We’re in the series "Simple Living," based on the 2nd half of Paul’s correspondence to the Ephesian Christ followers of the First Century.
In the first half of the letter, believers are described as “spiritually rich,” and in the second half, the part upon which this series is based, we’re told how to spend our spiritual riches!
One of the simplest techniques for simple living and thereby be able to cash in the spiritual riches we have in Christ, is to IMITATE GOD.
Our grandson Andrew is at the age of imitation. We don’t get to see him in person that often since his mom and dad serve the church in Spain, but we do use our video camera frequently enough to notice him mocking what he sees. At nearly two years of age he apes what he sees mom and dad and others around him doing.
Here’s a brief video to show you what I mean.
Today I want to talk to you from Scripture about imitating our heavenly Father. He has set this wonderful example of behavior for us and a simple rule of living is to act how God acts. Look at Ephesians 5, verses 1 and 2.
1 Imitate God, therefore, in everything you do, because you are his dear children. 2 Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ. He loved us and offered himself as a sacrifice for us, a pleasing aroma to God. Ephesians 5:1-2 (NLT)
Notice the Bible says imitate God in “everything you do.” We’re not just to imitate God on Sundays or set times of spiritual activity. We’re to imitate God in everything we do. This is a simple maxim but it has a broad application. I’m to imitate God in my relationships, my thought life, my private life, my leisure, my business, etc. And this imitation centers on the sacrifice of Jesus on skull hill. The pivotal event of the biblical narrative, the sacrifice of Christ for our sins, is to become the primary focus of my imitation of God lifestyle.
WAYS TO BE LIKE GOD
PRACTICE PURITY
3 Let there be no sexual immorality, impurity, ["Impurity" means "morally impure." By using the word impurity, Paul is going beyond the specific act of having sex before or outside of heterosexual marriage and saying that we should be free from all association with sexual sins. Impurity includes stuff like porn, and any thought or activity that leads to sexual lust. The word “impurity” is translated “uncleanness” in the KJV. Demons were often referred to as “unclean” spirits, so impurity is something associated with Satan’s followers.] or greed [Excessive desire for wealth or possessions.] among you. Such sins have no place among God’s people. 4 Obscene stories, foolish talk, and coarse jokes—these are not for you. Instead, let there be thankfulness to God. 5 You can be sure that no immoral, impure, or greedy person will inherit the Kingdom of Christ and of God. For a greedy person is an idolater, worshiping the things of this world. Ephesians 5:3-5 (NLT)
God’s nature is pure and holy. That’s one of the things we love so much about Him! It’s one of the primary reasons we worship Him. Who would want to worship an impure God?
Because God is holy and pure and righteous He says to those who follow Him:
“Be holy because I am holy.” 1 Peter 1:16 (Leviticus 11:44-45, 19:2, etc.)
So the directives to refrain from sexual sins and greediness are only a natural outflow for followers of Christ. Pure living is part of the family resemblance.
The big danger of these sins is what they do to our relationships. Sex sins and greed are based on selfishness. Selfishness eats away at relationships. Selfishness rewards us with instant gratification but purity and generosity reward us with strong relationships that stand the test of time. God is unselfish and He wants us to be like Him and it is for our own good. Our friendship with a holy God and others will not be enjoyable unless we’re walking in holiness and purity.
Are we surprised that a totally pure and holy God gets angry at impurity? In many ways we don’t like impurity either. Recently my wife Deb asked for a “to go” box to take her leftover food home from the restaurant. When she opened the Styrofoam box there was a cough drop wrapper inside. She wasn’t going to use that box to take her food home. Perhaps the person who put the cough drop wrapper in the box had coughed in the box. So she asked for another box.
We don’t use dirty containers and neither does God. But its not because God is mean and unloving. It’s because He knows that impurity is dangerous to us. My wife wasn’t being “hard to get along with” when she asked the waitress for another Styrofoam container. She was only being cautious of the danger of germs.
It’s a shame that God is so misunderstood on how He has rules for our own good.
After the Bible reminds of how our lives ought to be characterized by purity, verse 4 says, "Instead let there be thankfulness to God." Instead of sexual immorality, impurity, and greed, Christ followers should be thankful.
What does “thankfulness to God” have to do with counterbalancing things like immorality, impurity, greed, and filthy conversation?
All selfishness is based on the fearful premise that if we don’t watch out for ourselves, no one else will. Take greed for instance. What precipitates it? People are fearful they aren’t going to have enough for themselves so they don’t share with others. No one is more inwardly focused and narcissistic than the greedy person is.
Thankfulness to God recognizes God’s hand in our lives. It speaks of how we trust Him enough to be a sharing individual just like He is. We’re thankful! We’re not fearful! We all experience fear but we don’t have to remain that way.
God has a sharing nature. He gives and gives and gives because it is His nature to give. If we know God and walk with Him we don’t have to worry about whether we will have enough if we share with others. We don’t have to be greedy; afraid that if we give our stuff away we won’t have anything left. The irony of greed is, the more you have - the more you have to worry about.
"In 1926, a wealthy Toronto lawyer named Charles Vance Millar died, leaving behind him a will that amused and electrified the citizens of his Canadian province. Millar, a bachelor with a wicked sense of humor, stated clearly that he intended his last will and testament to be an “uncommon and capricious” document. Because he had no close heirs to inherit his fortune, he divided his money and properties in a way that amused him and aggravated his newly chosen heirs. Here are just a few examples of his strange bequests:
"He left shares in the Ontario Jockey Club to two prominent men who were well known for their opposition to racetrack betting.
"He bequeathed shares in the O’Keefe Brewery Company (a Catholic beer manufacturer) to every Protestant minister in Toronto.
"But his most famous bequest was that he would leave the bulk of his fortune to the Toronto woman who gave birth to the most children in the ten years after his death.
"This clause in his will caught the public imagination. The country was entering the Great Depression. As people struggled to meet even their most basic economic responsibilities, the prospect of and enormous windfall was naturally quite alluring. Newspaper reporters scoured the public records to find likely contenders for what became known as The Great Stork Derby. Nationwide excitement over the Stork Derby built quickly.
"In 1936, four mothers, proud producers of nine children apiece in a ten year time span, divided up the Charles Millar’s bequest, each receiving what was a staggering sum in those days - $125,000." (From Sermon Central sermon by Joanna Beveridge)
I wonder if those ladies had all those kids because they loved children or because they loved money. God only knows; but now they had all of those kids to pay for!
Immorality, impurity and greediness don’t get us anywhere. Being pure like God is smarter!
LIVE AS PEOPLE OF LIGHT
6 Don’t be fooled by those who try to excuse these sins, for the anger of God will fall on all who disobey him. 7 Don’t participate in the things these people do. 8 For once you were full of darkness, but now you have light from the Lord. So live as people of light! 9 For this light within you produces only what is good and right and true. Ephesians 5:6-9 (NLT)
These first-century words are so very timely for the 21st Century. “Don’t be fooled by those who try to excuse these sins…live as people of light!” Only people who want to walk in darkness try to find excuses to disobey.
Lauren F. Winner, author of the book, “Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity,” converted to Christianity from Judaism. She talks openly about one of the big areas of her life where she struggled with her newly found faith: sexuality.
“The bottom line is this: God created sex for marriage, and within a Christian moral vocabulary, it is impossible to defend sex outside of marriage. To more liberal readers, schooled on a generation of Christian ethics written in the wake of the sexual revolution, this may sound like old-fashioned hooey, but is the simple, if sometimes difficult, truth.
“For several years, I tried and tried to find a way to wiggle out of the church’s traditional teaching that God requires chastity outside of marriage, and I failed. I read all the classics of 1970s Christian sexual ethics, all the appealing and comforting books that insisted that Christians must avoid - not sex outside of marriage, but rather exploitative sex, or sex where you run the risk of getting hurt. These books suggest that it is not marriage per se, but rather the intent or state of mind of the people involved, that determines whether or not sex is good and appropriate; if a man and woman love each other, if they are committed to each other, or, for Pete’s sake, if they are just honest with each other about their fling being a no-strings-attached, one-night stand, then sex between them is just fine. After all, as long as our 1970’s man and woman care about each other, making love will be meaningful. In fact, sex might even liberate them, or facilitate their personal development.
“Well. I tried to find these books persuasive. I wanted to find them persuasive. I wanted someone to explain to me that I could be a faithful Christian and blithely continue having premarital sex. But in the end, I was never able to square sex outside of marriage with the Christian story about God, redemption, and human bodies.
“It wasn’t just the liberal, supposedly liberating, books that left me cold. I didn’t find many of the more conservative bromides all that persuasive either- the easy proof-texting that purports to draw a coherent sexual ethic from a few verses of Paul. To be sure, scripture has plenty to teach us about how rightly to order our sexual lives, but, as the church, we need to ask whether the starting point for a scriptural witness on sex is the isolated quotation of "thou shalt not," or whether a scriptural ethic of sex begins instead with the totality of the Bible, the narrative of God’s redeeming love and humanity’s attempt to reflect that through our institutions and practices. If our aim is to construct a rulebook, perhaps the cut-and-paste approach to scripture is adequate: as the bumper sticker wisdom goes, Jesus (or in this case, Paul) said it, I do it. But if we see scripture not merely as a code of behavior but as a map of God’s reality, and if we take seriously the pastoral task of helping unmarried Christians live chastely, the church needs not merely to recite decontextualized Bible verses, but to ground our ethic in the faithful living of the fullness of the gospel. As ethicist Thomas E. Breidenthal once put it, "We must do more than invoke the will of God if we wish to recover a viable Christian sexual morality.... Even if God’s will is obvious, it cannot provide a rationale for any moral code until we are able to say, clearly and simply, how God’s command speaks to us, how and why it addresses us not only as a demand but as good news."
“The church derives its sexual ethic from scripture, and Paul has a few sharp-tongued things to say about sexual morality. But those verses of Paul had little impact on me. That is probably more my failing than anyone else’s, but for a few-months-old Christian-too Christianly young to be said to be formed in Christian virtues and hardly eager to stop sleeping with her boyfriend-an isolated verse from 1 Thessalonians was about the easiest thing in the world to ignore.
“An analogy may help make the point. If my sexual habits were formed by Hollywood and Cosmo and therefore at odds with how Christianity would have me comport my sexual self, my shopping habits were equally schooled in a surrounding secular culture whose assumptions are contrary to those of the gospel. Compact discs were coming into fashion when I was in fourth grade, and my father, upon buying a CD player, presented my sister and me with one CD each. Leanne got ABBA’s greatest hits, I got the more modish Madonna, her album Like a Virgin (which may itself speak volumes about how I was formed sexually) with its hit single, "Material Girl." And though after college I eschewed lucrative job offers to work on Wall Street and rake in more money than a twenty-one-year-old should be allowed to earn, I nonetheless was something of a material girl. I liked to shop. I owned a lot of silk blouses. I was singularly unreflective when it came to matters of money, ownership, and wealth.
“Not that I hadn’t read the Gospels, where Jesus has quite a few things to say about money, ownership, and wealth. I had read his strict words about the rich man’s inability to get into heaven. I had even heard sermons that quoted these lines and urged the faithful to be "good stewards," whatever that meant. (As far as I knew, a steward was a male airplane attendant.)
“Jesus’ words did, in fact, lodge like small burrs in my side, and I began to feel pangs of something-though I’m not quite sure you could call it guilt-when I went on those silk shopping sprees. But it was not until I began to grasp the larger arc of the Gospels’ teaching about wealth and possessions that the radical nature of Jesus’ words began to sink in. It would be a dramatic overstatement to say that today I am a model of simplicity (I do still own a few silk tops), but I have begun to take steps toward simple living, and those steps were goaded not merely by hearing Jesus’ harsh words to the rich young ruler, but by hearing them through the scrim of centuries of church teaching on ownership and possession, by coming to see how Jesus’ words were not isolated instructions but integrally related to basic Christian themes of creation ownership, and salvation.
As with wealth, so too with bodies. Yes, St. Paul’s sexual guidelines would be sufficient. But they would be sufficient the way a black-and-white film clip is sufficient. Sometimes you see gospel truths in very sharp relief when they are just in black and white. But sometimes they are clearer and more arresting when they are not seen as isolated instructions, but rather as part of the large biblical narrative of creation, fall, and redemption-the entire story in Technicolor.
“Our bodies and how we inhabit them point to the order of creation. God made us for sex within marriage; this is what the Reformed tradition would call a creational law. To see the biblical witness as an attempt to direct us to the created order, to God’s rule of creation, is not to appeal to self-interest in a therapeutic or false way. It is rather to recognize the true goodness of God’s creation; things as they were in the Garden of Eden are things at their most nourishing, they are things as they are meant to be. This is what Paul is saying when he speaks to the Corinthians: Don’t you know that when you give your body to a prostitute, you are uniting yourself to her? To ask that question is to speak the wisdom of Proverbs in the idiom of law. It is a law that invites us into the created order of marital sex; a law that rightly orders our created desires for sexual pleasure and sexual connectedness; a law, in short, that cares for us and protects us, written by a Lawgiver who understands that life outside of God’s created intent destroys us. By contrast, life lived inside the contours of God’s law humanizes us and makes us beautiful. It makes us creatures living well in the created order. It gives us the opportunity to become who we are meant to be.”
Lauren Winner’s point is the point that Paul makes in the next verse.
10 Carefully determine what pleases the Lord. 11 Take no part in the worthless deeds of evil and darkness; instead, expose them. Ephesians 5:10 (NLT)
Carefully determine what pleases the Lord and then refuse to take part in anything that doesn’t please God. Furthermore, expose them. But be careful. “Expose them” insinuates bringing them to the light; not being judgmental. Exposing people to the light of Jesus and judging them are two completely different things!
We aren’t to be voyeuristic either.
12 It is shameful even to talk about the things that ungodly people do in secret. 13 But their evil intentions will be exposed when the light shines on them, 14 for the light makes everything visible. This is why it is said,
“Awake, O sleeper,
rise up from the dead,
and Christ will give you light.” (Paraphrase of Isaiah 60:1, 2) Ephesians 5:12-14 (NLT)
LIVE WISELY
15 So be careful how you live. Don’t live like fools, but like those who are wise. 16 Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days. 17 Don’t act thoughtlessly, [How many people actually think about what they do? Don’t be a robot!] but understand what the Lord wants you to do. 18 Don’t be drunk with wine, because that will ruin your life. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit, 19 singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, and making music to the Lord in your hearts. 20 And give thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Ephesians 5:15-20 (NLT)
"It had been four grueling years of computer science courses for John, but the end was in sight, with only one more semester before graduation. However, he realized he still needed one more general science class to fulfill his graduation requirements. Rushing to register, he found the only course still available was on "Birds and Their Habitats." Reluctantly, John signed up.
"Like many elective courses at the university, the class was large, and taught by one of the professor’s assistants. As the semester continued, the workload increased, and he found himself spending more and more time studying birds. To make matters worse, the professor offered only one test at the end of the semester to determine each student’s grade--it was all-or-nothing. Two weeks prior to the final, John began cramming and re-reading the class books and his notes. As he walked in to the exam room, he was confident he not only would pass, but would fly through the test with little effort.
"As John began the final, he discovered each question centered around a picture of a pair of bird legs! He was to identify each bird by its legs, and then answer the corresponding question. He could not believe it; he had studied so hard, and it all came down to his ability to identify birds by their LEGS?
"He answered as best he could, but after struggling with the test for over an hour, John marched down to the front where the professor of the class was standing and slammed the test down into the pile of other exam books.
"’This is the sorriest class, and you are the worst professor on this campus!’
"As he started out the door, the shocked professor yelled back, "What is your name, young man?"
"John turned, pulled up one of his pants legs, held his bare leg in the air, and replied, ’You’re so smart, you figure it out!’"
When everyone and everything around you tells you that you must conform to their stupidity - be wise enough - be thoughtful enough - to not go along with the flow!
Be filled with God’s Holy Spirit instead of allowing yourself to fall for the excuses made for bad behavior.
Be wise enough to imitate God.
