Be Imitators Of God

“Be imitators of God in everything you do,  for then you will represent your Father as his beloved sons and daughters. And continue to walk surrendered to the extravagant love of Christ, for he surrendered his life as a sacrifice for us. His great love for us was pleasing to God, like an aroma of adoration—a sweet healing fragrance.”                        Ephesians 5:1-2 TPT

As Oscar Wilde said, Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery mediocrity that can be paid to genius. In the case of Jesus Christ, He is the genius we imitate. Jesus stepped up His game when Philip asked, "Just show us the Father, then, Master,” said Philip to Jesus, “and that’ll be good enough for us!” “Have I been with you for such a long time, Philip,” replied Jesus, “and still you don’t know me? Anyone who has seen me has seen the father! How can you say, ‘Show us the father’”? John 14:8-9 NTFE

This response was unexpected from Jesus; He declared His divinity, and all of His cards were placed on the table for everyone to see. But we come back to the question of what it means to be an imitator of God. How do we imitate divinity? The answer is we don’t! Or better said, we can’t! We cannot even approach this concept, for God is holy and altogether different from who we are as humans; we are fallible by design, and God is not. The only way to be an imitator of God is for Him to live through us; this is not an imitation but a profound connection, an extension of God Himself.

Paul says that when we allow the Lord to live through us, we become His beloved sons and daughters and represent Him to others. As we share with other sons and daughters of God, we see Jesus manifested in amazing ways, scripture becomes enlightened, and we begin to demonstrate the gifts of our calling. When we meet together, He equips us with the ability to be pastors, teachers, prophets, and evangelists to build up the body of Christ.

It is truly amazing that God sees us and hears us in our weakness and in our inability to do anything to please Him through our flesh. He sees us through the lens of Christ, which brings us into clarity before God. He hears us with a heart of compassion and stretches out His arms to embrace us. He knew that the only way He could rule and reign on the earth was to do it Himself, with a family which where we're just like Him and reflect His presence to the world.

Paul affirms that Jesus's love for humanity was pleasing to God. The Father desired to dwell in a sacred space with His creation, so He established Eden within the heart of every son and daughter of God. Eden is no longer a physical place; it is a space within the heart of humanity where God resides through His spirit. We have now become God's dwelling place, in other words, we have become God's temple.

The love of Jesus for us is compared to the aroma of a sweet perfume which is pleasing to God. In 2 Corinthians 2:15 GNT, it says, "For we are like a sweet-smelling incense offered by Christ to God, which spreads among those who are being saved and those who are being lost." God takes great pleasure in the fact that the spirit of Christ Jesus resides deep within us, revealing the very nature of God within us, for God is love. When we express that love to others, the power and presence of Jesus Christ is revealed in us and through us.

The passage above not only describes Christ’s love as extravagant but also emphasizes the personal connection we can have with this love. In another place, Paul says, “For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. I pray that according to the wealth of his glory he will grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner person, that Christ will dwell in your hearts through faith, so that, because you have been rooted and grounded in love,  you will be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and thus to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you will be filled up to all the fullness of God.” Ephesians 3:14-19 NET

Did you notice that there was a prerequisite for the comprehension of God’s love? That prerequisite is that we experience the width, length, height, and depth of God’s love in Christ is with all the saints; it goes beyond and bypasses what we can perceive with our mortal brain and goes right to the desire of God to fill us with His presence. That is called glory, that is the place where we can see God with a pure heart, because Christ resides in us. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Matthew 5:8 NET

Stephen Barnett