Role-Modeling

A role model is a person demonstrating a part or position in life by doing it. A role model is not only explaining how to do something, but showing how it is done. More that this, a role model is not merely demonstrating a skill, but is showing how to be a worthy person while fulfilling a certain role. For example, a good mother is not a role model simply by having successful recipes to share; she is a role model by demonstrating the wisdom of worthy motherhood in a complete sense. We see the evidences of good motherhood embedded in the person; she is a strong role model – a quality person. She is showing her children how to deal with disappointment, how to be joyful, how to make wise decisions. A role model is demonstrating character not just skills.

In 2 Thessalonians 3 Paul says that he and his team were deliberate role models of this active, hard-working, energetic Christian living to the Thessalonians. How did they model this? First, Paul says, that they paid for their own food! They did not gobble up others’ food without contributing towards its cost. They got jobs so they could pay board to those they lived with while they worked in the Thessalonian church. This is so practical and plain. They demonstrated the life of Christ in them, by working. Paul says that he could have made a case for the Thessalonian Christians to provide for them, because they were teaching and ministering to them. But he said that he deliberately wanted to give them an example to imitate: that each person should work to contribute to his own support. Paul did not regard this part of life to be ‘unspiritual’, but he deliberately made the hard work they put into supporting themselves part of his lesson to the Thessalonians about how the power and energy of Christ sustains us. In these practical everyday matters, you also can prove whether the Spirit of Christ is motivating you or not. Your willingness to 'pull your weight' and be responsible for your own support in life, is one of the most basic ways that you demonstrate your new character in Christ to those who look up to you.

Paul and his team deliberately modelled what they expected of Christians. They worked hard, night and day to provide for themselves and for those they were serving. It wasn’t just at Thessalonica they did this. When Paul left Ephesus he reminded them how he had worked among them and why. In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Acts 20.35

You are a leader of someone. Perhaps you are a leader of a few people, whether it be younger family members or your peers. Where is your faith and what are its outcomes? What is there about your faith that someone can see in the way you are living your life and imitate? How is your life explaining and exemplifying the Word of God? In what ways are your people learning from you to keep their life free from the love of money?

How are they seeing contentment with Christ as your highest and best treasure demonstrated in your life? What do they see when you are afflicted by terribly fearful situations? How do you model faith in Christ when you are being oppressed and troubled by the evil behaviour of family members? Who are you leading? Where are you leading them?

Paul grasped the opportunity to role model to the Thessalonians the joy of serving Christ by working hard – using up his life joyfully in the cause of Christ. Jesus Christ was his role model and he joyfully grasped with both hands the opportunity to reflect what he knew of Christ for the good of his people. Imitate Paul’s faith. Get your own faith focused in Christ so you also have something of Christ’s glory (his wisdom, strength, meekness, energy, justice, joy, mercy, love and grace) to reflect to your people. They are looking to you. They are hungry for food. They are needy of light. What will you give them!

Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever. If he worked successfully to turn the apostles into role models, he can do that successfully in you, today. His qualities will never dim and never wear out. You will never go to him and find he has run out of the character you need to be a child of God. No run on ,bank will ever exhaust his supplies for you.

John Piper: A Challenge for Young People

How might we talk to children a about having an ambition to serve Christ?

A Really Good Question

This week I was given the question: How do I stop my sins from weighing me down?
The short answer is: strip them off! The longer answer is: run in such a way that you long to strip them off.
Hebrews 12:1 Therefore, 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, 2 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.
This describes a marathon race and suggests that if we are to effectively complete the race marked out for us, we will need to strip off everything that slows us down. The writer describes these as weights and sins.
Weights are not necessarily sins - they are all the unnecessary baggage that when added to our lives has the cumulative effect of making us sluggish and slow in our Christian race.
Sins are like sticky vines and roots that easily trip us up, cling to us and slow us down, or overhang the path deceiving us into sidetracks.
The Hebrew Christians to whom this letter was written, had lost their 'fight'. They were no longer living on a competitive footing. They had become soft and distracted and were in danger of slipping away and fading to the rear of the pack so they failed to finish the race. The writer is urging them to get running!
It seems that if we get running, we will very quickly become aware of the surplus weight that is slowing us down and the sins that easily entangle us. Faithful running down the path Jesus has marked out for us, will soon get us discarding our unnecessary baggage and breaking through the sins that easily blocked our path when were were moving so sluggishly and aimlessly that we were making little or no progress at all.
1 Corinthians 9.24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. 25 Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. 26 So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. 27 But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.