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