This is a question presented to my by my mother dearest. It's a very tricky question to answer for a number of reasons. Partly because the way we view ourselves, and the way those outside the church view us, are two very different things. While we see ourselves as loving and caring and compassionate, those outside see us as unloving, judgmental, hypocritical. But these things don't make one a Christian. A Christian is a follower of Christ, no more, no less. And there are as many different ways for a Christian act as there are different Christians.
So the question really should be "what is the ideal Christian?" The answer is in Jesus Christ. It's trite, I know, but He really is our greatest role-model.
We're meant to love completely and utterly. It takes love to die for a friend. How much more does it take to die for countless billions of enemies?
We're not meant to be happy and calm all the time. We're talking about a man who wept 'tears of blood' in the garden of Gethsemane. We're talking about a man who threw vendors out of His father's temple.
We're meant to forsake everything worldly. Jesus walked around the countryside preaching with little more than the clothes He was wearing and the friends He had made.
We're meant to be able to reason and argue well. Jesus was the king of this. Read any of the gospels, and it should strike you just how cool He is. For real. I read the things He says to the pharisees, and it's just like 'woah! shut down!' Like when they asked Him 'by what authority are you doing this stuff?' and He replied with 'did John's ministry come from man, or from God?' and the pharisees knew that if they said from man, the people would hate them, and if they said from God, Jesus would ask why they didn't believe. They thought they were clever, so they came back and said 'yeah well we don't actually know', and Jesus just says 'well then I'm not going to tell you by what authority I do this stuff!'
But finally, we're meant to trust God completely. Jesus threw Himself into the father's hands. He prayed that His 'cup might be taken from me... But your will, not mine, be done O God.' And then He went to die on the cross. For us. And after three days, God raised him up again to be with Him.
I could go on for ages about all the little things Jesus did, and all the ways we should emulate Him. But it would take far more time than I have! So I'll wind up now with a suggestion that you all read the gospel of Matthew. And look at the character of Christ. He was 100% God, but also 100% human. And the human part shines through very strongly. You can actually imagine hanging out with this guy, and He really is incredibly cool.
3 comments:
OK cool, nicely put, well done, all that. But is there a limit to this imitation Christ approach? I mean like we're hungry and go looking for apples on trees in mid-winter, and curse them to a frazzle when we find nothing on the trees. Do we imitate that? Yes, I know it was a fig tree but that's not the point; I'm just re-contextualising. John in his gospel and epistles talks about loving as characterising Christians, but the wild card is that he defines "love" as obeying God's commands. Heard there's a series on John's epistles coming up at your church soon. Worth catching.
Serves me right for putting Latin in it. I typed i m i t a t i o C h r i s t i but they "corrected" it to imitation Christ. Oh well, almost a proper translation.
You raise some good points. I think it's more that He should be a role model. When I look up to my role models, it's not that I want to do everything THEY do, how they do it. It's about attitudes. My biggest role model drives a red Mitsubishi Magna for goodness sake :p
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