Blog # 356 Living the Life of Jesus

Blog # 356  Living the Life of Jesus

              When a prep football player goes to a professional game he sees speed strength and skill that he likes and appreciates. He watches carefully, and thinks within himself how good this is.  He goes home happy to have  seen what he saw, and eager to work hard to make this skill strength and speed his own. When we read of the life and work of Jesus in the Bible something like this can be true for us. We see in Him an attractiveness that causes us to wish to make it our own.
              
             Jesus is our God and Ruler but He came to teach us how to rule ourselves in freedom according to His wisdom.  He is our Judge, but He came to save and defend us.  The wisdom of the planets in motion, the strength of storms in their fury, and the beauty of the sun going down are but images and reflections of His goodness and perfection as the Word of God.  But as Jesus He lived among us as an ordinary child, as a carpenter, and later on would freely give Himself to crucifixion so that we would know the value of the Father's will.  He was willing to die that the Father's will be accomplished. And so that we would know how much we are loved by Himself and the Father, what He suffered on the Cross He suffered for us.(Jn. 10:11.)
        
             May each of us find the attractiveness in Jesus that great Saints have found in Him.  May we come away from merely reading of His love in the Bible to a desire at His invitation and with His support, to make His goodness wisdom and strength of character our own.  That is what Jesus was saying when He told us to love one another as He loved us. The Bible stories of  the goodness and love of Jesus were not given merely as good reading. They were given as invitations to be for us the strength wisdom goodness and love by which we love one another as members of  His Body, the Church, by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Jn. 13: 34;  15: 12, 17).