Walking in Love
Ephesians 5:1-2
“Walking in Love”
I was in grades four through eight from 1970 through 1975. During those years my father was a professor of music at Cedarville College (now Cedarville University) in southwestern Ohio. We lived in a little town call South Charleston about eleven miles from Cedarville but, more importantly, about sixty or seventy miles from Cincinnati. If you lived only sixty or seventy miles from Cincinnati in the early 1070s, you were a Reds fan. I was a Reds fan. If they played on TV, and that didn’t happen much back then, I was in front of the TV. But their games were always broadcast on radio—WLW in Cincinnati, the 50,000-watt clear-channel voice of the Cincinnati Reds; 700 or your AM dial. If the Reds were playing at home, or anywhere in the east, that meant I might actually be able to listen to the whole game before I had to go to bed—or at least before I had to go to sleep! If they were playing on the west coast, I had to figure out ways to stay awake while lying in bed in a cool, dark room until 10:00 or even 10:30 until the game started! And on a few occasions—but only a very few—I actually made it through an entire west coast game—lying awake at 1:00 or 1:30 in the morning, listening to Al Michaels and Joe Nuxhall narrate a baseball game!
Why did I do it? I loved baseball, and I particularly loved the Reds. I imitated the Reds. I knew their whole line-up, complete with batting averages and fielding percentages. When my friends and I were playing home-run derby waffle ball, I was always the Reds. I would move through their line-up batting right-handed or left-handed depending on the hitter, and I imitated not only their batting stance and swing, but all of their little nervous habits in the batter’s box.
Now, all my friends loved the Reds too, but I got to be the Reds by letting them choose to be any other team in the NL, and I could usually recite that team’s line-up as well just from having listened to the radio. Every once in a while one of them would insist on being the Reds, so I’d actually assume a different team name, usually the Dodgers, then I’d proceed to lose on purpose, but only by a run or two!
Why do we do such things? I’m not that unusual; what I did with baseball others do with other sports, or trinkets, or cars or money. I know people who can’t enjoy a delicious dish at dinner until they’ve deciphered the recipe—they love cooking! Why do we do such things? We are creatures of worship, and we worship what we love. We can see that in the very first commandment. When God wrote in stone: You shall have no other gods before me, He wasn’t validating the existence of other gods that we might place before him. Rather, He was identifying and properly directing our inclination toward worship, and our propensity to create our own gods to satisfy that inclination.
But we will worship something—that is our nature; we can’t help ourselves. You may as well ask a fish to live out of the water as to ask a person not to worship. And the object of our worship is determined by whatever we love the most. During the early 1970s, I’m not sure if there was anything I loved more than baseball. But if there was, it was football. You could tell by how I spent my time, how I dressed, what I listened to, and how I behaved—how I lived! I made sacrificial decisions in favor of baseball—on blistering hot summer days all the kids would go to the swimming pool; so would I, unless there was a baseball game to be played or watched. That was my identity.
We’ve been talking in recent weeks about identity—about the new self that we have in Christ—about putting on that new and putting off the old. As we open c.5 of Ephesians this morning, we’re moving into the summary statement of the paragraph we’ve been looking at for the past two weeks. Don’t let the chapter break fool you; the thought continues from 4:32 right into 5:1. In fact, a better place for a chapter break might have been before vs.3, but that’s not for us to debate this morning. In order for us to get the point of Paul’s summary instruction in Eph.5:1-2 regarding putting off the old self and putting on the new, let’s ask the text three questions.
Where should our attention be primarily directed? – 1
This opening sentence of c.5, then, serves as the closing sentence of the paragraph that ended c.4. And the transitional therefore, with the repetition of be or become—be imitators—draws out the consequences of the whole paragraph. That is to say, Paul is calling his readers to imitate God by showing the same kind and tenderhearted forgiveness that God has shown them in Christ.
This theme of imitation appears rather often in Paul’s letters. More than once he calls people to imitate him as he imitates Christ. In 1Co.4:16, Paul was scolding the Corinthians and urged them to imitate him in Christ, and he sent Timothy to them to facilitate the process! Later on, in ch.10:31-11:1 he again told the Corinthians to imitate him as he imitated Christ. Phi.3:17 words a similar challenge to that church. And 1Th.1:6 actually equates imitating Paul with imitating Christ. In 2:14 of that same letter Paul makes mention of the fact that the Thessalonians were also imitators of the Judean churches in their sufferings. Finally, 2Th.3:7,9 Paul makes imitation of his diligence an ought for the Thessalonians. Can you imagine being able to make that statement? If you want to know what it means to be a true Christian, a diligent Christian, just imitate me! What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you (Phi.4:9)!
Eph.5:1, however, is the only place where Paul explicitly states that believers should imitate God; but the calling is essentially the same. And don’t oversell the idea that this imitation is like a child imitating his parents. That idea may be present—and it conjures up great illustrations—but it is also the case, and likely the primary point, that Paul is saying: Since you’re his beloved children—since he’s adopted you into his family—you ought to be imitators of him. This therefore, then, is similar to the one in Rom.12:1: In view of God’s mercies, present your bodies as a living sacrifice—our reasonable response. It is the same word as appears at the opening of Col.3:12: As God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with the virtues of Christ. It is not payback; it is grateful response. It is worship! As we seek to put off the old self and put on the new, where should our attention be directed primarily? It should be directed at our heavenly Father whom we imitate—as an expression of obedience.
What should our obedience look like? – 2
Imitating God means we live the way Christ lived. And living like Christ means first and foremost that we live a life of love as He defined it by His own life. As one commentator put it: By living a life of love the readers will imitate God; yet that life of love is modeled on Christ’s love so signally demonstrated in the cross (O’Brien, 354). That is the ultimate picture of love.
Later on in this chapter we’ll read these words again: Love as Christ loved us, and gave himself up for us. This reappears in v.25 describing the husband’s love for the wife. We tend to think of that as a special variety of love, a love that is above and beyond that normal, daily, garden-variety sort of love. But that is not so. It is true that the role of husband places special demands on a man to represent Christ in some unique ways in his relationship with his wife. But love is love, regardless of whether it is expressed in the context of marriage or, as here, in the context of relationships within the body of Christ. There are variations within the expression of love, as a study of the love of God would demonstrate. His expression of love for His elect differs from His expression of love for all people demonstrated in the fact that He sends rain to water the crops of the godly and ungodly alike. Similarly a husband will express his love to his wife in ways that are distinctly different from the ways he expresses it to others in the body. But the Christian’s call to love is invariably a call to love as Christ loved—as a self-sacrificial, jealous guarding the best interest of the beloved in direct correlation to the nature of the relationship.
Thus, as the nature of the relationships within the body of Christ have been laid out and clarified through the first four chapters of this letter, believers are called here to love one another in precisely the way Jesus loved us—by giving Himself for us, enabling us to experience God’s absolute best for us. Living a life of love, then, is the primary way in which we are to be imitators of God. We walk in obedience to the greatest commandments: to love God with all our heart and soul and might, and love our neighbors as ourselves.
The way Paul worded his reference to the sacrifice of Christ seems to be drawing attention to the fact that it covered the gamut of what God required and also was thoroughly pleasing to Him. The OT sacrificial system could really be divided into three categories: expiatory offerings (atonement, to cover sin), consecratory offerings (for purification), and communal offerings (expressions of relationship). Jesus pleased God in all of these categories; that is the sense of a fragrant offering. The separation of offering and sacrifice suggests all kinds of sacrifices, grain and animal. And the reflexive pronoun, himself, stresses the fact that Jesus gave Himself up willingly. And one final thought on the fragrant offering: the only other place this appears in Paul’s letters is Phi.4:18 where he used it to describe the financial gift that the Philippians had sent him: a fragrant offering, an sacrifice acceptable and pleasing to God. Bruce (369) wrote: The fragrant odor of all the main types of sacrifice in the levitical ritual betokened their acceptance by God; in the NT the language, like the idea of sacrifice in its totality, is transferred to the spiritual and personal realm. It is used of the perfect self-offering of Christ and of his people’s dedication of themselves and their means. We give our resources to God, then, as wholly and unreservedly as we give ourselves, and the very next verse in Philippians is Paul’s assurance that God will not leave us in want; but rather he wrote (4:19): And my God will supply every need of your according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
Our imitation of God, then, our obedience, should be a lifestyle of love, walking in love, in such a way that the boundless love of Christ is put on display in us. It captivates and characterizes our whole lives. Love is our: ultimate goal (Mat.22:37), our primary motive (1Co.13:1-3), our defining characteristic (Col.3:12-14), our test of authenticity (1Jo.4:8), our moral obligation (1Jo.4:11), our most evident witness (Joh.13:35), and our most convincing witness (Joh.17:23-26). Love is one of the foundational assurances of our salvation (1Jo.3:19). It’s at least as important as sound doctrine (Rev.2:2-4). Love is both the ground (Joh.3:16) and the goal (1Jo.4:19) of the gospel—walk in love; walk in Christ!
How should we begin to move in this direction? – 4:25-32
Speak the truth to one another (25). In our anger, don’t sin; don’t give the devil a foothold (26-27). Don’t lazily and illicitly seek to meet our own needs, but labor hard to meet the needs of others (28). Speak wholesomely, gracefully at all times (29). Throw away bitterness, anger, and malice; don’t grieve the Holy Spirit who has sealed our deliverance from that way of life (30-31). Be kind, tenderhearted, and forgiving of one another, just as God has done for us in Christ (32). Be imitator of God!
Conclusion
As we seek to finish this thought today, let me ask all of us one question for personal reflection. Are you imitating God by walking in love as Christ did? Or, perhaps for more clarity let’s turn it around: When people see you, do you remind them of God? Every child plays that game with their parents: Mom, who am I?—then they proceed to imitate someone. If you were able to ask your family or close friends or neighbors: Who am I? Would anyone be inclined to say: Jesus! A Christian! A child of God!
When Wycliffe translator Doug Meland and his wife moved into a village of Brazil’s Fulnio Indians, he was referred to simply as “the white man” (Tan, 3201). The term was by no means complimentary, since other white men had exploited them, burned their homes, and robbed them of their lands. But after the Melands learned the Fulnio language and began to help the people with medicine and in other ways, they began calling Doug the respectable white man. When the Melands began adapting to the customs of the people, the Fulnio gave them greater acceptance and spoke of Doug as the white Indian. Then one day, as Doug was washing the filthy, bloodcaked foot of an injured Fulnio boy, he overheard a bystander say to another: Whoever heard of a white man washing an Indian’s foot before? Certainly this man is from God! From that day on, whenever Doug arrive at an Indian home it was announced: Here’s the man God sent us.
When people see you, do you remind them of God?