From description to prescription +

Think how you would summarise Ephesians 5:1 in your own words: ‘Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children.’

I wonder if your summary focused on the call to imitate God or the description of Christ as ‘dearly loved children’?

It is all too easy for us to hear only the commands of Scripture and miss the descriptions out of which they arise. The prescription to behave like God only makes sense as the outworking of the description that we are God’s children. The imperatives (commands) of the New Testament always arise out of the indicatives (description). We are already God’s dearly loved children so let’s live as God’s dearly loved children by imitating our Father.