As my two year old watches and listens to his older siblings
and then imitates their actions and voices his own renditions of their words,
noises and sound effects, I feel I’m observing the basic instinct of learning
and development. These days, we’re constantly asking, “Where did he learn to do
that?” and “ Who taught him to say that?” He’s a full time learner and he’ll
try to do or say just about anything he sees or hears, and with pretty decent
success. Thinking back now, there are so
many competencies and abilities that my kids acquired along the way with little
or no intentional effort on our part. And for that reason, we’re all the more
deliberate about what we’re modeling for them, and with stair stepped siblings,
what they’re modeling for each other. It’s how we grow as a family, by each
living purposely to honor God personally and to demonstrate Godliness worth
following. That’s what the Apostle Paul was doing when he told the church in
Corinth to “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” We should never too highly
esteem another person who, given time, will certainly fail us. But with
discerning hearts, we should look to those ahead of us on this faith journey
and imitate the Godly things they do and say. I think we often deem the great
commission a corporate assignment rather than a personal call and discount our
potential in it when we stop short of it’s final charge of “teaching them to
obey all that I have commanded you.” It’s not from public speakers and in well
planned programs that we learn to obey. It’s in the context of the family and
has a great deal to do with this concept of brothers and sisters modeling for
the young the way they should live and pointing them toward what is true. We’re
each someone else’s big brother or sister. We’ve each been called to teach them
to obey the commands that we’ve been taught. Who taught you and who are you
teaching today?
