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What example did Christ leave us?

The ultimate goal of growing in our faith is that we would become more like Christ, so it is important that we understand the example that Christ gave. We live in a time where there are many opinions of who Christ was and people often summarize His ministry in different ways. The tragedy being that people often define what Jesus’ life and message was based on what they value the most or how they choose to live. We often find tidbits of Jesus’ ministry that align somehow with how we want to live and we then focus on those things because they justify our lives. This is where we get bad definitions of who Jesus was and what He was all about. Some say that Jesus was all about love and so we just need to love each other, that’s it. It’s based in some truth because Jesus was very loving and the new command that He gave was that we should love one another. However, Jesus also taught about sin and His life was centered around resolving the problem we have with sin, both in this life and in eternity. There are others who say that Jesus was all about sin and so they focus on sin, and they live their lives trying to be perfect morally. They have a tendency look critically at every action that they do and every action that everyone else does. If you do something wrong, you’re going to go to Hell and while we should take sin seriously because Jesus took it very seriously we cannot forget that Jesus also taught about grace. Grace is there to free us from the bondage of sin and it is there to cover us when we do fail. Then there are people who focus so much on grace that they really don’t see the need to improve or make any changes in their lives, because after all they are saved. So they go about continuing in their sins and living compromised lives because they are covered by grace. Meanwhile the Bible teaches us that we have been transferred from a kingdom of darkness into a Kingdom of light and that we are indeed a new creation in Jesus. These exaggerated idea about Jesus can go on and on and if we are not careful we can approach our faith from an immature place not really looking to master any of it and never really becoming less like our former selves, or less like the world and more like Christ. We can blind ourselves and only focus on certain aspects of the gospel that suits us.
The problem in all of this is that when someone says that we should become more like Jesus that we are not on the same page. In other words, that we are visualizing the Jesus in our heads and not the real Jesus. Which means that we need to take a look at the example of Jesus so that we can understand what it is that I should become like.

In this Sermon

We are going to take a look at how the apostle Peter defined Jesus’ example. Specifically we are going to look at six ways that we should aspire to be like Jesus.

Scripture References

1 Peter 2:21-25

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