Now notice that, broad as this precept is, and all-inclusive of every
kind of excellence and duty as it may be, the Apostle has a very
definite and specific meaning in it. There is one feature, and only one,
in which, accurately speaking, a man may be like God. Our limited
knowledge can never be like the ungrowing perfect wisdom of God. Our
holiness cannot be like His, for there are many points in our nature and
character which have no relation or correspondence to anything in the
divine nature. But what is left? Love is left. Our other graces are not
like the God to whom they cleave. My faith is not like His faithfulness.
My obedience is not like His authority. My submission is not like His
autocratic power. My emptiness is not like His fulness. My aspirations
are not like His gratifying of them. They correspond to God, but
correspondence is not similarity; rather it presupposes unlikeness. Just
as a concavity will fit into a convexity, for the very reason that it is
concave and not convex, so the human unlikenesses, which are
correspondent to God, are the characteristics by which it becomes
possible that we should cleave to Him and inhere in Him. But whilst
there is much in which He stands alone and incomparable, and whilst we
have all to say, 'Who is like unto Thee, O Lord?' or what likeness shall
we compare unto Him? we yet can obey in reference to one thing,--and to
one thing only, as it seems to me--the commandment of my text, 'Be ye
imitators of God.' We can be _like_ Him in nothing else, but our love
not only corresponds to His, but is of the same quality and nature as
His, howsoever different it may be in sweep and in fervour and in
degree. The tiniest drop that hangs upon the tip of a thorn will be as
perfect a sphere as the sun, and it will have its little rainbow on its
round, with all the prismatic colours, the same in tint and order and
loveliness, as when the bow spans the heavens. The dew-drop may imitate
the sun, and we are to be imitators of God; knit to Him by the one thing
in us which is kindred to Him in the deepest sense--the love that is the
life of God and the perfecting of man.
Well, then, notice how the Apostle in the context fastens upon a certain
characteristic of that divine love which we are to imitate in our lives;
and thereby makes the precept a very practical and a very difficult one.
Godlike love will be love that gives as liberally as His does. What is
the very essence of all love? Longing to be like. And the purest and
deepest love is love which desires to impart itself, and that is God's
love. The Bible seems to teach us that in a very mysterious sense, about
which the less we say the less likely we are to err, there is a quality
of giving up, as well as of giving, in God's love; for we read of the
Father that 'spared not His Son,' by which is meant, not that He did not
shrink from inflicting something upon the Son, but that He did not
grudgingly keep that Son for Himself. 'He spared not His own Son, but
delivered Him up to the death for us all.' And if we can say but little
about that surrender on the part of the infinite Fountain of all love,
we can say that Jesus Christ, who is the activity of the Father's love,
spared not Himself, but, as the context puts it, 'gave Himself _up_ for
us.'
And that is the pattern for us. That thought is not a subject to be
decorated with tawdry finery of eloquence, or to be dealt with as if it
were a sentimental prettiness very fit to be spoken of, but impossible
to be practised. It is the duty of every Christian man and woman, and
they have not done their duty unless they have learned that the bond
which unites them to men is, in its nature, the very same as the bond
which unites men to God; and that they will not have lived righteously
unless they learn to be 'imitators of God,' in the surrender of
themselves for their brother's good.
Ah, friend, that grips us very tight--and if there were a little more
reality and prose brought into our sentimental talk about Christian
love, and that love were more often shown in action, in all the
self-suppression and taking a lift of a world's burdens, which its great
Pattern demands, the world would be less likely to curl a scornful lip
at the Church's talk about brotherly love.
You say that you are a Christian--that is to say a child of God. Do you
know anything, and would anybody looking at you see that you knew
anything, about the love which counts no cost and no sacrifice too great
to be lavished on the unworthy and the sinful?
But that brings me to another point. The Apostle here, in the context,
not for the sake of saying pretty things, but for the sake of putting
sharp points on Christian duty, emphasises another thought, that Godlike
love will be a forgiving love. Why should we be always waiting for the
other man to determine our relations to him, and consider that if he
does not like us we are absolved from the duty of loving him? Why should
we leave him to settle the terms upon which we are to stand? God has
love, as the Sermon on the Mount puts it, 'to the unthankful and the
evil,' and we shall not be imitating His example unless we carry the
same temper into all our relationships with our fellows.
People sit complacently and hear all that I am now trying to enforce,
and think it is the right thing for me to say, but do you think it is
the right thing for you to do? When a man obviously does not like you,
or perhaps tries to harm you, what then? How do you meet him? 'He maketh
His sun to shine, and sendeth His rain, on the unthankful and the evil.'
'Be ye imitators of God, as beloved children.'
Now note the all-sufficient motive for this great precept.
The sense of being loved will make loving, and nothing else will. The
only power that will eradicate, or break without eradicating, our
natural tendency to make ourselves our centres, is the recognition that
there, at the heart, and on the central throne of the universe, and the
divinest thing in it, there sits perfect and self-sacrificing Love,
whose beams warm even us. The only flame that kindles love in a man's
heart, whether it be to God or to man, is the recognition that he
himself stands in the full sunshine of that blaze from above, and that
God has loved him. Our hearts are like reverberating furnaces, and when
the fire of the consciousness of the divine love is lit in them, then
from sides and roof the genial heat is reflected back again to intensify
the central flame. Love begets love, and according to Paul, and
according to John, and according to the Master of both of them, if a man
loves God, then that glowing beam will glow whether it is turned to
earth or turned to heaven.
The Bible does not cut love into two, and keep love to God in one
division of the heart and love to man in another, but regards them as
one and the same; the same sentiment, the same temper, the same attitude
of heart and mind, only that in the one case the love soars, and in the
other it lives along the level. The two are indissolubly tied together.
It is because a man knows himself to be beloved that therefore he is
stimulated and encouraged to be an 'imitator of God' and, on the other
hand, the sense of being God's child underlies all real imitation of
Him. Imitation is natural to the child. It is a miserable home where a
boy does not imitate his father, and it is the father's fault in nine
cases out of ten if he does not. Whoever feels himself to be a beloved
child is thereby necessarily drawn to model himself on the Father that
he loves, because he knows that the Father loves him.
So I come to the blessed truth that Christian morality does not say to
us, 'Now begin, and work, and tinker away at yourselves, and try to get
up some kind of excellence of character, and then come to God, and pray
Him to accept you.' That is putting the cart before the horse. The order
is reversed. We are to begin with taking our personal salvation and
God's love to us for granted, and to work from that. Realise that you
are beloved children, and then set to work to live accordingly. If we
are ever to do what is our bounden duty to do, in all the various
relations of life, we must begin with recognising, with faithful and
grateful hearts, the love wherewith God has loved us. We are to think
much and confidently of ourselves as beloved of God, and that, and only
that, will make us loving to men.
The Nile floods the fields of Egypt and brings greenness and abundance
wherever its waters are carried, because thousands of miles away, close
up to the Equator, the snows have melted and filled the watercourses in
the far-off wilderness. And so, if we are to go out into life, living
illustrations and messengers of a love that has redeemed even us, we
must, in many a solitary moment, and in the depths of our quiet hearts,
realise and keep fast the conviction that God hath loved us, and Christ
hath died for us.
But a solemn consideration has to be pressed on all our consciences, and
that is that there is something wrong with a man's Christian confidence
whose assurance that he himself possesses a share in the love of God in
Christ, is not ever moving him to imitation of the love in which he
trusts. It is a shame that any one without Christian faith and love
should be as charitable, as open to pity and to help, as earnest in any
sort of philanthropic work, as Christian men and women are. But godless
and perfectly secular philanthropy treads hard on the heels of Christian
charity to-day. The more shame to us if we have been eating our morsels
alone, and hugging ourselves in the possession of the love which has
redeemed us; and if it has not quickened us to the necessity of copying
it in our relations to our fellows. There is something dreadfully wrong
about such a Christian character. 'He that loveth not his brother whom
he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?'
Take these plain principles, and honestly fit them to your characters
and lives, and you will revolutionise both.