The Standard
One word of inspired authority settles the whole question to faith forever: “Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children.” This is the standard and the measure of devotedness. Being the children of God, we are partakers of His nature, and we ought never to admit a standard lower than the nature of which we are partakers. God was manifested in Christ Jesus, the express image of His Person. It is in Him that we see our new nature presented in all its perfection and in all its fullness, but in Him as man, and as it ought to be developed in us here below, in the circumstances through which we are passing.
It is indeed humbling to think that we have answered so little to the call of God to be imitators of Himself as His children. But He has given us an object in which He manifests Himself that He may lead and attract our hearts to follow Him, and this object we know as the One who loves us and gave Himself for us, and the only object the Christian should ever have. “There is a sense,” says one, “in which God is, morally, the measure of other beings — a consideration which brings out the immense privilege of the child of God. It is the effect of grace, in that being born of Him and partaking of His nature, the child of God is called to be an imitator of God, to be perfect as his Father is perfect. He makes us partakers of His holiness; consequently, we are called to be imitators of God, as His dear children. This shows the immense privilege of grace. It is the love of God in the midst of evil, and which, superior to all evil, walks in holiness and rejoices, also, together in a divine way, in the unity of the same joys and the same sentiments.”
J. N. Darby,
Things New and Old, 18:104