"Follow the way of love, even as Christ loved you." Though using different words, this command of the Letter to the Ephesians seems to be an echo of the new commandment which, as St. John tells us, Jesus gave us during the Last Supper: "You must love one another as I have loved you." It is interesting that just before this the Author commands us: "Be imitators of God as his dear children", yet he does not specifically ask us to imitate Jesus. This conforms to the general usage of the New Testament, which seems to prefer asking us to follow Jesus. St Augustine explains that to imitate Jesus means to follow him: in other words the following of Christ includes the obligation to imitate him.

Our vocation to imitate God is grounded in the revelation of Genesis that we are created in the image and likeness of God. By sin, we lost the likeness of God by we are still the image of God. The purpose of a moral and spiritual life is to restore the likeness of God so that we become what we are created to be.