Part four of five. Every conversation like this one eventually collides with a phrase that is true, necessary, and frequently used to end the discussion early: “just be like Jesus.” I have no interest in weakening that summons. But it requires a distinction that is easy to lose — and losing it is how we arrived at the problem this series has been describing. So first the distinction, and then the indictment it makes possible.

Be Imitators of Me, as I Am of Christ

Any discussion like this eventually runs into the phrase every Christian has heard: “just be like Jesus.” It is a true and necessary summons. We are called to imitate Christ — Ephesians 5:1–2 tells us to be imitators of God as beloved children and to walk in love as Christ loved us; 1 Peter 2:21 says Christ left us an example, that we should follow in his steps; 1 John 2:6 says whoever claims to abide in him ought to walk as he walked. None of what has been argued above diminishes that calling.

But there is a theological distinction that must be preserved carefully, and a Reformed Baptist reader in particular will want it stated with precision. Christ’s unique redemptive office — his role as the incarnate Son who atones for sin, who exercises divine authority, who fulfills messianic prerogatives given to him alone as the Mediator between God and man — is not something we imitate or replicate. We are not mediators. We do not atone. We do not speak with Christ’s underived divine authority when we confront error. We imitate his moral character as finite, sinful creatures being progressively sanctified by grace, not his unrepeatable office.

This is precisely why Paul’s own words are so useful to us here. Paul can say, without any tension with Christ’s supremacy, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). Paul does not offer himself as a rival standard to Christ; he offers himself as a servant in whom Christlike faithfulness has taken visible, ordinary, human shape. And what we see in Paul’s life, again and again, is not emotional flatness. We see boldness before governors and kings, doctrinal precision defended at real personal cost, willingness to confront both erring believers and false teachers by name, sacrificial perseverance through beatings and shipwreck and imprisonment, and — running through all of it — zeal. The apostles, precisely because they are ordinary human servants rather than the divine Son himself, give us a biblical model of what Christlike faithfulness looks like when it is lived out by people like us. If we are looking for a template for how zeal for Christ is meant to be expressed in a human life without divine prerogative, the apostolic pattern is exactly where Scripture points us.

And because Scripture — not personality, not temperament, not the shifting expectations of the surrounding culture, not whether we are perceived as nice — is the sufficient and final authority for the Christian life, this is where the argument must be anchored. The question is never “does this feel gentle to my neighbor” or “would this be well received in polite company.” The question is whether our zeal is being shaped and governed by what God has revealed. A zeal untethered from Scripture degenerates into self-righteous aggression. A gentleness untethered from Scripture degenerates into cowardice dressed up as virtue. Only the Word rightly governs both.

The Domesticated Christ

Here is the indictment I want to state plainly, because I believe it is true and because I believe the church needs to hear it: if we have taught generations of Christians that being Christlike means being perpetually soft-spoken, endlessly agreeable, emotionally restrained, and conflict-averse — while quietly setting aside Christ’s prophetic denunciations in Matthew 23, his zeal-driven cleansing of the temple, and the apostles’ extraordinary boldness in the book of Acts and the epistles — then we have not given people the whole biblical picture of Christ. We have given them a domesticated Christ, a Christ shaped more by modern therapeutic and social expectations of niceness than by the actual text of Scripture. And we should not be surprised when believers formed by that domesticated Christ grow anxious and apologetic about their own God-given convictions.

I want to be fair to the other side of this conversation, because it is a real and biblical concern, not a strawman. There are Christians who rightly warn against sinful anger, spiritual pride, cruelty in speech, and reckless, undisciplined confrontation. That warning is entirely biblical, and much of what passes for “boldness” online today really is just unsanctified anger wearing zeal’s clothing. The problem is not that gentleness is preached. The problem arises when “gentleness” quietly becomes a euphemism for never confronting error, never naming sin as sin, never calling false teaching false, never raising one’s voice under any circumstance, and never allowing anyone to feel the discomfort that truth sometimes produces. At that point, “gentleness” has stopped being a fruit of the Spirit and has become a strategy for avoiding cost.

It remains to say what this costs — for the person who tells the truth and is resented for it, and for the person who has been told often enough that his conviction is anger that he has begun to believe it. Next week, in the final part: offense, exhaustion, and the zeal I want back.

The Domesticated Christ — part 4 of 5:

1. The Meekness That Was Never Softness
2. Zeal That Consumes
3. Zeal and Its Counterfeits
4. Be Imitators of Me, as I Am of Christ (you are here)

Later parts in this series have not been published yet. They will appear here as they are released.