Have you ever been reading your Bible and you come across the verse and it just kind of makes your brain short circuit? Like there's no explanation. It just keeps you up at night. It just constantly rolls through your head, rent-free, for periods of time. I recently had that issue, and uh I was studying for a lesson for a class I was teaching at church, and I ran across this verse, and honestly, it it stopped me in my tracks. I've read it before, I've probably even taught on it before, but for whatever reason, this time it just hit me differently, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. It's it's a verse on imitation. Okay, so the reason it grabbed me is because when I started playing golf, I used to imitate Tiger Woods. I wanted to swing like tiger, I wanted to finish like tiger, I wanted to dress like tiger, but nobody had to tell me to do it. I just figured if I could make my swing look like his, maybe I would become the golfer like him someday. And we all do that all the time. We imitate people we admire. Kids do it instinctively. We grow up and get a little bit more sophisticated about it, but we never really stop. We never stop imitating people. We imitate people we respect, we imitate people we spend time with, we imitate people who have something that we want. And then we read this verse, and it made me ask a question I haven't been able to shake. Stick around, and I'll share with you my conundrum. Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Shankctification. Let me share with you what's haunted me for the last four or five days. Hopefully, it doesn't haunt you, or maybe it does, I don't know. Let your conscience be your guide here. But if you're afraid of not being able to sleep, then may want to turn this off now. But if you're up for the challenge, stick with me for a few minutes and let me tell you what I've been wrestling with. Who are we imitating and what would happen if someone started imitating us? That's it. That's all I want to talk about today. The verse that stopped me in my tracks is 1 Corinthians chapter 4, verse 16. Paul says it's a simple, simple verse, and it's in fact it kind of boils down to two words. He says, as he's talking to the Corinthian church, as he's talking about how to serve and how to be selfless and how not to serve for accolades, that serving is about the heart, about not what you can get out of somebody, but what you're giving into somebody. And then after he wraps all that up, he says, I urge you then to be imitators of me. That's it. Imitate me. Now, think about that for a second. Think how bold that is. Paul is telling people to copy him, and honestly, that makes me a little uncomfortable because I have no problem telling somebody to imitate Jesus, but telling somebody to imitate me, that feels completely different. But yet Paul says it. And there are three questions that I boil this down to and I ask myself when I heard these words, and I want to share them with you and see if you agree or see if this challenges you as much as much as it challenged me. Question number one: are we imitating someone who's further down the road than we are? Because that takes a lot of humility. When I was watching Tiger and I was trying to emulate a swing, I was imitating somebody who was clearly better than me. I was admitting that Tiger knew something I didn't. That's humility. Humility is not usually my strength, but golf kind of doesn't give you a choice in the matter. But I think the Christian life should work the same way. There should always be someone ahead of us that we're watching, somebody whose faith challenges us, somebody whose marriage challenges us, somebody whose character challenges us, somebody who's walked through the things we haven't walked through yet, somebody who's been following Jesus longer and more faithfully than we have. Because it's easy to get to a place spiritually where we think we've got this all figured out, especially if we've been around church long enough. We know the Bible, we know the songs, we've heard the sermons, we've been in Bible studies, we've may even know what the pastor's gonna say before he even says it, but but none of that means we've arrived. Paul himself in 1 Corinthians 11 1 says, Be imitators of me as I am of Christ. Paul understood something important. He was not the destination, Jesus was. Paul was simply further down the road. He was saying, I'm following Jesus, so watch me. That is what healthy discipleship looks like. We find someone who's further down the road and we have enough humility to say, I can learn from you. Question number two: are we living a life that we are confident enough to say, imitate me? That's the harder one because most of us would probably rather point to Jesus and leave ourselves out of the picture. That's the easy thing. Oh, just follow Jesus, just be Jesus. How much confidence, how much arrogance, how much willingness to be able to be satisfied with our walk with Jesus to say, yeah, just just just do what I do, just emulate my life. And obviously we should point people to Jesus, but Paul didn't hide behind that. He said, look at my life and just copy and paste. Could we say that to somebody? Could we say that to our kids? Watch how I handle disappointment and imitate me. Could we say to our colleagues, watch how I treat my wife and just imitate me? Watch how I respond when someone hurts me and just do what I do. Could we say, watch how I pray when things are not going the way I want them to go and just do what I do? That's not arrogance, that is integrity. Arrogance says, look at me because I'm impressive, and integrity says, look at me because I'm trying to follow Jesus. And there's a huge difference. I think that's exactly what Paul is doing in 1 Corinthians 4 16. He's not he's not claiming perfection, he's inviting imitation. He is saying, watch my life. And that raises an uncomfortable question for us. What would happen if somebody actually did? What if somebody actually imitated your life? What if our kids copied the way we handled conflict? What if our friends copied the way we talk about people who aren't in the room? What if our coworkers copied the way we respond under pressure? What if the person sitting next to us in church copied the way we live out our faith Monday through Saturday? Would we be comfortable with that? Because whether or not you realize it or not, people are already watching. People are already imitating you, especially those who are closest to us. And that brings me to my third question. What if our lives are already imitatable, but we lack the confidence to tell somebody that? Maybe we're doing more than we realize. Maybe we've spent years walking with Jesus. Maybe we've learned some of the things the hard way. Maybe we've learned how to forgive. Maybe we've learned how to serve. Maybe we've learned how to pray when we don't know what else to do. Maybe we've learned that God is faithful. But are we reluctant to let anybody close enough to see it? And maybe that's not humility. Maybe sometimes that's fear. Maybe, maybe sometimes that's selfishness. Because we don't have to tell people that we have it all figured out. We can say, man, look, I don't always get this right, but here's what God has taught me. We could say, I've made lots of mistakes, but here's what I've learned. We can say, I'm still growing, but if you want to know what following Jesus has looked like in my life, walk with me. That's called discipleship. It's not standing on a platform pretending we've arrived. It's walking down the fairway and saying, Come with me. I've been around this hole a few times, and maybe that's a better picture of a Christian life. None of us have finished the round. We still are learning. We still are growing. We are all still being changed. And sometimes we're all still hitting one into the trees and wondering how in the world that happened. But somebody is still watching and somebody is still following. And maybe 1 Corinthians 4 is the standard for us. It's not perfection, it's direction. We don't have to be perfect before we can be worth imitating. We just need to be heading in the right direction and be willing to let somebody follow us. So let me ask you those three questions one more time. One, who are you imitating? Is there somebody further down the road that you're humble enough to learn from? Number two, are you living a life that you could confidently say, imitate me? And thirdly, if your life is already worth imitating, are you selfless enough to let someone else see it? Because eventually somebody is going to imitate us. Our kids will, our friends will, somebody younger in the faith will, maybe somebody we never even realized was watching us. And that brings me back to Tiger Woods. I thought if I could swing like Tiger, I would become like Tiger. If I could dress like Tiger, I would become like Tiger. Unfortunately, I was wrong about that. I never became Tiger Woods, probably for several reasons. But the principle was right. We become shaped by what we consistently watch and consistently imitate. So let's be intentional about who we imitate. Let's find people who are further down the road and learn from them. And let's become the kind of people who can eventually say, hey, just watch me. Not because we've arrived, not because we've got it all figured out, but because we're following Jesus, because somebody is watching. And somebody is going to imitate what they see in you. The question is not whether our lives will influence somebody. The question is what kind of influence our lives will be. Hey guys, thanks for joining me on this week's episode of Shangtification. And thanks for being my audience that I can just kind of spew all this out. And when these verses just kind of get cobwebed into my head, I can have an audience to kind of let them loose with. So thank you for being there. Thank you for being my therapist. Hey, join us next week for another episode of Shangctification. And in the meantime, help me keep chasing better.