Imitating God: Ephesians Series Part 11- Bill Shiley

Lesson Transcript

We're continuing in the book of Ephesians. We're ready for chapter 5, the beginning of chapter 5. And we're in the last part of the book that's talking about the first part of the book Paul is drawing their minds into understanding what God wants to do with them. And in the last part is a lot of practical instructions about how to go about making that happen, demonstrating God's incredible wisdom.

So the title of the message this morning is "Imitating God." And if you're familiar with the first couple of verses there, you know where that comes from. But before we get into it, I want to do a little brain stretching here. What do you see in the picture on the screen? Trees. Trees. Beautiful landscape. Beautiful landscape. God's creation. God's creation. Okay, this is good. Pardon? A good vacation. A good vacation. We just got to see a bunch of this going down Interstate 81 down into Tennessee this week.

Mountains there? Mountains. Good. The entire universe in essentially sky, earth, and settled. And pretty much everything that we know all the way from you can't see them, but there's dirt there too. We know that there's dirt there because the trees are there. Yeah. So the question I want to think about is that trees or is it a forest? And some of you went much bigger than that, and that's excellent for what we want to learn from this. Well, it's both. You can't have a forest without trees.

And if you have a bunch of trees, then you're going to have a forest. There's a little bit of a dilemma when we try to do expository teaching. This is something I've been trying to learn. This is the first time I've gone through a book and taught on a book. Most of the time I've done subject. And there's place for both subject teaching on a subject or topical, usually they call that topical, or expository, exposing what a book is saying.

And the issue is because it's my tendency when I get to a passage, like, "Oh yeah, I know this is the part that talks about this," and to talk about that subject then. But really the responsibility when you're preaching on a book is to say, "What was the apostle teaching here?" Not to go off and talk about a subject.

And so what I've found often in this though is the apostles when they're talking, they're not just giving you a bunch of rules or even a bunch of life advice to get you through a current thing or keep you out of trouble or something like that. But they're always giving those things in the context of trying to stretch your understanding and to think much bigger than just whether or not you do and you don't do certain things.

And in the broader Christian world, there's a tendency to kind of go to one or the other, to have a view where you focus on the details that you do and you don't do, or to focus on, I don't think most of them focus on the big picture. So there's terms for this. There's the moralist view that says, looks at life as these are things you should do, these are things you shouldn't do. Looks at God's word as a book of a list of things to tell us that these are things you should do and you shouldn't do.

These are good things, these are bad things. If you do these, you'll stay out of trouble and get to heaven when you die. If you do these things, God will be mad at you because God doesn't like those things, and you'll get in bad trouble for that. The other view is the covenantal view. That's probably the best term I came up with short term for it.

The problem the Old Testament leaves us with is not so much that the Israelites did things God told them not to do, but that they trashed the covenant God had made with them. God had picked Israel out of all the people in the world after the first covenant in the Garden of Eden was ruined and made a partnership with them to work with them to show His goodness to the world and to bring redemption to the world. And with that, He gave them laws and things to do to help them to accomplish that.

And they just trashed it. It was like they couldn't get rid of Him quick enough. So what we want to do is we want to try to focus. We want to have a covenantal view. The problem is in order to have a forest, you have to have trees. And if you want to create a forest, how do you create a forest? Well, you plant trees. But if you're just out there planting trees, you can lose your sight of what you're trying to do. You can lose your purpose and your motivation.

But if you realize while you're doing that that you're planting a forest. If you've ever been to an arboretum, which is a place where they have it's a garden of trees and things like that, you realize that there's tremendous beauty that can come with someone planting and growing things with intention. So if you're thinking about that, well, you're pulling weeds and you're digging up dirt and pulling rocks out and all those things, it gives a lot more purpose and meaning and direction to what you're doing.

So as we look at today's, we want to look at this whole subject of both, of looking at the big picture, the forest, but also the trees and realizing that it's through the trees that you get to a forest. Some of you brought out even in that picture, let me go back to the first one here, that there's even more than a forest in that picture. There's mountains and a beautiful and all those things working together creates a beautiful landscape. It's the same way for us as we follow God.

When we do that, we become part of something much bigger and better than just our daily lives. And those things create a lot of motivation for us and raise the importance of the things we do, the trees, the little small things that we do in daily life. Another picture of that that we've looked at is the idea of a temple that God wants us to work together to become a temple. You don't have the Taj Mahal unless you have building blocks, those individual blocks work together. So it's both.

The man who's working and building those blocks, laying the blocks, cleaning up the mortar at the bottom, he feels a lot more purpose and is a lot more careful in what he does if he realizes he's building the Taj Mahal. Putting this probably a little more in the children's level, we talked last time about the story of Tutul, how he liked running in the meadows, but that was not good for him and he was living a completely unproductive or ruinous life.

And so they put all the red flags out there and he was very sad because all he could see was all the things he couldn't do. And when he looked at the track, then he saw the green flag and realized that's where he's supposed to go. And when he got on the track, then things went well and he found a very purposeful and meaningful life, a useful life.

And so using that principle, that story as we look at scripture, whenever we see the don'ts, we want to take heed to them, but remember they're always to turn us to the do's, the things to put our lives into. And beyond that, there's always a don't. Whenever you see a don't, heed it seriously, but always look for the do because that's going to tell you what to put your life into.

And then often God also has then a new way to think that changes the kind of person we are and our outlook on life that makes those obediences much more doable. Another thing we want to do when we read the Bible, especially the New Testament, is look for hyperlinks. So a hyperlink is when you're doing something online and the text turns blue and you can click it and it takes you to someplace else.

And there's lots of things in the New Testament that doesn't say, "And now we're going to talk about this story that happened in the Old Testament," or, "Now we're going to talk about Jesus' words." But he's quoting it and it's to tickle your mind and make you think, "Ah, he's making a connection between this and that." And we'll do some of that today. So let's go to our text for today. It's going to be rather short.

I worried if this was worth just spending all the time on these couple of verses, but there's some things in these verses I feel like are important to bring out. And so I can't really do I couldn't do both. I couldn't go on to and do the next section. I could, but as Socrates said, "Know thyself." So I decided to try to just work on a smaller spot this morning and hopefully it'll be worthwhile. I know it was for me. So let's read this passage here, Ephesians 4, verse 31. Remember this was a letter.

That's why I put the parchment and the older style script up there just to remind us this wasn't some sort of a theological writing, but it was a letter that was written from Paul to people as a father writing to his people. "Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.

Therefore be imitators of God as dear children and walk in love as Christ also has loved us and given himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma." So when Paul wrote these words, the Bible wasn't divided up into chapters and verses. It was a letter. And the chapters and verses are helpful, but they also can make problems sometimes. And this is one that I am from the connection between the end of chapter 4 and chapter 5 really hit me this time going through it.

And it's something I always want to remember. I want to think of them as together in one passage from here out in my life. So he says to be kind, to be tenderhearted, soft-hearted towards each other and forgive each other. The reason for that is because God in Christ forgave us. And so therefore, because of that, we have a therefore, so we want to connect back to before. He says, "Be imitators of God as dear children." Be imitators of God.

Can you think does that sound like anything you've heard before in the Bible about people supposed to be imitating God? Should be all through it. Think all the way back to the very beginning. We were made in the image of God. Right. We're made in the image of God. So when you go back to Genesis 1, verse 26, when God decides to make man, God said, "Let us make man in our image according to our likeness and let them do our kind of thing.

Let them take care of the world and do like we would do, have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and the cattle and every creeping thing." Later on, God says this thing again and talks about being fruitful and multiplying, making more people who are like God, who imitate Him in their character and in what they do.

This is the purpose God created the world is because He has always wanted loving children who were obedient and chose to be like Him and work together then to create a family and fill the world up with a family of people who were like God. This is what God has this is why God created us and it's what He has always been after all through history.

And this is what Jesus has come to restore, not so much to get us out of here so that God can just scrap this whole project and move on to other things, but because God wants to restore that state here. Now, Jesus prayed in the Sermon on the Mount and we often pray with Him. "Your kingdom come, your will be done in earth just like it is in heaven." Colossians 3 brings this idea out.

It says, "Do not lie to one another since you have put off the old man with his deeds, the old way of being human that Adam started by doing his own thing and rebelling against God, listening to Satan. Since you've put off the old man, the old human, and have put on the new human, and the new human is renewed in knowledge according to the image of the one who created him." It's renewed in being in God's image, a copy of God. So be imitators of God.

Then God gives us a little picture of how this happens and how this whole thing works. He says, "Be imitators of God like dear children." Now, this isn't talking about just any children. There's children who don't imitate their parents. This is talking about dear children. There's a relationship there that they're cared for, they're loved, they're special to their father. Their father's a presence in their life and they love their father back.

And what comes to your mind when you think about children imitating their parents? Why do children imitate their parents? What's inside of them that makes that happen? They want to be like them. They love them. They love them. That's just a natural response of a child who's cared for is to love their parents. And they want to be like them or they admire them. Their parents are their heroes. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. And this picture has taught me a lot.

There's a little girl that reminds me of Wilhelmina looking up at her dad who is wearing a superhero cape. Now, it's a little bit of mixed matter because the rest of the dad doesn't look like a super. He's got his pants rolled up there. They're standing on top of a mountain. So I don't know what all is in the picture here. I think this is looking at dad as the little girl is thinking of him. And who knows what they've gone through to get to this place.

Maybe the dad carried her, maybe chased away a snake and kept encouraging her and showed her how to be careful and not twist her ankle on the rocks or whatever. And now they're here and she's looking up at him and in her eyes, he is amazing. A couple of things that just come to my mind when I think about that is love, admiration, and loyalty. Children, our little children are very loyal.

You say something about their they can be driving an old clunker, but somebody at school says something about their dad's truck and they're in tears. That was just a class treason to say something like that. Sadly, we go through a stage in adolescence where that all turns around and then often later in life, they realize that dad was not perfect, but dad was doing pretty good for what he had to work with. Be imitators of God like little children. So there's a reason why that we imitate God.

We love Him and we admire Him. Therefore, it refers back to the end of chapter 4 where it says, "To remember how God in Christ forgave us, to remember His kindness and His tenderheartedness toward us." And that moves us when we let God do that to us, when we're a child that lets our father teach us and lets him take care of us. His goodness toward us motivates us to admire Him and to love Him and to want to be like Him.

And particularly here, that's talking about admiring God's love and forgiveness and so desiring and being driven to imitate that same love and forgiveness ourselves. John Chrysostom says this, "Look, here's the foundation of everything. Where this exists, there is no wrath, no anger, no shouting, no slander, but all these things are gone." That's why he places the most important point at the end.

So in chapter 4, we were kind of going through this thing about working together as a body and becoming a temple to demonstrate God's glory and to put away anger and wrath and clamor and all those things. And he keeps building up and he keeps getting deeper to the root of things. And also it becomes a more beautiful and a better thing as he goes to the end of the chapter here. "How were you made a child of God? Because you were forgiven.

On the same basis that you received such a great privilege, on that very same basis, forgive your neighbor. Tell me, if you were in prison with countless wrongs to account for and someone brought you into the palace, or even more, if you were gravely ill and on the brink of death and someone healed you with medicine, wouldn't you value that person above all, even cherishing the name of the medicine?" So I think that's an important thing to us is to look at God's kindness towards us.

Look at how freely God has forgiven us and invited us to be His children. And that when we focus on those things and we allow God to forgive us, we repent and we understand the things that need to change in our life and we understand God's kindness and His patience in working with us, that motivates us then. It fills us with joy and with admiration towards God. That motivates us then to live that way towards other people. That's from John. Oh, I didn't finish up here.

"If we treasure the places and moments that benefit us, how much more should we value the things themselves? So be a lover of love because by love you were saved and by love you were made a child of God. And if you have the chance to save someone else, wouldn't you use the same remedy and tell everyone, 'Forgive,' so that you may be forgiven? Encourage each other in this way.

Encouraging each other in this way is the mark of thankful, generous, and noble hearts." So the mark of someone who has been forgiven is a desire to forgive others. The mark of a child who has been loved by their father and has a response of love back is admiration and a desire to imitate him. I think this is important. This root of the motivation for our obedience is that we humble ourselves and we turn from doing our own thing and we allow ourselves to be instructed by our father.

We allow him to forgive us and to bring us out of our own life into his family and that we look up to him and we value and we learn to practice his ways to look at the world the way he does. Because if you don't, you get focusing on the trees. You get focusing on all the things you can and cannot do and you're trying to do that and it's going to be a miserable life. If you don't admire God, his commandments are just going to be a chore to you.

There's a realm of people that say, "Well, if you're not doing what you're doing out of love, then you should just quit. It's worse than if you don't." And I'm not sure. I must be missing some pages in my Bible because Jesus never says that kind of thing. God wants cheerful, loving obedience, but it's never better to just not obey, not do a good thing just because your motive isn't quite right yet.

But if you are going along and you are concerned about obedience and you don't really love God and you don't admire him, you don't think his way is good, whether you understand it or not, you're not that little child who is looking up to him, your life is probably going to be a little bit like this. This is just a favorite cartoon of mine. It's low resolution, but it describes a little too much how I've lived for too much of my life.

People talk about, "Oh, you're trying in your own strength." Well, obeying God's commandments isn't trying in your own strength. It's when you're doing it because you don't really believe that God loves you in his commandments. And when you decide to give up your will and decide to believe, "God loves me. This is the best thing for me," and choose to admire him for what he's done for you, then you're not just trying to get away from being fed to the devil in hell.

The church isn't a load on your back that you just about can't handle. And what you're after in life is something you can experience every day because you're not just trying to get out of here and heaven just always seems just I don't know if we'll ever get there. Well, the other side of that, so that's obedience when you don't admire God and you don't love him back. So then on the other ditch is admiration for God, but you don't obey him. You want to see a picture of that?

So there's two things popped into my head when I thought about that. The scriptures talk about the dog going back to its vomit and the pig wallowing in the mire. And I decided to put a picture of the last one. I thought it would be a little better. That's what we are when we say we admire God and we love him, but we don't imitate him. And that's not what God's after. He's not after a world of pigs. He's after a world of children that obey him because they love him and choose to and they admire him.

So again, this is a false dichotomy. We talk about that a lot. It's neither one. And somewhere in the middle is something good and beautiful. Just a comment on this is the interesting thing is after this, God goes and he tells us a bunch of things to do. So this thing of imitating God isn't something that's just going to happen naturally out of your life.

It's just someday you'll be sitting someplace and you'll have this wonderful experience where God loves just fills you and just forever after you just want to be good and just don't want to do anything bad. It's through choosing to listen to God, to lay down our will, and to be taught by him that we begin to think like him and we begin to understand his goodness and we begin to understand how wrong we have been and how patient God has been and how much God has forgiven us. There's a darker side to this.

If we don't choose to be loving imitators as dear children of God, there's not just like a middle ground here. You're just not either one. There's no neutral position. You are going to be, when you're still living in your own way and living in sin, you are somebody's child. You are imitating somebody. And Jesus speaks very clearly about that. You are of your father the devil and the desires of your father you want to do. So this is really an important question for us to look at our lives and say, "Who do I admire?

Whose way am I following in choices that I make in my life? Who do I love?" Another one from 1 John 3, "He who sins is of the devil." This is the sins there in the more modern English is not the King James has the idea of this is the ongoing pattern of their life. It's not something that they fall and they repent of. But somebody who goes on in sin is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning.

For this, the purpose that the Son of God was shown or manifested was so that he would destroy the works of the devil. So the one who has been born of God does not continue in sin because God's DNA is in him by our choice. And he can't just continue in sin because he admires and loves his heavenly Father and chooses to be led by him.

Matthew 5:44-48, "But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be the sons of your Father in heaven. For he makes his Son to rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." So this is how we become children of God is by choosing to imitate him. "For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors the same.

And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so. Therefore, you shall be perfect or complete just as your Father in heaven is complete." Don't be a contradictory person. Some deep challenges there about the way we treat other people. Another reference to this thing about how we become like our Father or the children of our Father.

"But love your enemies, do good and land hoping for nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be the sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the unthankful and evil. Therefore, be merciful just as your Father is also merciful." So hopefully we don't have much struggle with this here, but this thing of do you put effort into imitating God or not is a big problem in the Christian world.

And you have lots of people, lots of good teachers, books that you can pick up at the bookstore that might actually help you in some ways, but they will tell you. This is actually the words from Casting Crown song, The Altar and the Door. There's a spot in there. It's about the struggle with wanting to change, but it's just not happening in my life. And it says there in the bridge, it says, "I'm trying so hard to stop trying so hard.

Just let you be who you are, Lord, who you are in me." And there's that teaching out there that that's really, if you really want change, you just got to quit trying. You got to quit trying to obey and just let God's love fill you. And that will change you from the inside out. Well, the scriptures don't tell us that. That's a lie from Satan. The scriptures tell us that we do need to love and admire our Father, but the way to begin to be an imitator of God is to choose acts of obedience to him.

This is something that we do. So it's neither ditch. It's neither the—well, we're getting to there. God tells us how to imitate him, and it's something for us to do, to walk in love, to choose to forgive. We are to begin imitating God in his love for us, which forgave and is kind. Do you believe that God is kind? Do you believe that God is tenderhearted? If you don't, that's an important thing to learn. And I would be happy to talk to you because that's where I was for a lot of my life.

There were things I couldn't understand God as a loving God, and it made obedience very difficult. Godly love is the root of all the other imitating. It's the root of our love, of our imitating God, and it's where we start in imitating God. So we're not talking about this extreme of trying to do this stuff and not feeling like God loves us and all that kind of garbage. We're not talking about that.

We're not talking about being a person who just loves God all over in our hearts, but it's just we're waiting for God to do the right thing in us so that we start actually being like him. And right now, we're just not being much like him. We're not talking about that. But there's a third way, and that is being imitators of God like dear children who love him and admire him and earnestly, from the depths of their heart, put their lives into becoming like him.

We sang a song this morning that I really love the wording in it. It was in the song, "Take thou my hand, O Father, and lead thou me." And the one verse, the end of it said, "Permit thy child to linger here at thy feet and blindly trust thy leading with faith complete." Here's another quote from John Chrysostom on the matter. "Oh, what can be more blessed than a sound like this? Tell me of royalty or whatever else you will. There is no comparison. Forgive another, and you are imitating God.

You are made like God." That's something that I think everybody can get ahold of and start doing. This idea of walking in love stretches my mind because love often—I think about love as like a thing like, "I love Raleigh, and then Raleigh loves me," and kind of a directional thing. And I didn't know how to try to illustrate this, so I'm just going to try to explain it, and hopefully maybe some of you have some better ways of explaining it. You can share with me. But it's more like a pool of something.

We receive it from God, and then we wake up to the fact that God loves us. Because sometimes there's things that we don't—like God's commandments, and we don't realize this is God's love for us. He's trying to help us to walk in the way that we ought to, the way of life. And then it's something we love God back, and it's something that flows into us and fills us, and we give back to God, and then it spills out of that. It's because of God's love in us that we then can give other people.

We're full of love for God because he has forgiven us, and he is kind and compassionate towards us. And then that it just means that we must pass that on to other people. So moving on, he says, "And walk in love as Christ has loved us." Well, that's interesting because now we don't have to fill in the blanks and use our imagination necessarily to understand what love is.

We have a specific example to tell you takes us right to and says, "Look at this." Jesus shows us, and so we have a much higher level of responsibility. Jesus was the perfect imitator of his Father. Jesus shows us clearly what God is like. Sometimes you read the Old Testament, there's things about that that can be a little confusing, but when Jesus comes, we can see, and he tells us, "Look at me. If you've seen me, you know what the Father is like." There in John 14 talking to Philip.

And so Jesus shows us clearly what it's like to live with God's character as a human. That's one of the things that's special to me about Jesus in the incarnation, which is what we—so the birth of Jesus, Jesus coming as a human that we celebrate at Christmas is because now we can not just be set free from our sin and all that, but now we can know what it is like to live God's way as a human because there's been no perfect humans since Adam and Eve spoiled themselves in the garden there.

And so Jesus uses these terms to describe this. He says, "I am the Son of Man," or, "I'm the true human. I'm the one who is human." He talks about himself as the Son of God and also as the Son of Man. And he's emphasizing there that God has—the Word has become flesh and lived among us, and we could see God's glory as a human. He says, "I am the way. I am the method of the way to live as a human. I am the truth. I am what is real.

The other ways are false." And he says, "I will give you eternal life." This is the way to live that always was God's way and always will be as something that will continue on forever. So that's just an important part of who Jesus is and how—and we look to him then for our example, and he has raised the bar on this. So we've always been taught to love each other. The Old Testament taught loving each other. But since Jesus was here, now we have a new commandment. We'll look at the passage here in a little bit.

Well, let's look at this one first. John 13:34, "A new commandment I give to you that you love one another as I have loved you." Sorry, let me read that and follow the punctuation. "A new commandment I give to you that you love one another as I have loved you that you also love one another." So why is it a new commandment? Because we're always supposed to love each other.

Well, because he's writing a commandment now because there's an example there, and we are not just called to love each other, but we are called to love each other as Jesus loved us. And I think it goes for other things in life too. Now we have a higher level of understanding and accountability now. That's one of the big differences between the Old Testament.

Not that back then they couldn't please God and they couldn't be godly people, but there's availability for us to be a much different person since we've been freed from sin. We have God's Spirit, and we have Christ's example and teaching to show us the completely repaired way of being a human. John, in his epistle, talks about this, "Brethren, I don't write a new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning.

The old commandment is the word which you heard from the beginning, which is that you should love each other." But then he's saying, "But at the same time, it's a new commandment that I write to you because this thing is true in him and in you.

Love has been completed in Christ and in those who follow him because the darkness has passed away and the true light is already shining through Jesus and through those who follow him." The NLT says it a little better way, "Dear friends, I am not writing a new commandment for you. Rather, it is the old one that you have had from the very beginning. This old commandment to love one another is the same message you heard before. Yet it is also new. Jesus lived the truth of this commandment, and you are also living it.

For the darkness is disappearing and the true light is already shining." So as we think about Jesus and what Jesus came to do and all that stuff, I think this should be one of the foremost things is that Jesus came to restore us to be able to be accurate imitators of God, like God intended all the way in the beginning when he created us, both by setting us free from the bondage of ourselves and sin and washing us, forgiving us, and then by teaching us and showing us the true way to be human, to be true imagers of

God, imitators of God.

So now we have an example that loved perfectly, and we can imitate Jesus' example and become imitators of God like dear children who love and admire their heavenly Father. So what was that like? How did Christ love? Well, one thing I discovered in thinking about this years ago with what is love, and I started thinking about different passages that talk about love, that God, at least often, if not always, when God says he loved this much, then he has something there that tells us what his love is like.

Let's pop a few of these up here and fill in the blanks. "For God so loved the world that he gave everybody that he gave his only begotten son." In Ephesians 5:25, "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it." Ephesians 5:2, which is what the text we're reading today, "And walk in love as Christ also loved us and hath," this is a little different, "given himself an offering and sacrifice to God." So this is what love does. Love gives itself.

Humility is kind of a synonym of love almost because humility brings itself back down and lifts others up and makes them the priority. And then love is willing to give itself and sacrifice itself for what's good for others. This is where God's forgiveness comes from, is because God valued us more than himself. So there's two words here that bring out some dimensions of this giving that I learned a few things from. So the first one is that he gave himself as an offering.

So the mentality here, if we're going to love like Jesus loved, is our mentality is that others are more important. And if someone has to suffer, I'm going to put myself there first. I'm going to offer. I'm going to be the volunteer to, if there's something bad has to happen, if someone has to suffer, then it should be me. I'm the one who steps forward and offers myself in their place. And sacrifice.

So sacrifice, a story that kind of is one of my building blocks at the bottom of my when I think about sacrifice is the story of David and Ornan, or he's called Aruna in, I think it's in 2 Samuel and Chronicles, I think calls him Ornan. So the story there is when David numbered the people, and there was a plague then that came because of that. And there was the angel was stretching out his hand over the city, and people were dying from the pestilence.

And the angel came up to the threshing floor of Ornan, and David was going to make an offering there to stop the plague. And so David comes to the threshing floor and tells Ornan that he wants to buy this all, the floor, the area, and the instruments of wood and the oxen as an offering. And Ornan says, "Well, here, you can just have it. No problem. Just have it." And David said, "No, because I won't sacrifice to the Lord what doesn't cost me anything." It's not a sacrifice then.

It's just getting rid of when you get a free truckload of yogurt, and so you say, "Hey, everybody, come get it." I don't need it all. The value isn't there. And so as we think about love that offers itself as a sacrifice, it's where I give up something of great value to me and suffer a loss to receive something that's of even greater value to me. God never asks us to sacrifice something, and we come away and we're in worse shape.

It may feel like that, but it's always whether it was a sacrifice in the Old Testament, whether it's a sacrifice of praise, Paul and Silas singing in prison, whatever sacrifice it is that God asks of us, we always receive we're in better shape when we do that in the end. It hurts. It feels like a cost. And same thing with our brother.

When we sacrifice, we love others, and we give ourselves as a sacrifice, we're saying it comes from a mentality that, "Well, this is hard for me, but my brother or sister, what they need is more important to me than what difficulty it's going to cost me." So I'm willing to give offer myself and do something that's difficult for me because they are more important to me. That's what God has done for us. We have Jesus' example to follow. So I give myself because my brother or my enemy is more important to me.

Love as Christ also loved. I'm just going to read that verse again from 1 John because this is just really special to me. As we look at the problems in the world, the problems in churches, the problems in family, Jesus came to give us the solution in that so that the world isn't that kind of place. And as we follow Jesus, we are part of restoring this broken world and creating a world that, again, God can look at and say, "It's good.

It's very good." This commandment to love one another is the same message you heard before, yet it's also new. Jesus lived the truth of this commandment, and you are also living it. The darkness is disappearing, and the true light is already shining. Well, the last part of this is, how does God feel about all this? God sees Jesus do this, and God sees us do this to, out of love and admiration for God, follow Jesus' example in loving others, forgiving others, offering ourselves as a sacrifice because we prefer them.

They're more important. And how does God feel about that? He goes, "I don't know what comes to your mind. Maybe you're not a smelly person. I am somewhat." Somebody gave us a subscription to coffee when we got married. And so every month we get this box, and you can smell it nine miles away. Well, not quite, but you don't have to open the box. You just go to the mailbox, and there's this box, and you know right away what it is because you can smell it outside the box. It's coffee, and it just smells amazing.

I like making chai. It's hands down my favorite hot drink. And good chai is worth walking aways for. And chai is made up of a bunch of different spices. There's cinnamon, and there's cloves, and there's ginger and allspice and star anise, and some people put cardamom in there. And well, one time I made chai. It was a pretty big pot of chai. I don't know if the youth were over or what, but anyways, and you dump the spices in the trash when they're done.

Bachelor's trashes don't get changed as regularly as some people do. And I think it was probably it was several days anyways later. I remember opening the trash, and boy, you may think this is gross, but it smelled so good in there. I went, "Wow." Because those spices had sat in there and leached their fragrance into all the rest of who knows what was in there. And it smelled amazing.

I think that's a little picture of what happens to the world when we live Jesus' way, that it makes the world a place that is less ripe for judgment and is a place that's more pleasing to God. Can you think of anywhere else in the Bible, back to the beginning again, where God saw something and he just said, "Wow, I love it"? His creation. Yeah, his creation. Genesis chapter 1, every time he's like, "That's good." And it's like, "Oh, that's good." God gets done with it.

And then when he made people, God said, "It's very good." God was just tickled pink. He's like, "That's me right there." And it really was. And so when we follow Jesus as imitators of God, we make the hard choices to do the things God tells us to do to be like him, out of a heart of love and admiration for him, like dear children. That's who we become. We become again that delightful ambiance to God that he felt at the beginning when he made this brand new perfect world.

And we begin to become part of the restoration when there will again be a new heaven and a new earth where it dwells righteousness. Let's bow our heads for prayer. Thank you, Father, for your love to us. Thank you for your forgiveness and your giving your Son to suffer and face Satan and deliver himself as a hostage in our place to bring redemption in the careful life that he lived and even times was strong crying in tears to be blameless.

Thank you so much for all of that and that we can become your children and join you. And we have another chance to be part of creating a good world and bringing wholeness to the world that we're in. Help us, Lord, to like simple children, to love you, to admire you, and to obey you. And we want to grow up to be just like you. In Jesus' name, amen.