We Become What We Behold
Learning to copy the way of Jesus
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.” (Heb. 12:1-2)
What is it to follow the way of Jesus? The essence of the Christian life can be boiled down to the invitation of Jesus: “Come...follow me” (Mt. 4:19). There are two essential dynamics captured in this invitation. We must come to Jesus. And, we must come ready to do whatever Jesus does by following him with our lives. Discipleship, in the clearest of terms, is the pursuit of an actual person with whom we seek to imitate. Discipleship is not pursuing a cold set of facts, ideas, or doctrines. To be a disciple is to walk in the footsteps of someone else.
Jesus invited his disciples to live this way. But he also did what he invited his disciples to do. “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus would teach them, “the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does, the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does.” (Jn. 5:19-20) The entire life and ministry of Jesus is captured by a deep and rapturous life under—and in faithful obedience to—what he saw his Father in heaven doing. Jesus could do only what he “saw” his Father doing. And the Father “shows” the Son everything he is doing. The relationship of the Triune persons was marked by seeing and showing.
Paul’s ministry, no doubt, was shaped by this way of thinking. He would write several letters to churches and Christians who faced the pressures of life in the unforgiving Roman Empire. The heart of his ministry was being with people to show them the way of Jesus. This reality drove Paul to invite the church in Corinth to “imitate me” (1 Cor 4:16) and “follow my example...as I follow Christ.” (1 Cor. 11:1) If Jesus followed the Father, then Paul followed Jesus who followed the Father. And he invites others to follow him as he did this. Paul’s invitation to follow him reveals something of human nature. Just as the first disciples needed a rabbi to follow—an actual, breathing, walking, talking person—so do the next generation of Jesus people.1 This call to imitate the person Paul is by no stretch isolated to the Corinthian letters.2 Imitation is a major theme of the New Testament.
Still, there were boundaries. Paul did believe that people should follow him as a person who had gone further down the road than they had in the spiritual life. But he never believed Christians should follow a mere human leader as an end unto itself. It was only to be done so long as it was intended to lead to Christ. We follow Jesus through following people. This is why Paul strongly critiques the Corinthian church for balkanizing the Christian faith. In Corinth, there were allegedly some factions of Christians who were calling themselves by the name of Paul, Apollos, and Cephas (1 Cor. 1:12). This was a dangerous problem in Paul’s mind. Following a person as an end would always lead to a fractured church. But neither should Christians do away with human leaders. This seems to be Paul’s concern for another group in the same section who claim “I follow Christ.” (v. 12b) This group sees themselves as having Jesus to themselves without needing community or leaders under whom they were to submit. One group idolized Christian leaders. The other ignored them.
We follow people as they follow Christ. Theologians call this the doctrine of imitatio Christi (“the imitation of Christ”) or the imitatio Dei (“the imitation of God”). For Paul, following Christ means following somebody. All Christian formation, in even its earliest iterations, is akin to being the understudy in a great play. As Thomas à Kempis eloquently outlined in his The Imitation of Christ his belief that being a Christian is learning how to imitate someone else and their way of existence.3 This is the essence of all discipleship. “We must imitate Christ’s life and his ways if we are to be truly enlightened and set free from the darkness of our own hearts,” he writes, “Let it be the most important thing we do, then, to reflect on the life of Jesus Christ.”
Which is how most of us learn. Not by study—but, rather, by copying and imitation. We become who we are watching because we will likely copy who we are watching. And this is an inevitability. We are all watching someone. And thus becoming someone. We are formed when we watch someone for hours on TikTok. We are formed when we seek to learn the skill of an actor or athlete. We are formed when we watch a pastor week in and out on the stage. Over time, we will be most shaped into the people we give our attention to. As David Brooks is reported to have said: “We’re decent at learning, but we are fantastic at imitating.”
That we will imitate someone is a given. Who we are imitating is what is most formative. This is why God so harshly critiques ancient Israel in the book of Ezekiel. They had ceased imitating the ways of God and had chosen to imitate the nations around them. Through Ezekiel, God declares: “You not only followed their ways and copied their detestable practices, but in all your ways you soon became more depraved than they.” (Eze. 16:47) Israel was copying. They were, sadly, copying the wrong thing. They copied. Just the wrong original.
This brings us to the text we began with from Hebrews. When we read the text in Hebrews mentioned above, we hear the author invite us to “fix our eyes on Jesus.” (v. 2) The invitation, first, is said in such a way so as to suggest a constant, repetitive, ongoing fixing of one’s eyes upon Jesus. Secondly, it is an invitation given to an entire community. The command is not for one person to fix their eyes on Jesus. Instead, it is for everyone who was reading to fix their eyes on Jesus. Together. As a people watching in awe at a solar eclipse.
When a whole community does this—fix their eyes on Jesus together—this is where the power of the church is made manifest. Discipleship is fixing our eyes on Jesus by being within a community who seeks to do do it together. A.W. Tozer liked to use the image of the tuning of pianos as a way to talk about this. When 100 pianos would all be tuned to the same fork at the same time, they will inevitably become tuned to one another. That is, unity, love, and a transformative community are the results of everyone tuning their entire life to the person of Jesus Christ. As Tozer would say:
So one hundred worshippers meeting together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be were they to become ‘unity’ conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship.4
I am often asked by new Christians what they should do as their first few steps of faith. I would say two things. First, read the Gospels. And, second, immerse yourself into a church that is obsessed with the Jesus of the Gospels. In short, this is the heart of the command in Hebrews to “fix our eyes on Jesus” (v. 2) while being in the midst of a “cloud of witnesses.” (v. 1) There is immeasurable power in getting our hearts and minds to give attention to the glorious, resurrected, eternal person of Jesus Christ. But all the more transformative is when we do it together—tuning our lives to the person of Christ.
This theme of copying and imitating was at the heart of C.S. Lewis’s theology of discipleship. As should we, Lewis grew concerned about a world that idolized originality and unbound ingenuity because it created the kind of people who saw real life as never imitating. “Be your own self,” that world would say. So much so now than ever. But the art of true discipleship, for Lewis, was in submitting to not being original and new and instead choosing to live the life of Christ that has already been lived. His words are as timeless today as they were then:
In the New Testament the art of life itself is an art of imitation. ‘Originality’ in the New Testament is quite plainly the prerogative of God alone; even within the triune being of God it seems to be confined to the Father. The duty and happiness of every other being is placed in being derivative, in reflecting like a mirror. Nothing could be more foreign to the tone of Scripture than the language of those who describe a saint as a ‘moral genius’ or a ‘spiritual genius,’ the insinuating that his virtue or spirituality is ‘creative’ or ‘original’. If I have read the New Testament aright, it leaves no room for ‘creativeness’ even in a modified or metaphorical sense. Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not our own...I am saying only that the highest good of a creature must be creaturely—that is, derivative or reflective—good.5
A friend of mine said to me years ago that the only thing original about any of us is our sin. Perhaps that is the essence of all sin—the human drive to do something innovative. And all the more, perhaps the essence of a true life with God is learning to embrace a holiness that is little more than plagiarizing the life of Jesus as our own.
Thanks for reading. You can always find me wasting time on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or check out my podcast with Dr. Nijay Gupta at Slow Theology. If you found this content helpful to your spiritual life, yay! Consider enjoying my most recent book The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War for our Wants, which was released with Zondervan in February of 2024. Within, I explore the topic of human desire from the perspective of Scripture, theology, and experience—with particular interest to how we can be formed into the image of Christ through our desires. In short, it’s about why our cultural mandate to “you do you” is so profoundly unhelpful to the follower of Jesus. You can support my work by reading it! And sharing about your experience. Click on the image below to get yourself a copy.
Jason Hood, Imitating God in Christ: Recapturing a Biblical Pattern (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013).
See, as well, 1 Cor. 4:16, 2 Th. 3:7, and Heb. 13:7.
Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2003).
Tozer, A.W., The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine (Camp Hill, PA: Wingspread Publishers, 2006), 90.
C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1971), 9.
The section about Lewis and originality reminds me of what Thomas Oden wanted on his grave marker: “He Made No New Contribution to Theology”
You made some important points here about idolizing spiritual leaders. It’s a lot of what I’ve thought, however, we rarely hear it talked about. Emphasizing choosing a church that loves the Gospels is a good recommendation.