LEARNING DAILY

 

Ephesians 5:1, Therefore be imitators of God as dear children.

 

John 14:15, “If you love Me, keep My commandments.”  Jesus

 

Two very short but direct statements concerning how every Christian should live their life.  You and I should imitate God and keep the commandments; this is living life in an attitude of love and obedience. Our desire should be to conform to the will of God in order to become more like Him each day and to stay on the narrow way that leads to eternal life with Him.  This way of life is dependent on our obedience.  We have already seen this week that this leads to a church without spot or wrinkle, the church the Lord Jesus is coming back for.

 

In Peter’s first letter, he writes Christians are to turn away from the way they used to live before they accepted Jesus as their Lord.  He comments that before we did this, we lived in ignorance and lived only for ourselves.  Now, as Jesus is our Savior and Lord, we are to be holy, because He is holy and demands that we live that way.  Holiness carries with it the thought that one is separated from the ungodliness found in the world and set apart for service and for worship of God.  Holiness means being like God and being dedicated to Him.  In other words, it is to be our desire to please Him in everything we think, say and do.  This just does not happen overnight!  It is a process of maturing and growing as we are in God’s Word; we learn what it means to be like God and the Holy Spirit helps us in that pursuit.

 

Do you understand that the enemy of your soul does not want you know this?  If God’s Word is the way to know who He is and the way God wants to purify His church, is it any wonder the enemy tries to keep people from reading it?  Make it hard to understand and they won’t read it, he says.  Make them just think they are reading words and it is so boring he says.  Make them think it irrelevant, he says. 

 

Peter quotes Isaiah 40:6-8.  The world and all human achievements will end but “the Word of God will endure forever’.  The world and everything in it must be continually judged by the standards set in God’s Word.  Too often the Bible is judged by the world.  “The moral absolutes of God’s Word will stand long after today’s relativism has collapsed in self-destruction.  Those who bend the Word of God to conform to the intellectual and moral trends of their generation betray ‘the Word of God which liveth and abideth forever’ (1Peter 1:23).” (LSSB)

 

How do we imitate God?  We look to His Son and how He lived His life while on this earth.  By looking at Jesus, we learn to walk in love with one another.  We learn to give sacrificially to others and to even offer ourselves as a living sacrifice to God. We learn to walk in obedience.

 

From now on DJSB will be used to note information or quotes from the David Jeremiah Study Bible and LSSB will refer to information and quotes from the Life in the Spirit Study Bible.