How to Imitate Jesus Without Getting Crucified

Have you ever been told that if you would imitate Jesus all would be well in your life? From pulpits to podiums to books we are told to imitate Jesus. WWJD bracelets were all the rage a decade ago. Put one on your wrist, look at it every once in a while, and viola, better life. It’s no doubt true that to seek to live as Jesus lived and to react as Jesus reacted would result in a better spiritual life. Despite the facts that Jesus lived two thousand years ago in a country far removed from our own doesn’t lessen the value of his examples. When you speak of Jesus you are speaking of God; so, emulating Jesus is to emulate supreme Godliness. Jesus was God Incarnate, which is Bible-speak for God in human form. Jesus is to be our life-example.


Now for the hard part: exactly how do we emulate and imitate Jesus? We can’t heal the sick, nor can we drive demons out of people. We can’t turn a few fish and loaves of bread into a massive fish sandwich meal for thousands of people. We can’t turn water into wine. We can’t calm gale force winds on a body of water and we certainly can't walk on water. Enough of the cant’s, let’s look at what we can do: we can see our power coming from God the Father and keep up a regular stream of communication. We can go around doing good for people in God’s name. We can love the hard-to-love and provide care for the needy. We can place the needs of those we haven’t yet reached ahead of our own.


Now for the really hard part: Jesus died. To emulate Jesus is to be willing to die for God. Losing one’s life due to being a Christian actually happens in many places in the world; but let’s face it, it doesn’t happen here. Losing one’s actual life is not required to be a dedicated follower of Jesus. This is a good thing. All that is required is to symbolically give up our hold on our life and give it to God. We symbolically die to our carnal, sinful, natural, dead-end selves and allow God to gift the Holy Spirit into our lives. So death is involved, just not the as a doornail type. After we have the Holy Spirit in our lives it is easier to seek to imitate Jesus in all the other ways…just don’t get your hopes up for walking on water or tossing out demons.


Crucifixion is not required, but a form of death is before we have a prayer of imitating Jesus. It’s so very counter intuitive but death precedes life in God’s equation. It is only in dying that we can live in the manner God wishes for us to live. Sign me up for that whole WWJD thing!

Most Overused Words & Phrases

Recently a small college in Michigan determined the most overused words and phrases in the English language. Their idea was to have these words banished from the Queen’s English, although it seems unlikely the Queen of England will pay a great deal of attention to Lake Superior State University (the Lakers, of course). Google, Yahoo and a few other internet groups picked up the list and it’s presently making its way around the web. It’s hard to disagree with the choices, which will be examined below, but the list is simply too short. Words should be examined annually by some trustworthy group and if found to be overly trite, rude, insensitive or ubiquitous (O.K., or too long), they should be officially banished. The Queen of England should be part of the ceremony, along with the National Spelling Bee Champion of the United States, and seven randomly picked English teachers from the English speaking world. If the words are deemed losers…BOOM, gone, banished, vanquished, non-ubiquitous (or long).

The Lakers chose:

Occupy: For obvious reasons and yes, it is getting a bit ubiq…uh, overused.

Baby Bump: Totally insensitive but actually better than the British preggers.

 24/7: Yes, thank you for this one. All the time worked so well for so long.

Ginormous: Did we really need to combine giant and enormous? No. Pick one.

Thank you in advance: I actually use this one a lot so let’s skip it.

Amazing: Huh? They are actually dissing amazing? That ranks with cool. Nope.

As Christians we have to be especially careful with our language choices. People are always listening and many are taking cues from us. If we use a certain type of language  they may feel better about using it. For this reason we too should do a review of words and phrases that might shed a negative light on our faith. We may have a ginormous problem and it may be on-going, even 24/7. Possibly negativity occupies our minds and souls. Remember, our faith is amazing and so is God’s grace. We can speak and sound like the positive, edifying people God created us to be.

Oh, and thank you in advance for reading this article!

Michael McCullar