Curtis Klingle

Following Jesus

I explore Christ’s commandments daily and I know He meant more for us and expected much more than what most of us are giving to Him. As this writing unfolds, some may cry out that I am endorsing legalism or lordship salvation, but they would be in error. My purpose is to bring clarity to what He said and eliminate some of the confusion about what it means to love Him and to serve Him. The soft soap Christianity that is being spewed from pulpits across the planet is not leading people to Christ, to the contrary, it is detouring them to that other destination. It is sophistry at its finest. A soft soap religion is not what Jesus intended and from all appearances, He is very hard-nosed about what it means to be a disciple and to truly follow Him.

It is curious to me that He attached stipulations to following Him, and there has been a continuous trend to overlook these and or water them down. These other “gospels” put the focus on us and our desires rather than the Author. We can envision Jesus’ walking about with a lamb in His arms, while we should be looking upon Him with reverence as the Lion of Judah. As Dorothy Sayers surmised, “…We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”

“Forgive if you want to be forgiven.” “Do not judge or you will be judged.” “If you love me, you will do what I ask of you.” When is the last time you heard a sermon which addressed any of these things which Jesus taught? When have we last examined ourselves to see if we are in line with what He requires of us?

At the seaside breakfast recorded in John 21:15-19, Jesus restored Peter. For all of His boasting about fighting for and defending Him, even unto death, he betrayed Christ, he denied Him. Imagine the pain, the shame, and self-revulsion he experienced when that rooster crowed! No matter how many times I read this passage my soul grieves for I too have betrayed Him, not once, but multiple times. And yet, He has restored me time and time again. Those piercing words echo in my mind, “Do you love me?” They haunt me, they bring me to my knees in continuous repentance.

And that is the first question we must ask ourselves, “Do I love Jesus?” All those who call themselves believers will inevitably respond with a resounding “Yes.” But do I really? The next question would be, “Then why do I not display that love in very word and deed?”

When we proclaim that we love someone, what we mean is that we care for them, we have an affection for them, and we want to please them. All of the natural loves have a personal need attached to them, these loves are not selfless. Only agape is a selfless love, and it is this love we should love Him with. Agape is a love with no attached emotion, and it is indeed separate from our often-whimsical feelings and emotions. After all, we tend to be fickle creatures. I will add though that emotions can, and often do accompany this love.  Agape is a love that elevates the beloved above our own interests. It is a love freely given with no thought of reciprocation.

So how do we love someone who we cannot see or touch? I’ll answer that question with a question. Have you ever felt constrained to pray for someone, say someone you read about in a newspaper, seen in a news broadcast, or on social media that was in need of prayers? If you have, then you have sent a message of love directly to the throne of heaven on that person’s behalf. You have indeed loved someone who you have never met. Remember what agape is and then you will see that you have in fact loved them. You could not see the person, nor could you touch them, but yet you loved them.

You will likely never meet the person you prayed for in the above question. You will never get to speak with them directly or experience them. However, one of the amazing things about loving Christ is that you will experience Him. This may not occur every time you pray on your own, but more often than not, you will know He is with you. There is nothing that is sweeter to the soul than experiencing His presence. Interestingly, when we gather in corporate prayer, He said He would be present, Matt. 18:20.

We can say we love someone all we want, but it is when we take action that the beloved knows we love them. Action costs us something. A husband can tell his wife every day that he loves her, but if there is no gentle touch, an embrace, a kiss, some offering of affection, then she will not feel loved. You can tell your children you love them, but if you don’t spend time with them, you must ask yourself if you really do. I can assure you that your words alone are not convincing them. Love must be put into action. I include the following and while it may appear to be a digression, I assure you it is not, it is of paramount importance. To you young girls and women out there. If a man is pursuing you and is making attempts to seduce you all the while saying that he loves you, I submit to you, he does not. He wants what you can provide him, specifically, satisfaction of his sexual desires but he does not love you. If he truly loved you, he would know that to have premarital sex with you would be to defile you and in essence, he is violating you, he is dishonoring you before men and before God. Any man who will not wait until after marriage to have you is not worthy of your time, and I highly suggest that you vehemently kick him to the curb. Alright, I’m stepping down from my soapbox now.

In James’ epistle he gives practical examples of living a life of faith. If our faith is based upon Jesus Christ, then our faith is one of love, agape love. Remember, you don’t and probably won’t have any natural affection for those in need you might encounter. You might have sympathy or even empathy for them, and even this can be touched with love, but don’t count on it being present. We must love, and as I just mentioned, love must be put into action, and it is going to cost you something.

Loving Jesus is the hardest, yet it is one of the easiest things we can do. He first loved us and demonstrated that love on the Cross. I know from experience that when a person gains a real understanding of what He did for them, they can begin to grasp His great love. Loving Him comes easy once you know Him. The hard part is getting to know Him. Permit me to explain.

You cannot get to know someone unless you spend time with that person. Let’s say you meet someone who really interests you. You notice that they seem to be genuinely good natured, witty, (which often denotes intelligence) and pleasant to be around. If you want to learn more about them, you must spend time with them. You must sacrifice some of your own time and energy to be near them. You will get out of the relationship precisely what you put into it. If you meet with this person once a month, things will move rather slowly, and chances are, much of what you discussed in the previous month will be forgotten. You will be in effect starting over every time you meet, because there has not been enough time spent for a bond of intimacy to form.

Once a week and things may progress faster than in a once a month setting, but they will still be at a snail’s pace. So, what if you could meet with this person several times a week, or even every day, for say, 20-to-30-minute intervals. How much quicker would you get to know the person? Your conversations could be instantly recalled because only 24hrs had passed since your last encounter. You would find it easier to pick up on mannerisms, humor, and idioms specific to him or his culture. You would be able to really know him.

So, I ask, why would it be any different getting to know the Lord of the universe? He is a Person, He is the Person, the One you really need to know. In order to know Him you must spend time with Him, and that is accomplished via three routes. One, is reading the Bible. It is the greatest love story ever written, and it was written to you specifically. This “book” was written over a period of about 1500 years, on three different continents, with some 40 different authors, and is in complete unity. In the Old Testament you will see God the Father interacting with a people group He chose to work through, that were to be a “kingdom of priests,” and it was in this people group, the Jewish people, that Jesus would be born into. There are near 30 “theophanies” recorded in the Old Testament. A theophany is a visible manifestation of God to mankind. Each time this happens it is the pre-incarnate Jesus. I mention this so you understand that He has been active since the beginning of time and throughout man’s existence.

The New Testament is about Jesus, His teachings, and the spread of Christianity. It is in the first four books, called the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that you can read the words Jesus spoke. It is here that you begin to see what it is He requires of each of us and all He has done for us.

I now mention prayer, but it really should be our first go to. There are many throughout this world even right now in modern times who do not even own a Bible, but have received Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. They heard the Gospel through a missionary or maybe through a home church leader, or a friend, and began a life of faith. It is here, in these faraway lands that we see powerful faith most active. I have visited some of these distant peoples and their faith is remarkable. I learned valuable lessons about faith from people whose language I could not even understand.

Prayer is fellowship with God. One dictionary refers to it beautifully as “spiritual communion” with God. It is a time that you can spend speaking to Him directly about things you are grateful for, giving Him thanks, expressing concerns you may have, or placing petitions for yourself or others before Him. It is in this act, the act of prayer, where intimacy with Him begins, grows, and multiplies. All hangs upon your prayer time with Him. Again, you must spend time with someone if you want to get to know them.

The last primary avenue of learning who Jesus is and spending time with Him is through fellowship with other believers. Now, I want to caution you. Not all who claim to be believers really are, and the false ones are readily recognizable. If they are outside of the church building and act and do things like everyone else you know, then it’s a good guess that they are not a true believer. A believer will be different than what you encounter in this world. I am not saying that they will be perfect, but they will make every effort to be. You may have already heard someone say, “I am in the world, but not of the world,” and that is a good description of a Christian. They will be distinctly different from all others you know, and these are the people you want to be close to. They are obviously closer to God and have taken the pains to come to know Him. What you want is to learn how they achieved their relationship with Him, and I can assure you, they will not only tell you, but will help guide you. And one more thing, I hear people say, “I don’t go to church because it is full of hypocrites.” My response to that is, “It certainly is, but they can always use one more.”

Now, we must return to our original question, “Do I love Jesus?” If you can answer “Yes,” then we can proceed to the “how” we display our love for Him.

As you may have already guessed, the true believers are already displaying their love for Him. If you were to ask them how they do this, they would respond, “By keeping His commandments.” Here is also when we return back to one of my initial remarks about how Jesus included stipulations with many of His teachings. As we have already deduced, love must have action associated with it in order that the beloved “know” that you love them. If you have the slightest idea what Jesus did for you on the cross, you will want to love Him and do as He asks of you.

In Matthew 22:34-40 a lawyer of a Jewish religious sect posed a question to Jesus. He asked, “Teacher, what is the great commandment in the law?” Jesus responded, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This the first and great commandment.’” Jesus followed the answer up quickly with, “And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all of the Law and the Prophets.” Jesus was quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, and Leviticus 19:18. Loving God covers the first four of the Ten Commandments, and loving your neighbor as yourself covers the remaining six, man’s relationship to man. And yes, it is that simple. Isn’t it amazing?! It all comes down to love!

A stipulation is a prerequisite or a condition of an agreement. It can also take the form of a demand. Jesus did in fact put down stipulations, but many tend to overlook these. It is these conditions which set the tone of our relationship with Him, they are the inward as well as the outward display of our love for Him. They also serve as a glowing example to the world that we are following Him.

The first stipulation I’d like to address is forgiveness. In Matthew 6:9-13 Jesus gave His disciples instructions on how to pray and provided them with a model prayer. We often recite this prayer and refer to it as the Lord’s Prayer. It is interesting to me that right in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer, a stipulation is injected. It is so abrupt that I would actually call it an interjection. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Jesus is not talking about financial debts, but this is a direct reference to sin. He is saying that we must forgive others if we want to be forgiven. Jesus believed this to be so important that He put it right in the middle of the model prayer. So, if we want to love Him, we must forgive others. If we love our neighbor as ourselves, then we will forgive them. I ask you, don’t we forgive ourselves for a vast array of foibles and wrong doings?

A second stipulation can be found one chapter over in Matthew 7:1-2 “Judge not, that you be not judged, for with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the same measure you use, it will be measured back to you.” And this is dangerous ground indeed. When we judge others what we really tend to do is compare them to ourselves, or rather our idea of ourselves. We are not nearly as good as we think ourselves to be. We cannot live up to the ideals we set for ourselves, yet we demand it of others, and we tend to be much more lenient on ourselves than we do with the errors or flaws of others.

I have written on this topic in the past (See: “The Endless Pursuit”) and will include some of that information here. We must always be mindful that we really have no idea what another is struggling with or what they have suffered in this life. We make judgment calls all day long, but the judgment referred to here by our Lord is a judgment leading to condemnation for the recipient, and it is this we must flee from.

This type of judgment is definitely not the way to loving others. We can, and rightly do pass judgment on the acts committed by ourselves and others, but we must resist the temptation to judge the person. The separation of the two can be extremely difficult, but we must make all effort to place a distinction between them. For with judgment comes condemnation, and what follows is punishment.

As I previously stated, we should always bear in mind that we do not really know the struggles the person we are judging goes through. They may be giving every ounce of strength to overcome an addiction or some foul temptation that does not trouble us. We may not have any propensity towards drink or drugs. We may have full control over our emotions, especially the ugly one, anger. I personally have no inclination to gamble, but the compulsive gambler certainly does. Every single one of us is “broken” in some way or other. There is something askew and not just right within us all. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not condoning the behavior of the drunk, the addict, the angry man, or the gambler but, we can still love the person and yet hate the offense.

In describing the differences between us I like to use the analogy of machinery. I first learned this from C.S. Lewis’ works and find it to be a fitting portrayal of ourselves. All of us are given a body, soul, and a mind, and these are the foundations of our specific piece of machinery, our equipment that enables us to walk through this life. Good genetics, nurturing parents, freedom from mental illness, and our interactions with others, all have a hand in fine tuning the machinery. On the other hand, abnormal genes, absentee parents, and being raised in the confines of abuse and addiction, can alter and or damage our machinery. Furthermore, our life choices, both the good and bad decisions we each make, all influence the operation of our machine.

Now, some of us were given a machine that operates rather smoothly with few hiccups, all is operating at or near optimum conditions. Others among us may have a machine that has a bolt missing here, or a support structure that is bent, maybe a couple of gears are a bit rough and don’t quite mesh together properly. It is a wonder that what some are given even operates at all. But whatever we have been given, we must operate that piece of machinery to the best of our ability. To those that are given much, much is required. Keep that in mind if your machine operates relatively well.

I have come to believe that the operation of the machinery that we are given is the filter through which we will be judged. That disturbed man, completely self-absorbed, who for years has been walking the streets yelling at himself and frightening all around him, only acknowledging another person’s existence with a hateful stare or a rage filled scream, one day steps out into oncoming traffic to save a turtle crossing the road. That simple act may have been for him the most powerful act of selflessness in all his life, the equivalent of one of us storming a machine gun nest to save a fellow soldier. He pushed his machine to its limits, very near its breaking point. And because he did so, he may have a greater reward than the man who was a pillar of the community, who went to church every Sunday, who gave his earnings to the poor, but in private was a cruel master over his wife.

And notice what happened in those two descriptions. In the former, we quickly, albeit subconsciously, elevated ourselves above the disturbed man. In the latter example, we were on an even playing field, that is, until the truth of the church man was revealed. We tend to judge those who do not fit our view of the norm much more harshly than those that do. In these descriptions, we have the luxury of seeing these men as they really are. In real life, that is impossible.

We never fully know the person we come into contact with. Even those who we have known and loved for years are really a mystery to us. There are hidden things within each of us that affect us, and many of those are dark things, ugly and horrid, buried so deep that we are not even aware of them ourselves. Because we do not know the person, we must never judge them. And because we do not judge them, we cannot compare ourselves to them. Then we can set aside our judgment and realize that all of humanity is fallen, including us.

The final stipulation I will include in this writing is found in John 14:21. I find this verse intriguing and I have seen Jesus’ words come to fruition in my own life. “He who has my commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And He who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love Him and manifest Myself to Him.”

Jesus lays it out simply in that if we do what He asks of us, it is proof that we love Him. What is more, because we love Him, we will be loved by God the Father and Jesus both, and here it comes, wait for it, “I will manifest Myself to him.” This is an extremely interesting proclamation, and it should grab your full attention. The English word “manifest,” translated from the Greek, “emphanizo” both carry a similar meaning, but as is usual, the Greek is richer. Emphanizo means to exhibit (in person), to disclose (by words), appear, declare (plainly), inform, show, signify. I don’t know about you but as for me, any of these methods of manifesting suit me just fine.

What you will find is that the closer you draw to Him, the closer He will draw to you. Like any friendship, the more time that you spend together, the more intimate the relationship becomes. It is this relationship that is paramount to all others, for when this relationship is “right,” all others will fall naturally into place. The correct order of our relationships should be Jesus first, our spouse second, our children, family, friends, and then our neighbor. This last category encompasses all of mankind. Now, the ranking in relationships can be misleading and there will be some crossover in categories, such as a friend who becomes more like family, and a family member that is more like a friend. And this ranking seems to smuggle in the idea of proximity, something closely following, but that is not the case with our relationship with Him. What you will find is as you grow to love Him, that your relationship with Him is miles ahead of your next closest relationship, and rightly so. As I’ve already said, when this relationship is where it needs to be, the love you receive from Him will overflow into the second, the third, the fourth, and so on. You will be able to love all within and without your circle more than you ever dreamed possible.

When I was a child, my parents forced me to go to Sunday school. I use the word “force” because I really didn’t want to be there. I was a boy, and I mean all boy. My days were meant to be spent playing, hunting, or fishing, not inside yet another classroom. But I did learn about Him, albeit it was a superficial experience, but those that donated their time, those who acted out of love for Him and for me, are much appreciated. As I’ve grown older, I have come to realize that one lady in particular, Mrs. LaVan Engelhardt laid the foundation there upon which a lifetime of pursuing Him culminated in actually finding Him. I shall be forever in her debt.

There was a print of a painting that hung on the wall in that little Sunday school classroom. The print depicted a small European style cottage in a nighttime setting. There was a gated entrance lined by shrubbery, and rose bushes and ivy climbed along the walls of the cottage. The cottage gave the impression of warmth and was utterly inviting, so much so you wanted with all of your heart to live there. A lamp was affixed to the wall just above and to the left of the door. A bearded man, obviously a depiction of Jesus, was standing outside the door with His right hand raised into a knocking position. As a child I could see that there was something not quite right with the picture, but I could never put my finger on exactly what that something was. Years later, as an adult, I saw the print again and my attention was immediately drawn to what the wrong something was: the door had no doorknob. As I pondered this, I received nothing short of a revelation; it was then that I realized that Jesus will not come in until I open the door, and open the door I did.

I will close with a word of encouragement. “For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” Matthew 7:8. You may not have got it right yesterday, and you may have failed today, but keep at it, because you will get it right tomorrow.

He is waiting. Open the door.

C. Klingle