Ephesians 5:2

Ephesians 5:2, in plain English

The way you imitate God is by loving others the way Christ loved us—with complete self-giving, willing to lay everything down.

Why it's here

The Ephesians knew about love in their culture, but it was usually transactional or conditional. Paul is redefining love using Christ's sacrifice as the model. He describes that sacrifice as a 'fragrant offering,' using Old Testament language to show that Christ's death was pleasing to God, acceptable, the kind of thing God desires.

Who's speaking

Paul, continuing his instruction to the Ephesian believers

Where it sits in the story

This is the heart of the gospel made practical. Christ's death wasn't just a transaction to rescue you from hell—it was an act of love that becomes the template for how you treat others. Every act of genuine self-giving love points back to the cross.

The scholarly reading

The supreme expression of imitating God is walking in self-giving love, exemplified by Christ's sacrificial death, which pleased God like the fragrant incense offerings of the Old Testament.

Language and setting

Paul invokes the sacrificial imagery that would resonate deeply with former Jewish adherents in the congregation, particularly the vocabulary of 'aroma' (osmē euōdía) from Levitical worship (see Leviticus 1:9, 13). The phrase 'gave himself up' (paredōken heauton) appears also in Galatians 2:20 and 1 Timothy 2:6, forming a doctrinal refrain across Paul's corpus. This is not merely moral exhortation but christological proclamation—Christ's self-donation is simultaneously an offering acceptable to God and a template for Christian conduct.

Voice

Paul, drawing on the earliest Christian kerygma about Christ's redemptive death.

Significance

This verse encapsulates the gospel itself—Christ's death as both sacrifice (fulfilling the Old Testament cultus) and ethical paradigm. It connects the incarnational descent of Ephesians 4:8-10 to the practical outworking of grace in the believer's life, demonstrating how soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) necessarily generates ethics (how one must live).

1Be imitators of God, therefore, as beloved children,

2and walk in love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant sacrificial offering to God.

3But among you, as is proper among the saints, there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed.

4Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk, or crude joking, which are out of character, but rather thanksgiving.

Read all of Ephesians 5 — Imitate God as beloved children. Walk in love. Walk in light. Paul transforms the household codes of his day with a vision of mutual, sacrificial love.