Walking Closely and Pleasing Him

July 20, 2011 [Wednesday],

Dear Fellow Travelers,

       In response to one of my recent posts, I received the following email from one of the members of The Believers’ Club: “IF a person says to you, 'I just want to walk closely with the Lord and live a life pleasing to Him' do you tell that person he/she cannot??????????"  WHAT do you actually SAY to a person who says to you, ‘I want to be like Jesus?’" [I assume he added the question marks to emphasis his belief that I must be crazy, even for implying such a thing]

            Both questions are reasonable and deserve accurate answers. In response to the latter question, I would advise the person to carefully consider his wanting to be like Jesus, as doing so requires much more than we can give. I know it sounds like a noble goal, and I know it makes good “altar call” fodder, but the truth is none of us really want to be like Jesus. Oh, we probably want to have some of His attributes—kindness, gentleness, peacefulness—but I seriously doubt any of us really want to be like Him. If per chance you do, I would merely suggest that you carefully consider all that will be involved before you make the commitment. I might add that one Jesus is all we need. Surely, He doesn’t need any clones.

            I wonder if we will ever realize that Jesus did not come to make us like Him, but to rescue us from the pit of sin and hell and give us the gift of life—His life. The truth is He didn’t come to model the Christian life for us; instead, He came because He knew that our best efforts at living the Christian life would be as “filthy rags” before God. He came to do for us what we could never do for ourselves—redeem us and set us free.

            As to the former question—IF a person says to you, "I just want to walk closely with the Lord and live a life pleasing to Him" do you tell that person he/she cannot?—my answer is “Yes, that is precisely what I would tell the person.” Now, please do not jump to conclusions, as I do realize that the person who might make this statement is probably very sincere, but I also know that sometimes we are sincerely misguided.

            There are two very distinct issues in this statement: (1) I want to walk closely with the Lord and (2) I want to live a life pleasing to Him. Allow me to shed some light on the first by suggesting that the more appropriate question would be something like this: Lord, I want you to walk closely with me. Then, to refine the request even more, it would read: Lord, thank you for walking so closely with me! You see, we have the very strong tendency of giving ourselves far more credit than we deserve. “I am walking closely with the Lord,” sounds so much better to our proud and arrogant hearts than “the Lord is walking closely with me” would ever sound.

            As to the second issue, I would merely say this: try as we might, we simply cannot live lives pleasing to Him, which is why we need the Savior—desperately need the Savior. Again, saying that I am living a life that is pleasing to Him sounds so good to our proud and arrogant hearts, but the fact is, it is Jesus, not us, who pleases the Father. I wonder if we will ever get over ourselves and realize that the Christian life is about Him and NOT about us. This really is the secret, “Christ in us, our hope of glory.”

            I hope you will give this some serious thought—

This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent" (John 6:29 NASB).