As Was His Custom: Repent. Believe. Follow.
It wasn’t until I sat in a discipleship seminar that a lightbulb blazed on inside my soul. It was the realization that Jesus preached the Gospel.
Wait- what? I thought the Gospel was Him.
And it is. Jesus is a BIG PART of it. But there’s more. And when I realized what He preached about, when He was preaching about the Gospel, all the bells and whistles began to sync together into a perfectly harmonized song.
As Was His Custom: Habits We Need… Because We’re Human- Confession
As a committed follower of Christ, I remember a season clearly in my life when I had found myself ensnared and entangled in a sin. Having given way to the enemy in my mind, I had allowed sinful thoughts to take hold, and somewhere along the way became completely incapable of finding freedom on my own. While I’d turn from the sin for a short while, the thoughts would eventually return. It was only when I shared my struggle with a trusted, godly friend that I found full freedom. I confessed my sin in humility and repentance. And I prayed for God to rescue me and my mind from that dark place. And God was faithful. He met me in my brokenness, and He set me free. The power of sin was no match for the work of the Holy Spirit in my heart and mind, activated and set free through the act of confession and repentance.
As Was His Custom: Submission
I remember it vividly. Michael (my pastor husband) and I were leading a group of engaged couples through several months of pre-marriage counseling and preparation. During that time, we leaned into some heavy passages of Scripture that ruffled a few feathers. This time, Michael asked everyone to open their Bibles to Ephesians 5:22-33. Immediately, once the pages were turned and the passage quickly scanned, I heard several breaths suck in, saw shoulders stiffen, and mouths turn down. The women’s eyes shifted hastily from the page to their future husbands, and the men all seemed to be looking at the ceiling for an auditory word FROM THE LORD.
Submit. That word alone sends shivers down spines. It acts as a gut punch for any woman who has, at one time or another, wanted to lead something in her church or home. It shuts the mouths of prophets, silences wives everywhere, and makes a lot of men in our Western culture uncomfortable. It’s a word that’s been abused in the Church for hundreds, possibly thousands of years.
What’s surprising is that Jesus practiced submissiveness. Wait - submissiveness was a normal custom of a man? The Son of God?
As Was His Custom: Serving
We live in a world preoccupied with greatness. As humans, we follow star athletes, celebrities, artists, and leaders, and we yearn for significance in the individual corners of our own lives. We pursue financial gain, popularity, appeal, and admiration. We seek to be known and praised. We find satisfaction in attention and aspire to feel important in the eyes of others. Throughout history, this obsession has taken many shapes and forms, but it is the same, nonetheless: conquering kingdoms, rising to power, acquiring a following, generating wealth, gaining importance.
When Jesus came, however, He modeled an entirely opposite ambition and aim. Instead of seeking greatness by these standards, Jesus turned our entire way of living on its head, swinging the pendulum to the other extreme. He taught that in His Kingdom, the key to greatness is, in fact, found in becoming less:
Jesus both taught and modeled in His earthly ministry a different objective– Serving is the way of God’s Kingdom.
As Was his Custom: Simplicity
“A simple, humble life with peace and quiet is far better than an opulent lifestyle with nothing but quarrels and strife at home.” Proverbs 17:1 TPT
A couple of years ago my family of three moved into a tiny home (literally - 200 square feet). Let me be the first to tell you this was not my idea of a “dream house” when I was growing up and planning my future. It took lots of episodes of Tiny House Nation, Pinterest scrolling, and conversations with my husband to convince me that this lifestyle was (and is) worth pursuing. Needless to say, we have learned (and are still learning) how to do without a lot of “stuff” that we thought we previously needed.
In the culture that we live in, there is a constant expectation to always be on-the-go, to buy the newest model {insert item here}, live in the nicest house, have designer clothes, participate in the current trend, etc. Not only do we need to keep up appearances, but we also need to juggle all the things and do it perfectly - motherhood, ministry, career, marriage, faith, health, and ALL the activities that come along with those things. Social media has only increased those expectations for us.