“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.” 

– Ephesians 5:1-2

Notes:

The overall purpose of God is for His children to be as He is: To be His “imitation”.  It is to have His full expression of personhood and character on the inside and the outside of us, and to be ye perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect.  This was the great purpose behind the Cross.  The suffering of Jesus and the Blood atonement was to remove our sins so that the Holy Spirit can take up residence within us and give us the grace and ability to be as God is.  However, without it, there is only so much we can do on our own strength.  I was eating dinner with a friend the other night that had been going through a horrific breakup with His ex-girlfriend.  I was admonishing him that the key to removing bitterness and anger is to forgive.  His response was “Yeah, that’s true, but a person can only forgive so much!”  This was such a true statement.  Without the Holy Spirit, we are incapable of forgiving the way that God forgave us who believe. In the same way, we are also incapable of walking in love as Christ loved us, if we do not have His love abiding in us.  In other words, we cannot give away what we don’t have.  From an overall perspective, it is absolutely impossible to be Christ-Like and imitators of God without the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.    

Willing to Take the Challenge?

If we want to love like Jesus loves, have compassion like He has, forgive as He forgives, and be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, we must learn to walk in the Spirit and be Spirit-led in all things, as Christ was while He was upon the earth.  Being the full expression of the Father (He said if you have seen Me you have seen the Father), God emptied Himself and became a man totally dependent upon the Spirit, so that he could give us an example of what we should do while we are upon the earth as well.