BECOMING IMITATORS OF GOD
Greetings in Jesus:
Ephesians 5:1-2 speaks to us about being dearly beloved children of God...trying to imitate the things that we see Him do in our lives. I have watched small children try to walk in the shoes of their mother or their father...which is a real struggle at best, and I have watched just how clumsy and heavy those steps are. The shoes they fill with their tiny feet are often too much for them to even lift off of the ground, and they drag the shoes around on the floor like they were balls and chains. It usually isn't too long before they fall under the strain of trying, and sit there crying for a while because they could not do what they wanted so desperately to do in their parents shoes.
I am often reminded of that kind of scene when it comes to our attempt to walk in God's steps. It really does not matter how much we love God...there are some things that we cannot do. It was when I began to realize that fact that I also was given a new teaching from God's Spirit for my life. The teaching was that we are not the ones to be doing anything for God...but we should at all times be allowing God to do what He wants to do through us. I began to see that if I did indeed want to walk with God I needed to have His strength and power to move through me as I walked in His shoes. It was then and only then that God was in complete control of me and of the situation where I was being used.
The other thing that I began to understand to a much greater part was the fact that if I wanted God's power to walk through me in those shoes I needed to get rid of much of the self that I had built up around me spiritually. Unless I did that on my own and through my own will to be a sacrifice to God just as Jesus was to God for me God would not be with me when I walked in His shoes...and that meant that the power I was using was not His but my own. Because of that fact I could be certain of failure.
As Ephesians 5: continues it tells us about many of the things that cause self to get in the middle of our pathway to trip us us up as we walk with God. Among the most common is our own human traits including;sex,obscenity,course words and joking with the world around us. All of these things we need to put aside if we are going to walk with God's power within us. The language and the thoughts of this world are not God's thoughts or language, and we would do well to learn that from the beginning of our relationship with Him. When Paul writes about this he is not saying that we should not have contact with nonbelievers but that we should not condone the excuses that many have for bad behavior in life, nor in recommending bad behavior for others Christian or non-Christian. If we can learn to walk by God's strength there is much that we can do while walking in His shoes, but in our own strength we are mostly useless. I pray that we would prepare our lives so that God's Strength will always be with each step we take. May you richly bless God through your life in Him.
THE UNWORTHY SERVANT
Ephesians 5:1-2 speaks to us about being dearly beloved children of God...trying to imitate the things that we see Him do in our lives. I have watched small children try to walk in the shoes of their mother or their father...which is a real struggle at best, and I have watched just how clumsy and heavy those steps are. The shoes they fill with their tiny feet are often too much for them to even lift off of the ground, and they drag the shoes around on the floor like they were balls and chains. It usually isn't too long before they fall under the strain of trying, and sit there crying for a while because they could not do what they wanted so desperately to do in their parents shoes.
I am often reminded of that kind of scene when it comes to our attempt to walk in God's steps. It really does not matter how much we love God...there are some things that we cannot do. It was when I began to realize that fact that I also was given a new teaching from God's Spirit for my life. The teaching was that we are not the ones to be doing anything for God...but we should at all times be allowing God to do what He wants to do through us. I began to see that if I did indeed want to walk with God I needed to have His strength and power to move through me as I walked in His shoes. It was then and only then that God was in complete control of me and of the situation where I was being used.
The other thing that I began to understand to a much greater part was the fact that if I wanted God's power to walk through me in those shoes I needed to get rid of much of the self that I had built up around me spiritually. Unless I did that on my own and through my own will to be a sacrifice to God just as Jesus was to God for me God would not be with me when I walked in His shoes...and that meant that the power I was using was not His but my own. Because of that fact I could be certain of failure.
As Ephesians 5: continues it tells us about many of the things that cause self to get in the middle of our pathway to trip us us up as we walk with God. Among the most common is our own human traits including;sex,obscenity,course words and joking with the world around us. All of these things we need to put aside if we are going to walk with God's power within us. The language and the thoughts of this world are not God's thoughts or language, and we would do well to learn that from the beginning of our relationship with Him. When Paul writes about this he is not saying that we should not have contact with nonbelievers but that we should not condone the excuses that many have for bad behavior in life, nor in recommending bad behavior for others Christian or non-Christian. If we can learn to walk by God's strength there is much that we can do while walking in His shoes, but in our own strength we are mostly useless. I pray that we would prepare our lives so that God's Strength will always be with each step we take. May you richly bless God through your life in Him.
THE UNWORTHY SERVANT
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