Modeling: Imitate Me As I Imitate Christ

Imagine you are driving on a highway in the right lane, and you are approaching an entrance ramp. There is a car on the ramp, and it is getting ready to enter the highway and merge with traffic. You can tell it is going to merge at the same time you will be even with it. What are you supposed to do? Move over to the left lane to allow the car to enter the highway, right? But what if there is a car beside you in the left lane and you can’t move over? One option would be to speed up, allowing the merging car to enter behind you. The other would be to slow down, allowing the merging car to enter in front of you. What if you chose to slow down, but the merging car slowed down too, thinking they would enter behind you? Each of you keep deferring to the other, going slower and slower, causing all kinds of traffic problems as cars are hitting their brakes on both the highway and the entrance ramp.

This happened to my son when he was riding in the car with his girlfriend. She slowed down, trying to allow another car to enter the highway in front of her. As she and the other car kept slowing down, my son said to her, "WHOA, WHOA, WHOA, WHOA... WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!?!!" As you can imagine, that didn't go over very well.

Guess where my son got those brilliant words of reassurance and encouragement. That's right. He had heard his dad say those words to him multiple times. I had modeled this reaction for him, and he imitated me. Hopefully that is not all he's learned from me, and I have modeled many good things for him to imitate.

Read 1 Corinthians 11:1.

Read Mark 3:13-14.

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2.

When you spend an extended amount of time with someone, you can begin to resemble and imitate them. If you move to the south, after a year or so, you will probably start to speak with a "southern accent." If you're around someone who plays video games all the time, it's likely you'll start playing video games more often. And if your dad says, "WHOA, WHOA, WHOA, WHOA... WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!?!!,” you’ll probably say the same thing sometime.

When you spend time with your disciples, you're going to "rub off" on them. They're going to imitate you and become like you. It's important that you "remain" in Jesus so that you rub Jesus off on them.

When Jesus called the Twelve, He not only spent time with them, He also sent them out to preach. What do you think they preached about? What do you think their preaching "style" was like? Where did they learn how to preach? Remember, they were fishermen and tax-collectors, not trained preachers? They probably preached like Jesus and did exactly what He did, because they spent time with Him and imitated Him.

You are going to have to model this for them. Have them imitate you reaching out to the lost. Help them get to Chair 3 by reaching out to people in Chair 1 and building into people in Chair 2. Model this for them by doing it with them, and then "send them out" like Jesus did, so they can imitate you as you have imitated Christ.