7. Modeling
7
Modeling
I have given you an example, that you should do just as I have done to you.
John 13:15
Love one another as I have loved you.
John 15:12
Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.
Philippians 3:17
People imitate people. That is a natural, universal, creational fact. Much of the imitating is unconscious. Thus, children learn to talk by imitation. The newborn’s first wails, gurgles, and coos sound the same all the world over, but as the parents bend over the baby and coo back, adding simple words and phrases, the child starts to imitate and in due course becomes a speaker of the parent’s language. By young adulthood these children are likely to have picked up gestures, inflections, and facial expressions that will prompt the comment, “Oh, you are so much like your dad” or “so much like your mom.” J. I. lived through days when England’s two outstanding preachers of the gospel, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Stott, were both at the zenith of their powers, and he got a good deal of fun from noticing how young admirers, when preaching, imitated the intonation and style and tricks of speech of these two greats. But none of the imitations so far mentioned were or are conscious copying; they are the kind of thing that just happens through ordinary togetherness. Unconscious imitation, or assimilation, if we would rather call it that, takes place much more widely than we realize.
Sometimes however, the purpose of imitation is fully conscious. We find ourselves wanting to be like someone. Is that good or bad? It depends. When a starry-eyed admirer says to a Christian leader, “I want to be a theologian (or preacher, or teacher, or writer) like you; please tell me how,” it really is not good. Ambition to be of service in God’s kingdom is admirable, but aiming to acquire someone else’s spiritual gift and ministry by learning to imitate them is more an ego trip than a path to godly service. The motive is wrong, as one can sometimes make clear to the fan (yes, that is the word that fits) by simply asking, “Why?”
Yet taking people as role models for encouragement, once one knows one’s own calling from God, can be very good, for the role model constantly motivates one to do better. Thus, D. M. Lloyd-Jones and Charles Haddon Spurgeon, great evangelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, both looked to George Whitefield as their ideal and made no secret of the fact. Whitefield was in every way the pioneer and powerhouse of the eighteenth-century revival in Britain—indeed, both sides of the Atlantic—and, from a human standpoint at least, understandably so. His zeal was inexhaustible, his stamina hardly believable; his voice was magnificent, his wholeheartedness in preaching Christ was overwhelming, his power of projecting and applying God’s truth was breathtaking, and his love for people overflowed torrentially as he preached. J. I. has enjoyed two role models: Richard Baxter, a seventeenth-century Puritan, and also George Whitefield himself, whose old school J. I. attended. Is it bad to have such figures from the past motivating, encouraging, and admonishing one in the present, forbidding self-satisfaction and calling one to higher aspiration with fuller imitation? Neither of us thinks so; rather, the reverse.
What, you ask, is the relevance of these reflections? Answer: they add a very necessary dimension, and so bring a very necessary enlargement, to our ideas of God’s guidance. Let us explain.
God as Guide
Up to now, we have been thinking of God’s promised guidance as help in the conscious making of decisions—help through Scripture, help through wisdom, help through friendly advice. Of the inner sense of rightness and peace by which, again and again, God confirms good decisions we have yet to speak. But at this stage we would make the point that there is more to God’s guidance of his children than helping us see what to do in particular cases where choosing is called for. Prior to this, God has been guiding us by molding and shaping us, forming and conditioning us, so that we will be inwardly equipped to make right choices, wise and discerning, when the time comes. That fact is to be the focus of this chapter.
Think back to David’s great parable with which we started, Psalm 23, where he pictures himself as a sheep in God’s flock, joyfully testifying: “He leads me in paths of righteousness.” When the shepherd sees one of his sheep wandering, or standing still, puzzled and tempted, poised to start wandering, he will chase, call, and maybe use his crook, as we have seen, to get the animal moving along as part of the flock again. When the sheep is doing that, however, it will have no reason to feel that the shepherd is taking any special notice of it. Yet David’s verb, “he leads,” comprehensively covers all the regular movement of the flock from pasture to pasture and drinking place to drinking place, no less than it covers the moments of necessary personal attention. If the sheep supposed that the shepherd’s eye was off it while it trotted along in the flock, the sheep would be wrong. Similarly, we must understand that God in his sovereign providence is leading and guiding us through each day of our lives, whether that day calls for new, far-reaching decisions or not. And one of the many things he is providentially doing for us is exposing us to influences that will deepen, ripen, and mature us. Setting before us models for imitation is one major mode of his doing this. We may not think of godly people’s influence on us as divine guidance—indeed, much of the time we will not be thinking of their influence on us at all—but God-given guidance, guidance at the level of vision, valuation, and, quite simply, virtue is what in truth these saintly souls are to us. God sends them our way in order that we may learn more about godliness through our contact with them.
Psalm 32:8–9, a direct oracle from God, repeats his covenant promise of guidance with a significant emphasis on learning.
I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go;
I will counsel you with my eye upon you.
Be not like a horse or mule, without understanding,
which must be curbed with bit and bridle,
or it will not stay near you.
Here, the shepherd-sheep picture is left behind; schoolroom verbs appear, “instruct,” “teach,” “counsel,” and we are told not to behave like animals that lack understanding, but to learn, and so gain the understanding we need. We ask, “How are we to do this?” In the first place, by ingesting and digesting Holy Scripture, and by distilling wisdom from what we read—practicing, that is, the disciplines with which this book has dealt thus far. But there is more. One further way in which God teaches is, as we said, through the provision of object lessons, mind-expanding and heartwarming models that impact us at different levels, some alerting us to things hitherto taken for granted, some reinforcing priorities that we had already tentatively embraced, and some working by spiritual osmosis, if we may put it so, to make us larger people in Christ, blessed with more vitality, vision, and virtue than was ours before. Let us open this up.
What Models Do
What is the place of models, and imitations of models, as God guides us into Christian maturity? What can such models do for us anyway? How is rubbing shoulders with godly men and women, in all their variety and with all their God-centered energy, meant to affect us? We offer a threefold answer.
First, models will enlarge our vision. They will enable us to grasp more clearly the moral and spiritual ideals which have always been held in high regard among Christians but which we ourselves never really appreciated. Abstract ideals, however noble, rarely come alive in our minds until we see them being lived out. We need to contemplate models in order to realize the full implications of these highest standards. For example, we Christians speak of love, even a special kind of “Christian love.” Everybody has some idea of what the word love means; but even Bible readers are not likely to appreciate the full significance of love until they have meditated in depth on Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan and on the factual narrative of the Son of God, becoming incarnate, humbling himself to live the life of a poor and insignificant man by human standards, and finally humbling himself further to the ultimate shame and pain of crucifixion.
In Philippians 2:6–11, Paul, perhaps quoting an early hymn, celebrates how the Son did not hang on to equality with God but emptied himself of his dignity and glory and took all those steps down; becoming “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God . . . exalted him” (2:8–9). But first it was down, and down, and down. All of that was done out of love. As John 3:16 declares, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son” to endure it all so that those who believe in him, the sin-bearer, might not perish but have eternal life. Only as we live in light of the love of the Father, and the love of the Son, in the whole work of our redemption, can we begin to see what love means. Only those who can say, with Paul, “the Son of God . . . loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20) will ever be able to join him in saying “the love of Christ controls us” (2 Cor. 5:14). This staggering love of Christ is to become our own behavioral standard. But, being spiritually sluggish, we still need close-up models to help us realize what that means. These God in many ways provides. As we link our lives with resolute Christ-followers, we will see in them over and over this Christlike, self-humbling kind of love, and thus our vision of the love we ourselves are to live out will be focused and enlarged and become, shall we say, a little less inadequate than it was.
Second, models make us realize what could and should be in our lives. Models show us possibilities that were never in our minds before, possibilities of doing things that are better than we had ever thought. Tennyson wrote, “We needs must love the highest when we see it.” For the Christian, at least, that is true. When Christians see God’s highest, the vision stays with us. Our conscience operates henceforth in terms of that ideal. It constantly presses on us the question, Are you living up to what you now see to be God’s standard for you? You must try to do that. Pacing ourselves alongside a model obliges us to imitation, that is, to an attempt to match the model in our own lives. It must be, in Oswald Chambers’s unforgettable phrase, “my utmost for his highest” from now on. J. I. acknowledges that he has been under this constraint ever since, in literary terms, he met Whitefield and Baxter more than sixty years ago, and as he looks back he is grateful for that meeting, which has obliged him to aim higher than he would ever have done had it not taken place. This can work in a spiritually fruitful way—particularly when one of our models is Jesus Christ.
Third, encountering a model can also help us vocationally. This is a matter which we will treat more directly in the next chapter, but it merits mention here. For example, many Christians who have become either domestically or cross-culturally significant missionary workers were inspired to do so by the career of some beloved missionary whose written life was read and whose story fired their imagination. Now they reproduce elements of that vision in their own ministry and mission work. Models can thus serve as vocational guides, suggesting goals to us that we would not have imagined had we been left to ourselves.
It should, perhaps, be said explicitly at this point that what we are talking about here is not what the world calls hero worship. Hero worship is precisely what the words say—worshipping the hero, finding and celebrating special excellence in him or her. Hero worship focuses entirely on the persons being admired, sometimes in disregard of their feet of clay, always idealizing them somewhat unrealistically. But when God in his providence brings spiritually outstanding models before us, our minds hone in on the God who enabled them to live and serve with such spiritual authenticity, power and fruitfulness, rather than staying centered on the persons themselves. At least, that is how it is meant to be and how the Holy Spirit within us will cause it to be, unless we obstruct him. And if we allow our appreciation of spiritual models to degenerate into hero worship, so that God’s servants rather than God himself take center stage in our minds, we shall frustrate, and so quench and grieve, the Spirit—make no mistake about that. The godliness of our models, which so arrests our attention in the first place, is meant, first and foremost, to help us see more clearly the greatness and goodness of God. Models are given to be signposts rather than shrines.
The New Testament encourages us to imitate models as part of our learning to walk in the way of God. Evangelicals for some reason seem to shy off this subject; we rarely hear sermons about it we rarely read books about it, and when we talk to Christian people; it doesn’t often become the topic of conversation. Perhaps this is our way of being careful never to put any human in the place of God. But overcaution in this area may keep us from the God-intended benefit of learning from those who are farther along in their spiritual journey than we, and that could be a major loss.
Of course, the primary model for all Christians is the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who lived the only perfect human life on this earth. He is the model on whom first and foremost we are to fix our eyes. His is the example which has power to transform our lives. His love and his wisdom, his total self-giving and self-humbling in the service of others, his humility, his endurance as he went down and down through Gethsemane, the humiliation of his trials, and finally the agony of his death on the cross—all these are aspects of his earthly life in which he is a model for his followers. So says the New Testament in text after text. Gazing on Jesus runs no risk of keeping us from God, since Jesus is God himself, and it confronts us with an absolutely perfect model, inasmuch as Jesus himself is the absolutely perfect human being. No wonder, then, that the New Testament writers lay stress on imitating the Lord Jesus and regard this discipline as a receiving of guidance for life.
Imitation of Christ
Here are some passages that instruct us to model ourselves on Jesus: “Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked” (1 John 2:6). “He walked,” of course, does not refer to some literal step-by-step footpath across the landscape of Israel; walking, as we said earlier, is the regular Bible image for living one’s life. This passage is instructing us to live our lives the way he did. Not surprisingly one of the priorities in this kind of walk is love. Over and over in this first letter of John we read variations on the theme, “We love [one another] because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19; see also 1 John 2:7–10; 3:1–3, 23–24; 4:7–12, 16–19; 5:2). In John 15:12 the same point is made; here the Savior says to his disciples, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” His prophetic example of what that kind of love would entail follows in the next verse. “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends” (v. 13). Jesus was about to do that very thing; these words were among his final teachings to his disciples before he walked to the cross. He had already demonstrated the radicalism of this kind of love, through pantomime, as he knelt before his disciples one by one and washed their feet (John 13).When he had finished, over the stunned silence of eleven of them and Peter’s strenuous objection, he stood and taught them all the meaning of his gesture: “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master. . . . If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them” (John 13:14–16). This is Jesus talking about the radicalism of real love.
In Ephesians 5:1–2, we find Paul saying, “Be imitators of God . . . and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Christ’s sacrifice of himself was quite literal; he died on our behalf. If we follow him as our model, we must be prepared to put self-interest aside in any number of ways any number of times. The order will always have to be God first, others second, self last. And this is not just a word for the good times. In 1 Peter, a letter of encouragement written to churches who were soon to enter into persecution, the same challenge to model the self-sacrificing love of Jesus appears emphatically at the end of 1 Peter 2:21, “Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.” Peter tells his readers to prepare for the fact that though they were doing good, they were likely to find themselves suffering for it, suffering, that is, for their Christian discipleship in this time of coming persecution. After calling on them to follow in the steps of Jesus, Peter reminds them what Jesus’s own experience was: “He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly” (vv. 22–23). Those were challenging words to probably new converts about to face undeserved violence: there must be no deceit, no bitter talk, no threats, just sustained trust in God that he will pass just judgment on the enemies by his own means and in his own time. Modeling Jesus involves the unflinching practice of this trust.
Working up similarly to a climactic charge to imitate Christ’s fortitude in the face of the fiercest and deadliest opposition is the extended exhortation to faith and faithfulness that fills Hebrews 11 and 12. It begins with a roll call of heroes of faith during and after Old Testament times—Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, “the prophets,” unnamed “women,” and others. For readers with a Jewish background, mention of these names and events would have triggered lifelong memories of stories told and retold as parents created in the earliest years of their children’s lives a sense of belonging to the people of God and a confidence in God’s marvelous protective guidance of his people through history’s ups and downs. These men and women of Hebrews 11 are our models too, every single one of them, living by faith and enduring what came their way as they did so. None was perfect. As we read their stories spread out through the Old Testament, we see their failures, weaknesses, and sins. But we also see their great acts of faith and how God guided them to greatness through that faith.
But now the writer steps out of history and addresses his readers directly in the present, speaking as though these heroes still live—which in fact, of course, by God’s grace, they really do: “Therefore,” he writes, “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God ” (Heb 12:1–2). This is the climax, to which the tour of the heroes’ gallery was, it now appears, simply the preliminary. Jesus, centrally and definitively, is the one whose faithful hoping must be the model for his followers. Jesus, suffering patiently in expectation of joy to follow, is the supreme example of unyieldingness triumphant, on whom hard pressed Christians must ever fix their gaze. “Looking to Jesus.” The Greek verbal form conveys the thought of concentrating one’s vision on something so that one is looking at it with full intensity and not looking directly at anything else. “Consider him . . .” the writer continues. He, above all others, is the model; we, his latter-day disciples, are to walk in his steps at all times. That imperative and the example Christ has set both belong to our guidance from God.
We round off this section by pointing out that Jesus himself taught, quite explicitly, that discipleship to him, across the board and in every respect, was to be conceived as modeling oneself on the Lord himself. This was his meaning when he said, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me. . . .” (Matt 11:29). The picture is of two oxen pulling a cart or plow, one of them a veteran, the other a youngster in training. A wooden yoke fastened over both their necks links them side by side. The young ox, paired with the veteran, learns to pull by imitating the other; indeed its only choice for comfort in this twosome is to keep in step with the older partner. In the disciple’s case, pairing with Jesus and learning from Jesus will be a lifelong business. The Savior’s invitation to it is compassionate. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (vv. 28–30). Modeling Christ, as part of the larger process of being modeled by Christ, is thus of the essence of the Christian life and of the divine-guidance process. Christians learn to live in Christ, to follow and fulfill the example that Christ has set us, and to recognize that this—only this—is the way of our maturation, namely, through imitation of him. It is by this means, in the first instance, that we are led in paths of righteousness, namely, by consciously keeping in step with our divine-human leader with whom we are inseparably yoked. The image is truly awesome, but very clarifying and very supportive.
Imitation of Leaders
Paul calls on the people he pastors to imitate Christ, as we saw. “Walk in love, as Christ loved us. . . .” (Eph. 5:2). But he does not stop there. Writing to the Philippians, he first tells them to imitate Christ: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who . . . humbled himself. . . .” (Phil. 2:5–8). But a little later he says: “Brothers, join in imitating me (Phil. 3:17). He includes with himself other believers who are mature in faith adding at once: “And keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.” The us is Paul and Timothy, who are writing the letter together. Paul’s principle here is double-barreled: it is, first, that, following Christ and under Christ, many “walk according to the example” that Paul set in following the example that Jesus set and all of these are benchmark people on whom it is proper to model oneself; and, second, that all Christians should take note of these people and make imitation of their virtues a deliberate project in their lives.
Peter exhorts the stated leaders of Christian congregations (elders he calls them) saying, “Shepherd the flock of God that is among you” (1 Peter 5:2). This points to a responsible kind of leadership that has the well-being of the flock in mind. Under Christ, “the chief Shepherd” (v. 4), leaders of churches are to exercise shepherdlike qualities toward the people in their care. A shepherd sees the big picture and guards the whole flock, but a shepherd also cares for individual sheep—as our Lord Jesus effectively underlined in his parable of the shepherd who left ninety-nine of his flock, then at great personal inconvenience and with much effort went off looking for and finding one recalcitrant sheep who had strayed away; whereupon, he placed it lovingly on his shoulders for a free ride home (Luke 15:3–7).
Human shepherds of God’s people are to extend this same kind of wise, compassionate, self-sacrificing, Christ-following care to “the flock of God that is among you.” (Note who is the owner of this flock.) Peter continues his charge to undershepherds by challenging them to take a hard-eyed look at their motives and their manner. Leaders in the church are to exercise “oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:2–3). Not drivers or organizers or teachers or visionaries, we note, though leaders will also be some and perhaps all of those, but examples. Here it is pertinent to point out that in God’s church everybody is a leader to somebody—parents to children, siblings to siblings, seniors to juniors, the strong to the weak, friends to friends, encouragers to the discouraged, one disciple to another—and all of us, therefore, have leadership responsibilities that we must take seriously. We should expect God to use us his maturing followers as models to somebody and thus to live our lives accordingly. What a daunting assignment, and what a rewarding one. Peter finishes his admonition with a glimpse of the future when the Great Shepherd gathers us all to himself, the stated and the informal leaders together: “And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory,” a joyful prospect indeed!—and one that, please God, will include us all.
Reverting to Paul, we may be surprised to see how much he makes of the modeling motif. He commands a congregation to imitate him. “I urge you, then, be imitators of me” (1 Cor. 4:16). “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (11:1). He commands a colleague: “Set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Tim. 4:12). He reminds a congregation of the example he has set them: “You yourselves know how you ought to imitate us. . . . We worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you. It was not because we do not have that right, but to give you in ourselves an example to imitate” (2 Thess. 3:7–9). He reminds them joyfully how they have already been following examples given: “You became imitators of us and of the Lord. . . . You, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea” (1 Thess. 1:6, 2:14).
We should not, however, be surprised at Paul’s emphasis. Paul saw his church planting and pastoral leadership in family terms: from one standpoint he was the father and mother of his converts (see 1 Cor. 4:14–15; Gal. 4:19; Philemon 10); from another standpoint, he and they were brothers in Christ; and the family in God’s intention is a prime area for setting and following examples—for modeling, in other words—as we noted above. This was doubly so in the ancient world, as it is in a good deal of Asia today. In the modern West, much of this aspect of family life has dissolved away, but our obligations to each other in the church remain unchanged, and one aspect of the love and care that we owe to each other in Christ is setting each other good examples, just as Paul did to the churches he founded long ago. Paul’s presentation, indeed projection, of himself as an example to follow was not any form of egocentricity or tyranny; rather, it was ministry, plain and straightforward, and the responsibility of ministry to each other remains real in a way that our secular culture cannot comprehend.
But what if a leader of God’s people turns bad? It happens. We cringe when we see one of our own as newspaper fodder for some stupid statement or some shameful deed. We are chilled to our heart when a Christian icon’s immorality is exposed. We hurt when we read of a national leader who names Christ on Sunday but on Monday squanders the funds of his country on personal luxury while his nation’s children die of hunger and disease. The Old Testament shows us an instance of this as it tells us how the prophet Jeremiah confronted Jehoiakim, the younger son of a great and godly king, for this kind of egoistic malfeasance. Jehoahaz (Shallum) had reigned as king of Judah briefly in 609 BC. His father had been the good king Josiah who during a reign of more than thirty years instituted godly reform, led the people to return to God, and eventually died honorably of battle wounds (2 Chonicles 34–35). Within weeks Jehoiakim was following his brother to the throne, where after eleven years he reaped the epitaph all too common among the kings of Judah and Israel: “He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD his God” (2 Chron. 36:5). Jehoiakim was firmly in the saddle when Jeremiah addressed to him the following message from God:
Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness,
and his upper rooms by injustice,
who makes his neighbor serve him for nothing
and does not give him his wages,
who says, “I will build myself a great house
with spacious upper rooms.” . . .
Do you think you are a king
because you compete in cedar?
Did not your father eat and drink
and do justice and righteousness?
Then it was well with him.
He judged the cause of the poor and needy;
then it was well.
Is not this to know me?
declares the LORD.
But you have eyes and heart
only for your dishonest gain,
for shedding innocent blood,
and for practicing oppression and violence. . . .
With the burial of a donkey he [Jehoiakim] shall be buried,
dragged and dumped beyond the gates of Jerusalem. . . .
The wind shall shepherd all your shepherds,
and your lovers shall go into captivity;
then you will be ashamed and confounded
because of your evil.
Jeremiah 22:13–17, 19, 22
Scripture blames the eventual exile of both Israel and Judah on the irreligion, immorality, and untrustworthy double-dealing of their kings; bad examples have great power to corrupt. The ripple effect of personal influence, for good or ill, is incalculable in advance; one can only say that it is likely to exceed our anticipations. Nor did Jehoiakim’s callous depravity injure only himself. The prophet warns that his underlings in government (“your shepherds”), having taken their cue from their master, will receive retribution too (“The wind shall shepherd all your shepherds”). As good examples have great power to inspire, so when a Christian public figure is publicly disgraced the negative fallout may well be huge. So we need to walk warily—very warily indeed.
Conclusions
Pulling together the threads of this chapter, we may now make three closing points. First, the guidance that God gives to his covenant children is not exhausted by the help he provides for our decision making, nor by his protecting and preserving ministry that restores us if we slip or stray. It extends to the forming of our characters, out of which our decisions are made, and to the formative influences shaping us into the persons we become. This is the providential aspect of the work of God in the personal sanctification of each believer. It complements the faith-and-obedience aspect of personal response to God’s words of promise and command, which often is all we think of when sanctification is under discussion. In older evangelical parlance, the language of guidance was used comprehensively to cover God’s eliciting of faithful obedience from us within the often enigmatic and daunting frame of providentially ordered circumstances (of which more will be said later in this book). One example is the close of Charles Wesley’s hymn, “Jesus, My Strength, My Hope” which runs as follows (emphasis added):
I rest upon Thy Word,
The promise is for me;
My succor and salvation, Lord,
Shall surely come from Thee:
But let me still abide,
Nor from my hope remove,
Till thou my patient spirit guide
Into thy perfect love.
The present book was conceived in terms of the older, broader usage of guidance language, and we shall keep the older, broader conception explicitly before our minds as we move into our final chapters.
Second, imitation is natural to humans, and God’s work of sanctifying grace in each Christian life includes, as we said above, the provision of models and imitations. The first and most perfect of these is our Lord Jesus Christ himself. Wisdom would seem to direct that in order to receive the full sanctifying benefit of contemplating this model, we should read and reread the Gospels, where we watch the perfect person living, working, speaking, reacting, relating, caring, rejoicing, praying, and enduring. Constant reading of the Gospels will allow the perfection of Christ’s character to have its full influence on the shaping of ours. It is to be feared that some evangelical Christians, in their very proper zeal for reading the whole Bible, fail to read the Gospels as frequently as wisdom would prompt them to do. The letters of Paul and John, and the Psalms, should also be read frequently as well, for here too are models of godly inner life, life with God, that are given to shape us and guide us in godliness; not so much by the doctrines that they teach or imply as by their attitudes to God—praise, thanks, petition, celebration, complaint, submission—in the circumstances of their lives. The old dictum, that you become like what you look at, applies directly here.
Third, our purpose of consciously conforming ourselves to good and godly models should teach us to learn from the examples of both faithful Bible characters and faithful persons in the congregation. As the personal impact of live actors on the stage has a quality that surpasses the impact of actors on the screen, so the impact of live Christians with whom one rubs shoulders will exceed the impact of Christians about whom we read in books; yet wisdom directs us to expose ourselves to the influence of both, and the habit of reading Christian biography, as well as Scripture, is as much to be encouraged as is the habit of associating with the liveliest and ripest Christians that we know. Does God guide us by leading us to form these habits? And can imitation, which has been cynically described as the sincerest form of flattery, also be described as a major means of guidance and of grace? We believe that the answer to both questions is yes, and it is in this confidence that we proceed.