Andrew Fuller and being an Imitator - GBC Bulletin Column #3

One hundred and ninety eight years ago this past week, a Baptist pastor named Andrew Fuller crossed the waters of death and passed into eternity. A farmer’s son and a powerfully built, successful wrestler in his youth, Fuller became a pastor and prolific writer, tirelessly devoting much of his energy towards sending and supporting missionaries to foreign countries from his native England.

Fuller once attempted to plough a straight line across a field. Finding where such a line had already been ploughed, he thought he could reproduce the original ploughman’s work by simply following alongside it. Fuller eagerly set to work with his plough, only to discover as he went that the original was not as perfectly straight as he first thought – it had little wriggles and kinks. As he looked back over his own work, Fuller noticed how he had taken the flaws in the original line and exaggerated them in his own, producing a more obviously crooked line. He later wrote “On perceiving this, I threw the plough aside, and determined never to be an imitator.”

Love people. Learn from them. If God has given them authority over you, be led by them. But don’t imitate people as they are, in-and-of-themselves. Physically, morally, spiritually, rationally, and in every other way you can think of, people are either rebels or redeemed and recovering rebels against the righteous Lord God. People are flawed in their whole being. By imitating them, you will exaggerate their flaws so that they are even more pronounced in your own life. And don’t kid yourself that you know where to draw the line or that you can succeed at moderation: remember…you are flawed too.    

Imitate people only so far as they are in and of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1). This really amounts less to imitating the person himself and more to imitating Christ in the person! “Be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:1-2).   

This was printed in the worship bulletin of Grace Baptist Church (Wood Green) 12/05/2013.