How to Live More Like Jesus

TRANSCRIPT

So my husband runs a, or he owns a solar installation company. So he puts solar onto people's roofs and he's great at what he does. If you know, Sam, he's very personable, gets along great with people, explains things well, likes to help solar is very helpful to families and households. So it's just win win he's great at it.

He had a customer last year who was a, um. Single mum. She had two very young children. I think one was a toddler. One was a few months old and So he did the quote and you know, she runs her own business supporting her own little family there and so he did the job for her at a Discounted price because he really wanted to help her out and they put the solar on the house.

Everything was fine It was the middle of winter and when on the day of the installation he went in to just like show her how to use the app and stuff and And When he walked into the house, he said to me later, Oh, it's like walking into a wall of fire. It was so warm in her house. It was just, you know, that stifling kind of heat.

She was running multiple heaters throughout the house, all running at the same time. And he said, he remembers thinking, This must be costing a bomb. Thank goodness she's getting solar. Cause this is an expensive way to live running a lot of heaters. So the solar goes on, everything's great. A few weeks later, he gets an email from her, a very weirdly worded email, almost like this AI generated legal letter, almost explaining to him that she was extremely dissatisfied with her solar because she had just gotten her first bill since the solar went up and it was a big deal.

3, 000. She said that the reason was that the solar was not functioning correctly, and it was pulling power from her house. And that must be why the bill was so high. She said she had called Energex, and they confirmed that the problem was definitely the solar panels. And she said, therefore, we should pay what we had to pay for 3, 000, because it was 100 percent our fault.

And she said that if we did not pay, That she would make it her mission to go out and tell everyone to go on to social media to go into all of the community groups on Facebook full of tens of thousands of people and tell them that we were a scam company. We would rip you off and no one should ever use Sam's solar business.

That's a lot for to get in an email. So we obviously felt pretty kicked in the guts by this. That's a tough email to get. And if you're a small business owner, you know, That, well, for Sam, especially, 100 percent of his business comes from referrals and word of mouth. So when someone goes out and makes a conscious effort to tank your business online, it can be very effective.

We've probably all seen those posts on Facebook where someone says something and then a whole bunch of people just come on board. They love to have a, you know, jump on the bandwagon and say, that's disgusting. That's despicable behavior. Report them to the ACCC. Sue them. Like no one on social media ever says rationally.

Is there another side to that story that I should know about? They just take it at face value, that's it. You've been branded for life. So this was not a small thing for us to now have to try to figure out, and it did not feel good. But Sam was great, and he went and like, he called her on the phone, he tried to, you know, communicate with her about it.

He said, can you send me the bill so I can see what's going on? She didn't really want to, but then eventually she did. So the bill solved a lot of problems, okay? We could see a lot of things on this bill that cleared things up. So, uh, the first one was that we could see from the bill that, you know, you get your power bill every three months, 12 weeks.

We could see that the solar had only been running for about a week and a half of that 12 weeks. The rest of it was entirely her usage. We could also see from the graph that Energex helpfully gets you, uh, that it shows you every day what's, what your usage is, right? So days on the bottom, and then it's got like a little squiggly line that says what your usage is each day.

So hers is like maxing out at the top. The day the solar is activated, boom, it goes down to the bottom and usage goes down to almost nothing for that last week. So we could see nothing to do with the solar. She just used a lot of power. Sam called Energex and said, can you tell me why someone would have said this was a solar problem?

And the guy said, well, we log every call. No one's ever called about his residence. So we don't know who she called. Maybe she called her power provider, which is different. Maybe they were just trying to find a scapegoat. We have no idea where she was getting all this information from. So Sam goes back to her, calmly and kindly.

He's trying to explain it. She is stonewalling him. She is acerbic in her responses. She does not want to communicate. Just pay the bill. This is your fault. He says, I'll come round to your house. We'll sit down. We'll work it out. Not interested. She keeps cancelling on him. She is, this is the hill she's willing to die on.

Despite the avalanche of evidence, she is sticking to her guns. This is our fault. We need to pay it. So after months of this dragging on and hanging over our heads, we sat down and we said, okay, we're There is no easy answer to this. Like, she's not seeing what's really going on. What are we gonna do? So we talked through it, and there was only really one option that we knew that we would do.

And we felt complete and total peace as we talked through it. It just was so obvious to us. Because we knew that we didn't know her. We didn't know her situation. We didn't know who she was. We didn't know what she was going through. We didn't know if maybe she got that bill and she's a single mum running a business trying to help her family out.

Maybe that bill was the last straw. Maybe she was operating out of absolute desperation and just like, couldn't even handle it anymore. We don't know if maybe she'd been really hurt. If she was operating out of bitterness, anger, maybe we were just getting the overflow of other things going on in her life and she just didn't want to deal with that.

So we couldn't judge her and we couldn't blame her for the way that she was behaving because we don't know her. We don't even know what her intentions were behind it. And we knew that it wasn't about us being right. It was about doing what was right for her. Yeah. So we decided, and we knew, that the only thing that we could do was pay that bill for her.

And, just to do it in the way that was like, we're just going to come alongside you, let's clear this bill, from now on, every bill you get is going to be so much cheaper because of the solar, let's just clear it, and you just go, and you look after your family. Let's get you moving. That was our intention.

And that's what we felt good about. So we weren't worried about the money. Three grand. Okay, great. That's a lot of money, but we trust God with our money and with our business. Um, Jesus said, look at the birds. They're not out there storing up food. They trust that there's going to be provided provision every day.

So we trust God with that. And we know that the money will flow out and the money will flow back in. Jesus said, don't store up stuff here, keep an eye on eternity. So we were okay with that. The money would come back some other way. And we weren't worried in the end about what she would say, because we can't control what people say about us.

And if I look at it even logically, we could have paid that bill and she might still have gone out and told everyone, See, I knew they were wrong. They said they weren't wrong, but I got them in the end and I made them pay. And she could still go out and say terrible stuff about us. We can't control that, but we can trust God that he'll protect our business.

And we can put our faith into that. Jesus had so many people who said terrible things about him. He would literally perform a miracle and people would go, Well, you're a liar and a fake, like right there, you've just done it. And they would still say that he was a liar. And he said, you know, he said to his disciples, if people treat you like that, it's OK to just shake the dust off your feet and move on.

Just go on. You don't have to carry it with you. And when he was being crucified and people were torturing him, and he said, God, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. So we weren't worried about what she would say about us. And we weren't worried in the end about people. Being right. We weren't worried about justice being served and her understanding that we had done all the right things.

And she was being really difficult to deal with. It wasn't about that. Jesus said, when someone wants to sue you for your shirt, go and give them your coat. If they want to lock in a battle with you, you just turn around and give them all of the grace and the compassion. You want this here, take even more.

Let me show you what the love of Jesus looks like. So that's part of it. That's what we wanted to do for her. So I told this to Kalisha, a very shortened version of that. And I said, that is the biggest change I see in myself over the last 25 years is the perspective that I now have of people. the grace that I can now have for people because I understand that I cannot judge people.

I have to just love them the way Jesus did. And he has changed that in me. So a lot of us here would have very similar before and after stories. And I know you would be able to get up and tell a story about how you've changed and probably maybe even more. better stories than what I have. Um, the reason this stands out to me as a big juxtaposition in my life is because when, before I became a Christian, I was a bit of a snot.

I was not the best person. I was a late teenager type age person and the world revolved around me. I had anger issues. I blamed everyone. I was like, I think I just, I held everyone to this state of, I just needed them to be perfect and the same. And I could be whatever I wanted. I could have a bad day every day.

I could be upset. I could blame them. But they weren't allowed to have an emotion because that upset my life. So they all had to cater to me. I was the main character and they were just the NPCs, the non playing characters around me, that my life, you know, they revolved around me. So to then, two decades later, be able to be toe to toe with someone who's blackmailing us and still say, I want to help you, that is entirely the work of Jesus in my life.

Because that is not how I was in my human form prior to knowing Jesus, right? So, some of you are the same, some of you have been Christians for, oh, decades and decades and decades, and you're so wise, and then some of you are in the middle of your journey now, and some of you might be super brand new, you've only just discovered who Jesus is and what he did for you, and maybe it's only been a few months or a few years and it's all learning, learning, and some of you might not know anything about any of this and you're just here and it's the first couple of times, and you're, you know, Just listening and all of that is okay.

It's all just different dots on a timeline. We all just have a journey and it looks the way that it looks. Um, but I thought that we would have a look at what we've already been talking about this morning in a little more practical detail, because we already have heard. That becoming like Jesus, that transformation doesn't happen instantly.

And it doesn't happen because your head is full of theological knowledge. And it doesn't happen because you've got the Bible app on your phone. And every day you tick off the verse of the day. It requires a little bit more than that. So I wondered if we could have a look at becoming like Jesus from a bigger perspective.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Okay, great. Would you be able to pop the table up for me? So, there was a man named Paul who, um, lived a few decades after Jesus was on earth and then went back to heaven. So Paul, uh, he has an amazing before and after story, one of the best ones that you'll read about. And he went around and taught people about Jesus.

And because he traveled a lot, he also wrote a lot of letters back to different churches. And we get to read those letters today in the New Testament, which is the Jesus part of the Bible. So, he wrote to a church there in Ephesus. which is now part of Turkey and he spends an entire chapter talking about how we were before we met Jesus.

And he uses in what I'm about to read the term Gentiles, which means, um, people who don't know God. So just, uh, non believers is the word that they used back then.

All right. And he talks about, can you see this? Maybe you can see it with the camera. Oh, great. All right. So he talks about, he describes our life without God. looking a little bit like if we imagine that this is us, this is people, this is all of our stuff, there's a little bit of, you know, me, a little bit of selfishness, a bit of greed, maybe there's a bit of PTSD, there's a bit of trauma there, uh, you know, I'm a pretty impatient person, so just all the bits and pieces that make up who we are, right?

That's us there. Okay. So he talks about what we'd be like without God and he says, I won't read the whole thing to you, but what he basically says is that in this state our minds are really dark. and our hearts are hard. And he even likens us in this stage to children, so immature, like toddlers. And we're just being blown around and tossed around by whatever comes along, just every emotion, every whim, a reaction to every circumstance.

So he talks about us like that, like being toddlers in the way that we behave. And then he says in Ephesians 4, 17. So this is in his letter to the people of Ephesus. He says, so I tell you this and I insist on it in the Lord. And he's saying that because Jesus reiterated this multiple times. So he's saying, well, listen, really careful, carefully that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking.

So he's saying, you cannot stay like this. You can't stay immature in your emotions and you can't be someone who doesn't grow. And when he says futility of their thinking, he means people with no point or purpose or intention to what you're doing. You're just floating along, reacting to life. So he says you can't stay like that.

So when he's talking about people who don't know Jesus, when he's saying the gentiles, he's talking about that, but it's also entirely possible for us to know Jesus, know who He is, know that He died for us, understand that He died so that we could be reconciled with God, so that we could have eternity in heaven, that we can say yes to Jesus, I'm going to follow you, and have Jesus covering us and be under His protection and still look like this on the inside.

In fact, that's how it's going to look in the beginning. Because that's the justification done, but none of the transformation has happened yet. So whether you, maybe, I'm just saying you as, I'm not blaming anyone, but maybe you look like this because you don't know God. Maybe you look like this because you're new and maybe you look like this because for a while you've been disengaging.

Because I don't know anyone who said yes to Jesus and just had this absolute like gross trajectory of, man, within weeks I am just Jesus on earth again. Here I am. Come learn from me. For most people, and I say this, As someone who has been in the church for 25 years, most people's journey tends to look a bit more like grow, plateau, grow, plateau, maybe disengage a little bit, disconnect, plateau, grow, plateau, grow.

It comes and goes in seasons. So sometimes we can know Jesus and love Jesus and still on the inside. Not quite look like Jesus and not quite be acting the way that Jesus would want us to act And I know from my own experience and also from watching other people and journeying with other people That when we feel like this on the inside, it's a bit like being in a battle It's like being swept along, upstream, fighting a current.

And if you know what I mean, then you know what I mean. That feeling of being just in a fight all the time, against your own self, your own emotions, your circumstances. There's no freedom. There's no growth. There's no feeling of control or overcoming. You're just operating out of whatever is in front of you in the moment.

So this is more of like our natural pattern of human behavior that we fall into, right, where we operate out of anger and we might have a victim mentality and we're just like responding out of the way that we grew up and the way our parents showed us and things like that. And we only have to spend about five seconds reading social media comments to see unfiltered human behavior at work.

Total lack of grace and maturity and empathy that goes on there. But here's what Paul says. This is kind of a long one. This is what he says just a little bit after that last one about having, um, futile minds. He says that, however, and when he says that, he's talking about this way of being, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ.

These people had not met Jesus. They were learning about Jesus when you heard about Christ and were taught in him accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. Next one. You were taught with regard to your former way of life to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires. So just all the things in the world that pull us every which way, remember being infants or toddlers being blown around to be made new in the attitude of your minds.

To put on the new self created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness Paul is saying that because that's exactly what jesus taught and he reiterates it over and over and over to all these people in these Different letters. This is what is actually required of us. Once we say yes to jesus.

It does not get you salvation It is not part of the justification process, but it is part of our life of loving. Jesus is what he is saying So how do we do that? What does that look like? How do we become more like Jesus? Well, that is answered in John. I've got a lot of scriptures today. I'm backing up everything with some stuff from the scriptures.

All right. So a guy named John, Uh, who was one of Jesus disciples. Um, and he's actually one of Jesus inner circle disciples. So he wrote down a whole bunch of things that Jesus said. And the disciples were extremely confused at this point because he keeps talking about, um, you know, Oh, I'm going to be crucified.

I'm going to come back to life. They're going, we don't understand what you're talking about, Jesus. So he clarifies it by saying, Soon I'll be gone, but I'll still be with you. And they're like, thanks. That doesn't make any sense either. Thanks Jesus. Great. Um, so then he goes on and he says this. Yeah. He's like, just give me some trust here.

So he says, this is in John. Uh, 1426, he says, okay guys, so this is what's gonna happen. The advocate called the Holy Spirit, whom the father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you. And that's exactly what happened. So Jesus was crucified, he was resurrected.

He stayed on earth for about 40 days. Um, he stayed and taught the disciples and had his family and his friends. And then he said, now it's time for me to go. God is going to send the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is going to take my place here on Earth, and He's going to teach you now from the inside.

How to be like I have been here on earth. That is the mission of the Holy Spirit to bring to fruition everything that Jesus taught. Even now, 2, 000 odd years later. The mission is the fruition. Can we remember that? It's so great. What a great and catchy thing. All right, so how does that work? How do I, how am I changed by the Holy Spirit?

Do I just sit here and the Holy Spirit just tinkers away at my insides and it happens naturally? Is it like one of those, uh, remember those like muscle stimulators that like gave you abs while you were watching TV? No, unfortunately it requires more than that. So I, because I'm a practical person, have made you a list.

So here we go. Let's have a look at our list. Now these are not going to surprise a lot of you. In fact, you'll be yawning by the end of it. Let's have a look at our first one. Oh, look, the Holy Spirit can work through our relationships, our small groups, our mentorships, people speaking into your life. The Holy Spirit works through that to change you.

What's next? Ooh, quiet time, something that we don't often do in our current world, is sit quietly and allow the Holy Spirit to talk to us. Some of the best moments I've ever had have just been sitting quietly with the Holy Spirit. What do we have next? Well, prayer. Because when you love someone, you talk to them.

And when you talk to God, He answers. and he speaks to you and when you communicate and you open that communication pathway the Holy Spirit works to to give you the answers. Okay, what's next? Worship. So all throughout the different books and documents of the Bible it mentions that music is an enormous part of the heaven experience and it's the same on earth.

The Holy Spirit moves through music. The amount of times that I've been having a really rough time and a worship song has just turned my whole attitude around. That's the Holy Spirit. That's not great lyricists. That is the Holy Spirit. Uh, do we have one more? Oh yeah. Scripture and devotions. There's that d word again devotions because we have to go back to the source every time we have to read Who was Jesus?

What did he do? What did he say? How did he treat people and the Holy Spirit brings that to life in you as you read it? It's not just words. It is the Word of God Come to life through the Holy Spirit So when we do those things, we're giving the Holy Spirit so many, and that's not exhaustive, there's tons more things, but we're giving the Holy Spirit opportunity to change us.

If we don't do things like that, and we just keep on living our old life, we have decided not to allow the Holy Spirit to change us. You can still love Jesus, but it can still be a big old mess as well, right? Lots of stuff. I mean, that's exactly what we were talking about this morning. We've got to let things go.

That's how the Holy Spirit works in us. So when we start to look more like this, we respond differently to our circumstances. We see people differently. Our faith in God grows, our trust grows. We understand that we are now aligned with the overcomer of the world. That was something I realized this morning as we were singing, that not only does God Do we start to become more like Jesus?

But we are now under the protection of someone who overcame the world. He said, Jesus said, um, something about bad things will happen, but take heart in this world. We will have trouble. That's it. See, I'm so good in this world. We will have trouble, but take heart. He says, don't panic. I have overcome the world.

That's who we love and that's who we're becoming more like, the overcomer of the world. There's enormous just assurance in that. There's enormous strength in knowing that God has got your back. You are aligned with that. Okay. You've been rebuilt on solid ground. Okay, great. What you are is no longer a giant baby.

Let me see if this is, oh no! Being, oh this is not going well. It's not going to work now because I've moved it. Destroyed. It tells me it's not working. Let's just say that it's just moving around a lot. There we go. Um, being blown about by everything that's happening to you. I should have done a rehearsal.

I did not. But now you have this North Star. You have this standard. You have something that you are constantly growing towards being. When we made that decision to show that customer grace and pay for that bill for her, we felt nothing but absolute peace. We knew it was the right thing to do. And before I forget, I should say, we did not end up paying anything because we decided that.

And then she never contacted us again. I know that's slightly anticlimactic. It would have been great if we paid it. And she was like, I want to come to your church. And that would have been great. She must've got her next bill and realized that she had no grounds to ask us to pay for her bill. I don't know, but it doesn't even matter.

The point is that our intention had been, we were absolutely going to help her out. I just didn't want you to think that we had done something that we didn't end up doing. But the reason that we felt that incredible peace is because of something else that Jesus said. In John, straight after Jesus says the Holy Spirit is coming to teach you, he said, peace, peace, peace, peace.

I leave with you my peace. I give you, I'll read it to you. My peace. I give you, I don't give it to you as the world gives. It is not a piece that the world can understand. Don't let your hearts be troubled. Don't let them be afraid. He's saying, when you live like me, you'll have peace, which sounds crazy.

When you think about what living like Jesus requires because it requires humility. It requires compassion, it requires giving even when you don't have enough, it requires being gracious when someone is being unreasonable, it requires being calm when someone is being angry or blaming, it requires giving help that they don't deserve.

So some of these things are really, really hard from a human sense. Who loves being humbled? I know I love eating a great big slice of humble pie every Monday morning to really just set up my week. It's great. Who loves, um, being a peacemaker, even when you're, you know, the other person is completely wrong.

Who loves loving someone who is just the worst and nothing that you are doing is changing how awful they are being? Who can keep loving someone like that? Living that way is so counterculture. But what we get out of it is something even more counterculture because your life will still be a mess. There will still be stuff going on, but you'll have mess with incredible peace and bad things will happen because bad things happen all the time, but you'll go through it with strength and assurance that it will be okay no matter what.

And in fact, you'll even get to a point where you can stand there and praise God in the middle of even the worst circumstances. And there will be sadness and there will be grief. And somehow there is just this string of joy, even in the sadness. And those things seem impossible. It seems like, how could they possibly happen?

They don't work together, but they do because Jesus said, it's a piece that you won't understand. You can't reconcile it, but you will know it, you will feel it, and you will live it when we allow the Holy Spirit to work in us and change us. So not only at this point have we had Jesus come to earth to teach us, He's shown us how to live, He's been crucified, He's been resurrected, He's shown us that we, He's given us the Holy Spirit to now teach us in His absence, He's given us freedom and peace, and that's not all.

He gives us one other thing. It doesn't end there. And this is something that Paul says in another letter to Philippians. He says, be children of God without blemish. So he's saying, just uphold the standard that Jesus set. Try to do it to the best of your ability. Be children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation in which you shine like stars in the world.

I love that. How beautiful and poetic is that? You shine like stars in the world. Do your best to grow in Jesus so that you can go out and show people who Jesus is. So I don't have time for this, but I'm going to say it anyway. My husband and I have been running a community group on Facebook for the last, I don't know, six years or something.

And when we started the group, it was just to have a bit of fun, get our community together. We did not know that eventually that group would grow to 25, 000 people and that we would have in the end, hundreds of conversations with people who were very much like the people Paul described. Toddlers, not in control of their emotions.

That we would get so many, hundreds of people blaming us and yelling at us and calling us all sorts of names and really disliking that we set a moral ethic for the group about being kind to each other. People didn't like that. There is quite literally an entire bunch of women who started a group just about how much they hate me.

This is, seriously, I could tell you so many stories. I wish I had time. I could tell you, I could probably take all of next year's entire, all 52 messages. We could do them all, just out of stuff that's happened in this group. Um, but the point is that from day dot, from the very beginning, when all of this started, we have, and I can say this honestly, responded to every single person With grace and respect and kindness every single time, no matter how much they hate us.

And sometimes things like that happen. It feels like in a void, you know, you're just doing it and you never see anything from it. But a few months ago I was having morning tea with some ladies. I didn't know all of them. I was walking back to my car afterwards with one of them that I hadn't met before.

And she said to me, Oh, I actually do know you, you run our community group. And I was like, Oh, that's cool. So we chatted about that for a bit. And then just as she was leaving she said, you know, I just have to say, I'm so amazed sometimes by how horrible people can be. I read what their comments are and how they, like, how they say things to you and I'm like, who are they and how dare they talk like that.

And she said if I was an admin I'd just be, well I can't really say what she said, but she was saying like I'd be giving a verbal what for kind of thing and I'd be banning them and all this stuff. And then she said, Every time you respond, you are so nice and you are so understanding and I don't know how you do it.

Well, that's because 20 odd years of Jesus changing me on the inside from that snotty 19 year old all the way through to someone who can now try to show people Jesus just even in a response to them. And I just, it was such an amazing moment for me because that is what Paul is talking about that we get to shine just that little bit.

And if she noticed, maybe other people have noticed too. It doesn't take huge amounts to go and shine in your little part of the world. It's a reflection of our love for Him. And that's an incredible thing. I just, I've been thinking about this a lot this week that Jesus already did so much for us, but then we have this opportunity to actually be more like Him, to change our lives.

to become more like Jesus, the son of God, the greatest man who ever walked the earth, the most influential teacher who ever existed, who revolutionized the way that human beings could think, live and behave and love each other. And we, he says to us, the Holy Spirit has been sent so that you can do that, so that you can have a life of peace and freedom, that you can be an overcomer, that you can have joy in the mess.

That's what he's given to us. What an incredible gift. So if we're not doing that, why? What are we, what are we prioritizing over? And I'm saying this to myself too, but what are we prioritizing over spending that time doing the things that allow the Holy Spirit to teach us and set us free from things and give us that spirit of being an overcomer and go out and have grace and be released from the things that are just weighing us down all the time.

Why are we not doing those things? Because it better be super, super important to put it above that. And I know in my case, it never is. It's because I'm being lazy. It's because I'm doom scrolling. You know what doom scrolling is? When you get stuck on social media. Yep. Social media has got a lot to answer for.

Being more like Jesus requires something of us. It's a verb. It's an action. So we have to think about what we're doing and what we're not doing. So can I ask the team to come up? I know we've gone a little bit over time, but I really think that we need to do this. I want you to for a second, just imagine, I mean, I don't know where you're at at your journey.

So, you know, if you're all good, then you're all good. But I want to say this for a second. If you feel like there's gaps, if maybe there's something more that you. You know that you could be doing more. You feel like maybe you're living a little bit in the mess in Paul's way that he was talking about a bit hard in your heart, a bit.

Another thing that he said was they've lost sensitivity. And I think that's a really awesome way to describe it to be insensitive, to be locked down. If you're feeling a little bit like you're kind of being blown around, imagine this. Imagine if you were at a place where someone hurt you and you could forgive and be free of it.

I'm talking like, actually just have it gone and not carry it? You could love someone even after they've hurt you. You could feel compassion, an actual ache in your heart for someone who seems unlovable. What if instead of getting angry or retaliating, you could bring peace into an argument instead and be the peacemaker?

What if you could humbly make things right when you're wrong, so you're not carrying the weight of guilt? What if you could repair a relationship no matter whose fault it was? Imagine if you could. Apologize, even when it's to your spouse, even when it's to your kids, or to your awful boss. What if you were unruffled by people's actions, lies, and opinions about you?

What if you walked your journey without comparing yourself to others? What if you could give your time or empathy to people who don't seem to deserve it? That's how Jesus lived. And he was not weak. None of those things were a weakness. It takes incredible strength to live a life like that. It makes us stronger.

It makes us shine a little brighter. It gives us the freedom and peace that he promised.