two points that I would
briefly touch upon now--the one is the sublime precept of the text, and
the other the all-sufficient motive enforcing it. 'Be ye imitators of
God as'--because you are, and know yourselves to be--'beloved children,'
and it therefore behoves you to be like your Father.

I. First, then, this sublime precept.

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 perfectin