Imitation is the sincerest form of...Worship

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as
Christ loved us and gave himself up for us... (Eph. 5:1 ESV)

I have played guitar since age 11--over 40 years now. At about age 30 I discovered jazz and began the arduous task of learning to improvise. As I explored the literature on the subject I found there were two main theories. One was the chord/scale approach. This is very much in vogue today; it's taught in most of the university jazz departments and consists of learning various scales that relate to the chords that make up the harmonic structure of the song. The idea is to practice these scales against their corresponding chords, and eventually use notes from those scales to create improvised melodies. The second theory is much older and was the way most of the musicians who created the jazz lexicon learned to play: it is to transcribe the solos of admired masters and learn to play them. To put it simply: it is to imitate one's heros.

I could go on at great length about why I think the older "imitation" system is better than the newer, in vogue, system, but this might illustrate it best: the new system seems to be like trying to teach one how to write stories by focusing only on the alphabet. The result is strings of letters that don't mean much of anything.

The older "imitation" style of learning is in reality the way we learn everything. The most rudimentary abilities of human life--speech, walking, even eating--are learned by imitating our parents.

The reason, I think, that this style of learning has fallen out of favor in the arts at least--music, painting, and writing to name just three--is the modern value placed on novelty (or it's more respectable term originality.) Such is the esteem given originality in modern art (or at least the perception of originality) that almost all other attributes--beauty, structure, meaning-- are willingly sacrificed to its preeminence. Personally I still find beauty, structure and meaning important qualities in art, which is why I probably find so much modern music, painting and fiction repellent.

To whatever degree beauty, structure, meaning--and above all, truth--are significant to the quality of art, they are incalculably more so to the Christian life. Christians, as disciples of Christ, are trying to learn from Him the way to live. Disciple means pupil, from the Latin discipulus. The Greek word matheteuo, often translated as disciple, means learner.

Jesus is our teacher in life; as his pupils the best way to learn is to imitate. Anti-Christian critics have ridiculed this principle by such slogans on bumper-stickers as, "What would Jesus drive?" and, "Who would Jesus bomb?", but this doesn't invalidate the very real and important question that Christians have been asking themselves for two millenia: what would Jesus do?

And if this life is the preparation for where we will spend eternity and what we are to become, which I believe Scripture teaches us, then this quote from a recent sermon by the brilliant preacher and theological writer, Doug Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho--(you can access a downloadable mp3 of this sermon, entitled, "A Second Battle of Tours II", by clicking here)--is particularly poignant:

"...we need to recognize that if you're worshiping an idol, you are going to become like the idol you worship. If you're worshiping the true God, you're going to become like the true God...Paul tells us very clearly that we are being transformed from one degree of glory to another as we behold the face of God in Christ. And John tells us that when we see Him we're going to become like Him because we're going to see Him as He is. The one we worship, when we see Him most clearly in the resurrection, we're going to be completely conformed to His image when we see that image most clearly. And as we see that image through a glass darkly, now, we are being transformed in a process from one degree of glory to another. And if you worship an idol, the same process happens. You become more and more like that idol: deaf, dumb, and blind."