Children Naturally Imitate Their Parents
If you’re a parent, one thing you probably learned very early on in your parenting journey is that your children are always watching you. You need to be careful with how you speak and act, because your kids will start imitating you at a young age. You’ll hear them start to use words or phrases that you use. When they’re playing, they’ll start to act out things that you do.
When my daughter was three years old, she was always carrying around a baby doll and diaper bag, because she saw my wife do that. My oldest son wanted to mow the lawn when he was two, because he saw me doing that on the weekend. In these and countless other examples, my wife and I saw firsthand how natural it is for children to imitate their parents.
In Ephesians 5, Paul urges Christians to follow this natural pattern. He’s going to command us to be imitators of God and explain how that should look in our lives. We’ll see that believers must be imitators of our heavenly Father by walking in love, purity, and wisdom.
Walk in Love
Therefore, be imitators of God, as beloved children.
verse 1
In light of Paul’s call earlier in Ephesians for Christians to walk worthy of their calling in Christ and to no longer walk as unbelievers walk, Paul is going to command them to do something else. Paul commands them to do something that we naturally do in our human relationships. He says they should be “imitators” of God. The Greek word for “imitators” is “mimētēs”, which is where we get the word mimic. We are to mimic God. Why? Because God is our Father and we are his beloved children. We see the incredible truth that believers are God’s children in 1 John:
See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
1 John 3:1
Paul says we are God’s “beloved” children. We are deeply loved by our heavenly Father. As his children, we must be conformed to his image, becoming more like him each day.
And walk in love,
verse 2
Paul specifically calls out walking in love as a way that we should be imitating God. Walking in love should be part and parcel of the Christian life. This type of love is not just expressed in having strong affection for other people. The Greek word for love is agapē and speaks of the unconditional, active love that works and is sacrificial. As new creations in Christ, displaying sacrificial love for others is evidence of true salvation. John talks about this as a necessary test for true salvation in 1 John:
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
1 John 4:7-8
whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
1 John 2:5-6
As believers, we must be imitating God in showing love for others. Paul gives us even more clarity into what this looks like by pointing to the example of Jesus.
as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us,
Since Jesus is God in human flesh, imitating Christ is the equivalent of imitating God. Jesus displayed the ultimate example of sacrificial love:
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another (see 1 John 3:16, John 3:16, and John 13:34).
1 John 4:9-11
Likewise, we must imitate Christ’s example of displaying sacrificial love for others.
a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
When we do this, this greatly honors God. He is like a proud father looking down at his child imitating one of his attributes. Paul says this is like a pleasing aroma to God that brings him great pleasure.
Imitate God by Walking in Love
It is the most natural thing in the world for a child to imitate their parents. For those who have placed their faith in Jesus Christ, we have become children of God. We should be living our lives in such a way that we are constantly imitating the attributes of God. Walking in sacrificial love for others is just one of many attributes we should be inheriting from our heavenly Father.
In our next two articles, we’ll look at how Christians should be imitators of God in purity and in wisdom.