1/25/2017 8:58:47 AM
Copycats of Christ
If God were to come to me at night and tell me that I could ask him for anything I think I would ask God to be as good a preacher and teacher as Jesus Christ. When we go through his ministry in the season of Epiphany we see Jesus manifesting himself as God’s one and only Son. We see him perform miracles showing that he is the all-powerful God. But what we see him doing more often is preaching and teaching about the kingdom of God. And Jesus does it well, in fact, he does it perfectly.
When I look at how well I carry out my work of proclaiming the gospel, I see quite plainly that I fall way short of where I should be. I’m guessing you could probably same the same thing about yourself; we just aren’t the missionaries that Jesus wants us to be. We have all these other concerns in our life, we struggle against our sinful unwilling hearts and we give in to our weaknesses whatever they may be. And in the end, we see just what inadequate, weak missionaries we really are. That’s why if I had the chance, I would ask God to make me as good a teacher and preacher as Jesus.
That’s what makes God’s decision to use us to do his work so amazing and so humbling. We are very weak, yet God’s strength is worked through us. We don’t always know what to say or how to say it, but the Holy Spirit speaks through us. We don’t always know how to treat other people, but the love of Christ shines through us. In fact, because God is in control, we’re really just copycats of Christ.
I remember in grade school that it was not good to be called a copycat. Everyone wanted to do their own thing, to be unique in some way. Being a copycat meant that you weren’t unique; even worse, it meant you were trying look unique by copying what someone else did. Actually, there was something else at work that we weren’t mature enough to realize: admiration. When someone would copycat, it meant they admired what the other person was doing so much that they abandoned their own ideas for this better idea. That’s really the whole point of being a copycat of Christ. We abandon our own ideas and stick with what Christ did, his mission of saving people from sin and death is our mission and his message of free and full forgiveness through his work is our message. All we do is copy it.