When I was in primary school, I spent a lot of time in hospital. I had a problem with my hip that saw me in and out of hospital several times. My first hospital stay was for a week of traction (yes, they were literally pulling my leg—for a whole week). In the children’s ward with me was a school friend; he’d been dragged by a horse and had burns all over his body (he has since recovered!). There was also another child in the ward with us. His name was Dean. Dean was about two years old, and his dad was a truck driver. I remember this fact quite distinctly. The reason I remember it is because Dean clearly loved trucks. How do I know he loved trucks? He told us. Often. All day, and all night, Dean would say “Truck!” He would require us frequently to acknowledge the significance of trucks. One night, while my friend was sleeping, Dean decided it was important to make his love of trucks known. So Dean toddled over to my friend’s bed, grabbed the portable food table, rammed it repeatedly into his bandaged belly (just to get his attention, of course), and said, “Truck! Truck!” Happily, the nurses heard and came pretty quickly to sort it all out. Dean didn’t stay too long in the ward with us after that. Dean’s love of trucks was entirely natural, wasn’t it? This is how the world works: children imitate their parents. Children learn to act the way their parents act, and to love what their parents love. Now that I’m a dad myself, I can see how true it is. It’s impossible for us as parents to get away with hypocrisy. If we really want our kids to grow up to be certain kinds of people, there’s no short cuts: we need to work hard at becoming those people ourselves. Our kids don’t necessarily learn to do what we say, but they do learn to do what we do and to love what we love. Sometimes I see my kids stressing out and worrying too much, and I know exactly where it comes from: me. On the other hand, sometimes I see them imitating us in good ways: for example, when I see them genuinely loving and respecting each other, following in the way we try to model love and respect in our marriage. Of course, my parenting is nowhere near perfect, and I get it wrong far too often. There are no perfect parents on this earth, and none of us have perfect parents either. Maybe yours were (or are) downright awful. Maybe you’ve realised that you’ve inherited from your parents certain behaviours that you wish you could get rid of. That can be hard. For good or bad, children imitate their parents. That’s why being a Christian is such a powerful thing. If you’re a believer in Christ, then God is your loving heavenly Father. Even if your earthly parents were terrible, or absent, that fact doesn’t have to determine the course of your life. You have someone perfectly good to imitate: God himself. That’s what Paul is writing about here in these verses: he says to “become imitators of God”. So then, become imitators of God, as dearly loved children, and walk in love, just as Christ also loved us and gave himself for us as an offering and sacrifice to God, a fragrant aroma.Ephesians 5:1–2 “Become imitators of God”. This is an amazing privilege, and it undergirds everything about our Christian lives. Dearly loved children The reason we can become imitators of God is that we are God’s “dearly loved children”. God isn’t just some distant supreme being who demands our cowering allegiance. God loves us, deeply and sacrificially, as our Father. That’s why he wants us to live for him. In his