Good morning! We are so glad you chose to join us here at Harding Street Church of Christ to worship God and hear a portion of His word spoken. If you are visiting with us, we hope you will stay awhile after services to enjoy our Bible classes, and then fellowship with us so we can get to know you better. This week the Bible app on my phone gave me two good verses that made me think and look within myself if I was truly living according to God’s will. The first being from Ephesians 5:1, “Therefore be imitators of God, as dear children.” Are we truly working to imitate God in everything we do? When you’re around children, you learn that they will pick up on everything you say and do. You will hear them say something, or watch them do something and think “Where in the world did they learn that?” Well kids are like little sponges, they soak up everything they hear and see even from a young age. Angel tells me about this when she is teaching little Boone in Bible class, that every time he takes a drink of something he has to say “Ahhhh” after like it was a really refreshing drink. I’m sure it was something he heard mom or dad or the grandparents do, so he thinks that’s just what you are supposed to do when you take a drink. In the same way we are called to soak up everything that we are taught in the Bible and through the teachings of the New Testament so that we can imitate God in our lives. And when someone asks us why we do it, or where we learned it from, we should think to ourselves, “That’s just the way it is supposed to be, why would I do it any other way?”
Then the second verse that got me thinking was the verse of the day right after Ephesians 5:1. This verse was Galatians 5:14, “For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” God teaches us love. God teaches that He loves us from the very beginning by creating us in His image. God shows us His love through the great sacrifice of His only son, Jesus. In return, we are called to love everyone around us. If we are to be imitators of God, then loving everyone shouldn’t be a choice for us, but it should just be the way we are. Many of the problems in the world today would go away, if we just learned to love our neighbors. To stop thinking so highly of ourselves and just learn to love. When we think we are better than one another, or we think hateful thoughts to one another, we will only destroy ourselves, which is taught in the verse right after we are told to love one another in Galatians 5:15, “But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another!” Let us all work within ourselves to be better imitators of God, and we can start that today by working to love those around us unconditionally.
-Geoffrey Bane
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