Adoration < Imitation
Have you ever had a powerful emotional experience with God? Perhaps you had an ecstatic experience during a time of prayer, worship, or contemplation. Or maybe you broke down in tears while someone prayed for you, or felt surging waves of unexplainable love and peace in times of high stress or suffering.
These are wonderful moments that often serve us well in our desire to connect with God. We are emotive creatures, and our emotions are a necessary part of drawing closer to God. If we wish to find union with Christ and be formed into his image, we cannot experience God in our head only.
That said, feelings and emotions have limitations. First and foremost, emotions do not adequately define what it means to love God. The adoration of God (having profound love or regard for God) is not the end of the journey. It leads somewhere.
The natural outcome of adoration is imitation. At least, that's what Jesus said. He told us he imitated the Father, and we were to likewise imitate him.
“I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself. He does only what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son also does."
~ John 5:19
"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another."
~ John 13:34
"You call Me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet."
~ John 13:12-15
The other New Testament authors agree:
"Imitate God, therefore, in everything you do, because you are his dear children."
~ Ephesians 5:1
"For God called you to do good, even if it means suffering, just as Christ suffered for you. He is your example, and you must follow in his steps."
~ 1 Peter 2:21
"The one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked."
~ 1 John 2:6
After adoration must come imitation. If we head to church on Sunday morning, adore Christ, and go home and read our Scriptures and talk about how thankful we are for our salvation and how much we love Jesus, but do nothing in the way of imitating him and following in his footsteps, as hard and uncomfortable as that may be, then we have missed the point of worship.
In other words, worship falls short when adoration isn't demonstrated through the imitation of Christ. Put another way, the fruit of adoration (profound love and regard for God) is imitation (walking as he walked, or at least attempting to).
PAUSE and REFLECT: Does your profound love and regard for God lead you to a place of desiring to and attempting to walk as he walked?
We might automatically think yes, but perhaps we should take time to truly reflect on this. In his book The Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne writes about a time he surveyed those who identified as "strong followers of Jesus":
"I asked participants who claimed to be "strong followers of Jesus" whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes.... I sneaked in another question. I asked this same group...whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2 percent said they did. I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did."
So I ask again: is our adoration actually leading to imitation?
Do we need adoration? Yes, absolutely. If the imitation of Christ becomes untethered from the adoration of Christ, the result is spiritual burnout and a lack of compassion (both those are symptoms that something is amiss). But let us not forget the church exists to imitate Christ.
That's the only way we can truly be his Body on earth.