Getting clear on what I believe and stand for PART 2

Photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash

What I wrote in the previous post feeds nicely into the second thing that I stand for. Namely that we need to do our best, in all our fallibility, to emulate Jesus. To follow him and the example he set with the life that he lived. We of course all fall short of this ideal. But I truly believe that Jesus was the first perfect person in the world. One that lived free from sin. But I also believe that if one person manages to free him/herself from sin, that person will become like Jesus, no matter what he/she has done previously. 

A while back I wrote about how our lives are programmed by the world. And the thing is that there is a natural state that we can function from. And it is most clearly presented in the person of Jesus. Jesus walked fully with God throughout his life. You may debate whether the story about him is true or not. This does not interest me very much. We will always have a limited perspective of history and it will be harder and harder to discern facts from falsities the further back in time that we go. 

The important thing is that the story about Jesus is psychologically and metaphysically true. Psychologically because it tells us something about what the life of a fully functional person looks like. And metaphysically because it shows the perfect way of relating to the hidden laws that govern our being in the world. 

The way Jesus is portrayed, he lived with total love, kindness and compassion towards other people. And he lived in total obedience to God’s will. He accepted life fully, even up to the point of his painful execution. 

I don’t think that most people appreciate how radical Jesus’ message was. He was born into a culture of “might is right”. And if we look to the animal kingdom, this seems to be our natural state. This was the prevalent philosophy in the Western world. 

There have been other teachers outside of the West, such as the Buddha and Lao Tzu, that have proclaimed similar teachings. And I do believe that we have important things to learn from them as well. But I would argue that none of them embodied the perfect life. Only Jesus did. 

Some people have a problem with the idea of obeying God’s will. But what I’ve come to realize, is that we are so governed by forces that we don’t understand, that if we don’t freely choose God’s will, we give our will away to the world. This is what I will talk about in the next post that I will save for next weekend.