If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again. Love God. Love Others. Sign In. How to Imitate Jesus. Read: 1 John Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did.
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Enable or Disable Cookies. Enable All Save Settings. Sign in with Facebook. And Paul himself did what Christ did as we see in this scripture. The point of imitation is to learn how to live differently. When we imitate someone we take on their behaviours, attitudes and ways of seeing things. And when we imitate what is good we learn to do what is right. But it is more than that. As we imitate Christ Jesus and continue to mould our way of living to be like His example, we change.
Over time we cease to imitate because we become what we have imitated. We learn new patterns of behavior, new ways of thinking and acting and we become more Christ-like. We are told by behavioral experts that if we want to change a habit we need to replace it with a new habit. These experts say it typically takes about three weeks to change a habit, but some things will clearly take longer than others, especially if we are seeking to change deep and abiding aspects of our personality to be more like Jesus Christ.
But the key is to imitate Christ first so that we learn what holiness, righteousness and goodness look like, and then do the same. Do as He did and over time we will be as He is. It is about making change. Sure it may feel strange and you might even feel like you are faking it in the beginning, but as you continue and it becomes more natural the change takes place.
The reason why Jesus came to the earth was to give us hope and to establish in His sacrifice the means by which man could be reconciled to God. He removed sin for those who believe and are baptized into His death andHe set us free from the law so we could walk in the righteousness by faith that comes through the grace of God.
The second part of the grace of God was to give us the Holy Spirit, and it is the work of the Holy Spirit to bring us into the image of Jesus Christ.
The work of the Holy Spirit is to bring us to perfection in Jesus Christ for, as the scripture tells us,. For better or worse, in the Beatitudes and a host of other passages, Jesus only guarantees that his disciples will feel lousy "suffer" and likely die young. Then again, unseemly things happen when the culture gets a hankering to be like Jesus. An early episode was inspired by Antony of Egypt , who one day abandoned his family and wealth, and walked into the desert to battle the Tempter in the wilderness, as did his Lord.
The idea caught on, and pretty soon the desert was littered with solitaries. The ensuing spiritual disciplines formed many of these into stellar disciples Cassian, Basil, and Athanasius, to name three. But the same movement produced zanies like the Stylites, who thought holiness amounted to living atop pillars, and thousands of gaunt, weak, and weather-beaten hermits who thought a life of malnutrition was a fitting imitation of Jesus.
Francis of Assisi ignited the next wave of holiness and silliness. Like Antony, he was impressed with Christ's poverty and self-denial and took dramatic steps to follow.
He so yearned to imitate his Lord in every respect that he annually reenacted Jesus' nativity. And just before he died, as a confirmation that his whole life had been lived in imitation of Christ, he is said to have miraculously received the stigmata, the bleeding wounds of Jesus, on his hands, feet, and sides. This was an unfortunate example to the often excitable medieval imagination. Within a hundred years, tens of thousands of flagellants were roaming Europe, whipping themselves bloody so they could a punish themselves for their sins and b suffer like Jesus.
Ironically, the timeless book that embodies this idea in its title, The Imitation of Christ , rarely invites the reader to live or be like Jesus. As such, it never entices people to wackiness and, instead, has been a steady source of inspiration for, among other luminaries, Sir Thomas More, Ignatius of Loyola, and John Wesley—who called it the best summary of the Christian life he ever read.
All this to say: Perhaps Jesus never intended his disciples to slavishly imitate him. Notice that he never uses the idea himself. All he says is "Follow me. But the context is always about living by overarching Christian principles, not slavishly copying what Paul or Jesus did.
As he lay dying, Francis of Assisi said to his followers, "I have done what is mine; may Christ teach you what is yours. That means some of us will be called to live in the desert, others in castles; some will fight just wars, others will wage peace; some will itinerate, others will settle down; some will marry, others will remain single. In short, disciples are not called to live Jesus' life—only he was responsible for doing that.
Instead, we are to do what the Spirit of Christ teaches us is ours to do.
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