Proclaimer Blog
Christ our pattern
Some powerful words from the pen of Donald Macleod, in what seems to have been an address to the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland:
‘The Christ whom we are trying to follow and trying to emulate made himself nothing. He became a nonentity. It was not what he was, but it was what he looked like, what he allowed men to think of him and how he allowed men to treat him. He obscured his deity beneath humanness and ordinariness and suffering and even death. He didn’t look great or clever. He had none of the trappings of popularity. Instead, he was despised and contemptible: a non-person. That is a hard road. But for the Christian it is the only road: one on which we are willing to renounce our rights, to be misunderstood, to be damned with faint praise, to serve and yet be deemed absurd failures by those we are trying to help… ‘What upheld Christ? What kept him going? A sense of duty, of course, and love for lost men and women. But there was something else – what the Epistle to the Hebrews calls ‘The joy set before him’. That has become very unfashionable today. But Christ was not ashamed to derive strength and courage from that great prospect – the prospect of glory with the Father – which lay before him. Neither should we be ashamed of it.’ (From Glory to Golgotha, pp.157-58).
Macleod of course has a strong understanding of what Christ has done for us that we cannot do ourselves (see his new book Christ Crucified: Understanding the Atonement). But in the above quote he challenges me deeply to take Christ as my pattern too. Sometimes I am what Macleod calls an ‘absurd failure’ because, well, I can be a bit absurd and I often fail. But other times we are judged to be absurd failures simply because we are following our Lord. Then he challenge for me is: will I be ashamed to find my joy in precisely the same thing that the Lord Jesus chose to find his joy in?