“Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps” (1 Peter 2:21).
The poet penned: “Of much advice, I’ve had an ample; ‘twas just advice, but bad example.”
Leslie Flynn tells of a Christian baroness living in the highlands of Nairobi, Kenya. She had employed a young national to be her house boy. After three months he asked for a letter of recommendation to a friendly sheik some miles away.
Not wishing to lose the boy just after he had learned the household routine, she offered to increase his pay. The young man replied that he was not leaving for more pay. He had decided he’d become either a Christian or a Muslim. He told the baroness that he had worked for her to observe her Christian lifestyle. And now he would work for the sheik to see how Muslims lived. Remembering all the rude mistakes she’d made with him in her impatience, she cried out, “Why didn’t you tell me this at the first?”
Jesus has told us at the first, hasn’t he? I’m a Christian today because of the example I saw in the house in which I lived as a boy. I’m a minister of the word because of the prayers of a dying mother. Who of us really knows the power of example? The scriptures imply that a mate can be won to Christ by example. Pulpiteers may not wish to admit it, but more souls are probably won by the influence of godly Christians than by all the flowery homilies delivered in fancy church buildings.
Remember the story of the puffed up preacher who asked a young lady what it was in his sermon that caused her to obey the gospel? She replied, “Oh, it wasn’t anything you said. It was the example and teaching I got from my boyfriend.” Ouch! There is no more powerful tool at our convenience than the combination of the word of God and lives willing to live by that word.