Written by Pastor Mark Driskill
December 1, 2011

Read Ephesians 5:1

“Therefore be imitators of God as beloved children.”

One of the crucial decisions we will make with our lives is whether we will spend our lives as competitors with God or as imitators. Ever since Adam and Eve were enticed by the serpent to seek to become their own gods (“You will be like God knowing good and evil.”) humans have had the terrible tendency to choose the former. Rather than seek to bring glory to God by imitating him as sons and daughters, we often find ourselves seeking to live in competition with God, striking out on our own.

We tell ourselves that we can live independently of God and even in opposition to our creator.  Still others foolishly seek to live as if there is no divine being beyond themselves. The Christian however takes the old adage, “imitation is the greatest compliment.” to its ultimate expression. As believers our goal is to live before our heavenly father as beloved children, imitating his love and goodness, his creativity, and his passion for life, his holiness and his love. As earthly children seek to imitate their parents walk and talk and other mannerisms, so we who are living in relationship with God through Christ, seek to imitate his life on the earth. In this way we give praise to his glory. We become finite expressions of the infinite! What a privilege to live as reflections of God’s glory.

I once sat by a river watching tiny flecks of golden light dancing with joy on the ripples and currents of the water. Like tiny jewels these reflections silently celebrated the glory of the sun. I thought about how ironic it was that such tiny, silent, drops of light were reflections of a sun, millions of miles away. This sun for whom the sparkles danced was so unimaginably powerful in itself that I could hardly imagine how it could produce these tiny reflections. Hard to imagine that the source of these silent unassuming sparkles was more powerful than a million thermonuclear explosions. They were finite expressions of the infinite, mere imitations of something overwhelmingly powerful.

This is how we are when we allow the grace of Christ to remove our desire to compete with God, and be our own sun, and replace it with a new desire to simply reflect his glory. We who are redeemed are reflections of his majesty and our job is simply to dance on the water and imitate the infinite. To compete with God is as futile as a sparkle on a stream trying to become a sun. Today let us be content to dance in his presence and reflect his glory.

Pastor Mark Driskill
Web Minister of Begotten By the Word web ministry
See our website at http://ourchurch.com/member/b/bbtw
and
www.facebook.com (to group “begotten by the word”)
Begotten By the Word is a ministry of Helping Hands Christian resources-Evangelism Outreach
www.hhcr05.org
(Feel free to copy in any way that will bring glory to God and further his kingdom.)