Cultivating a Life Worth Imitating
“Imitate me,” Paul says—and if we stop here, the words sound strangely arrogant. But he continues, “as I imitate Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1, GW). The words are not attention-seeking, but arrows pointing to Christ—the purpose of Paul’s life is to direct focus to God’s glory, not to underline his own. “Imitate me as I imitate Christ” is discipleship in radical simplicity. We cultivate a life worth imitating through spending time with the One we wish to imitate, then as discipleship organically overflows, we continue to deflect the focus back to God.
We learn to imitate what we are proximate to.
Imitating Christ is not about us striving on our own efforts to adopt His character and way of thinking. It’s less about our doing than it is about where we are choosing to be. We learn what moves Him when we come close enough to feel His heart beat and are willing to linger. We cannot learn from a distance what lies within. Consequentially, if we want to look more Christ-like, we must learn to abide in Him: “for as a branch severed from the vine will not bear fruit, so your life will be fruitless unless you live your life intimately joined to mine”(John 15: 4b, TPT). Abiding precedes imitating.
Too often I think that to look more Christ-like, I need to work harder to be better. I endeavor to extend selfless patience to my kids, generously give of my time, volunteer to not let anybody down, attend all the special church events and conferences. . . and wonder why the harder I try, the emptier I feel. When I slow down, I realize that I have been trying to recreate the outcome of proximity to Jesus without actually drawing close.
To truly abide, I need to draw close, and often. I must learn to love the Lord simply for who He is, not what He offers.
May we yearn to not only recognize His voice, but treasure it as immensely beautiful and precious.
May we aspire to listen for His words with both expectancy and reverence, patience and honesty.
May we drop the pretense that we are near Him because of anything we earned, as indeed “all our right and good works are like dirty pieces of cloth” (Isaiah 64:6, NIV), and simply, vulnerably, bring our raw and real.
May our thirst for Him be whet with the glory of His gaze.
Abiding is found layers beneath simply resting. It conjoins resting and intentionality so our retreat is truly life-giving. In his book, Building a Discipling Culture, Mike Breen affirms that “of course, we are to set aside time to spend with the Lord alone. And as we get to know him more intimately, these times will be the most refreshing of all. But there is grace in being who God made us to be.” He explains this further in another line: “when it comes to knowing how to rest, understanding how God has created us makes all the difference.”
Abiding for one may look like a walk in the serenity of a foggy morning. For another, it may entail being elbows deep in a serving project. For yet another, it may involve a deep dive into Greek and Hebrew word roots. Gary Thomas has a Spiritual Temperament Quiz that can help us better understand how we abide as well as give us ideas for more ways to intentionally abide in Christ.
The easily overlooked step of cultivating a life worth imitating is abiding. Abiding precedes imitating, yet equally important is that abiding should result in our imitating Christ. If we simply abide but don’t let our proximity to the King transform us from the inside out, we have become “a hearer of the word and not a doer” that we are cautioned against in James 1:22 (NKJV). I resonate with the phrasing of The Passion Translation (TPT) in verses 22-24 of James chapter 1:
22 Don’t just listen to the Word of Truth and not respond to it, for that is the essence of self-deception. So always let his Word become like poetry written and fulfilled by your life! 23 If you listen to the Word and don’t live out the message you hear, you become like the person who looks in the mirror of the Word to discover the reflection of his face in the beginning. 24 You perceive how God sees you in the mirror of the Word,[c] but then you go out and forget your divine origin.
When we abide, we begin to see the way God sees. May our seeing forever change us!
“Imitate me as I imitate Christ.”
And here we begin to round another corner. We abide to imitate, and we imitate so others can imitate us as we continue to imitate Christ. We don’t stop with only our imitation of Christ, because to truly imitate Christ is to look out beyond, to let love ripple out to the fridges of our communities and connections, to let our heart throb with the things that bring tears to His eyes and joy to His heart.
To sincerely accept our identity as being adopted into His family, we need to adopt His mission to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19, TPT). As Caesar Kalinowski explains in Small is Big, Slow is Fast, “It is the power of the gospel that sets us free and saves us. It is the purpose of the gospel that then sends us out to make more disciples of Jesus who now live in light of the same good news” (63). We get to give, receive to share. The transformative power of the presence of Jesus is not a secret to be kept stowed away in dusty journal pages—it is meant to be shared through living it out in community with others.
We get proximate to Jesus to let Him transform us, and we also invite others into close proximity with us in order for Him to likewise transform our friends, and family, and co-workers, and teammates, and neighbors though us. We cultivate a life worth imitating through abiding . . . and then we live out a life worth imitating in community.
But we have not yet come full circle, because we are both imitators of Christ and disciple-making-disciples: the identity we are invited to when we join God’s family is to be a disciple who makes disciples who makes disciples who makes disciples. We are not to be a one-generation family, but one that is vibrant, ever growing, ever shining brighter. We are led so we may lead, and lead so others too can lead, and the family can keep growing, keep reflecting more purely Christ Himself.
I write specifically about living missionally (as a disciple-making-disciple) in our neighborhoods because here proximity is already a given, and that makes the potential for true discipleship astronomical. Yet as image bearers cultivating a life worth imitating, our identity doesn’t change no matter where we go. In our workplaces, schools, churches, and other social circles as well, may we imitate Christ so others may imitate us and be drawn to Christ—for that is the point, that Christ would be glorified and known. Abiding helps us remember that—that the glory is due Him and everything about our lives is to point to Him.
Father, Your touch is gentle. May we welcome it.
The only risk is drawing close to You is losing the things that keep us from you—may we remember this when we hesitate.
Let us put our questions to rest and simply rest in You, trusting that You will answer them in time.
Teach us how to abide with You in ways that are meaningful and life-giving so we may cultivate a life truly worth imitating.
As we walk with You, may each #nextrightthing lead us “further up [ and] . . . further in” (Lewis, 213).
Breen, Mike, and the 3DM Team. Building a Discipling Culture: How to Release a Missional Movement by Discipling People Like Jesus Did. Mike Breen, 2011.
Lewis, C.S. The Last Battle. HarperCollins, 1956.
Kalinowski, Caesar. Small is Big, Slow is Fast: Living and Leading Your Family and Community on God’s Mission. Zondervan, 2014.
2 Comments
Taylor
“ When I slow down, I realize that I have been trying to recreate the outcome of proximity to Jesus without actually drawing close.”
That was SO powerful and so true. I never really thought of feeling overwhelmed in trying to do good as just recreating instead of drawing near. This was great.
twyla
So glad you found it helpful, Taylor! Thank you for your kind words, and for stopping over to read 🙂