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.
As Was His Custom: Fellowship Part 2
While the gift of salvation is certainly a personal decision one makes individually, the restoration of fellowship with God opens up the gift of fellowship with His church. Eugene Peterson refers to our association with and participation in the body, the church, as “part of the fabric of redemption.” We can’t separate our fellowship with God from our fellowship with other believers and truly experience the fullness of what Jesus offers. They are inextricably tied, and it is within the context of common fellowship that we experience the fullness of what Jesus came to bring, in community with his Body: his imperfect, beautiful, messy, and beloved church. We see the early church experiencing this same fellowship: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”
As Was His Custom: Fasting
While we don’t hear much about fasting in our modern faith circles, the power of this singular spiritual discipline is wholly worth pursuing. In my own faith journey, I’ve reaped the profound benefits of fasting and prayer, particularly when seeking direction, to hear more clearly from the voice of God, and to experience a breakthrough in an area of struggle. While I find such a powerful and extensive topic intimidating to write about, I’m eager to illuminate Jesus’ example and teaching in this custom while emboldening each of us to follow Jesus and experience more of Him through this practice.
As Was His Custom: Rest
If you had asked me last summer what I thought when I heard “rest,” I would’ve thought of sleeping or running away from my life. When that began to fail me and not satisfy me, I became more tired and more depressed. Growing up, I was raised in the church but was never taught what the word “Sabbath” means. I could probably tell you I didn’t even hear the word until I was about 16 or 17. It wasn’t until last fall that my student pastor said to me, “Halle, when was the last time you sat with God?” I looked at him like he was asking me a stupid question because I just spent the last 15 minutes of service worshiping God. He repeated it and walked away. From that, I walked away confused, but I didn’t know that 10-word sentence would change my life with Jesus.
As Was His Custom: Teaching
On hundreds of Sundays, I padded down the blue-carpeted basement steps to our newly constructed Sunday School rooms. I followed as other children walked into their respective classrooms. I looked forward to Sundays, as I enjoyed learning about Jesus, but I especially loved being taught by Doug Livgren. Now, looking back, it's because his love and passion for Jesus superseded just "getting through the Sunday School curriculum." My class would enter, girls giggling and boys shoving to get to seats, and Doug would walk in and command attention from us. What I remember most was having light bulb moments through his teaching, and honestly when I taught third-grade boys Sunday School in college, I thought back often and used Doug's methods.
Teaching is one of the many customs/habits of Jesus. Immediately following his 40 days in the wilderness (Luke 4), he begins traveling, preaching, and teaching in synagogues throughout the countryside. He even taught (albeit briefly) in His hometown of Nazareth. (Click here for a blog post on this topic!) However, Jesus' teaching slightly differed from what we're used to in our Western context. Jesus, more than likely, was educated in rabbinic tradition (see here for more info).
As Was His Custom: Silence
I remember the first time I experienced true silence. I was 11 years old and had just spent a week at my grandparent’s home all by myself. My Grandma Gus and I had attended musicals, gotten my ears pierced, and shopped until we dropped. She’d taken me to tea houses, watched Anne of Green Gables (with Megan Follows- because that version is a part of my DNA!), and rode my Grandpa Gus’ horses at sunset. That week was one of my most beautiful times with my grandparents on my mother’s side.
But in one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, on the way to surprise my Grandpa at work with ice cream, an intoxicated driver t-boned the car my Grandma and I were in. Our vehicle spun, rolling violently eight times into a bean field. When our car came to rest upside down, I was unconscious, pinned between the dashboard and the windshield. My Grandma’s seat belt had snapped, leaving her bleeding out on the ceiling of the car, now on the ground. My parents were over 12 hours away, and even though my Dad left immediately after receiving that awful phone call, I was relatively alone for several hours in that hospital room in Princeton, IL.
As Was His Custom: Solitude
One of the truths that most strongly stood out to me in studying Jesus’ practice of solitude is the foundation from which he operated. Jesus knew and operated from the truth that his strength, security, and purpose came solely from his place with the Father. Thus, he prioritized time to connect solely with Him.
As Was His Custom: Studying Scripture and Meditation
Although many secular scholars label Jesus as a country bumpkin, who probably couldn’t read or write, there’s adequate reason to believe that He could do both. We know from Luke 4:16 that Jesus was invited to read on the Sabbath in his hometown synagogue. While the other Scripture that talks of Jesus’ writing is not found in the earliest manuscripts (John 7:53-8:11), we can deduce that if He knew how to read, He would have also learned to write.
As Was His Custom: Reading scripture
Nazareth. It’s a small village nestled down in the middle of the cliffs and high hills north of the Jezreel valley. Back in Yeshua’s time, this valley was a major intersection for non-Hebrew people groups to travel through and sometimes settle as it was the easiest to navigate east to west from the coast to the Sea of Galilee. (I mean, who wouldn’t want to settle there when there is 365 feet of topsoil in the Jezreel Valley?!?!) This valley holds so much deep meaning for Israel and Christians alike. (For a video by Daily Bread featuring my professor, John A Beck, regarding the importance of Jezreel Valley, click here.)
Today, Nazareth is the fastest-growing city in what was ancient Israel. But this small village is where Yeshua’s parents raised him. (Essentially, he was a small-town boy). Surrounded by high cliff faces (see in the above video at time stamp 0.01-0.38), Nazareth was isolated from these Gentile and pagan people groups, to say the least. It was tricky navigating to Nazareth back in Yeshua’s time (probably only accessible by climbing on foot or with a donkey or mule). Even today, they’ve had to blast the cliffs to provide transportation to the community.
As Was His Custom
Right then, it occurred to me that Jesus led a life filled with habits and customs that He had done His entire life! And He had a lot. If you've heard the term "spiritual disciplines"- they are taken from the habits of Jesus. There's a reason for them- so that we can literally follow in the footsteps of Jesus.