Practice
/As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. -John 17:18
There is a large section of the gospel of John called the “farewell discourse,” in which Jesus says goodbye to his disciples. He also prays for them. He prays to God: Be with them. Love them. Guide them. Guard them. I love how not only do we pray to God, God also prays for us.
Jesus had spent a while with his disciples, teaching them about faith, demonstrating the way to act, showing them what love really looks like. And he called them to love one another as he loved them. To serve others. To welcome strangers. To give away their possessions and follow. To let nothing come before their love of God. These are tall orders. As disciples, we’ll always fall short of Jesus’ divine example, but that didn’t keep Jesus from sending us out into the world in the same way God sent him.
A few years back it was popular to wear rubber wrist bands that said “WWJD.” It stood for “What would Jesus do?” I used to kind of roll my eyes at those. I mean, how do you claim to know, exactly, what Jesus would do? And even if you could know, how would you ever assume you would be equipped to do the same?
I guess that’s the challenge of discipleship in a nutshell. We’re called to be Jesus’ hands and feet and heart and voice in this world, even though we’re only human. We’re called to something bigger than we are or could ever hope to be. We’ve got the Holy Spirit to guide us, the Word of God to inform us and the Creator God to protect us and, well, off we go. We are sent into the world to practice forming our lives to be a little more like him as a practice every day and therefore bring God’s reconciliation and love into the world through that practice.
In what small way could you practice being more loving today? How could you find a small new way to serve? To welcome others more genuinely? To let go of something? To put God first before other things? The WWJD bracelets are no more than bumper sticker wisdom It’s the day to day practice of sticking close to Jesus and doing whatever we can to ‘put on Christ’ that brings us ever closer to the Kingdom of God.
