Radical Disciples – A Remnant Revolution

The Christian life, the Christian walk should be characterized by the virtues taught in the Word of God. We have said that love embodies all of these virtues, and that a life of perfect love would necessarily be an entirely virtuous one. Such was the life of our Lord Jesus Christ.

During His tenure on this earth, He embodied and exemplified the love of God, and by His own example, facing the same difficulties of life which we face (yet to a far more intense degree, Heb.4:15), He gave us a pattern to model ourselves by, footsteps, by which if we should only follow them, we would be lead by the straight road to a virtuous life well-pleasing to God (1Pet.2:21-25; cf. Matt.16:24; Jn.13:15).

The Bible is about Jesus Christ (Jn.5:39), about the love of God demonstrated in His gift of Jesus Christ (Jn.3:16), for love comes from God and God is love (1Jn.4:7-8). In this sense then, every page of the Bible reflects the character of God and the love of Christ, and we should try to retain this perspective as we study the scriptures. Spiritual growth, as we have seen, is a process of transformation, and the ideal goal of that process is the formation of the character of Jesus Christ within each one of us (Gal.4:19).

To accomplish this heady goal, we need to “imitate Christ” (1Cor.11:1) and “put on Christ” (Rm.13:14) until He “dwells in our hearts” (Eph.3:16-17). The contexts of each of these passages show that this reproduction of Christ’s character is part and parcel of this transformation of our thinking which we have been discussing. In 1st Corinthians 11:1, the command to “imitate Christ” is given in a context of self-sacrifice, of giving others more consideration than ourselves when it comes to their spiritual advance (1Cor.10:23-33).

The command to “put on Christ” in Rm.13:14 is given in a context of rejecting the vices of the sin nature so that we may conduct our spiritual “walk” in a decent way. Lastly, Paul’s prayer for Christ to “dwell in our hearts” (Eph.3:16-17) is accomplished “by faith” and is predicated on our prior “internal strengthening in the inner man by the Holy Spirit”, a process as we have seen involving the adjustment of our thinking to the principles of truth taught in God’s Word.

Emulating the character of our Lord is only possible when we begin thinking as He did, putting the spiritual welfare of others before ourselves, rejecting the claims of the sin nature, and turning to the Word and the Spirit of God for our strength.