During my pastor’s Father’s Day sermon, he talked about how kids pick up a lot of their early habits from their parents. After the sermon, he called all the men to the front to pray over them. I had my son back in service with me by this point so I took him down there with me. While my pastor was speaking to us, my son was watching him intently and then said, “Amen!” I laughed and thought about the message. When he prayed over us, I heard my son say, “Yes, Lord.” He’s starting to pick up a lot of habits by watching me. He’s imitating what he sees me do. It’s important that I give him a good example to follow.
When you look at Ephesians 5:1-2 in the Message Bible, it speaks to us as children and how we are to be imitators of Christ. It says, “Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.” It’s pretty clear message what God wants us to do.
The first thing is that we choose who we imitate. The people we spend the most time with are the ones who we become most like. We end up liking the same things, going to the same places and even speaking the same way. It’s part of life. You become like those you run with. Your parents told you that line and you’ve told it to your kids. It’s such an important lesson for every stage of life. If we want to be more like God, then we have to spend more time with Him. If we want to see what God does, we have to be around Him and we have to be paying attention.
Mostly what God does is love. How would our lives be different, if most of what we did was to love others? How would the world be different? God’s message to us over and over is simply to love others. Jesus said that was the greatest commandment. In I John 4:7-8, John said that the person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God. In I Corinthians 13, Paul gave us all the attributes of love including that it was patient, kind and that it didn’t keep score of the sins of others. We typically apply those to romantic love, but they are to be applied to Christian love toward others too.
You and I are called to love and we have been shown the greatest example of it. It’s time we started to imitate our Father and demonstrate the kind of love we’ve been shown. The people around us who need God’s love the most don’t need another person pointing out what’s wrong in their life. They need someone who will love them in spite of it. They need someone who will love the me extravagantly. They need someone to show them what selfless love really is. You have experienced it from your Father. It’s time we started imitating it to those around us. Who in your world needs that kind of love today?
Devotions by Chris Hendrix 
