Imitate Jesus

Ephesians 5: 1-17. In our tenth week exploring Ephesians, we find ourselves waist deep in what Paul the Apostle had been working towards teaching to his audience: the way of a Jesus follower. These verses have been all too easily abused in the Church history, so they should be treated with discernment in some regard; this is not another list of religious laws for us to blindly mimic. Rather, these are explicit examples of what it means to take to heart everything that Paul has been teaching us from the very beginning. As followers of Jesus, we have been pulled out of the death and slavery of our pasts into a new identity defined by Jesus himself; it only makes sense, then, that we act as he did, and Paul is determined to show them—and us—exactly what all that entails.