Beloved First, Then Imitators

     Children imitate their parents before they understand a word of what they are copying. They pick up the walk, the tone of voice, the way a father holds his shoulders or handles a disappointment. No one tells them to do it. It simply happens, because a child belongs to a parent and watches him constantly, and what you watch with love you begin to become. Paul reaches for exactly that picture when he tells the Ephesian church how to live. "Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children" (Ephesians 5:1). The command sounds impossibly high until you notice the order of the words. The imitation comes second. Being beloved comes first. We are not told to copy God so that He will accept us. We are told to copy Him because we already belong to Him, the way a son already belongs to the Father whose habits he is quietly absorbing.
     Everything Paul is about to ask for grows out of a relationship that already exists, not a relationship we are trying to earn. And he wastes no time telling us what the imitation looks like, because if he left it vague we would fill it with our own ideas of what godliness means. "And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God" (5:2). Love is the imitation. But notice the measure he gives it. Not love as a warm feeling, not love as tolerance, not love as leaving people alone. Love as Christ loved, which means love that hands itself over. The word Paul uses for "gave Himself up" is the language of being delivered to death. The love we are called to imitate has the shape of a cross, costly and turned toward God and neighbor rather than toward ourselves.
     Once Paul names the real thing, he has to clear away the counterfeits, because plenty of things wear the name of love while doing the opposite. So he gets specific, and he gets specific in a way that lands uncomfortably close to home. "Sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you" (5:3). He keeps going, down into our speech, naming "filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking" (5:4), the casual corrosion of words that tear down instead of build up. What strikes me is how little has changed. You might expect that across two thousand years the human heart would have invented some fresh category of sin. It hasn't. Paul reduces the old life to two summary appetites, the misuse of sex and the hunger for more, and we are still living inside those same two. We have only gotten better at decorating them.
     The second of those appetites is the one Paul exposes most sharply, because we tend not to see it as sin at all. He calls the covetous person "an idolater" (5:5). Greed is not merely wanting things. It is worship pointed in the wrong direction, the heart setting up a created thing in the place where God belongs. That is why Paul keeps prescribing such an unexpected medicine. Against corrupt speech and grasping desire he sets one small word, thanksgiving (5:4). It seems too gentle to do anything, until you realize that covetousness and gratitude cannot occupy the same heart at the same time. Greed fixes its eyes on what is missing. Thanksgiving fixes its eyes on what has been given. You cannot ache for more while you are busy giving thanks for what you already have, and that is precisely why Paul reaches for thanksgiving when he wants to break the grip of wanting.
     Then comes the line that holds the whole section together. "At one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light" (5:8). Read it slowly. Paul does not say we were in the dark and now carry a lamp. He says we were darkness, and now we are light. The change is not external lighting. It is identity. And that is the engine of his command. Walk as children of light, not in order to become light, but because that is now what you are. This is the heart of what I want us to hear. Believing in Jesus has never meant we stop caring about sin. We have been forgiven of it, fully and freely, and that forgiveness leaves us with a new responsibility, to live as what we now are. Grace does not lower the call to holiness. Grace is what makes the call possible, because it has already made us light.
     Light, in Paul's hands, does something active. It does not only let us see. It exposes. "Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them" (5:11). Sin survives by hiding. It prefers the secret, the unspoken, the thing everyone does and no one names. Light ends that simply by shining, because, as Paul says, "when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible" (5:13). I want to be careful here about what kind of exposing he means, because it is easy to hear this as a license to scold the world. That is not the aim. The exposing Paul describes is mostly the silent witness of a life lived differently. The church does not need to stand over the culture wagging a finger. It needs to live so openly, so honestly, so plainly in the light, that the contrast itself shows the darkness for what it is. We are a congregation surrounded by the assumption that sexuality is a purely private matter, answerable to no one but the individual, beyond the reach of any moral question. I am not asking us to become the morality police of our neighbors. I am asking us to walk the way of the Lord ourselves, out in the open, with nothing to hide, and to trust that a life in the light does its own quiet exposing.
     The obvious problem is that none of this is sustainable by willpower, and Paul knows it. So in the last movement he stops describing the walk and tells us where the strength for it comes from. "Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit" (5:18). The contrast is chosen with care. Wine and the Spirit both promise release, both promise to lift you out of yourself. But one empties a person and leaves him with less, while the other fills him and leaves him with more. The command itself is worth pausing on, because in the original it is continuous and it is passive. Paul is not telling us to fill ourselves once and be done. He is telling us to keep on being filled, again and again, by Someone other than ourselves. We do not generate this. We yield to it. The Christian life is not finally about trying harder to imitate God. It is about being filled by the Spirit of God until the imitation starts to come from the inside.
     And Paul tells us what the filling looks like when it happens, which keeps this from drifting into something vague or merely emotional. A Spirit-filled church is "addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs" and "giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father" (5:19-20). There is that word again, thanksgiving, now flowing not as a discipline we grit out but as the natural overflow of a filled heart. The Spirit produces in us the very gratitude that starves our covetousness. And then He produces one thing more. The whole movement lands on "submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ" (5:21). The old appetites curve a person inward, always calculating what he can get. The Spirit bends him back outward, toward the people beside him, willing to yield, willing to serve, willing to put another first. Where sin makes us grasp, the Spirit makes us give.
     So the passage ends where it began, with imitation, but now we can see the full circuit. We imitate our Father by walking in love. That love refuses the counterfeits of impurity and greed and walks instead in the light, openly, with nothing to hide. And we sustain none of it on our own. We are filled with the Spirit, who turns our grasping into gratitude and our self-protection into service. The question this leaves with each of us is not whether we have kept a list of rules. It is whether we have settled into some gray and comfortable corner where the line between us and the surrounding darkness has gone faint. Wherever that corner is, that is the place to walk into the light this week, thankful, given to others, a beloved child learning again to imitate his Father.