As a kid, I’m sure I often complained that one of my buddies was a “copycat”. He would do or say something just like I did, and he would do it over and over! I should have realized that it was really a compliment. He was copying me because he thought what I said or did was funny. But still, it was annoying to me at the time.
Unlike us, God loves it when we copy Him. Reading 21 of the Outflow book reminded me that I should “imitate Jesus in how I connect with each person I meet and, like Jesus, I’ll begin impacting one life at a time as I go about my daily routine.”
Does Jesus really want us to imitate Him? Am I really supposed to do that? Yes. Jesus was looking for followers that would be transformed more and more into His likeness. Paul told the church at Ephesus:
Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children – Ephesians 5:1 (NIV)
There is something transforming about imitating God. C.S. Lewis put it well when he said in Mere Christianity, “do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”
As Pastor Terry reminded us on Sunday, it is important for us to believe that God loves the people around us, and it is equally important to believe that we can love them too. If we imitate His love for people, the unthinkable will happen: we will find ourselves loving them too!
