Few lines in the apostolic epistles send shivers down my spine quite like these words with which Paul admonished the Corinthians (and, by extension, me):
Imitate me, as I imitate Jesus.[1]
When I first began to read and meditate on the letters written so long ago by apostlic pens led by the Holy Spirit, I shuddered. Don’t expect too much of me, I thought/prayed. I’m not Paul, and I never saw You on the way to Damascus.[2] And, if I’m honest, I carried a kernel of gratitude for not having ever been near Damascus. I had no interest in going. Imitating Jesus already felt out of reach. Failing to do so would bear a wild weight of shame upon me in my youth. Trying to imitate Paul imitating Jesus felt like someone was kicking me while I was down.
But the One who breathed the words we read[3] would whisper to me, “Blessed are those who believe without seeing,”[4] and I’d feel my insides erode like sandcastles lost to the evening tide. They were never as stable as I thought they were, and they were never meant to survive the pressures of the day. Something else would need to be built instead.[5] “Walk worthy of the calling with which you have been called”[6] was reiterated often enough throughout the pages that I knew myself to be without excuse. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t received the blinding experiential revelation Paul had as he traversed his bloodthirsty road; he and I were brought under the same Greatest Commandment, beholden to the same blood that bought us:[7] “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”[8] You shall. I shall. I will. It’s a command, and a prophecy. My Father in heaven is doggedly committed to raising me in mature love, conforming me to the perfect Image of His Son.[9] He will finish what He has started.[10]
Will we?
Consider that this same man, this apostle to the Gentiles and father to so many newborns in the faith,[11] is he who said this: “One thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”[12] By the time he wrote these words, Paul was several years along the narrow road,[13] with several more yet ahead of him. He knew what it was to lose family, prestige, career, relationships, health, and friendships to obedience—and it doesn’t seem he ever entertained regret. You “become what you behold,”[14] and Paul locked his gaze[15] on Jesus and persevered down the path of costly discipleship.[16] Paul’s “one thing” was Mary’s “one thing,”[17] and it was David’s:
One thing I have desired of the Lord,
That will I seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord
All the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the Lord,
And to inquire in His temple.[18]
What impresses and impacts me the most in David’s verse is this lyric: “All the days of my life.” All the days. It’s easy to sing all the high and lofty ambitions when you’re young, or when you wake up the morning after the Light blinds you on the Damascus road. But David would later reflect: “I was young, and now I am old—but I have never seen the righteous forsaken.”[19] There were a lot of days between the boyhood he spent on the back hills of Bethlehem, writing songs on a shoestring harp, and balding under the crown in his latter years.[20] He’d endured untold loss, numerable wars, and faced the capacities of his own disastrous failures on more than one level, in more than one way, more than one time. He’d been betrayed, attacked, usurped, confronted, and found out. He himself would stray from the narrow way, only for the gentle hand of grace to pointedly place him back on it again—more than once. And over time, the merciful patience of Jesus percolated this truth into David: he was not righteous because he didn’t stray. He was righteous because Jesus didn’t. Generations later, the early church put it this way:
If we have died with Him, we will also live with Him;
If we endure, we will also reign with Him;
If we deny Him, He also will deny us;
If we are faithless, He remains faithful—
For He cannot deny Himself.[21]
It is the faithfulness of Jesus that brings us into the endurance required to reign with Him—all we have to do is not deny Him. This hymn sung by the first generation to know the name of the Messiah weaves David’s day-by-day commitment to seek the beauty of the Lord—not just His power, not just His healing, not just His salvation, but Him in His deepest waters, His most shrouded mysteries, His beauty—with Paul’s perseverance. Our good days, our bad days, our disillusioned days, our cynical days, our burdened days, our grieving days, our mistake days, our bored days—all our days must be committed to seeing and savoring the Son of Man. What prompted the middle-aged apostle to “forget what lies behind and strain towards what’s ahead”? Let us rewind his Philippian letter a few verses:
Everything that was a gain to me, I have considered to be a loss because of Christ. More than that, I also consider everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. Because of Him I have suffered the loss of all things and consider them as dung, so that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own from the law, but one that is through faith in Christ—the righteousness from God based on faith. My goal is to know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, assuming that I will somehow reach the resurrection from among the dead.[22]
“My goal is to know Him.”
What’s yours?
You can’t do difficult things over a lifetime out of your zealous, youthful, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed bombast. That won’t carry you through the years and wounds of betrayal, grief, disappointment, and failure. You can’t live through a lifetime in this “present evil age”[23] with a vibrant, tender heart if you forfeit cultivating intimacy with the One who made you. You'll just check out. For many nowadays, David’s elderly meditation would instead read, “I was young, and now I am old, and somewhere along the way I got lazy and disengaged. Checked out. Deconstructed and peaced out.” But John's revelation of Jesus and the new Jerusalem tells us plainly: cowards will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven in eternity.[24] We must put a stake in the ground and declare war on cowardice. Don’t be the fool who builds a sandcastle on a vulnerable shore when you knew full well you needed to build a stone house on a better rock.[25]
We can do difficult things and die without regret because we remain connected to the Vine, knowing all we will ever be are branches wholly reliant on Him who gives us life.[26] So we press into Jesus—to know Him—and count anything and everything else this life has to offer as “dung,” knowing that’s how we press on into the hard yards of the final years in this bankrupt age before the glorious return of the One we adore.[27] That’s our “blessed hope.”[28] And it is through Him alone we can do all things[29]—invincible despite slaughter[30]— under the committed hand of the Sovereign Shepherd who will not fail to draw a mature Bride out of the wilderness, leaning on her Beloved.[31]
Remember this: If you don’t quit, you win.
Maranatha.
Stephanie Quick (@quicklikesand) is a writer/producer serving with FAI. She lives in the Golan Heights and cohosts The Better Beautiful podcast with Jeff Henderson. Browse her free music, films, and books in the FAI App and at stephaniequick.org.
[1] 1 Corinthians 11:1
[2] Acts 9:1-9
[3] 2 Timothy 3:10
[4] John 20:29
[5] Matthew 7:24-27
[6] Ephesians 4:1; Colossians 4:10; 1 Thessalonians 2:12; Revelation 3:4
[7] Galatians 1:13; 1 Peter 1:19
[8] Deuteronomy 6:5; Matthew 22:36-38
[9] Romans 8:29
[10] 1 Corinthians 1:8
[11] 1 Corinthians 4:15
[12] Philippians 3:13-14, ESV
[13] Matthew 7:14
[14] 2 Corinthians 3:18
[15] Song of Solomon 1:15; 4:1
[16] See The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
[17] Luke 10:38-42
[18] Psalm 27:4, NKJV
[19] Psalm 37:25; emphasis added
[20] For a comprehensive study of David’s life, visit mikebickle.org or grab a copy of Bickle’s book, After God’s Own Heart.
[21] 2 Timothy 2:11-13, ESV
[22] Philippians 3:7-11, CSB
[23] Galatians 1:4
[24] Revelation 21:8
[25] Matthew 7:24-27
[26] John 15:5
[27] 2 Thessalonians 1:10
[28] Titus 2:13
[29] Philippians 4:13
[30] Romans 8:37
[31] Song of Solomon 8:5
