly laid down His life. As He prayed in the garden shortly before those events were consummated, Jesus made it quite clear that he had the power to stop what was about to happen:
"Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done."
Luke 22:42 (NIV)
But Jesus was committed to carrying out His Father’s plan, so He willingly submitted Himself to the will of His Father and laid down His life for all of us in the greatest act of love the world has ever known.
Although we’ve seen that the love that imitates God is much more than just words or an emotion, that doesn’t mean that our attitude is not important when it comes to loving others in the same way that God has loved us. I can do all the right things out of a sense of obligation or because that is what I am expected to do. But that doesn’t seem to be the kind of love that God has for us. In spite of the tremendous cost He knew he would pay, Jesus freely gave His life for us. So if we’re going to imitate His love, we need to love others in the same way.
Because God is God, I’m certainly not capable of imitating who He is. But I can, and I must imitate the way that He loves me in the way that I love others.
