So you want to be like Jesus?
There are two aspects of this, His life style and His character.
We can study His lifestyle through the New Testament record and teachings also.
While we can seek to emulate Him by obeying His teachings, the development of His character through His sufferings can only be achieved by allowing Him to work in our hearts and minds through the circumstances, which we often call tribulations, that come against us.
Here is a glimpse of what He suffered even before He suffered on the cross.
Isaiah Chapter 53
No natural beauty
Jesus was despised and rejected and forsaken by men
A man of sorrows and pains
Acquainted with grief and sickness
Despised
Like those
Who people hide their faces from
His worth was not appreciated
People had no respect for Him
His death was cruel and torturous
He BECAME sin and cursed and an actual cursed one
He carried the pain and burden of all sin ever committed and all that would be committed before and after his death
And yet He NEVER COMPLAINED.
HE WAS BURIED WITH THE WICKED, as a mortal man
And much more until He was reunited with His father from whom he had been separated and rose from the dead!!
I am honoured to be treated like HIM
We are sometimes persecuted, the word means to run after someone wishing to cause them harm by the way, and Jesus taught that we are blessed in His eyes when this happens because
all the prophets and patriarchs which have gone before us endured this also.
Matthew chapter five
If you desire to do what Jesus did, you must endure what He experienced on earth and do it with a heart that is grateful for the honour of being like Him.
By His grace we don’t have to die for our sins because Jesus died for them.
But we must die to our own natural desires as Paul said.
Not that you can’t have fun and pleasure, also the joy of the Holy Spirit, but when our wishes conflict with His, our choice to exchange our desires for His, as He prayed in the agony of Gesthemane, we choose His will.
When our reputations are broken and smeared, we can look to Him for the strength to not open our mouths in self defence, but to ask Him to be our advocate.
To do fully what he did you must experience what God allows for
Carry in the spirit what you’re called to.
Release and you will rise to carry and release what you have overcome.