More Than Imitation

I confess to being a cow watcher.  Here on the farm it is often our evening entertainment.  Parking the truck at the fence and watching is what we do around these parts in the final twilight moments of the day.  The young calves make it even more interesting.  Not being weighted to the ground with eight  hundred pounds and a few years enables them to run and frolic with feet kicking high in the air.  The calves are like children.  They learn how to be calves by imitating the older cows who share the pasture with them.  It is no different with two legged children who walk among us.

 

In Ephesians 5:1 the Word of God says, "Therefore be imitators  of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us..."  It is both striking and interesting that the Apostle would write about being imitators with one stroke and being children with the next.  Could it be that even as calves learn to be cows by imitation, so do we learn how to live through imitation.  When the Son came into the world through Bethlehem and lived among us, he gave us a life to model and imitate. 

 

Of course, imitation alone is not enough.  Most of us can remember a time in the early days of our spiritual journey when it seemed possible to simply grab hold of our life and make it after the example of Jesus.  As we walked a few steps down that road of faith, we soon learned that being Christ-like is not something we can manufacture out of human determination.  Oh, it can be done.  We can be shaped into the image of the heart of Christ from within, but it means putting our life completely in the hands of the Holy Spirit.  He is the One who can do with us what we cannot do for ourselves.  He can shape us from within in such a way that the spirit and heart of Christ begins to show through us.