herefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. Therefore, because we have become the sons and daughters of this great and Holy God, who is infinitely pure – by means of the coming of the Son of God, and the atonement that He made available because of His incarnation, death, burial, resurrection and ascension, and because of our faith, trust, belief and confidence in God the Father and God the Son, now we are the precious and eternal and beloved sons and daughters of God!
And, just as human children look to their parents as role models (for both good and bad), and often embrace their values and imitate their behavior, we are to imitate our Heavenly Father and Messiah Yeshua, our Elder Brother.
And, we should imitate God the Father and Yeshua the Son. Our Heavenly Father is a good Father. He is the perfect Father. He is perfect in character, perfect in values. Therefore with intention, with purpose, we are to learn out what He is like, and imitate what He is like. He learn what His values are, and we embrace His values. His values become our values, His standards our standards, His ways our ways, His character our character. We get to know God better and better. We study Him and what He is doing, and then we purposely, with intention, mold ourselves into His image.
There are several special areas that we need to imitate God in: We are to be imitators of God in love; we are to be imitators of God in holiness.
Be Imitators Of God In Love
And walk in love, just as Messiah also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.
We are to live a life that is characterized by love. We don’t just talk about it, we walk in love. We practice love, we do love, we walk in love, we live love. We make love a priority.
Why? Love is of God. God is love. Love is good. Love pleases God. Love results in blessing and reward.
What is love? Love is the desire to help another, to bless, do good to some other being. If you genuinely love someone, you are willing to diminish yourself so that they might become more; you are willing to have harm come to yourself so that the object of your love will be safe.
Love helps the one who is loved. But to really them, you must know what is good, what is right, what will really help the one you love. Only then will you be able to do what is good and right and will really help. A heroin addict is in pain, and wants more heroin. Do you give it to him? A child is headed in a destructive direction, and needs intervention. But if you intervene, he will get angry at you. Is it loving to intervene? Your family members are heading to a Messiahless eternity. Do you tell them about Yeshua, or do you remain silent to preserve family relations?
The love we are to imitate is sacrificial. It is the kind of love that we see God demonstrating to us when the Father sent the Son into this world, knowing that the Son would be hurt, and also that His own heart would be hurt due to the suffering of His Son. The love we are to imitate is the kind of love that made the Son willingly and voluntarily give Himself up for us, knowing the indignities and suffering and horrible death that awaited Him – so that we could be helped and blessed and healed and atoned for, so that we could overcome our greatest problems – alienation from God, and sin and death, and be reconciled to God and forgiven and live forever. That is true love. That is God’s kind of love.
The love we are to imitate pleases God. God is love, and sacrificial love that is based on truth and really helps others pleases the Lord. What Yeshua did for us is the supreme example of that kind of love. Messiah’s sacrificial love pleased His Father. Paul compares Messiah’s willing and voluntary giving of Himself to the God-pleasing offerings that were burned on the altar at the Temple.
Under the Sinai covenant, God-ordained worship involved the sacrifice of something precious, something valuable – a bull, a goat, a ram, a lamb, a dove, or precious grain. These expressions of love for God were costly. They involved a sacrifice of the life of a valuable animal, or the giving of grain, which diminished the resources of the offerer. It cost him something.
Everything the worshiper had already belonged to the Lord, but the desire to give to Him, to sacrifice something to Him, showed to the Lord that person really loved Him, and it pleased Him.
A God-ordained sacrifice, like a sin offering, a burnt offering, a peace offering, a grain offering, when it was given to God, was burned on the altar. The smoke that was created smelled delicious, like the smell of a nice steak sizzling on the grill. Just as most people find the smell of a steak cooking on the grill delicious, appealing and enjoyable, so God enjoyed the sacrificial love of His Son that exerted itself on our behalf. And, so He is pleased by our sacrificial love for others.
The love we are to imitate results in God’s blessing. God was pleased with the offerings given by the saints of the Sinai covenant and rewarded them for it. God the Father was pleased with the sacrificial love of His Son, and greatly rewarded Him. And, God will bless and reward us when we walk in love.
The Father and the Son have shown their love for us in so many ways, with the greatest way being the sacrifice of the Messiah. We need to imitate that love.
Love is good. Love is of God. Love pleases God. Love results in blessing and reward. This should motive us to sacrificial loving. Does this want to make you pray: “Lord, give me opportunities to love sacrificially, to give of myself, my time, energy, my money, to do something good and true and beneficial for someone else that will really help them. Let me not use all of my resources for myself Lord, but for others.”
Be Imitators Of God In Holiness
The God of Israel is a God of love. He is also a God of holiness. The Almighty is completely separate from all sin, evil, or anything that is in the slightest degree wrong. He radiates an amazing moral perfection. His sons and daughters are to imitate our Father’s morality purity. Therefore Paul writes: But immorality or any impurity or greed must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. Regarding the imitation of God in the area of holiness, the sage from Tarsus emphasizes two main areas – sex and materialism. We must stay within God-honoring, God-ordained, God-pleasing sexual and materialism-restrained boundaries.
There are God-honoring ways to engage in sexuality activity, and there are God-displeasing ways. The way we use our bodies and minds in the area of sex should be moral and clean, not immoral and impure. Sex is moral within a monogamous marriage of one man and one woman. Sex outside of marriage is immoral. Sexual thoughts when directed to one’s spouse are pure. Sexual thoughts when directed to anyone else are unclean.
We must stay within God-honoring, God-ordained, God-pleasing sexual and financial and economic and material boundaries. We must not give into greed. We must restrain our desire for more and more things. We must reject that attitude that is never satisfied with the things that we have, that is never content with the things that God has blessed us with.
We must not embrace the mistaken belief that a good life consists in the abundance of material possessions.
We must reject the attitude that does not pray, “Give me this day my daily bread” but instead prays for bread, and more and more bread and then starts demanding cake, and a bigger home to eat the cake in, and a nicer car to go get the cake!
The saints are not about accumulating more and more material things in this world, building up their treasure on Earth. They are focused on heavenly things, denying self to serve and love others, bringing the message of salvation to a dying world, looking for their rewards of the World-To-Come.
If you are a child of God, you are a saint. You are a holy one, one who has been separated from the world, freed from the forces of sin and death, separated to accomplish God purposes. If you are a saint, you are to live in a way that reflects this separation, this holiness.
You must know God’s boundaries for sex. You must limit sexual activity to within your marriage. If you are unmarried, your goal is not to engage in as much sexuality activity as you can get away with. Your sexual desires must become subject to you. You must not become subject to them.
You must live a life that is pure regarding greed. You must restrain your desires for money and material things.
Rabbi Paul continues: and there must be no filthiness and silly talk, or coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks. Our holiness, our striving for moral purity must affect the way with talk. We must be careful about what we say. We must control our mouths. No joking around about sexual stuff, no dirty jokes, no bragging about sexual conquests, no sharing sexual stories with friends and co-workers. It’s not cool, not funny, not entertaining, not appropriate. That is not why we have been given the gift of language. Things are not fitting of the sons and daughters of the Holy One of Israel, not proper for the saints. Instead, we use our mouths, our tongues, our ability to speak to give thinks to the Lord for who He is, and for His many gifts to us. If you can’t talk to God about it, then you shouldn’t be talking to anyone else about it.
Morality and purity in the areas of sex and materialism shows who we really are – if we are genuine born again children of God, and if we have the holy Spirit of the Holy God living in us, and if we really are saints – God’s holy ones, or whether we are SINOs – Saints In Name Only.
For this you know – what God’s emissary is about to tell us is something that we can know, and something that we know with certainty, that no immoral or impure person or covetous man, who is an idolater, has an inheritance in the kingdom of Messiah and God.
Messiah told us that we can know people by their fruits, by the way they conduct their lives, what their lives produce, by their words, their attitudes, their values, their morality – or lack thereof. We are to know with certainty, with assurance, with confidence, that the immoral and impure person, who won’t submit to God’s ordained requirements of holiness in the areas of sex and freedom from materialism, isn’t a saint, no matter what he or what someone else may say. He is an idol worshiper of idols!
The individual who will not keep himself within God-ordained sexual and materialism-free boundaries is an idolater. An idol is generally thought to be a statue made of wood, stone, or gold and silver that is a representative of some higher power. It is a false god that is considered worthy of honor, devotion, love and affection, reverence and service. An idol takes the place of the true God in the love, affection, devotion, priority and commitment of human beings.
But the way the Rabbi Paul uses the concept of idol is broader. It is not limited to the image of some godling. An idol can be anyone, anything or any activity that is substituted in the affections and devotion of a human being that rightfully should go to the one and only God. It doesn’t have to be in image that is worshiped. It can be anything that is become more important to us than the true God, so that thing, that activity receives the priority, the time and attention and devotion that should rightfully be directed to the great Creator.
Money, the desire for things, success the way this world measures success, sex, entertainments, relationships, the lust for power, the desire to dominate others, can become idols in your life, and make you an idolater, the worshiper of false gods. And, that is a very serious offence. It is a rejection of the essence of what is good, what is right. It is a rejection of the true God. It is a terrible crime that must be punished.
Your attitudes about materialism and how you relate to sexuality, reveals if you are a saint or a worshiper of false gods, and whether you are part of the Kingdom of God and Messiah, or the Dominion of Darkness. What is your God? Who is your God?
Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Don’t let anyone, especially some preacher or so-called theologian, trick you into thinking that grace means that you can be immoral and greedy and still be a good Christian and Messianic Jew. I’m thinking specifically of those immoral churches that teach that homosexually is OK, and those greedy churches that teach that the pursuit of materialism is what genuine Christianity is all about.
The Lord is kadosh – holy. He has a purity we can’t understand. He hates evil with an intense hatred and must reject it. It’s good that the Lord won’t tolerate evil, which corrupts and destroys what is good and right. The adulterer, the homosexual, the pornographer, the pedophile, the sexually promiscuous person, the greedy, materialistic person who lives for money and things and the things of this world, is a disobedient human being who can expect the wrath, the extreme displeasure, the hot anger, the righteous anger of an offended Creator.
Now, that doesn’t mean that someone can’t miss the mark in one of these areas, and then turn back to the Lord with remorse and repentance, but if there is no remorse, no repentance, but instead futile attempts at justifying these things, that they are OK – this shows that you have no inheritance in the Kingdom of God and Messiah. And, trust me – you want to receive an inheritance, you want a portion of that eternally blessed and happy kingdom!
I like that expression: “the Kingdom of Messiah and God.” It is the Kingdom of God and Messiah because there are two Kings – God the Father, the High King, and also Messiah the Son, because He is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. It is the Kingdom of Messiah and God because the Father and the Son share in the administration of this Kingdom in perfect unity.
Therefore do not be partakers with them. Don’t share their corrupt values, or you will share their punishment, showing that you are part of them. Therefore separate yourselves their attitudes, from their sins, from their punishments, by being obedience human beings, sons of obedience, not sons of disobedience, with godly values and submission to the Lord, demonstrating to God and man that you are no longer part of their corruption or share their future.
You may have been like them before, but that was in the past. Now you are different. You have been enlightened. For you were formerly darkness: we were part of humanity that is darkness. That means that we were under a dark and evil Satanic domination, enmeshed in false religions and philosophies. We were chaotic, confused, in error, deceived, without saving truth, without the knowledge of the only true God. We were idol worshipers. We crossed moral and spiritual boundaries that should not be crossed. We were immersed in death, not life, loaded down with sin, without life, having no hope.
But now, in stark contrast to the way we were before, you are light: We were darkness, but now we are light – and light is a symbol for truth, salvation, wisdom, knowledge, understanding, revelation, victory, and genuine happiness that lasts, but it is light that is “in the Lord.” It and wisdom and salvation that only comes from Adonai, the real God, who is who He is, who is the Source of life and existence; it is happiness that is connected to the God of Israel; it is knowledge and victory that only comes from being joined to and being submitted to the Three-In-One God.
Don’t just talk that way, live that way! Walk as children of light. We must live in a way that reflects our new reality, our new relationship to God, the inner moral and spiritual transformation that is taking place, the new standards that we are committed to. The inspired Rabbi from Tarsus gives us three things that knowledge and truth and salvation should produce in us: for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth, trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.
Goodness: is what is helpful and beneficial, not harmful or hurtful. Goodness must be based on truth, on what is really helps. Goodness can’t be based on what is false. We don’t want to be doing things that we think are good, but are in reality harmful. We must learn what is good and systematically do what is good for other human beings.
Righteousness: being in a right relationship with God, and then consistently doing the right things, not the wrong things, not bad things, not sinful things.
Truth: truth is what really is, not what we think it is. We must find out what really is, and then live our lives according to the truth. We must know the truth, speak the truth, live the truth.
Our new Christian and Messianic Jewish lives need to be producing good things, truthful things, right things. Is yours?
Its not that we know all of the truth, and become perfectly good and righteous immediately. Growth in holiness (sanctification) can take time. Newer believers might not always know what is good and right in a given situation, but as you continue reading the Scriptures, talking to other believers, consulting with wiser individuals, gaining more experience, you learn more and more what is genuinely pleasing to the Lord, and what isn’t, and you implement that knowledge.
In contrast to the fruit of light which we need to radiate, are the unfruitful deeds of darkness: Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them. But for that we will need to come back next week!
Therefore be imitators of the holy God, as beloved children, in holiness, particularly in the areas of sexual purity and your attitude toward materialism, and live a life that is characterized by sacrificial love and doing good to others. If you do, you will show that you are a genuine child of God, and your inheritance will be certain and your reward will be great!