Wednesday, July 05, 2006

A mirror image

My friend's son Wilson is two years old. He's at a great age.
He finds enjoyment in all the simplist things (despite the occassional terrible two's).
Yesterday we just stood in the rain and enjoyed throwing rocks across the street.
He saw me do it once and wanted to try it to - for the next 30 minutes.
Most of the evening I noticed he either copied what his dad, his uncle Matt, or I did and said, or he wanted to show us something cool he had learned.
From "wanna see me jump higher?" to "wanna see me do Superman?" Wilson wanted to know he was doing a good job and doing what the people who mattered in his life did.
His sister Amelia is funny like that too.
When you watch them play, they can each be doing their own thing until one of them notices the other doing something new. Then they want to be doing it too.
They won't rest until they get to try it too.
What if we were just like that with Jesus? What if we devoted our energy and life towards being a "copycat" of Jesus? Would anything change?
From Mark Batterson's weekly e-mail:
In his book, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Scottish novelist James Hogg says: “By looking at a person attentively, I by degrees assume his likeness and by assuming his likeness I attain to the possession of his most secret thoughts.”
That has profound implications. The way we become like Christ is by looking at him attentively. That is why Scripture tells us to fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.
Aristotle said, “Imitation is natural to man from childhood. He is the most imitative creature in the world.”
We are wired to imitate. So the question is this: who are we going to mirror? All of us mirror someone or something. A Christian is someone who is trying to mirror Christ.
II Corinthians 3:18 says, “All of us have had that veil removed so that we can be mirrors that brightly reflect the glory of the Lord. And as the spirit of God works within us, we become more and more like him and reflect his glory even more.”
All of us are mirrors. But most of us aren’t intentional about what we mirror. I’ve said it before but it is worth saying again. Everybody is somebody’s disciple. A Christian is someone who has made a conscious decision to imitate Christ.

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