Be Imitators of Christ

“I am writing this not to shame you but to warn you as my dear children. Even if you had ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. Therefore, I urge you to imitate me.” (1 Corinthians 4:14-16) In a letter to the church at Corinth, the Apostle Paul addressed their poor conduct urging them to live their lives as he has, through living out the gospel, being an imitator of him. If you know anything about the apostle Paul that’s a tough charge because not many people would be able to demonstrate the kind of commitment he had to Christ. He called them his “dear children” and as such felt the responsibility to teach them as a father teaches his children. So, he sent his spiritual son, Timothy to show them what being his imitators looked like.There’s nothing like a good father and unfortunately there are far too many who don’t and didn’t have good examples to follow. While I was listening to the sermon on Father’s Day entitled, Lessons that my father taught me, I immediately began to look back in my own life and asked myself, “did you learn anything good from your father?”I had to dig through the hardened exterior of a man to find any good things and there were. My father taught me how to cook, how to determine if a car was functioning properly by listening to how it sounds and what it feels like, and he taught me to respect people who didn’t look like me. His lessons weren’t deliberate but things I discerned as I consciously sought to see the good in a man who was hurting and sad on the inside. I learned that it’s not good to keep things bottled up because only sadness, loneliness, and disappointments reside there. If nothing else, in the end I believed that it was his faith in God that was the only thing that sustained him.We all need godly examples to follow and at times it appears that godly examples are hard to find but they are out there. But when the earthly examples aren’t there, know that you have a heavenly Father who is there, ready, willing, and able to provide you with His spirit that gives you the wherewithal to be like Him.