Theological Commentary: Click Here
Discipleship Focus: Imitation
- Imitation: This is the second over-arching step of the discipleship process. First we gain information, then we imitate our spiritual mentor. Imitation leads to innovation of spirituality in our own life.
The idea
behind imitation is really discipleship.
The imitation step is all about finding people in your life who are
applying God’s truth and learning to imitate their efforts. Imitation isn’t about making carbon-copies,
however. Imitation is not about
duplication. It is about mentoring and
developing good habits that bring us closer to the Lord.
This is what
we see in the beginning of Joash’s life.
The young king is under the tutelage of Jehoiada. Jehoiada brings him up in the ways of the
Lord. Jehoida helps protect him from the
world while he is developing. Jehoiada
helps give guidance to the young king. Joash
learns to imitate.
However,
Jehoiada eventually dies. Joash loses
his mentor. Things start to go downhill
quite quickly. Before too long, even
Jehoiada’s son is persecuted and killed.
When Joash loses his mentor, he falls away from God.
Now, I’m not
blaming Joash’s fall on the lack of a mentor.
The idea of mentoring is that eventually the person being mentored
becomes mature and capable of mentoring others while making mature
decisions. That being said, though, we should
never lose sight of the power of having people in our lives that we can look up
to and imitate. We all have room to
grow, always.
<><
No comments:
Post a Comment