Jesus is the Answer to the Question – Is There One Best Way to Live?
A Question – Is There One Best Way to Live?
“I came to give life in abundance to my sheep, a flourishing life, a rich and satisfying life! My purpose is to give them a life lived to the fullest, a real and eternal life which is a better life than they could ever dream of!” (John 10:10).
How should we live? Is there one best way? Everyone desires to live ‘the good life,’ but what if good isn’t good enough? What if we want the best that life has to offer, leading us not merely to the good life but the best life? Jesus is the answer to this question, and we can answer this question in the light of Christ in many different ways.
CityAlight – Yet Not I But Through Christ In Me (Live)
The Best Life Walks in Wisdom. “The ways of wisdom are sweet and pleasant, always drawing you into the place of wholeness and peace. Seeking wisdom brings the discovery of untold blessings, for she is a tree of life to those who grasp her. Whoever holds fast to wisdom will be made happy.” (Proverbs 3:18). We get the best life has to offer when we learn to live wisely, as our Creator intended… Using sensible judgment; demonstrating moral discernment; practicing the truth with deep understanding; making prudent decision; growing in spiritual intelligence and shrewd insight; living skillfully with clever street smarts; living into a relationship with Wisdom itself, the Person of Jesus Christ. “Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:24). Jesus demonstrated all these attributes of wisdom, because He Himself is all these attributes in the flesh. Christ is embodied wisdom. Christ is wisdom incarnate. Christ isn’t merely full of wisdom… “Jesus, in Whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” (Col 2:3). He is not merely a source of wisdom for us. He literally is Wisdom personified in real, concrete life. Christ is the Wisdom of God. He is God’s Wisdom made manifest. He makes God’s wisdom clearly seen, visible, experiential, obvious to the senses. God wanted everyone to see what His wisdom looked like, so He sent us His Son Jesus. Christian wisdom is not acquired through human effort, but through uniting ourselves with Wisdom, Jesus Christ; through acquiring the very mind of Christ; through union with Christ, the Wisdom of God. “It is by Him that you exist in Christ Jesus, who for us was made wisdom from God.” (1 Cor. 1:30). By gaining the mind of Christ, we are also acquiring the very mind of the Almighty God.
The Best Life is a Blessed Life. As Jesus taught in His Beatitudes in Matthew 5, to be ‘blessed’ is to enjoy God’s favor; to experience delight in God’s blessing; to be fully satisfied and content in the Lord; to know with confidence that God is active in your life. Those who are blessed are most fortunate, to be envied. When one is blessed, it is time to celebrate one’s lot in life, time to humbly receive a hearty congratulations because of the blessings received from the hand of God. You are blessed when you put yourself in the position to be transformed by God. You are blessed, you are most fortunate, you are to be envied, because you now have the unearned privilege of participating in the Kingdom of God. When you are blessed, you are aware that your blessedness does not depend on your outer circumstances. You are thus filled with hopeful joy. So when Jesus says that you are blessed, it is time to celebrate, for He is looking upon you with favor:
(5:3) “You will shout for joy when you are spiritually helpless, like a bankrupt beggar knocking at the gate of the King, hat in hand. Congratulations! When your spirit is poverty-stricken and you have no option but to place yourself at the mercy of God, He will open the gates to His Kingdom and welcome you in!”
(5:4) “You will sigh with satisfying relief when your heart is broken by the profound pain of loss, shame, or sin. You are fortunate! You are not alone! For the deeper your sorrow, the more room there is for God’s healing presence and comforting grace.”
(5:5) “You will be joyfully fulfilled when you submit to God’s authority, like a wild bronco bridled by a master horseman. Congratulations! Since your strength and giftedness is guided by God, you will soon explore the Family property, the new earth, when it appears.”
(5:6) “You will enjoy full satisfaction when you starve for a more righteous character like a desert pilgrim in a desperate search for food and water. Congratulations! When you have an appetite for righteousness, God won’t let you go hungry for long, and you will then be ready for a delicious meal of holiness!”
(5:7) “Congratulations! You are one of God’s favorites when you compassionately share someone’s misery and relieve their difficulty. You are to be envied! For putting God’s love into action towards others puts His love into action for you!”
(5:8) “You will cheer with delight when your innermost being is cleaned of mixed motives and impure thoughts. Congratulations! Your clean inner reservoir of instincts will now more clearly reflect a pure image of God, and your eyes will open to see more and more of Him.”
(5:9) “You will grin from ear to ear when you are able to harmonize people and help those in discord to sing the same sweet tune! Congratulations! God is drawing up the adoption papers for those who work hand-in-hand with the Prince of Peace! And the Father is asking you to join the Family choir!”
(5:10) “Congratulations! Be glad! You are in good company when you are treated badly for doing good. You are in a select group when you are mistreated for doing what is right. Rejoice, because the first club meeting of the Fellowship of Suffering will be around the throne in the Kingdom of Heaven! Celebrate! You are to be envied for your good fortune!”
The Best Life Follows the Greatest Commandment. Jesus offers Scripture’s greatest commandment in Matthew 22:36-40, Mark 12:29, and Luke 10:27, and this is the North Star of the best life. Jesus gave the best biblical answer possible to a lawyer inquiring about how to receive eternal life, the shema, found in Deuteronomy 6:5. The shema is the 1st prayer taught to children in a Jewish household, and it is prayed twice daily by every believing Jew, every sunrise and every sunset. Love your God, with everything you got, heart, soul, strength, mind, everything. The lawyer then adds Leviticus 19:18 to the shema, something that Jesus Himself said many times. Love your neighbor as yourself. Obeying Christ’s words here will unlock the best that this life can offer us: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”
The Best Life Weaves Together Truth, Goodness and Beauty. “We have the mind of the Messiah!” (1 Corinthians 2:16). When St. Paul exclaimed to the Corinthians that believers have the “mind of Christ,” He was speaking into a mystery. Jesus, fully God, fully man, had a human brain like the rest of us. But His mind was somehow full of God’s presence as well, shaped and inspired by His Spirit. What does a heavenly brain look like? We have a sense of what makes up the mind of God when we consider the divine qualities of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. These three primary qualities of the nature of God have been called “the Big Three, the “deepest realities,” the attributes of being,” and if we want to get fancy here, the “Three Transcendentals,” which simply means “that which exceeds.” I love the version of one old Bible translation of this verse, where the “mind of Christ” was translated as “the wit of Christ.” In other words, if we need to live with the mind of Christ, we must keep our wits about us. Because God so lovingly made us in His image, we humans have the capacity to live into those same three elements of deep Reality. We are miraculously capable of participating in what really matters in life. We can grow in developing an identity that reflects our true, good and beautiful God. Creator Lord is the origin and source of the Big Three in our lives, and we can only acquire and grow into them through an intentional relationship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. As has often been observed… All truth is God’s truth; all goodness is God’s goodness; all beauty is God’s beauty. Historian Joseph Pearce put it this way in a recent essay… “Love is the path to goodness; reason is the path to truth; creativity is the path to beauty. Love, reason and creativity find their unifying principle in the Person of Christ; Who is not only the end to which we strive but the very means by Whom the end is achieved. He is the Way, the path of love, reason and creativity which leads to Truth, Goodness and Beauty. The way of love leads to the Good of God, reason leads us to God’s Truth, and creativity leads us to the presence of God’s Beauty. The beautiful always leads us back to love and reason.”
The Best Life Embraces our One Central Identity. “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness… So God made man; in the image of God He made him; male and female He made them.” (Gen. 1:26-27). We are in the 21st century, and Americans are having a serious identity crisis. We seem to be on a mad race to discover who we are. And once we have latched onto an identity, it becomes the centerpiece of our lives. We orient our lives around this identity. We consider our identity sacred, infallible, the essence of who we are. Our identity becomes our idol. There are many, too many, identities from which to choose. Let’s see… which identity do we worship? Racial identity? Gender identity? Political identity? Religious identity? Sexual identity? Social Class? Appearance? Ability? Whichever identity we choose, we tend to place it front and center, and we view ourselves and everyone else through that lens. The motive for choosing our identities appears to be earnest and sincere and well-meaning: We want to identify ourselves, we want to have a personal brand. We want to have a world view through which we can look at everyone else. So most of us have embraced one identity among the options as if our lives depended on it. “Identity is found when we place ourselves into God’s story of what He is doing in the world, and what His plan is, not where we make ourselves the center of the story and either push God out or squeeze Him in.’ (Dustin Crowe). Out of all the options, the one identity worthy of being the centerpiece is that of being an image-bearer. This is the only foundational identity that goes deeper than anything else into who we are, that truly defines us at the most basic level. Each of us as fellow human beings is sacred, because we are stamped by a holy God. Each of us has been imprinted with a likeness to our Creator God. Everyone has been handcrafted to reflect God’s character. Each of us has been created to represent God in this world. And that is not only our main identity but our life mission as well. Image-bearing is a unifying factor among all human beings, it’s the one identity that we all share. The others mentioned above are secondary and incomplete. If we put one of the spokes of the wheel into the hub, the wheel won’t run properly, we have lost our purpose in life, our true self. All these other identities are not meant to be primary, whether racial, gender, political or sexual. They are not up to the task of central identity. Secondary identities are intended to be inspired by that one most primary identity. The spokes in the wheel are meant to be directed by the hub. The central identity of God’s image is meant to morally and personally shape whatever identity that is being considered in one’s self-definition. Every identity that we claim for ourselves which is not a direct off-shot of our image-bearing identity will be sadly lacking in depth or meaning.
The Best Life Follows the Direction Given in Micah 6:8. “You have already been told what is right, and what Yahweh expects of you. Only this, to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” This is the guiding light of a Christian believer’s lifestyle, the golden nugget in the Hebrew Bible of what constitutes a godly life. To live a life of justice, to embrace the ethic of showing lovingkindness to others, and to follow God daily with obedience, humility and gratitude. This is the holy behavior demonstrated by Jesus and expected of us by our holy God. That is the life that reflects the character of the Lord. This will unlock for us the best life possible.
Yet Not I But Through Christ In Me – Mission House & Citizens, REVERE – (Official Live Video)