Just the Example That We Need

Jesus is not mainly an example. But that is not to say he is not an example. Let us not neglect the example Christ gives us (which we do follow) in our appropriate concern to centralize his atoning work for our sin (which we do not, dare not, follow).

Warfield:

Who can find in all His life a single lack, a single failure to set us a perfect example? In what difficulty of life, in what trial, in what danger or uncertainty, when we turn our eyes to Him, do we fail to find just the example that we need?

And if perchance we are, by the grace of God, enabled to walk with Him but a step in the way, how our hearts burn within us with longing to be always with Him—to be strengthened by the almighty power of God in the inner man, to make every footprint which He has left in the world a stepping-stone to climb upward over His divine path. Do we not rightly say that next to our longing to be in Christ is our corresponding longing to be like Christ; that only second in our hearts to His great act of obedience unto death by which He became our Savior, stands His holy life in our world of sin, by which He becomes our example?

--B. B. Warfield, 'Imitating the Incarnation'