Category: Challenge to WWJD

In Part B, I outline three practical ways to surrender that run counterpoint to the three rational WWJD mistakes I wrote about previously. We can pray in surrender within the moment, or ahead of an upcoming situation, for God to work in at least three key ways.

(If you missed Part 1, please read that first:    A Challenge to “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do)? – PART 1 .   In that post, I revealed three problems with using a rational perspective to determine WWJD, and presented the solution of The Surrendered Moment).

Surrender Solution #1:  Give me your eyes to see what you are seeing.

This is a surrender to God of my own viewpoint, (which is myopic, tainted, and biased), and a plea for God Himself to give light to my eyes that I may have vision that transcends human perspective and perception. In asking this, I don’t expect God to give me perfect spiritual eyesight, but I do expect Him to give me corrective or enhanced sight so that I can experience the moment or the crisis with Him and rely on Him to show me what I need to know.

I must rely on the Spirit, 1 Corinthians 2:10-16 (NIV).

“The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for, Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.”

Seeing with spiritual eyesight is essential to walking by faith, as we must continually filter our human experience through a recognition of God as sovereign and through a reliance on Him to save us in every way and correct our vision.

John 5:19: “So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.” ESV. (Italics and boldface, mine).

Even Jesus, who has the “mind of Christ” in a way that no one else can, chooses to look to the Father in order to see what the Father is doing, and to do in the moment what He sees the Father doing. You and I can’t see perfectly what God is doing, nor do we have the mind of Christ in the same way that He has it, but we can look for God to inspire our vision and to reveal truth to us that we can’t find on our own.

When we pray for God’s perspective, we may not consciously recognize or understand anything different, but the most important aspect of this is that we have an eye that looks for God spiritually in the moment; an eye that honors God and acknowledges His presence, and that desires to see Him moving.

In the New Testament, we see that God, the Father, gives Jesus, the Son, special insight into a person’s past or private thinking so that He can directly address something very specific. The Spirit is able to cut through outward appearances to reveal truth directly and powerfully. When I’m asked for counsel, my best first response is to silently ask God to give me insight so that I may hear from Him and speak truth that is most needed. This prayer of surrender can be as simple as one heartfelt sentence or even an instantaneous acknowledgment that God is with me to help me help someone else. With a spiritual glance toward God in the room, or a nod in His direction, He catches my meaning and the setting of my heart on Him.

Sometimes I am surprised by the truth that comes out of my mouth in my response, because I am often convicted, instructed, and challenged by it, just as much as the person to whom I am speaking. The content sometimes is more than I could know or understand, and the manner of expression is far better than I could compose on the spot. I marvel when this happens, not at my own thoughts and words, but at God’s wisdom and power, and His expression of mercy and grace to me that He would use such a broken vessel in a redemptive way!

I’m not always cognizant of anything special in my surrendered responses, by the way, and sometimes I may go away thinking that God didn’t show up like what I had hoped, or it might seem that my answer was inadequate. When I catch myself thinking like this, I have to remember God will accomplish what He desires through such moments, and that God’s timing and His ways are better than my own. God can provide another opportunity for that person to hear truth clarified, and it doesn’t have to be through me. It’s actually a relief that the results are up to Him.

How can the LORD help us see more clearly in these situations, to know how to think, or speak, or act? Ask Him, yourself!

Surrender Solution #2:  Teach me your ways.  Psalm 25:4-5: “Show me your ways, O Lord, guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.” NIV.

God’s ways are not our ways, but He wants to show us His ways, and we can know more and more of His ways if we are looking for Him. Jeremiah 33:3: “Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.”

Sometimes, in my desperation to see God move, I become aware that I have left God behind, and that I have forged ahead to obtain results that I can see immediately. Coasting on my own gifts and talents, I can become too attached to a particular mode of ministry, too presumptuous as to what needs to happen, or too focused on meeting particular goals. Success in ministry can become its own end, and the craving for continued or increased impact can draw us to rely on those methods or gifts that brought results before. It’s a blessing to come to the realization that we have been trusting the trappings of ministry more than we have been trusting God Himself, so that we can make a change in course.

The line is a fine one, and easily danced across and moved around, where we leave off relying on the Spirit to move us and correct us, and instead pick up the work to establish our own heritage within a certain sphere of influence or mode of working. The larger the ministry, the more difficult it is to stay responsive to the Spirit. Each person should look to God to follow Him, and collectively the Church needs to be responsive at a grass roots (down to the individual!) level to the move of the Spirit.

When I look at the movements of Jesus with eyes of flesh, I scratch my head and think that He was often very impulsive, or even wishy-washy. At the wedding of Cana in John 2, His first reaction to His mother’s insistence that He do something about the wine that had run out was to indicate that it was not the right time to reveal Himself by doing miracles publicly. A few moments later, He seems to contradict Himself, and turns the water into wine.

In Mark 7, Jesus at first resists the request of the Syrophoenician woman to heal her daughter of demon possession, and then reversed Himself and healed the daughter after a single repartee from the mother.

I don’t point out these instances to suggest that following God must look impulsive, but we should all recognize that God’s ways are not our ways, and also that God is not limited to acting through prescribed methods nor traditional channels nor historical precedence. We must set our ways aside and make straight paths for the Lord to move when and how He will, and we should seek to be open to God’s leading, even if it looks like we are being detoured from a more well-planned, excellent, or expedient way.

Oftentimes, the Spirit calls us from the path of comfort into unfamiliar, uncharted, (and unplanned) routes and territories. Here, outside of our careful plans, we realize that we can’t control anything, and are wholly dependent on Him. God is not against planning, but if we plan to do anything, let us first plan to follow Him wherever He leads, and over all other plans, remain responsive to His call and command.

Surrender Solution #3:  Instruct me what to say and do, and give me your strength to accomplish your will.”

Jesus says in John 12:49-50: “For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it. I know that His command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say.” NIV 1984, (Boldface and italics, mine).

Jesus obeys the Father in WHAT to say and HOW to speak!

There are whole aspects of Jesus’s communication that we are not privy to… His tone of voice, His gestures and body language, His eye contact. Everything He said was commanded by the Father, and every aspect of His delivery was ordered by the Father.

Other translations express these verses more like what is in the ESV: “For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has told me.” Jesus seems to be redundant in this version, saying that the Father gives Him the specific words to “say” and to “speak.”

Speaking goes beyond mere content, however, and indeed we understand that we can speak the exact same sentence and change its meaning by emphasizing certain words. If I were to say, “Please give that to me,” my meaning can change based upon my inflection and body language.

If I say, “PLEASE give that to me?” then I’m politely asking you to give that to me. If I say, like my children do sometimes, “PLEEEEEEEEEASE give that to me?”, then I’m begging you to give that to me. If I say, “Please GIVE that to me?” then I’m asking that you would make it a gift with no strings attached, or otherwise differentiating the mode of delivery from another mode (like loaning). If I say, “Please give THAT to me?” then I’m emphasizing that you give me that thing instead of the other things. If I say, “Please give that TO ME,” then I’m emphasizing that you give the thing to me instead of to the other people. The content of what we say is modulated by our manner of speaking and the context of the situation.

Jesus didn’t speak like a robot, but instead, with emotion and body language and inflection, He communicated not only the content that the Father gave Him, (the specific words in order), but He also expressed that content as the Father directed, within the specific context, and to certain people.

Paul describes how we can do this same thing, in Ephesians 6:19-20. He asked for the Ephesians to pray “that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. ESV.

Paul asks that God will give Him the specific words when he opens his mouth, and for a manner of delivery that is bold, so that He can speak without fear of saying the wrong thing or being afraid of what the hearers may think. Surprisingly, Paul admits that fear is often with him when he speaks. In 1 Corinthians 2:3-5, Paul emphasizes the mode of expression in which he spoke to the Corinthians in person:

And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” ESV.

He mentions here that his message is not of rational human wisdom, and God speaks through Him in the power of the Spirit even though he himself is weak and trembling with fear.

This is what is available to us no matter our personal limitations—any time! God can communicate His Truth through the power and expression of the Spirit! In fact, Jesus calls the Holy Spirit the “Spirit of truth,” in John 14:16-17: “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.” ESV.

Jesus said, in Luke 12:11-12: “When you are brought before synagogues, rulers and authorities, do not worry about how you will defend yourselves or what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what you should say.” NIV. This kind of promise is scary, because God tells of a deliverance that happens “at that time.” We are not to expect in these situations that God is going to give us a speech ahead of time to practice, and to perfect the delivery. In an interview or cross-examination, anything prepared could be derailed or redirected, and if our confidence rests on a specific sequence of thought and phrase, we may take our eyes off of the Lord in worry over the performance.

The LORD told Moses in Exodus 4:12, “Now then go, and I, even I, will be with your mouth, and teach you what you are to say.” Nevertheless, Moses had no confidence that he would be able to say the right thing when the time came, even with the promise from God, and so he asked for God to send someone else. This fear of faltering in speech at an important moment—I know it well, myself. One of my biggest fears in college was the fear of public speaking. God has given me numerous opportunities to trust Him, standing before a crowd to speak, and, though I see that He has come through, time and again, this fear threatens me at every occasion. As I get older, I notice that I’m not as sharp or quick in memory as I was even last year, and I have fear that, if I am put in the spotlight, and many eyes are on me, I will not be strong or persuasive in speech. I may falter, and may not be able to pull up the words that would show themselves as true and bring honor to the LORD. However, GOD Himself is with me. I must rest in HIM. Jesus rested in the Father, Himself, and gave His own mouth to the Father:

John 14:10-11. NIV. “Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.”

Jesus Himself did not take credit for His words and His actions, but testified that it is God the Father living in Him!

As we surrender our eyes to see what He is seeing, as we submit ourselves to be taught His ways, and as we yield our bodies to speak His words and do His works, we will experience the truly abundant life, and the world will get to see that God the Father is still at work.

In the 1990’s, bracelets started appearing on teenage wrists with an acronym, “WWJD?” (“What Would Jesus Do?”). Have you ever tried to answer this question on the way to deciding something? If so, you understand the idea behind the question is to consider how Jesus would think, speak, or act in your situation, and then do likewise. The question is very useful on one hand, as a reminder that God’s perspective should be sought in any and every situation and considered above our own. Doubtless, many people in response to “WWJD?” have been driven to the Bible to study Jesus, which is a good thing! After all, you can’t know what Jesus would do in your situation if you aren’t familiar with what He did. God has blessed the question and the questioners down through the years as they have made choices to follow Jesus.

On the other hand, I often have—and I suspect we all have, at times—a tragic temptation to rationalize what Jesus would do through indirect study without consulting Him directly.

This tendency to work things through in our minds rationally, and leave God out of it, relationally, is a pattern that goes all the way back to the fall in Eden. Beguiled by Satan, Adam and Eve believed the serpent’s assertion that they could be like God, and, instead of engaging God Himself to subdue their illicit desires for knowledge and authority, they turned away from the Living God to obey the snake and taste the forbidden fruit. They weighed the whispered words of the Slitherer, dripping with half-truth, against the word of the Lord, and decided to risk everything for the chance to be God. In aspiring to rise to equality with God, Adam and Eve actually debased themselves and brought the sentence of death to all living things. It was the most precipitous reversal of fortune ever experienced by mankind, initiating a moral free fall that claims all, and, (if we continue our descent apart from Christ, denying the parachute He packed, and ignoring the rip cord), our bodies will slam the ground, pounding on the gates of Hell with the gravitational force of sin, releasing our souls into unending terror—a solitary eternity without God.

Denying the Living God and turning to pure human reasoning was disastrous then—now, it is second nature. Even after we see the light, pull the rip cord, and receive Jesus as our Savior, our fallen thinking strives for answers and achievement through personal research and experience. “Self-help” is an apt moniker for our best efforts, and “autopilot” an excuse for less than best—just doing what feels natural and good.

King Solomon WARNED, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” Proverbs 3:5. Such a simple directive, but it is hard to maintain, as Solomon knows.

By asking “WWJD?,” and even through searching the scriptures diligently, we can deceive ourselves into thinking that we are engaging God because we are studying the way Jesus would handle such a situation. Taking no notice of God Himself in the room, we study and talk to ourselves, dressing rationalization in the spiritual wrapper of biblical study! We’re certainly better off searching the scriptures than not, but how we search makes all the difference. If we merely try to understand the truth we’re reading through our fallen eyes of flesh and then take action through our own strength to accomplish our own goals, then we are leaning on our own understanding. When we don’t talk to or listen to God in our moments, nor trust in His deliverance, we make several mistakes through rational human thinking. I’ll introduce three of the mistakes in rational thinking, and then follow up with three spiritual solutions.

Rational Mistake #1: Employing Human Vision

From the outset, we all suffer from a serious and constant nearsightedness—we rely only on what can be seen or perceived within our own range of vision—under the delusion that we are seeing everything that comes to bear on a problem or situation very clearly.

This is a huge mistake. We are NEVER seeing the whole picture. Walking by sight, we fail to see the trip wires and traps, the cloaks disguising darkness that fool the eye and seduce the soul. We are often unwilling to bend our personal biases, or let go of our fears, to take certain factors into account, and so skew the truth. Consequently, we often misjudge the motives, subtleties, and alternatives in our situations, and, in turn, we misrepresent ourselves to others.

Often, we think we have a problem with “x,” when instead, there’s something deeper going on with “y.” We might look up all the verses in the Bible that have to do with “x,” (which is not a bad thing), but as long as we believe we can fix the problem by figuring out what Jesus would do with “x,” then we are completely blind to the “y.”

Leaning on our own understanding, walking by sight, we will consistently miss the opportunity to rely on God in our spiritual blindness, and we will judge all things through a heuristic of self-preservation and salvation, or even pseudo-spirituality, rather than through faith—by engaging God Himself—and depending on Him for insight, divine guidance, power through the Holy Spirit, and deliverance.

Let’s pretend for the moment that we can see our problems perfectly and know the layers of the onion that make up the stink in the present pickle. Even so, do we have enough knowledge of Jesus to be able to choose to act or respond as Jesus would in every situation? This brings me to another key mistake that we make in rationalizing to solve our dilemmas.

Rational Mistake #2: Employing deficient minds with limited understanding of Jesus Christ.

Do the accounts of Jesus ever surprise you? Jesus continually surprises me in scripture.

If I were reading through the gospels for the first time, I couldn’t tell you how Jesus would react in the next chapter to a given situation based on His reactions in an earlier chapter, and there isn’t a way to reduce His specific actions and reactions into a systematic matrix of behavior to refer to whenever I have a situation, no matter how many times I read the gospels. Sometimes He heals people and admonishes them to keep quiet about it, and other times He tells them to present themselves to the priests or to go and tell others what God has done for them. Sometimes He wants to be incognito, and other times He allows a reception of great fanfare. Sometimes He is quiet as a lamb before the shearers when confronted by his enemies, or gentle, even tender, and other times He speaks forcefully, even scornfully, or turns tables over in righteous indignation. Sometimes He heals with just a word or a thought, and sometimes He uses mud and spit. Sometimes He walks on water, but most often He rode in a boat.

While we may have good reason to think we understand why Jesus did what He did at certain times, there is an uncertainty when reading that defies complete understanding. There is no “Jesus Code” that we can decipher and then employ in a systematic fashion, (much as we may desire one), to make it easy to know what to do in any situation. GOD says it is impossible to pin Him down with our minds of flesh:

Isaiah 55:8,9. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.ESV.

No one has complete and perfect knowledge of scripture and the nuances of Jesus’ actions and words in a given situation and with a specific person. Since I’m not the Son of God, the idea that I can come up with the divine response in my present dilemma using only my reason and my knowledge of Jesus in scripture is presumptuous, at best. When Adam bit the forbidden fruit, he thought his eyes would be opened so that he could see clearly and judge rightly, like God, but instead he closed his eyes to God and began to see evil as a valid and attractive option. When we hide our eyes, our ears, and our hearts from God Himself in trying to figure out how to do the right thing, we take pride in our own understanding and believe that we can think and act like Jesus. To the degree that we believe this, we buy into a self-determinism and a false ownership of our results, which is a third fatal flaw.

Rational Mistake #3: Self-Determinism…Assuming the Results are Up to Us.

Oftentimes we feel like we’ve got to “crack the code” in order to get the results that we’re after: the solution to the problem, the cessation of negative consequences, getting that raise or new job, winning the respect and love we deserve. And so we try this and we try that, we kiss up, cajole and manipulate, we dramatize and threaten, we bait and bribe, we advertise our strengths, show off, blame-shift, and downplay our shortcomings.

In a broken world, seemingly driven by cause and effect, we adopt a self-salvation modus operandi summed up in the adage, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” The spiritualized version, though still unscriptural, is: “God helps those who help themselves,” or even, “Pray as though everything depended on God and act as if everything depended on you.” — St. Augustine.

Through common experience, we learn a a reliance on self to “make things happen” to ensure good results. We assume that we’ve got to pick the right principle to emphasize or prioritize if we’re to please God. I’ve got to believe and not doubt in just the right way, or obey as close to perfectly as I can… otherwise, God will not be pleased and He will not want to bless me with the successful result that I am looking for. Perhaps more often, we just act the way we want to, and ask God to bless us or save us afterward.

These three pragmatic approaches are very human, but spiritually misleading. Rationalizing “What Would Jesus Do?” puts us in the place of God, judging Jesus Himself in our own eyes and subjecting recorded scripture to our analysis of cause and effect. If we merely try to imitate what we think Jesus did in order to obtain similar results, then we reduce the power of God down to humanly achievable action and reaction, or, just as bad, we try to manipulate God into doing what we want by using the right words or behaviors, (which is akin to witchcraft). These errors of perception, understanding, and performance are serious impediments to the abundant life to which Jesus calls us. Thankfully, God offers the solution to all three aspects of leaning on our own understanding and walking by sight.

Do What Jesus Did… SURRENDER the Moment

Proverbs 3:5-6. “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”

If we really desire to do what Jesus would do, we first need to step back from analyzing individual cases and actions, and look at the big picture. Sometimes we can get lost in the details and lose something very important, and I’m suggesting here that we often do this when we pick apart the scriptures. We must ask God for inspiration in our studies, or we’ll become fixated on some minor aspects of behavior management so that the whole of our sanctification begins to be summed up as “try harder” or “do more.”

Let me give a metaphor as an example of myopic scholarship with an instance from the study of art. If you examine a small 2 inch square sample of the pointillist painting by Georges Seurat, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” you will find a collection of multiple colored dots of paint that don’t appear to have any relationship to each other that suggests any larger form. Pointillism is an impressionist style of painting that presents form and light through the juxtaposition of colored dots. We might admire the intensity and hue of the colored dots in the small sample, and even the spacing and size differences of the dots themselves, but we would be hard pressed to discern any recognizable form.

However, when we step back from the painting to take in the whole artwork, we can still see that small collection of dots that we were examining, but now we see that those dots were describing the profile of a woman who is standing on the shore with her beau or husband, enjoying a beautiful sunny day from the cool of the shade by the lake. We may begin to understand more of the painter’s intention and the meaning of the organized dots as we examine the relationship of the figures to each other, the formality of the fashion, the dogs at the figures’ feet, the presence of others at leisure, and so on. The painting expresses a captured moment in the lives of a certain class of people on a Sunday afternoon, from the perspective and intention of a talented artist.

When we examine the Bible, we can’t see the whole picture that the words describe, which is as infinite as eternity, but we can understand more and more as we examine the details in each verse within the context of the whole.

I want to expose something here which is evident in every dot of colored paint in the portrait of Jesus and holds up as one of the main truths of the big picture, and which has the potential to increase the brilliance and impact of the hues in our own self-portraits:

Jesus Christ lives an entire eternity of surrendered moments to the Father.

While He was here in the flesh, He surrendered to the Father in every moment, a feat never to be duplicated by any man. I will delve into the depths of His surrender in subsequent posts, but I would like to point out now that we have the same opportunity as Jesus did on earth, to surrender ourselves in our moments to God.

While we’re not able to live a lifetime completely made up of surrendered moments, we can surrender a moment… and another one… and another one. As we do, as we look for God to teach us what we need to know, give us thoughts that are higher than our own, words that are better than we can dream up, and actions that are inspired, we will be doing what Paul is talking about when he says, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Philippians 1:21. ESV.

When we ask God to do through us what we cannot do on our own, we do the opposite of leaning on our own understanding: we fall upon the Savior Himself so that Christ stands up in us through the power of the Holy Spirit and accomplishes what He desires.

You may wonder, “how can I surrender?”

Engage God Himself and invite Him to use you as He will. This in itself is the highest form of worship, when you count God as supreme and sovereign over this moment, and yield yourself within it to His desires. I may not ever (in this body of flesh) be able to yield every fiber of my being completely to God as Jesus did—there is some resistance to God inherent in the fallen flesh itself—but God is glorified in the essential submission of my will, imperfect as it is.

In Part B, I will outline three practical ways to surrender that are counterpoint to the three rational WWJD mistakes previously outlined.  Jump to:  A Challenge to “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do)? – PART B