Be Imitators of God - Brandon Scalf

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Ephesians 5:1-2

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All right, everyone, grab your Bibles and turn with me to Ephesians chapter 5.
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Ephesians chapter 5, and we will begin reading in verse 1.
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Verse 1. And the title of today's message is
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Imitators of God, and if you would, please stand with me for the honoring and reading of God's holy, infallible, and all -sufficient
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Word, and we will only read the first two verses.
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Ephesians chapter 5, verse 1. Therefore, be imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love, just as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.
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The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever, amen? Amen. Go ahead and have a seat and get your eyes back on verse 1 of chapter 5.
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Now, some of you will understand this reference while I know others will miss it, but I'm hoping that the figure
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I'm going to speak of looms so large that even the people who I don't think will get it will.
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Back in the ancient days of the 1990s, there was a famous Gatorade commercial that centered around one of the greatest, excuse me, the greatest basketball player of all time.
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And that was, of course, Michael Jordan. And Michael Jordan was bigger than life, especially then.
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He was maybe what really put professional basketball on the map in terms of the type of attention that we pay to it here in America.
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But not only that, he was presented as a squeaky clean, really nice guy, of course.
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There is some PR going on there. But the reality is everyone, whether it was set out loud or not, wanted to be like Michael Jordan.
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They wanted to wear his shoes. They wanted to play like him on the court. They wanted to wear his jersey.
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They wanted to be Michael Jordan, and this is something that Gatorade caught onto.
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And Gatorade created a commercial that had a jingle in it that went like this. I'm not going to sing it, but I'll say it.
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Sometimes I dream that he is me. I want to be like Mike.
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Throughout the 90s, this was everywhere. I want to be like Mike. I want to be like Mike.
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Many children wanted to be like him. They wanted to play like him. They wanted to move like him.
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They wanted to dominate the court like him. And if you understand who I'm talking about, they wanted to float in the air like him.
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But as great as Michael Jordan was, and he was the greatest, his influence was only temporary.
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His skills, as legendary as they might have been, belonged to this world.
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And they will fade, much like he will fade. And someday, no one will remember the name of Michael Jordan again.
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But you see, there was something that happened there, culturally speaking.
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There was something that the Gatorade people picked up on, and that's this. That we as human beings have a proclivity towards imitating.
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Which, really, actually, if you think about it, is we have a proclivity towards worshiping. And what we worship, we become like.
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Paul here is going to give us a command to imitate, and in many ways to worship.
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To act like, not Michael Jordan, but God himself.
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God himself. And what you will find is that Paul here is not giving some sort of motivational speech, or singing a jingle with a popular slogan.
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No, no, no. He's giving us a call to live, to love, and to act like the
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God who is. We're to be imitators of God, Christian.
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Not athletes, not celebrities, not politicians. God. Paul isn't interested in speaking to the
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Ephesians in such a way as to give them a self -help talk,
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TED talk, nor am I. The standard for the
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Christian life is not to be better than the guy next to you, but to be like God.
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And it's to not be filled with a mediocrity, because this is the higher standard that anyone could be called to.
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And so as we look at this text, as we examine this, what I will continue to call a divine imperative, we need to realize that not only is it reality that we should imitate
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God, but that it is something that we as Christians have been given the power to do.
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We've been given the spirit to do. And to be sure, it sounds incredibly difficult, and it is, but let's unpack it so we can see what it is that Paul is trying to get at.
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Because we're not interested in being like Mike, we're interested in being like God. And so the first thing that I want you to see is the first of two commands, which really are my two governing points, which are first, imitate
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God as beloved children. And then secondly, walk in love as Christ loved us.
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And so the first one here is imitate God. Look with me at verse one. It says here, it says, therefore, be imitators of God.
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Now of course, when we see therefore, we must ask what, children? Why it's therefore.
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This is a continuation of something that's being said. It certainly is a continuation of what came before it, namely, right?
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That we are forgiven graciously in Christ by God.
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But more than that, it's a building off of everything that has come before it, especially as it pertains to chapter four.
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Remember, we're not getting too far away from this governing principle of walking worthy and to guarding the unity of the spirit of the bond of peace.
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The rest of this book is telling us how we as Christians are to continue to walk worthy.
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Right? Ephesians chapter four, verse one, therefore, I, the prisoner in the
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Lord, exhort you to walk worthy of the calling with which you have been called. There is a way to walk that is worthy, and there is a way to walk that is unworthy.
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Of course, we mean conduct of living, the way you live your life, and we're talking about walking.
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This is something that the Gentiles, apart from Christ, did not understand, nor did they even attempt to do, which is why in Ephesians chapter four, verse 17,
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Paul says, therefore, if you see there's a lot of therefores, it's because Paul is continually building off of himself. Every time you see a therefore, and the reason
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I pause here is so that you can see where the biblical logic is built, and so he says, therefore, this
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I say and testify in the Lord that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walked in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their mind, alienated from the life of God.
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Walking is important to God. Therefore, he says, because you need to walk worthy and because you need to guard the spirit or guard the unity in the bond of peace, right?
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Verse three of chapter four, be diligent to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace because of these things, be imitators of God.
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Now, let's think about this because this is a huge deal.
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This is a bigger deal than maybe you've given it credit for in the past. It's such a big deal.
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In fact, that Martin Lloyd Jones, when he began his commentary on this very passage, he began by saying this, here is this new chapter that we come to, and it is perhaps what is
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Paul's most supreme argument. Wow. Have you thought about this as his most supreme argument?
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Martin Lloyd Jones seems to think that it is. To the highest level, he continues, of all in doctrine and in practice, to the ultimate ideal, this is the highest statement of Christian doctrine that one can conceive of or even imagine.
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It really is staggering, he says. But here it is, be ye followers of God, the imitators of God.
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His translation translated this, of course, followers. And of course, to imitate someone is to follow them.
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But what he's saying here deserves our attention. This is a huge deal.
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It is the climax in many ways of Pauline theology, as Martin Lloyd Jones is drawing out here.
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It is the greatest ideal that a Christian can attain to. And why do you say that, pastor?
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Because to divorce theology from doctrine or doctrine from duty or duty from doctrine is to be an atheist.
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And so if your doctrine is not informing the way in which you walk, then as one preacher said just even last week as I was listening, your theology is aborted.
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It makes no difference. And so everything that Paul has been saying up to this point, everything in chapters one, two, and three about how
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God creates Christians before time began and eternity passed and how he brings that to fruition in the present and how he's going to glorify them in the future and how he has brought two people together in the church and all of this doctrine.
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And then ecclesiology, right? Because he has taken care of the church. All of this stuff is supposed to flood our head so that it might flood our hearts so that we might put our hands to work for God faithfully and to walk worthy.
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And we do that by imitating God. It's a high calling.
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And in many ways, it's an impossible calling. But it's one that we must give attention to and it's one we must pursue and we must do so with fervor.
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Now this word imitate, this word imitate here is used in classical literature and antiquity to mean something like imitator or copier, an imitator or a copier.
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It's often used as someone who impersonates. It's used of actors, even people who pretend to be other people.
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So the idea here is Paul is wanting the Ephesian church to live as if they had
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God's brain, as if they had God's heart, and as if they had God's hands.
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Now that's interesting. And we must understand that Christians, according to the word of God, have the mind of Christ.
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And so that's not too much of a stretch to say. But we're to be like God.
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In fact, the word godliness really means God -likeness. To be godly is to be like God.
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Now at this point, we must pause and we must pause because we're going to bump into some weird things if we're not careful.
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When you open up a systematic theology book, you will oftentimes come across two words that are similar but mean two different and opposing things, communicable and incommunicable.
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Communicable and incommunicable. And these are used when the systematic theology is talking about attributes, what makes
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God God, who he is. And there are communicable attributes and there are incommunicable attributes.
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And really what that's meaning is that there are some attributes of God, things that make
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God God, that are belonging to God alone. And then there are other things that we possess as image bearers of God and we can, in fact, as we're being renewed by the
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Spirit, employ those things. And even people who are not regenerate still bear the marks of some of these things.
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A prime example of that is justice. Justice. That is all over the place on human beings' hearts.
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All you have to do is flip on the TV for five seconds. That's what the unbelieving world uses to promote and move forward the movement of the
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LGBTQ plus cause. It's what people talk about when they burnt the cities to the ground, when the
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Black Lives Matter protests were going on. The reality is they loved, believed in, and sensed that justice needs to be had because they're made in the image of God and yet they pervert it because of their sin.
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So those are what we would call communicable attributes, but the incommunicable attributes are things like omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence.
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God knows all, is everywhere at all times, and he is all -powerful.
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We don't get any of that. We're very weak, we don't know much, and we're certainly bound to one place at one time.
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Don't we wish that weren't the case though? But we are to be like God, not in the ways in which he displays his incommunicable attributes, but the ways in which he displays his communicable attributes like love, compassion, these sorts of things.
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So when we are to imitate God, we are to act the way that God acts, think the way
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God thinks, as it pertains to how we can act, think, and do.
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Another way that this word is used in antiquity is mimic. So I'm not teaching that you can become
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God or that you can display God's attributes in a way that would make you
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God -like. What I'm trying to say is that we see God do these things as it is presented in scripture and then we live out of that because we are both made in the image of God, reflecting his character and nature to the world, and we are also endowed with the
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Holy Spirit of promise who is chiseling and molding us into the image over time.
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We are to carefully and intentionally copy our God. In other words, the pattern of our life ought to be
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God -like. It's not to be Mike -like, to bring the illustration back.
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It's not to be Trump -like. It's not to be Biden -like. It's not to be anyone -like.
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It's to be God -like. So you must imitate
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God. You understand? And that is your goal in this life,
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Christian, is to look more and more and more and more like Yahweh.
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That's what Paul is getting at, and he's speaking to the Ephesians after telling them how to act and how to behave, after giving them all of these kind of to -do lists, right?
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If you look back, they are to speak truth to one another. They are to be angry at unrighteous anger and their sin.
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They are to not steal. They are to be wholesome in the way in which that they speak and build one another up.
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They are not to grieve the Holy Spirit and give themselves over to bitterness and wrath and shouting and slander, but they are to be kind and tenderhearted and graciously forgiving like God is in Christ.
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Therefore, because you have been forgiven and because you have this body and because you need to guard the unity of the
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Spirit and the bond of peace and because you must walk worthy, be imitators of God.
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In some ways, it's a summary of what he's saying and a summary of what's to follow.
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Be like God. This command is clear. It couldn't need any more explanation or exposition than that.
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Be like God, Paul is saying. But the follow -up question that you should be asking if you haven't already been asking is okay, well, how do
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I do that? What does that look like? How do I imitate
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God and what does it look to imitate God? That's a good question because Paul is going to answer that question and he's going to answer that question by addressing us as creatures.
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So how, in other words, does a finite sinful creature imitate an infinite and holy creator
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God, Yahweh, as beloved children?
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Look with me again in our verse here, verse 1 in chapter 5, he says, therefore, be imitators of God as beloved children, as beloved children.
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Now this changes everything because it's not just saying that you need to be like God because God is awesome and you need to be awesome.
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It's not saying that, hey, there's this leader of this organization or this church or whatever the case may be, and he is reigning and ruling over you and therefore be like him.
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Because as other religions would say, if you act like God, you will become a
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God and you will then be God. But no, this is saying something entirely different.
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It's saying you need to imitate God because he's your father and because he loves you and because you want to look like dad.
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That's what it's saying. Now, of course, we want to be reverent in the way that we say dad, but I'm trying to get you to wrap your mind around a concept here.
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Right? The motivation, in other words, for imitating God is not one of legalism.
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It's not one of rule following. It's not, you don't measure up, so imitate God. No, imitate
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God as a beloved child of God.
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It's not about obligations. It's about adoption. And here,
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Paul is just dropping a hand grenade. He's saying, hey,
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I know I've been talking a lot about some certain types of doctrine, but let me drop this in your lap again. I know it's been a few chapters since I've talked about it.
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Boom, doctrine of adoption. I want you to think about how you're a child of God, Paul is saying.
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I've been talking a lot about what you need to do and what you shouldn't do and what you should do and what your heart looks like if you don't do these things.
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But here's what I want you to hear. I don't want you to hear, do this, do this, do this because you have to and because God is going to crush you if you don't.
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It's because you're loved. It's because you're a child of God.
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And this is mind -blowing because it's not as though Paul is saying to the Ephesian church and now us by extension that they can become
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God's children through any sort of effort that they might put forward, but rather he's calling them to live as those who have been graced, as those who have been adopted into the family of God and whom he calls his very own.
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It changes everything. He's telling them to operate in the church in what way?
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In a way where they're operating out of something, namely their new identity in Christ as opposed to working toward something, they're working out of a reality.
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They're not trying to attain one. Do you think like that?
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When you're looking to walk worthy, when you're looking to be a Christian who loves
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Jesus and is marked by him and lives in community with others and you are trying to be like God to them, are you doing it because you have to or because as God's child, you get to look like that to other people, for other people?
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That's mind -blowing. Now I want to pause here and I want you to consider this word beloved or beloved or however you say it.
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This word beloved here, it is a special word. It means to be deeply and dearly loved.
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This word is actually very important because it particularly refers to, in its original context, an only child to whom the parents had devoted all of their love.
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It was a particular object of affection. For instance, like in the
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Roman Empire, it might even be the oldest son who would inherit everything. As a matter of fact, that is oftentimes what
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Paul is referring to. Because in Christ, we all get the inheritance and it's as if, and I want you to hear me on this, it's as if we are the only ones that God loves.
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Now that's not true. He loves all of his children equally, but because he's
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God, the object of his affections are loved as if they were of the only son.
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And you can even back up and pour this into the reality of why that is in Christology.
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Because when he looks at each one of you, he doesn't just see you. He sees the perfect and finished work of his dear son,
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Jesus Christ the righteous. He doesn't see some screw -up.
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He sees Jesus. Now you're not Jesus, and it's his blood that covers you. But because of Jesus, he can lavish his loving affection on us.
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The same word, in fact, is used in Matthew chapter three, verse 17, when Jesus is called the beloved son.
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It says this, God says, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.
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What I'm getting at here is the love that the father has for Christ is the same love that he has for us in Christ.
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Do you have that wrapped around your heart? The same love that God has for Christ, he has for us in Christ because we are in him.
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We are hidden in him. This is the language that the Bible continually uses all over the place.
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What a beautiful, beautiful reality. This is why in Romans chapter eight, verse 14, it says, for as many as are being led by the spirit of God, these are sons of God.
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For you have not received the spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry out, what?
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Abba, father. Abba, father. The spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are, in fact, children of God.
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And if children, also heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.
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Heritage, you must realize, you must realize that God's ability to extend his love to each one of his children is so vast, so beautiful, so God -like, it's as if he were loving each of you as his only child who would receive all of it.
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So you are to be imitators, you're to copy, you're to imitate God as a child, an only child who is loved by their father with great affection, imitates and follows his father.
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That's what he's saying here. That's what he's saying. Children, if you look at me, I want to help you understand what
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I'm saying if it's unclear. Now, for the girls, it's a little bit differently, but the boys especially, you guys, you want to be like dad, right?
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Oftentimes, you want to dress like him, you want to wear his clothes when he's not around, try on his shoes, you want to do the things he does that he likes to do, right?
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That's what Paul is saying here. We need to be like that, like a young boy who wants to be like his dad.
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And that's a good thing that you want to be like your dad. Your dad should be modeling God to you. And that's why so many people have, and now
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I'm going to transition to the adults here because I'm going to use a bigger word. Many of us have the same idiosyncrasies that our fathers had, for good and for ill, right?
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Because we, whether we want to or not, absorb the things of our father. So in many ways, Paul is saying that, yeah, try to be like him, but also just absorb.
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Like the more you saturate your mind in scripture, the more you get to know God, the more you're going to look like God because we become what we worship.
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We copy by nature. That's just the way of it.
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Now, growing up as a young boy, I did not have a father, and so I was always looking for someone to imitate.
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I was always looking for someone to be like, because I did not know how to navigate the world on my own.
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And I wish that someone had given me a Bible and said, here you go. There is this man, Jesus Christ, whom you can follow.
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He is the perfect example of who to be. And you need to imitate, not anybody around you, but you need to imitate
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God. You need to imitate God. Now, imitating is something that we do because we are made to worship.
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The question is, who are you imitating and what would your conduct reveal in that regard?
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I mean, think about that. It should be evident in your conduct who you imitate.
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Do you imitate the world? Do you care about what it values?
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Are you anxious the way they're anxious? Do you prize and prioritize the things that they do?
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Or does your conduct reveal your God -likeness? Our priorities, our speech, our attitudes, our actions, all of these things should reflect our
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God, because we are to imitate him as beloved children.
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That's the first thing. That's the first thing. The first thing is that we are to imitate
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God. The second thing that I want you to see, and this is my second point, which is really the second command, which is to walk in love.
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Walk in love. So we are, as Christians, the Ephesian church, primarily us by extension, because it's speaking of course with the universal church, with particularities toward the local church.
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We are, much like the Ephesians, are to imitate God and we are to walk in love.
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Now, of course, we define this walk as conduct and pattern of life. So when he's saying to walk in love, he's saying be loving.
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Like that's how you should live your life. That shouldn't be something that you display sometimes. It should be who you are.
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And in many ways, he's answering the question of how you imitate God. You imitate
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God by walking in love. By being loving.
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Because God is, according to 1 John chapter 4, what? Love. He is love.
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And how could we not be loving if our God is love? He gives it its very definition.
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There would be no love apart from God because God is love, which is one of the reasons we know that when people talk about love is love and all of these other things in the culture that they have no idea what they're talking about because they're jumping inside the
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Christian worldview car and then they're running it into a tree. And they're redefining definitions that they were never allowed to define.
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Because God is love. He doesn't possess love. He's not attaining to love. He is love.
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And if we are to imitate God, we need to imitate the type of love that he is.
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Because that's the only kind of love. So be loving.
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This is not a one -time deal. This is a lifelong walk. It's not walking to the car.
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It's however long your legs work. That's the deal. One step at a time to be sure.
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One decision at a time to be sure. One day at a time to be sure. But you must walk in love.
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You must be loving. And there are many ways that the
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Bible talks about being loving. And I want to tease a few of those out, but really we're going to focus on one because that's the point.
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If you get this first one right, all of the others seemingly fall in place.
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However, if you mess that up, you mess everything up. But this governing concept of love is littered throughout the entire
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Bible. The first one is, the Bible tells us that we are to love sacrificially. Christ's love was costly, it was sacrificial in nature, and really that's where we will wind up spending a majority of our time.
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He gave himself entirely to us and for us. That was the way he loved.
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That's the way he loved. As we will see here momentarily, he gave himself up for us, it says.
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Ephesians 5, 25, a little bit later, this is encapsulated, when he says to husbands that you are to love your wife as Jesus Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her.
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How did he give himself up for her? How did he love her? By sacrificially giving of himself everything that he is.
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The Bible says that we are to love unconditionally. By that I don't mean, well it doesn't matter what
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I don't mean, what I do mean is that Christ did not love us according to the Bible because we were worthy, but because he chose to love us.
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So when you love, you're to love not based on what you experience from other people, you're to love even when it's undeserved.
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Because you never deserved love, not one day of this entire life.
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You deserved quite the opposite. This is why in Romans chapter 5 verse 8,
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Paul says, but God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
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So it was while we were sinners, while we were in rebellion against God, that Christ died for us.
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We're to love patiently. 2 Peter 3 .9 says the Lord is not slow about his promise as some consider slowness, but is patient toward you, not willing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance.
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Christ bears with our weaknesses and does not grow weary in loving us. He shows us long suffering and he does so especially toward difficult people.
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And who are the difficult people? You. You. Me. We.
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All of us. Very difficult. And if you don't think so, you're not reading your Bible close enough and you're not listening to your spouse enough.
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That is the reality of the situation. You're to love gently. You're to love truthfully, right?
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We've already been over that. We're to speak truth and love to one another. And he'll go on and repeat this in Ephesians 4 .15,
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but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into him who is the head, that is
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Christ. We're to love humbly, we're to love generously, right?
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We're to give out of the recesses of ourselves, of our times, talents, and treasures.
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True love, in other words, according to the Bible, does not hold back, but freely gives.
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The idea here is that love ought to cost you something. It ought to cost you something.
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2 Corinthians 9 .7, each one must do just as he has purposed in his heart, not begrudgingly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
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You're to love faithfully. You're to love prayerfully, right? Love prays, love pleads.
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Matthew 5 .44, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Jesus says, you're to love also evangelistically, right?
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Christ loved by calling sinners to salvation. He came to seek and to save the lost.
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And when you truly love someone, you want them to know who God is and you want them to imitate him.
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And so love is evangelistic. That's the reality of the situation.
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You can think about Matthew 28, that's the command that he gave to go get the nations. This is why
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Charles Spurgeon said, if people be damned, then they should at least leap over our diving bodies to get to hell, because love is evangelistic.
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Love in other words, is others focused.
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It seeks their good above our own. And I can't help but bring this up.
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Every time something like this comes up, because it's so prevalent, not just in our culture, but in our churches.
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And I know that because every time I post a quote about it, or every time I put a sermon online, it generally doesn't come from people in this church.
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So in some ways I'm preaching to the choir, but in case you're visiting, or in case you need a reminder, self -love is a cancer that will destroy every relationship that you ever find yourself in.
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And you say, oh, well, pastor, I can't pour out what I haven't filled up. What are you talking about?
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And what Bible verse did you get that from? The Bible seems to suggest implicitly, if not explicitly, that the way in which you are to live is by depleting yourself for others.
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That is filling yourself up. I can't, I just can't, no, it's just because you're not doing it.
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You're thinking about yourself too much, you're self -obsessed, and you're not loving. That's the reality of it. Self -love never helped any relationship.
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Self -care never helped any relationship. It only damns them to hell. That's what it does. Loving people is other people focused to the point of even death.
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That's why Jesus says, there's no greater love than this, than he who lays down his life for his friend. What fool would say such a thing if that weren't true?
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If there is no heaven, if there is no God, if there is no Christ, to die for someone else would be the most moronic thing you could do.
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You would give up the only breath that you have. But if you reject self -love and you adopt biblical love, you can give your life away for the sake of your brothers.
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In fact, that's what you're called to do, whether you take a bullet or whether you go to war or whether you, whatever. You're called to live bleeding.
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That's just the way it is. That's what love looks like. Well, how do you know that?
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Because Paul goes on, he doesn't stop. Paul does not stop there. He goes on, therefore, verse one, be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love just as, okay, now we have an example.
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This is like that, right? You're to love others how? Just as Christ also loved us and did what?
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Gave himself up for us. An offering and a sacrifice to God.
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That's a fragrant aroma. So I want you to take this piece right here and focus on it for a second. Just as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us.
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Now, I want you to circle a few things if you're that type of person, or at least circle them in your mind. Look at how many times it says us in there.
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Now we're going to get to this. Christ dying on the cross in a loving, sacrificial way is for the glory and the pleasing of almighty
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God. But don't be so reformed that you miss the truth that Jesus died for you, that Jesus loves you, that God in Christ loves you, you specifically, not you corporately, you very specifically, and us very corporately, even as small as a local body.
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He loved us and he gave himself up for us. He didn't give himself up so that we might have a chance at forgiveness, or that we might have a chance of him giving himself up for us if we so adopt his gracious yet rejectable invitation.
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Your name was written in the Lamb's book of life before the foundation of the world.
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And when he hung on the cross, giving himself, and that's what it means to give yourself, right? It's speaking here of the cross.
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He took your name to Golgotha and died with your name on his mind and in his heart.
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You, you're not running from that, you're not rejecting that. He gave himself for you, and nobody gives themselves for the possibility of people living.
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That's foolish. You give yourself over in hopes as people that people would be saved, but as God, when you're omniscient, omnipresent, you make these things happen.
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So here you need to understand is that Christ's love is not sentimental, it's not shallow, it's sacrificial, it's other focused.
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Many people agree that this word used here, agape, is the highest form of love. Many commentators will say it's unconditional, selfless, and actively seeking the good of another at any cost, even and up to a check written that the debt is their own life.
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There's some interesting things to think about as it pertains to syntax and words and vocabulary and these sorts of things.
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But regardless of whether or not you take agape to be this higher form of love, or if it's just another word for love that has different nuance, or whatever the case may be, know this,
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Christian, that regardless of however you parse that out, no matter how nerdy you want to get, it is true that God's form of love is the highest form of love because he is love and he is perfect and you will never experience love the likes of which
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God has pointed at you, especially in Christ as he has given himself for you.
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This is why, for instance, Jesus can say in John chapter 13, verse 34, when he says, A new commandment
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I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
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Now, this is very interesting because loving one another is not a new commandment. So what in the world is
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Jesus talking about here? Paul is saying here in Ephesians 5, chapter 2, that we are to love as Christ loved.
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And here he's saying, by the way, I've got a new commandment, that you love one another.
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But that's not the new commandment. The new commandment is the second part, as I have loved you. Now there's this person,
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God -man, who has skin on, who has demonstrated and will demonstrate all the way up to Golgotha's hill, where his blood will be dripping from him as he will be filleted by the wrath of almighty
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God in the hands of the prisoners. And he says here, that's the way you ought to love.
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And he goes on to say later on to his disciples, you know how the world will know that you are actually a disciple of mine?
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As you love one another. You see, we get that twisted, especially as reformed people, because we think the world will know that we are of Christ, because why?
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We have really good Twitter arguments about this theological topic, right? Because we're always right, right?
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Because our preachers yell, I don't know, right? Because we have confessions because we, and I mean, we can keep going down the line, right?
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But Jesus never made any of those arguments. And I should humble every single person in these pews and anyone who steps behind this pulpit, especially myself,
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Jesus will make his presence known and his people's lives by the way in which they love one another.
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That is the apologetic to the world. Yeah. But I read
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Greg Bonson last week and I'm really hyped up on this idea that in the beginning of, of, of wisdom and knowledge is the fear of God.
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And so we must make sure that people fear God before they can eat. You know what? Okay, cool. There's really good stuff that Bonson puts out.
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There's really good stuff that apologia puts out in terms of apologetics. But you know what? At the end of the day,
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Jesus says not the best argument. Best argument is the way you love the brethren, the way that you love one another, the way that you model
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Christ in your life, imitating God, loving one another. And if you don't nail that, who cares what you do on the street corners?
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Because it means absolutely nothing. Well, that's not going to be used on apology or radio this week, but it's true.
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It's true. It's true. Love, love, love, love, love.
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That is what should exude from us. Not anger, not bitterness, not malice, not all of these other things that have already been talked about.
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Love. And we are to do it just as Christ did.
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John 3 .16, just in case you think I was lying, by this we have known love that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.
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And the reality is you cannot love, hear me on this, you cannot love if you are self -obsessed.
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So get rid of you, look to God, imitate him, let his spirit fill you, look to Christ on the cross, and love.
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Be obsessed with God. Be obsessed with God.
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Here recently I've decided to pick up a book by John Piper that's kind of a devotional called Pierced by the
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Word just to kind of, at the end of the night, just shove some Piper down my throat because it's sweet to the taste in many ways.
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And if you don't like that, I hate that for you. But he used this word that I don't encounter very often, and actually in this moment can't even remember what that word is,
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I think it's bespotted or something like that. And I had to look it up, it's been a long time since I had to look up a word, and I was like, man,
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Piper's getting me right now, what does this mean? I mean, in context, using context clues, you guys, you kids get it, you know, context clues help a lot.
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I got it, but I wanted to know the etymology and I wanted to know what was going on. And so I look at it, and the idea here is to be drunk, or to be excessively filled with, and he used it speaking about God, and he said that that's how
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Jonathan Edward was, so that's what he wants to fill his mind with, Jonathan Edwards, because he essentially is drunk on God.
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And I was like, ah, that makes sense, that's a very John Piper -esque thing to do, you know, with his whole hedonism thing and whatnot.
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But it got me thinking, and I'm thinking about this text, and I'm thinking about being imitators of God, and I'm like, no, that's like a perfect word.
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Like be so obsessed with, and quote -unquote drunk on, who
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God is, and it will work itself out through you, and you gotta do that by gazing at, looking at the beauty of Christ on the cross.
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That's the point. That's what he says. He loved us and gave himself up for us as an offering and a sacrifice to God.
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How did God in Christ love us? How did Christ love us? He gave himself up for us by being a sacrifice, by being a sacrifice and an offering for sin.
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And this is all over the Bible, John 3 .16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.
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First John 4 .10, and this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation of our sins.
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Romans 5 .8, but God demonstrates his own love toward us that while, in that while we were yet sinners,
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Christ died for us. In Galatians chapter two, verse 20, Paul says, I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer
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I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the
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Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me. See all over the place, the
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Bible is riddled with the motivator behind all of these things being the love of Christ demonstrated in him giving himself up as what a sacrifice and an offering.
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In other words, the greatest expression of love is not in that it gives things, not even that it believes things all the time, or that it gives up things.
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If I love you so much, I won't do that anymore. No, it's about giving your life away.
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That's what it looks like. It's about bleeding for other people, not expecting anything else in return.
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That is what our Lord Jesus did. Now, of course, that conjures up all kinds of imagery, right?
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When they use the word offering, it refers to a lot of the Old Testament in the way in which it pointed to Christ.
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Over and over in the Old Testament, the Levites and other people would put, priests would put offerings, they would be burnt.
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Sometimes it was grain, sometimes it was animals, and here's what happened. They died. They were burnt to death or slaughtered beforehand.
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And then, and so what he's saying is Jesus was like that. See, we don't think like the people who read the
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Bible initially, oftentimes, we have to be reminded of what the Bible says, but they would have known when
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Jesus was an offering, he was like that offering on the Old Testament that was put on that altar and was engulfed in flames, was killed.
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So in other words, how do you imitate God? By loving. And how do you love? Love like Christ. And how did
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Christ love? By dying. He gave himself up.
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And of course, the sacrifice here is speaking specifically of blood atonement. In our place, friends, in our place,
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Jesus gave himself up. Do you get that?
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You, I don't want to be too strong about this because a lot of people have things to say about it on the internet, I got too loud last time, but you, you, you needed forgiven and you needed a sacrifice.
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Your sins had to be atoned for and you couldn't do it. You could not do it.
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And so the God man put on flesh, came to this earth, he lived the perfect life that you were supposed to live and he died the death that you deserve to die.
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And he did what Martin Luther called the great exchange. He was treated like a sinner and he absorbed the wrath of God and he died a brutal death so that what?
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You could be treated as a son, as a daughter, as a child of God.
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Does that throw you to the floor? If not, let me help you. John Flavel, this comes from one of his most famous sermons.
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And I bet a few of you have heard this before, but it is underneath the umbrella of what is called the father's bargain.
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And what John Flavel did here is he kind of dramatized the covenant of redemption where Jesus promised to give himself for his people.
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And so what he does here is he starts off and the father begins to speak and the father says this, my son, here is a company of poor, miserable souls that have utterly undone themselves.
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And now I open to my justice, justice demands satisfaction for them or will satisfy itself in the eternal ruin of them.
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Right? What he's getting at here is that his wrath burns with anger and it has to, if he is to be a just God, find it's outworking on something.
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He must get satisfaction. And he asks, what shall be done for these souls? They're doomed.
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The son replies, oh, my father, such is my love to and pity for them that rather than they shall perish eternally,
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I will be responsible for them as their surety. Bring in all thy bills that I may see what they owe thee,
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Lord. Bring them all in that there may be no after reckonings with them.
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At my hand shalt I require it. I will rather choose to suffer thy wrath than they should suffer it.
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Upon me, my father, upon me be all their debt. Father replies, but my son, if thou undertake for them, thou must reckon to pay the last might.
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Expect no abatements. If I spare them, I will not spare thee.
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The son replies, content father. Let it be so.
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Charge it all upon me. I am able to discharge it. And though it prove a kind of undoing to me, though it impoverish all my riches, empty all my treasure, yet I am content to undertake it.
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Jesus paid it all for you. And it says in Acts, as Peter preached his sermon, that it pleased the
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Lord to crush him. And the follow up to that is found in Hebrews that says, for the joy that was set before him,
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Jesus endured this cross because he loved you and he was willing to take upon your debt.
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That's love. That's love. If Jesus was afforded no self -help, no self -love, and no self -care, take it not strange,
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Christian, when you are asked to do likewise, do you see the love that Christ gave?
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Do you? Let me ask you this question.
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If you get that, how can you live unloving? Christian, how can you be selfish when the only reason that you can suck air in right now is because the
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Lord Jesus was bludgeoned to death and absorbed the wrath of God on your behalf?
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The only reason you can have your spiritual eyeballs open to him is because he purchased that reality for you.
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How can you not want to imitate this God? How could you not want to be like this Christ? How could you not fall down and worship?
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Christ did not just give us things. He didn't give up things.
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He gave himself. And this was no accident, friends.
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Both the priest and the lamb in the Old Testament to which this points, those were very purposeful.
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And in the same way, his death was very purposeful. And it wasn't martyrdom.
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He didn't suffer some sort of, you know, worldly beating so that he could live on as an example.
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No, it was a divine exchange. Something happened. And what happened there was his love accomplished for you eternal life.
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The canceling of your debt, the justification of your sin, and the promotion of your eventual glorification.
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This is why in 2 Corinthians 5, verse 21, it says that he, that is God the Father, made him, that is
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Jesus, who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
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And this type of love is not only right, but it's pleasing to God.
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Look with me at the end of our theme verses here. Verse 1 begins, therefore, he be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love just as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us.
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An offering and a sacrifice to God as what? A fragrant aroma, a fragrant.
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Here Paul is wrapping this up in a bow. And what he's doing is he's showing us the end to which this thing points.
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Everything is all about pleasing God. It's all about pleasing
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God. He concludes here by saying that Christ's sacrifice was a fragrant aroma.
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Some translations translate this sweet aroma. What's happening here is it's using
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Old Testament language once again, which was used with offering and sacrifice pointing to Old Testament realities that all pointed to the finished work of Jesus Christ.
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And he's doing it again. And he's doing it again, helping them understand that it was very pleasing to God.
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Oftentimes the Old Testament would talk about how the smells of those offerings would rise to the nostrils of God.
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Oftentimes when that's brought up in the Old Testament, it's usually part of a rebuke. Ah, it stinks to me.
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In other words, but unlike the imperfect offerings that Israel gave,
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Christ's sacrifice was perfectly acceptable and eternally sufficient for you.
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This love is a love that is not going to go away. It is a love that exists forever.
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And that is good news, right? Like in Flavel's thing, I will be their surety, not their maybes.
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I will be their surety. And so what's saying here, this sweet smelling savor, you can tell
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I've been reading some John Piper, savor, sweet savor rises to God's nostrils, and he fully accepts the work of Christ on behalf of his people.
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And we know that because of the resurrection, and we know that because that's what the
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Word of God says right here, right now, that when God loved us in this way, it pleased him.
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That's a good deal. Christ willingly gave himself to be offered, and he did it to be a pleasing aroma to God.
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So who did Christ ultimately die for? God. But he, or who did
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Christ die for? God. To please him, that he might be exalted and have every name above every other name, but he did it with joy and with love, looking to you.
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But it pleased God when he did this, and that was what Jesus was ultimately after.
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But in the same way, and this is Paul's argument, we as believers should walk in this loving type of way, seeking to imitate and to please
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God, and to love in ways that are sacrificial. Bleeding out, in other words, so that we may be a pleasing aroma, not only to God, which is our first and foremost objective, but fellow believers.
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I find it most curious, in 2 Corinthians 2, verse 14, it says this, But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ, and manifests through us the aroma of the knowledge of him in every place.
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So we're to carry about the aroma of Christ everywhere we go, right?
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For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved, and listen to this, and among those who are perishing, to the one an aroma from death to death, and to the other an aroma from life to life, and who is sufficient for these things.
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Paul is saying, look, you're going to be an aroma one way or the other. You're either going to be a good and a sweet aroma that's pleasing to God, who loves sacrificially one another, and people see that and witness that, or you're going to stink, you're going to smell.
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You don't want to smell love like Jesus. And you can, because your children imitating your father, empowered by the
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Spirit. And so what do we take away from this? What kind of love is love?
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It's costly. It's costly. Costly love pleases
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God. Children, one more time, I got something for you. How many of you have smelled either your dad's cologne or your mom's perfume, or both, right?
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Probably all of you. Probably all of you. Well, you usually get a whiff of it and go, oh man, okay, all right.
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Maybe they're walking out of the bathroom, maybe it stinks, maybe you don't like that smell. I bet some of you guys don't like the smell.
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I see some faces, but some of you like the smell. That's what's going on in this text here.
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It's saying that our lives are like that perfume, or they should be like perfume.
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They are already like perfume or cologne, but the question is, does it smell good or does it smell bad?
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Like when we go places, do people smell Jesus or do people smell Satan?
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Because Jesus says in the gospel, we are either of our father, God, or we are of our father, the devil.
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So we either smell like our family, like Christians, or we smell like our family, non -Christians.
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So love, love when it's costly, love when sinners are sinners, and do it all the time, everywhere you.
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So what is this text teaching? Very simply, the imitators of God will walk in love, and walking in love means following Christ's example of selfless, sacrificial bleeding for everyone whose name was written.
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The world will tell you to live for everything else but other people.
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It will tell you to live for yourself, to prize your comfort, to chase your dreams.
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It will tell you to prize and prioritize and to live for your career, or your job, or for your marriage, or even for your children.
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It will tell you to live, but it's everybody you come into contact with, especially in light of the context, the local church, which is higher than any family.
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The bond here is one that is made by the spirit, which is stronger than any blood. This is why
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Jesus says, for example, who is my brother and sister?
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He asked this question, right? It's he who follows the
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Lord Jesus. It's he who follows the Lord Jesus. So if you're going to bleed for family, this is the family to bleed for.
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Now, men, bleed for your family family, like the ones that bear your last name, have your blood running through their arms and their legs, and so on and so forth.
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Do that. Mothers as well, okay? I'm not saying that in negation to that thing. What I'm saying is context here is the church, and it must rise to the top of your love.
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The word of God commands you to live for Christ, love like Christ, and walk as Christ walked.
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So how do you imitate God? You exalt Christ in your heart, and you live and love like him.
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Amen? Amen. All right. That's all I got. Pray with me. Father, we thank you.
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We thank you for this text. We thank you that you have helped us to understand it, and we ask that you would help us to understand it more and more and more and more as the days, weeks, months, years go on, that you would impress upon us the loving nature of both
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Christ's person and his work, and that you would help us to live and love out of those realities.
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Lord, help us to be people who imitate you. We ask this in Jesus' name, in the power of his spirit.