At church on Sunday, I was exhausted. I kind of tuned in and out, missed a good deal of what was going on, and slipped into some serious daydreaming. All related, I swear…

I tuned back in at a fascinating point, however. The pastor, in finishing a point, noted that (I’m paraphrasing) our first responsibility as Christians isn’t to be like Jesus. It’s to be with Jesus.

That’s a pretty radical departure from the way most of us think about Christianity. We think being a Christian is to be Christ-like. To be selfless, care for others, heal the sick, and so on and so forth. And Christianity does call us to be Christ-like. But that’s not the first step.

Think about your best friends, or your family, or your spouse –  \you rub off on each other, right? You develop each other’s goofy mannerisms, start to say the same things (my whole family now starts every sentence with "Yo" and ends it with "Dude." You’re welcome, Mom and Dad), and even begin to act and think similarly.

One of my favorite quotes from my favorite shows comes from Sports Night. The head of the show, Isaac Jaffe, is talking to those he has come to mentor, and says this: "if you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you." The only way to be smart is to be around smart people – you’ll learn how to think, how to argue, how to learn. That’s, in a lot of ways, why we go to school – to be in a community of learning that might just rub off on us somehow.

Being like Christ is impossible on our own. We suck. We’re selfish, mean, stupid, and all manner of other bad adjectives. On our own, attempting to be Christ-like, we will fail 100% of the time. I know I do. But if we spend time with Jesus, whether it’s by spending time reading, praying, or being with other Christians, we give him a chance to rub off on us. Whether we mean to or not, we begin to take on the attributes of the people we surround ourselves with; if we surround ourselves with Jesus, some crazy osmosis thing might happen, and we might just become a bit more Christ-like.

The first step is to be with Jesus. He might just rub off. We’re not Christ-like without Jesus, and we’ll only become so by spending so much time with him we can’t help but see some Christ in the way we think, act, and live.

How do we do this? How do we surround ourselves with Jesus? And what does this mean for our lives, that we’re so prone to becoming the people we surround ourselves with?

Photo: cproppe