Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ. – 1 Corinthians 11:1, KJV

It can be either very gratifying or very depressing when we compare ourselves to other people. If we are better off than the next guy, we might think very highly of ourselves. If we are not as well-off as the next guy, we might get bummed out. Either way, we err when we compare ourselves to other people, for Christ, not others, sets the example we are to follow.

When we compare ourselves to others, we tend to focus on outward manifestations of success and failure. We compare things like income, possessions, social status, and attractiveness – all things that the world tells us to value. But after a person dies, his or her earthly legacy is likely to be forgotten and/or squandered within two to three generations, which is why Solomon said that every thing on Earth is vanity and why Christ told us to lay up treasures in Heaven rather than on Earth.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with wealth, status, or beauty just so long as the pursuit of such things does not take the place of the pursuit of God. There were plenty of successful people in the Bible – Job, Abraham, Joseph, and Solomon, to name a few – who were great in an earthly sense because God made them so as a reward for pursuing Him first. But, regardless of whether our rewards on this Earth are material or not, we can rest assured that if we make Christ the example we seek to emulate, God will richly reward us. He will reward us in this life with rich relationships with Himself and with others, and He will reward us in Eternity with crowns of glory that we can cast at His feet. Both kinds of rewards have an eternal, not a mortal, shelf life, which means both kinds of rewards are of far greater value than anything we can hope to gain by striving to be like the people around us rather than by striving to be like the God above us.

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