Introduction
We have
friends who are missionaries in Africa . They
are in a very remote village. It takes them a whole day to get to the major
city where they need to conduct business. They have five children and they need
to home school their children while they carry on a ministry of discipleship.
It is hard work and often discouraging, but they continue to do so faithfully.
What an amazing love they have for the people of that land as they learn their
language, live among them and serve them.
We have
friends who have a severely handicapped daughter. She cannot walk and has
limited mobility and can only move her arms a little bit. The parents,
particularly the mother needs to do almost everything for her. She is in her
early 20's and her mother has been doing this for her whole life. What an
amazing love they have for their daughter.
In October
2006 near Lancaster , Pennsylvania
Frederick
Buechner writes, "The love for equals is a human thing…The love for the
less fortunate is a beautiful thing…The love for the more fortunate is a rare
thing…And then there is the love for the enemy…This is God's love. It conquers
the world."
These kinds
of love seem unusual and amazing, but for those who belong to Christ it is
valid to ask, "Is this extraordinary or expected?" A moment ago we
read in Scripture, "…be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in
love, as Christ loved us…" When we read that we must realize that these
kinds of love are not to be the exception, but the norm among those who have
given their lives to Jesus.
If we are
to make the gospel of Christ known in the world, we have already talked about
the fact that we need to be imitators of the holiness of Jesus. This portion of
the text indicates that we must also be imitators of the love of Christ. Are
you seeking to learn what it means to imitate the love of Christ?
I. We Are God's Beloved Children
There is
only one reason why we can even entertain the notion that we are to imitate the
love of Christ and that is because, as the text says, we are God's
"beloved children."
A. We Are Children of God
How can we
dare to claim to be the children of God? The truth is that we do not dare to
claim to be the children of God. It is God Himself who declares that we are His
children. When we stop fighting God and rest in Him by faith, He makes us His
children. The thing that prevents us from being His children is sin but because
Jesus died on the cross, our sins have been removed. Just as we did not become
children to our parents by obeying them, but by birth, so we do not become
God's children by obedience, we become God's children by a new birth. When we
put our trust in Jesus, we are welcomed into the family of God and God calls us
His children. Because we are His children, we are given permission to call Him
"Dad." Because we are His children, He comes to live within us by His
Spirit. When we die, we are invited to go home and live in His house for all
the rest of eternity.
B. We Are Dearly Loved
As children
of God, we are loved by Him. I like the New International Version translation
of this verse which says that we are "dearly loved children." We know
that the love God has for us is amazing because it pre-dates our relationship
to Him. In fact, John 3:16
and Romans 5:8 both
tell us that love was the foundation which caused God to reach out to us with
salvation.
When I was
in boys club we took an outing to the Whiteshell. On the way home, we were
fooling around in the back seat of the car of whoever was driving us home. One
of the older boys who was a junior leader was funny and I liked him. I remember
thinking, I am going to be funny so that people will like me. We all have a
need to be loved and if we do not feel loved, we do different things to try to
get people to like us, some of them are not very good. However, the need to do
that disappears when we understand how much we are loved by God. One of the
lies which Satan tells us is that we are not loved. The truth which will set us
free is the truth that God already loves us. He loved us before we knew Him. He
loved us enough to send His only Son into the world to die for us. He loves us
enough to forgive our sins. He loves us enough to call us His children. He
loves us enough to live within us. The love God has for us is incredible and we
need to know that, understand it deeply and rest in it.
The
instruction in this passage to imitate God in loving is only possible when we
know how much we are loved by God. Unless we understand the depth of His love
for us we will continue in self centeredness. When we know that we are loved,
we can give up self centeredness, grasping for attention and seeking for
affirmation because we know we are loved by the creator of the world. This
gives us the freedom to give away love because we understand that we have
everything we need.
Francis
Chan writes, "The very fact that a holy, eternal, all-knowing,
all-powerful, merciful, fair, and just God loves you and me is nothing short of
astonishing."
II. How Christ Loves
If we would
each take a quarter out of our pocket and compare them, we would find that they
are almost exactly the same. The reason they are the same is that they were all
impressed by the same master. As Christians, we also ought to look the same as
every other Christian because we also have been impressed by the same master.
Of course a coin has no choice in the matter, but we do. Therefore, the text
calls us to imitation. Yet we are all called to imitate the same thing. We are
called to imitate God and to love as Christ loved us. So if we are to
understand how we are to imitate God's love, we need to know how that love
works and what it is like. The master we are to imitate is none other than
Christ Himself and Paul tells us exactly what that love looks like. So let us
take a careful look at the love which Christ has demonstrated for us.
A. He Gave Himself for Us
The text
says that "Christ loved us and gave himself up for us." Philippians 2:6 says, "who,
though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something
to be exploited," or NIV has "something to be grasped." There
was a time when Jesus made a decision and the decision was to offer Himself in
order to come to the earth and to make the sacrifice that was necessary in
order to redeem people from their sins. He was in heaven reigning with God as
His Son, but made the choice to give up all that power and position in order to
come to this earth on our behalf. That is what it means that He gave Himself
for us.
When Jesus
was about to be put to death, he was in the Garden of Gethsemane
The love of
Jesus was self giving and sacrificial. Wood says, "The model of love is
Christ himself. It is because he laid down his life for us that we are to love
others to the point of sacrifice." Therefore, when we consider how we are
to imitate the love of Christ, we understand that imitation of love involves sacrifice.
We must learn what it means to give our life for the sake of another.
B. He Gave Himself to God
The other
phrase we notice here is that Jesus "gave Himself up…a fragrant offering
and sacrifice to God." The sacrifice which Jesus made to show His love was
not only "for us," but also "to God." Jesus didn't only
offer Himself on our behalf. He offered Himself to His Father. His death on the
cross was God's idea and He loved God so much that He trusted that God's plan
was the right one and the one which He should follow. Therefore, because He
loved and trusted God, He was willing to give Himself to God. The direction of
His life was towards God. The direction of His sacrifice was towards God. He
gave who He was and what He had to God.
The
language used here, "offering and sacrifice" comes from the language
of Old Testament offerings. There were different types of offerings and
sacrifices which were common in the Old Testament times. The offerings
indicated that a sacrifice had been made. Someone had dedicated some animal or
some grain to God. It indicated a dedication to God which was made with gratitude.
This tells us that, following the example of Jesus, our love must also be
offered to God as a sacrifice to Him, something that is dedicated to God.
The Old
Testament speaks of such a sacrifice as "a pleasing aroma" in such
passages as, Exodus 29:41
which says, "And the other lamb you shall offer in the evening, and shall
offer with it a grain offering and its drink offering, as in the morning, for a
pleasing odor, an offering by fire to the LORD." Sometimes when I ride my bike between 5:30 and 6:30 in the evening, I
get whiffs of BBQ. It smells good. But that was not why God called sacrifice a
pleasing aroma. God was not impressed with cooking meat. God was impressed with
the willingness to obey Him. That was what the pleasing aroma was. Because Christ
chose to obey His Father and offer Himself for us, God was pleased with His
sacrifice.
In the same way, God will be pleased when He sees in
us a willingness to offer our lives to Him as people who love. Therefore,
if we are to imitate Christ, we must imitate Him in offering ourselves in love
to God because He first loved us.
C. He Forgave Us
The third
example of love demonstrated in this passage is found in Ephesians 4:31 when it says,
"as God in Christ has forgiven you." All our sin was against Christ.
He died for us and so took the offence upon Himself and did not hold it against
us. In the same way, we are called to imitate His forgiveness by loving others and
showing that love by forgiving them.
One of the
ways in which we often get into relational trouble is when we take offence at
what someone has done to us. When that happens, we often assume malicious
intent on their part and we hold it against them. If we are to imitate the love
of Christ, we must imitate His readiness to forgive.
The love
which Christ has is sacrificial, offered to God and forgiving. That is the kind
of love we are to imitate.
III. Imitating the Love of Christ
Because we
are deeply loved we are able to love and because Christ has demonstrated what
love looks like, we know what it means to love. Having this foundation we are
called to love.
A. Imitating God
We are
called to imitate God. In Ephesians
4:17 we were told that we are not to walk like the Gentiles walk.
The opposite of walking like the Gentiles, however, is not walking like a nice
person. The opposite of walking like the Gentiles is imitating God Himself.
A few weeks
ago our son Joel and I worked together with Jonathan to build a fence and a
deck in their yard. Haven was watching and playing in the area for most of the
day and I am told that since that day he calls himself "Uncle Joel."
He plays with wood and tools and wants to be like Uncle Joel. This is what
children do. They imitate and by imitation they learn.
When the
text calls us to "be imitators of God" that is the kind of idea that
is in mind. The Greek word for imitation is μιμηταὶ
from which we also get our word "mimic" which gives us the idea of doing what we see
done. Yet when we think of imitating God, we know that there are some ways in
which we cannot imitate God. Barth says, "Men cannot copy the essence of
God, e.g. his work as creator or redeemer, or his trinity, but they are called
to imitate his love and make progress on the way of love."
We were
together with extended family, some of whom hadn't seen each other for a long while.
We saw a man, who is probably in his 70's, whom we hadn't seen him for a long
time. Someone remarked that he looks just like his father used to look. When we
obey this command, we will look like our Father, not in physical appearance,
but in behavior. We will love in imitation of the one who loves us.
B. Walking in Love
We are also
called to "live" in love or as NASB puts it to "walk" in
love. The idea communicated here is that love is to be a lifestyle. We may feel
love when we hold a newborn baby, but we will walk in love when we pace the
floor at night holding a colicky baby. We may feel love when we stand with our
fiancé at the altar on our wedding day, but we will walk in love when our
spouse gets a life altering disease and we continue to care for them. We will
have warm feelings towards our neighbor when they invite us to come over to use
their swimming pool, but we will walk in love when we decide how to respond on
the early morning when they start their snow blower and blow all their snow
onto our driveway. The Message puts it this way, "Mostly what God does is
love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ
loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to
get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that."
Penner
says, "…the life of love is always active and outgoing to those who need
that love. That is how God acts and how we, his dear children, must act."
C. Putting Off "Un-love"
As I was
studying this passage, I noticed that the call to love in Ephesians 5:1 , 2 is preceded in Ephesians 4:31 , 32 with some very specific and
practical details about what it means to love. The pattern followed in these
verses is that which we have already noticed in earlier verses which talk about
putting off a particular way of living and putting on a transformed way of
living. Verse 31 calls us to put off those things which are not loving. We will
learn love when we put off "all bitterness and wrath and anger and
wrangling and slander, together with all malice." I like the way Stott
puts it. He calls us to put off "the ill-willed plotting of a malicious
spirit."
It is
possible that the writer intended a progression in this section. The first step
of not loving is to feel bitterness. Bitterness can progress to anger, loud
protestation, speaking ill of someone else and ends in a settled anger called
malice.
So if we
want to avoid all of these unloving things, we must stop them at the first
step. We must choose not to allow a root of bitterness to grow up. How do we
remove bitterness from us? The best defense against any manifestation of lack
of love is to understand that we are loved by God.
D. Putting On Love
We will
also learn love when we replace these things and instead put on the things
mentioned in verse 32.
Kindness
reflects that which arises out of a gentle and good heart.
Compassion
is an interesting word. The Greek word comes from a word that originally
referred to the internal organs or as Wood says, "the liver, kidneys and
larger viscera." This is a concept that should be somewhat familiar to us.
When we talked about being excited we used to say "I have butterflies in
my stomach." Emotions, according to the Greeks were located in this
region. We have more often thought of the emotions as residing in the heart. It
is a similar concept and communicates the feelings of caring for another from
deep within our being. It is this kind of love that we are to put on.
Furthermore
we are also to put on forgiveness. Once again Paul points to the forgiveness of
Christ as our model. Jesus, of course, tells the great story in Matthew 18:23-35 to help us
understand just how important forgiveness is in our love for others. In that
parable, the king forgave a man his massive debt. Yet the man was unwilling to
forgive someone else who owed him a relatively small sum. It is obvious to us
that there is something very wrong about this. God has forgiven us all our
sins, how can we not forgive the things done to us. Barth says, "'Live as people who are forgiven!' – this is the
sum of Ephesians 4:31-32 ."
He also reminds us that forgiveness is always and only practiced in specific
situations when he says, "No man can really forgive a man whom he does not
personally know."
Conclusion
Is there
anyone who hasn't heard this before? I didn't think so. Is there anyone here who
is able to imitate the love of Jesus effectively? I kind of suspected that. How
will we make progress? We know that we are deeply loved by God and that He calls
us His children. We have a very clear example of love in Christ. We understand
that we must respond to God's love by loving Him and others. We understand that
in order for the good news about Jesus to be made known in the world requires
that we love God, love one another and love the other. But how will we make
progress in imitating the love of Jesus?
Let me
suggest several practical acts of love:
1. Identify someone you don't know very well in the church or
in your neighborhood and go talk to them.
2. Think of a person you don't like very well and without
telling them you don't like them or making a big deal of it, do something kind for
them.
3. Listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit in order to hear
how you can show love and to whom you can show love.
If we are
willing to imitate the love of Jesus, there is no telling what God will do in
us and through us.
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