An Imitator of Christ
1Be imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ.
Living a life meant to be an example to someone is never easy. For we must always live for others rather than for ourselves, and we must pay attention to other people’s hearts.
Pastors, parents and teachers go ahead of others, so they try to set an example, but they are human, so they cannot be perfect. That is why they must always pray with a repentant heart for the believers, children and disciples who follow behind them.
But the weakness of those who go ahead is that they are generous with themselves, so when those following behind show their shortcomings, they cannot accept it and get angry every time.
To put it in terms of a car, these are the people holding the steering wheel. That is what makes it evil.
A car moves as its driver wills.
So if someone who drives poorly, does not know the way well, or has a hot temper is driving, the car is not safe, and none of the people riding in it are safe either.
Even if the driver is a person of good character, if they are unskilled at driving or do not know the way, everyone riding in the car with them cannot help but lose their way because of the driver.
And even if the driver is skilled and knows the way well, if they have a hot temper, the passengers will be uneasy, because they have to keep watching the driver flare up in anger.
In the same way, if a pastor does not know the Word and does not really know God’s will, and so does not teach the truth, the believers are like people who go to church but live a life of faith without knowing their destination. Believers who live such a life of faith will always be uneasy and will wander spiritually.
In a home where the parents are hot-tempered and stubborn and lead by their own will, the children, though able to grow into people of greater capacity, will stay where they are and become people of small capacity, who think and judge no further than their parents do.
Depending on the drivers who lead the church and the home, the church and the home may go easily along the prepared road of Christ, or they may keep swerving left and right and live uneasy lives.
Whether the one at the wheel clearly knows the destination of life will make a marked difference in the lives of the believers and children who follow them.
Only when the one who goes ahead has a well-formed character can those who travel with them live at peace and have a firm faith.
So it is very important for those who go ahead in faith, and for parents, first to beat their bodies and bring them into submission and to humble themselves and go low, so that they can live lives that set an example.
If you are well prepared, the people who follow you will reach their destination by the safest and fastest road.
I am not saying that you must be perfect because you are believers or because you are parents.
When you show that you do your best even though you fall short, God will recognize that faith, and so people will naturally recognize you as well.
That is how hard it is to take responsibility for other people’s souls and lives.
For saving souls is itself a spiritual war.
If, on a battlefield, the people who must move at your command do not trust you and so do not act, that war is lost before it is even fought. That is why it is so important to win the trust of the people beside you. Trust is not won in a moment, and it is not something you can gain by doing well once.
When you become a believer, a parent or a leader, you have in effect already declared war on Satan.
If believers who go ahead live lives that set an example in every way, more soldiers of Christ will be raised up. So Satan does not leave those who go ahead to travel in peace.
Satan will do whatever it takes to make them lose their temper and spill the holy word of God, and he will put hatred in their hearts to make them ruin the work of Jesus. In the end, he shakes the driver to keep them from going down the road of Christ.
When Satan schemes against you and your feelings are not shaken, that is evidence of how far you have matured.
Hanging a sign on a church building does not make someone a pastor, and holding a wedding and having children does not make someone a parent.
Receiving an office in the church does not make someone a believer approved by God, and teaching disciples does not make someone a teacher.
What matters is what kind of person they will remain in the eyes of those people.
What kind of person are you in the lives of the people beside you?
As what kind of person do they remember you and trust you?
How hard are you working not to defile the name of Christ? We cannot be perfect, so we must be clothed with the power of the one who is perfect.
When you meet a problem, do not look only at the problem and the people involved; look at how your own heart is changing right now because of it.
A believer’s proper stance is to look back and ask whether this problem, which Satan made to bring me down, might have come because I gave Satan some foothold, and to repent.
Only when we pray if our temper flares, and repent when we feel like sinning, do we become mature believers.
When God does not stop your hardships, it is so that he can see how much you have grown as a vessel.
If someone does not see this heart of God and gets in the way of God’s work with a hot temper and foolishness, they become Satan’s co-worker.
To become an example, you must pray without ceasing to know what God wants of you.
And you must learn to look back on your own words and actions and see how far along your faith is.
As you live, you must make every effort to deny yourself, so that you become a believer who brings people to stand before God.
To build churches, believers and homes that reveal God’s glory, we must be ready to sacrifice and serve, even if it costs us something. When God sees that faith, he will instead raise you up even higher.
Have a faith that does good, gives way, forgives and embraces others.
Train for a long time to become someone who sets an example.
You cannot become an example to others by working at it for a day or two, a month or a year.
When you run looking only toward the destination of heaven, God will seat you, who have worked by faith for ten years or your whole life long, in a place where you are an example to others.
To become an instrument of righteousness that God uses, we must deny ourselves without ceasing and keep chipping away at ourselves without ceasing.
The great problem, though, is that believers are forgetting that Satan exists.
That is why they cannot have the faith of ‘nevertheless,’ or the faith of ‘even if God does not do as I wish.’
The apostle Paul said that he was an imitator of Christ.
Paul wanted believers to imitate him, so that they too would meet Christ as he had. That is why he looked only to Christ, did only what Christ did, and preached only the words Christ spoke.
The apostle Paul’s purpose here is clear.
For he believes that to rescue people’s souls from darkness and death, we must lead them to Christ, who is the true light and the life.
Pastors and parents have no need to force their own ideas on others.
When they live out the life of Christ as the apostle Paul did and act according to the words the Lord taught, believers and children will naturally live by Christ’s leading, and they will come to love the pastors and parents who set them an example.
Setting an example for believers and children is not a matter of humoring them to win their hearts, or of trying to read their feelings so that they will love you. What comes first is exactly what the words say: showing them the example of the faith you want them to live out.
The apostle Paul had a faith that could be spiritually free, but he was always careful, so that he could bring Christ to people.
He held himself back, afraid that his actions might make others stumble, and whatever he did and whatever he said, he worked to set other people’s faith on a firm footing.
Paul was afraid that his plans, his temperament, his words and his actions might hide Christ. He hid himself and revealed only Christ, and he wanted everyone to imitate Christ just as he had imitated Christ.
A person who thinks of the other person’s salvation before themselves and acts on it is someone who, like the apostle Paul, shows goodness in their life and puts goodness into practice.
A person of such outstanding character and rich wisdom will reveal the love of Christ through their life in any community.
Isaiah 53:4-5
4Surely he has borne our sickness, and carried our suffering; yet we considered him plagued, struck by God, and afflicted. 5But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought our peace was on him; and by his wounds we are healed.
Isaiah, around the eighth century B.C., is already prophesying that Jesus would come 800 years later. Isaiah prophesied with certainty that Jesus would be pierced and whipped for our sins and would suffer on the cross.
Just as the prophet foretold, Jesus came to this earth, and just as foretold, he died.
And just as foretold, he rose again and fulfilled every word. That is why we can believe in the Lord without doubt.
The Lord could simply have abandoned to death the people who defied God’s word in the Garden of Eden and left them to Satan, and that would have been the end of it. But because of a holy love that had pity on those souls, he left his glorious throne and came himself into this low, lowly world.
You must imitate this love of Jesus Christ.
The eternal God left his glorious throne and suffered, carrying the cross in the place of people who had become slaves of Satan.
But people, who are sinners in their very being, are not thankful.
Far from being thankful, they are racing toward success in the world.
Of course, success in the world is necessary too.
This world runs on material things in the end, so when the Lord helps you succeed, he is in the end helping you do the Lord’s work.
But because people are sinners by their very nature, once they have tasted the glory of the world, they throw away the Lord and their brothers in faith like worn-out shoes.
God wants to work through the person who has received the blessing of salvation and gone on to succeed. But for human beings, this glittering world and its boasting come before God and before heaven, so in the end they abandon God and abandon the church.
People do not know how fearful a sin it is not to live by God’s word, so they do not prepare for the last day.
Why did God leave us the Bible through the Holy Spirit?
To show us now, before our very eyes, that history flows just as the Bible says and that the world is moving according to the Bible.
He left it to us in writing to warn Christians who believe the Bible that now, just as the Bible says, the signs of the last days are appearing, and the sound of the trumpet of the Second Coming is very near.
Just as Isaiah prophesied, Jesus came the first time, and now, as Jesus promised, he will come again.
You who wait for Jesus’ return must show holy love, as Jesus showed the holy love of God, and work to save souls. That is to say, what matters is not this short life in the world; we must prepare to meet the eternal world.
It is not the end just because you are a little better off than others now, or own a little more of the world. The only thing you can take to heaven is faith, and that is why we must pray and devote ourselves for the fullness of faith.
However much knowledge you have, could it be more than God’s? And however much you own, could it be more than God, who created heaven and earth?
Life ends only when we put off this flesh. So as long as Satan, who holds the power of the air, is there, we must never let go of Christ.
And what I want to ask of you is that you love your brothers in faith who pray for you. None of us can ever resist Satan alone, and that is why Jesus bound brothers in faith together as members of one body.
Honor and cherish the brothers in faith who pray for you.
Even if the prayers they pray seem truly insignificant, do not forget that God loves intercessory prayer, and that he hears the prayer of the brother who interceded for you and answers you.
Perhaps you have faith now because of the prayers of your brothers in faith.
The world tries to solve its problems with money, but believers who hope for heaven can receive answers only when prayers have been stored up.
In life, the words ‘Now it’s done’ mean nothing.
For the spiritual war goes on without end until Jesus locks Satan in the abyss.
God, too, bound the people of Israel together as the people of one nation, and Jesus, too, called twelve disciples to work together with him.
You who are at Watercourse Church now, with Christ as your head, are members of one body.
If you cannot love such members, you are not a mature believer.
I say something like this to young people who want to change jobs because of someone who is tormenting them. I tell them that if they cannot bear the situation and move easily to another company, someone who will torment them even more cruelly than that person will be waiting, so they should be a little more patient. That is just what the world is like.
Yet the young people who moved anyway, thinking surely it would not happen, often end up quitting that company too, saying they cannot believe such a person could exist and that they now see that the person who used to torment them was a good person by comparison.
I am not saying that you should just stay at the company while someone torments you.
Look back at why the situation arose and whether you gave some occasion for it, and work to overcome it with faith or with skill. Only then does God lead you onto an easier road.
The world does not welcome Christians.
We pass through the world like pilgrims, enduring in faith, praying, asking our brothers to pray for us, and taking the protection of the Holy Spirit as our fence, and so we simply go on to heaven without wavering.
The apostle Paul understood all these circumstances and knew how great that holy love is. So, imitating Christ, who obeyed according to God’s will, he gave everything, even his own life, to preach the gospel.
Living by God’s word is never easy.
If obeying the Word were easy, would anyone need to be martyred?
The eternal world is a world of light, where God himself is the temple and there is not a speck of darkness. The blessing of living there is a reward, decided by how much we love Christ here on this earth now, and how much we have endured to keep his word.
What have you done to enter heaven?
When God prepared an eternal heaven and Jesus gave his own life to tear down the wall of sin, what did we actually do to help?
Perhaps we could say that we were not there then, so there was nothing we could do.
Then what are we doing now, in these last days when the trumpet of the Second Coming is sounding?
Jesus did not tell us when he would come.
But he told us the signs that will happen in the last days, so all of us know that now is that last time.
All of us must be ready to go up to the Lord when the trumpet sounds.
That preparation cannot be made by selling your property, nor even by giving your life. It is made only by relying on the Holy Spirit, who lives in your heart, and living a life of obedience according to the Word, by faith.
The apostle Paul is commanding the Corinthian believers to imitate him.
We, too, must imitate the apostle Paul.
We must reveal Christ in our lives, and we too must obey the word of God that Christ obeyed.
Like the heart of the Lord, who grieved as souls fell into hell, we must grieve when souls are not saved.
A believer with such faith is a holy believer who has received spiritual blessing.
Live a life whose purpose is one with the purpose of Jesus.
Jesus judged every matter in the world with his focus on the salvation of souls alone. In the same way, when you make any decision in life, if you think deeply just once about what is driving that decision, you will not live a life in vain.
When you live a life that imitates Christ, you will be recognized by people, your life will be free of wandering, and you will be greatly used by God.
Whether someone is greatly used by God is not judged by the world’s yardstick. We can say that someone has been greatly used only when they proclaim the truth alone.
Look at the people of faith who carried out God’s work, like the Old Testament prophets, the twelve disciples and the apostle Paul. They did not live in palaces, and they did not command the world with great wealth.
They proclaimed the word of truth God told them to proclaim; they simply met the people God told them to meet and went where God told them to go.
Seeing them obey according to the Word, we say that they were greatly used by God.
When you proclaim the truth, love souls, and beat your body and bring it into submission to walk the road Christ walked, God will tell you that he is using you greatly.
What kind of vessel are you being used as right now?
If someone is now watching your life and wants to follow it just as it is, make your decisions even more carefully, boldly throw off temptation, and do your very best so that Christ alone may be revealed through you.
May you always be approved by Christ, and live with a precious faith that can be among the first to welcome the Lord when he comes.