Imitation of Life

"He who belongs to God hears what God says. 
The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God".
                                                                     John 8:47

     There is only one person in this life that I need to worry about pleasing.  That person is God.  If I strive to please God, all other relationships will fall into place.  My relationship and passivity to the will of God is the foundation for all of my other relationships.  When my relationship with God suffers, all other relationships are affected.  When my relationship with God flourishes, all other relationships prosper.

     Too many Christians have been sidetracked at the altars of popularity and peer opinion.  Like an eternal teenager, when our popularity is jeopardized by our Christianity, our Christianity is often the first to be sacrificed.  Everyone certainly has a need to feel accepted.  But the level of our maturity can often be gauged by those whose acceptance we choose to pursue.  We often fail to realize that those who set their expectations for our acceptance at a level beyond our reach are often ones who cannot reach their own level of acceptance.  Striving for mortal acceptance often results only in failed expectations.

     As a teenager, I strove for non-conformity, a label which, in itself, is enigmatic as non-conformists often conform to their group's expectations.  Everyone is a conformist to one ideology or another.  Christians become mature when they realize that conforming to God means non-conforming to society, unless that society is ruled completely by God.  Everyone, to one degree or another, is imitating someone else.  The question remains:  will we doom ourselves by imitating mortality or free ourselves by pursuing a vision of eternity?
    
*        A disciple seeks to model his behavior after Jesus.
    
  Application - What affects me more, the opinions of man, or the opinion of God?  Who am I seeking to imitate?