Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father give us sobered hearts and strengthened minds to consider carefully and honestly our daily living. Father, are we pleasing you with how we live? How much of our thinking, saying, and doing is aimed at appeasing our own appetites? Father, help us to seek your satisfaction over our own until ours joins with your own. For yours will never and should never and can never and must never join ours. Never. In the powerful name of Jesus, help us to throw down at the foot of the cross anything in us that even whispers "My will over Thy will." Amen.
Your Morning Song: "Resurrection Day" by Rend Collective
Your Morning Scripture: 2 Timothy 3:10
You, however, have followed my teaching,
my conduct, my aim in life, my faith,
my patience, my love,
my steadfastness,
...
Who are we imitating? Who do we want to think like, feel like, speak like, and act like? For many of us it is our father or mother, or someone in a similar role. Our elders, our mentors, people who have gone before us that we can mold ourselves after.
Yes, of course we should be imitating Jesus. Yet there is a pattern, a hierarchy of imitation that begins and ends with Jesus. But in-between there must be others. Paul himself once said, "imitate me as I imitate Christ."
And we need to make sure that we are answering the question with the proper context in mind. When I ask, "Who are we imitating?" too many of us would give a false mask of an answer that fits only to the first thing Paul says to Timothy, "my teaching." Not who do we listen to on a Sunday morning or watch online. Whose whole life are we molding our whole lives to look like?
How palatable it is to affirm words and ideas, but divorce them from conduct, aim in life, faith, patience, love, and steadfastness.
The church is starving for mature brothers and sisters worth imitating. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves for how weak in the word and how compartmentalized in obedience we've become. Too many of us have more of the Bible read to us than we read for ourselves. Too many of us act and speak a certain Sunday way, and then act and speak like the world the rest of the week.
As Paul cries out, "may it never be!"
And yet it too easily and too often is.
Who are we imitating? With our whole lives? Are we imitating the right people? Are those people imitating the right Person?
Are we making good, Godly, sincere, Biblical efforts to become people worth imitating? Or has our appetite and preference become our "god," breaking our identity up into a million useless pieces that I hope no one imitates?
Find someone who is mature in the faith, grown, wise, Christ-like. And with your whole life, imitate their whole life. If you can find one such person, that is enough. If you can find several, then you have found not one treasure, but treasure upon treasure.
Once you have found someone to imitate in this way, then embrace their example, which leads to Christ, and become someone yourself, whose whole life is worth imitating.
So. Who are you imitating? And are you, yourself worth imitating?
No false humility. No pride. No "we could all do better."
Our actual lives are our actual answers to both questions.
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