13. Walk as Jesus Walked

The only difference between ourselves right now and Jesus as He walked this earth, including during His time of ministry, is believing. We do not see what is true because we do not believe what God says. Jesus did.

 

He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked. 1 John 2:6

How did Jesus walk?

Abide in me is the most important commandment in the Bible. Obey it, and all else falls into place. Disobey it and it matters not what else we do perfectly, it is all death.

I don’t know if it was John who worded it this way or the translators, nevertheless, in the middle of that verse is “ought to.” You “say” you abide in Christ, then you “ought to” be doing something, you ought to be walking just as Jesus walked.

There are only two ways I know of to attempt to fulfill the “ought to.” We can try very hard, with all the energetic enthusiasm, the determined wrench in the gut, the perseverance, the hanging in there that human beings are capable of.

I know good, godly, wonderful Christian people who have attempted to follow this approach to the most important command in the Bible. And listen, most Christians don’t even regard this verse, nor make any attempt to see it fulfilled in their lives. Unbelief keeps them out of the arena entirely.

I also attempted this approach to this verse for 21 years, surrounded by wonderful people anointed with a mighty anointing to do this thing, to walk just as Jesus walked, to prove that we abide in Him.

There are three results that I know of coming out of this first approach to obedience. One result is found in those who convince themselves they are succeeding. If they hold on just a bit longer, God will reach down and touch them and they will be transformed – if. These become pretenders. They have too much human gut ever to quit. But their walk becomes a mighty pretending that feels empty and hollow to those who observe them without prejudice. These so often become self-righteous, superior to all those “lesser Christians” out there.

A second result is in those who realize they can’t do it, and so they turn away from such a vision, walking as Jesus walked. Some turn away to living their own lives in this world in the pursuit of gain. Others turn away to in-part Christianity and decide that it’s just not for us, just not for now, this walking as Jesus walked.

The third result has in it the smallest number of people. These are those who also give up. “If I must do this thing in order to know Him, if I must fulfill this ‘ought to,’ if I must walk myself just as Jesus walked in order to abide in Him, then I must be lost, I must be unfixable, I must be without hope.” These do not “give up” on initial salvation, no, but they give up on all the fullness of Christ.

Yet they have a problem. Their desire to be with the Lord Jesus Christ in all fullness as He stands in His glory upon this earth, their desire to know Him as He truly is, to be like Him, to walk with Him in all reality, just does not go away. They may try the flesh in this world for a season, but it does not answer that deep cry. They may try nominal Christianity for a season, but something inside just weeps and yearns for a reality that simply is not found there.

But they know that they cannot, cannot, cannot, do what the Apostle John says in this verse. If obeying the most important command in the Bible, “Abide in Me,” means my walking just as Jesus walked, then where does that leave me? Yet they cannot make themselves stop wanting to be with Him.

And then they discover that everything Jesus commands, He Himself does inside of us, and with great joy, they let go and sink fully into Him. Christ is our life; in all the messiness of our humanity in this world, we have no other life. Then, bit by bit, they notice something incredibly awesome happening inside themselves. They see a transformation into joy, into peace, into reality as they had always longed for and never quite found. And they see this transformation happening for real while they continue just being themselves.

It doesn’t take much astuteness to see the sham of the first approach, performance, except by those caught in it.

The vast majority of Christians take the second approach, “Who cares. It’s not going to happen, so it must not be God’s plan anyway; why worry about it. We’ll know what it all means after we go to heaven anyway.”

But what happens inside this third approach? What do we find? What happens when we convince ourselves, telling our minds, speaking with our voice, “Jesus, You are my life; You are the only life I have. Every part of me, including all of my failure and weakness, You carry inside Yourself, and You live in every part of me in all the messiness of my human experience in this world. Jesus, You are my life; I have no other life.”

What happens?

Here is one of the biggest things I have found inside this third approach. How we see everything changes. Everything looks different. When people talk to us out of the old “Christian” way of seeing, they just don’t seem to make any sense. We remember the “meaning” of their words and their questions, but we cannot think as they think, and so their talk and their questions sound like gibberish.

We look at Jesus and how He walked, and He also changes in our sight. The question “How did Jesus walk?” looks entirely different.

Everything God does comes into earthly reality first through faith. Faith sees what is not seen. Faith believes what God says before it is visible. And only when there is such faith filling the human heart does the Word God speaks enter into this world in visibility, in outward demonstration, in transformation and glory.

We must believe it is true in full reality first, BEFORE we will ever see it manifest outwardly.

 People say, “I’ve gotta see it for real before I believe it to be true.”

The problem is they have the “for real” part in the wrong place. Something is not “for real” just because it is seen outwardly. There are many things that are seen outwardly that are not at all “for real” – all that is of the world is not at all real. Something is for real as God speaks it, we see it for real, and then it shows up outwardly.

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.

The “not seen” Jesus meant here, was not seeing outwardly. Yet the eyes of these who believe are fixed solidly on that which is very, very real. They see it, all right, just not yet outwardly.

How did Jesus walk? We are looking at the portion of His history from His birth to His submission to the cross.

First, we must get out of our minds the idea that Jesus walked as God; He did not. Jesus walked fully as a Man. There was no “God” part of Jesus, other than the Father, keeping in line the “man” part of Jesus. God cannot be tempted with sin; Jesus was tempted in all points just like us. That means He was led away of His own lusts and enticed – without “help” inside His own person. He faced the darkness in just exactly the same way you and I face the darkness.

I want to present two hypotheses. The first is that in every possible way, the nature of Jesus, in all parts of His being and makeup as He walked this earth, is identical to our nature, in all parts of our being and makeup right now – except one.

The second hypothesis is that the one difference between Jesus and ourselves is found entirely in the mind/heart connection. Jesus believed who He was in all things; we do not.

I’m presenting these things as “hypotheses” because I don’t know what I’m talking about. I reach forward, seeking to understand and to know Him. I see some things dimly, yes; I am experiencing a continuing depth of knowing Him intimately inside, yes. It is as I write, though, that I see Him more clearly.

There is no secret ingredient. (I watched Kung Fu Panda recently; I like that story.) We are not waiting for something to come to us to “make us like Jesus.” We already are. The grace that is to come is a grace that causes us to know what is already true and enables us to walk in what is. In other words, as that final grace comes upon us, it is a grace of discovery of that which already is, it is a grace of walking in who we have always been; we just didn’t know it.

The only difference between ourselves right now and Jesus as He walked this earth, including during His time of ministry, is believing. We do not see what is true because we do not believe what God says. Jesus did.

There is no secret ingredient that we are waiting to obtain. All we need is to change our minds, to believe what is already true.

This is important for us to understand. The grace that is to come has already come upon us. It is the only reason we can begin to see Jesus, now, as He really is. The grace that is to come is enabling us to believe all that God says, to see the unseen, to call those things that be not as though they are.

That is exactly how Jesus walked.

Jesus didn’t do anything miraculous or out of the ordinary except walk on water. All He ever did was say some things. He said very clearly that He did nothing Himself, that all the miracles people saw were the Father doing things, not Him. He pointed out to the Pharisees that if they didn’t like the miracles, it was God they were accusing, since Jesus didn’t do anything except speak.

Jesus had no miraculous “power” in Himself. No lightning bolts came out of His hands. No super-powers flowed out of His Person. The same Holy Spirit that is upon us was upon Him. The same Father that directs our way directed His.

Let me reach for a better understanding of how we are made. Two things. First, I am beginning to understand the heart and it’s role in our makeup a bit more. I always wanted to study the Bible’s take on human psychology and the human make-up, but God always forbade me. I know now that I never before had the right understanding to do so. Now, I seek for that understanding, not by intellectual Bible study, but by drawing His word through my present knowledge of Jesus.

The heart is the anchor of our person. It is the core to which all other parts of our being tie-in. Our spirit is the largest part of our being, but its center and anchor is the heart. At the same time the human soul, our mind, will and emotions, is anchored and centered in the heart. At the same time, the heart is also very much a part of the body, all the life that flows through the body is sent out by the heart. In fact, the heart more directly connects with every part of the body in a physical way than even the mind – the mind’s connection is not physical, but electrical.

Second, there is the heart – tongue – eye connection. These three parts of our being exist as three physical organs in the body, they are the government of everything that passes into and proceeds out of the soul, and they have their direct counterparts in our spirit. It could well be possible that our spirit, our spiritual body, is constructed along very similar lines as our physical body, with various organs existing in the frequency of spirit that are compatible to the organs of our body that exist in the frequency of physical matter.

The heart – tongue – eye connection is central to how we perceive and relate to the universe.

In Jesus, the heart – tongue – eye connection was filled with glory. Jesus always remembered His glory; never once did the certainty of His glory pass out of His mind.

In Adam, the heart – tongue – eye connection was filled with shame. Adam always remembered his shame; never once did the certainty of his shame pass out of his mind.

But there is no mechanical connection between the heart, the tongue, and the eye. The heart believes, the tongue speaks what the heart believes, and the eye sees what the heart believes. Where is the breakdown?

Everything that the heart believes is interpreted by the mind. Everything that the eye sees is processed by the mind according to its understanding of the heart. Everything that the tongue speaks is processed first by the mind, according to its understanding of the heart. The mind is nothing in itself; it’s just a processing unit. Those who live in their intellects lead very dry lives.

So, very simply, for us to walk as Jesus walked we must do two things. We must always remember that our heart is filled with glory. And we must change the way we think. We do not “work on” the tongue or the eye. They are simply conduits that express what the mind has interpreted concerning the heart.

We have two big problems. First is the lingering memory of shame that skirts around the edges of our hearts. Second is the faulty wiring of our brains.

Let’s start with the biggest reason why we do not yet “walk as Jesus walked” in all things. Shame.

Jesus never knew shame; He knew only glory in His heart. The shame of Adam did not pass to Jesus. Upon the cross, Jesus “despised” the shame. He hung there stark naked, exposed for all to see His weakness and humiliation. The word “despised” means that it meant absolutely nothing to Him. Yet He had “become” sin, and still shame had no meaning to Him; He did not know it. In spite of His “sin,” He stood fully open in the light. He did not hide from God.

That was at His most vulnerable moment, when He took all that we have been upon Himself. Salvation is the task of the Lord Jesus Christ. To walk as He walked, we look at His life from His conception to Gethsemane. To know what we shall be, we look to Him in His resurrection with power. But in that brief space of time between Gethsemane and the resurrection, the Lord Jesus took all of our shame into Himself and made it of no account. He made it nothing.

There is no shame in us.

Christ in you, the expectation of glory.

Now, Christ lives in our hearts. There is no shame in Christ, there never was. There is no shame in our hearts. From the moment that Jesus came into our hearts when we asked Him to, from that moment on there has never been anything but glory filling our hearts.

So what is our problem?  The mind.

We are transformed into His image by the renewing of our minds.

The wiring of our minds is all screwed up. Things are connected in all the wrong places. Bugs and viruses run rampant, short-circuiting, stalling programs, sending signals in all the wrong directions.

Our minds and our emotions remember shame, and so from our minds, the memory of shame forces itself upon the believing of the heart so that the seeing of the eyes and the speaking of the tongue are clouded by that memory.

I am often sharp with my wife. She says something, and I interpret it wrongly. My heart is filled with peace, but my mind is still screwed up. So my mind remembers shame, and I answer back as if I’m resisting shame in an outward sort of way. The problem is not my heart; the problem is my mind.

(This is different from Jesus’ statement that out of the heart the mouth speaks. There, He was speaking of hearts filled with shame. Hearts filled with shame can speak nothing but judgment. Our hearts are filled with Christ; they are His dwelling place, His eternal throne.)

Our minds have not caught up with reality. We must change the way we think.

There are two things by which we do that. First is the grace of God coming out of the Holy Spirit. The immediate presence of the Holy Spirit always comes first. But second is our tongue. We do not “work on” our tongue, trying to make it “speak right.” But we can use our tongue to work on our minds to make our minds “think right.”

We speak what God speaks concerning Christ our life in full confidence of faith. But that is a topic I have spent much time on elsewhere. Here I want to look more closely at Jesus’ heart as He walked this earth.

Jesus’ heart was always filled with glory. He knew no shame at all.

This is the most important thing for us to know of Jesus as He walked this earth before His resurrection. We must know His heart. We will never walk just as He walked unless we first know His heart.

Jesus’ heart was one. Our heart is one.

But this is an interesting thought. We will walk just as Jesus walked for a season upon this earth. That is our passage, but it is not what we shall be. We shall be like Him in His resurrection as we come out of our passage into all fullness.

We walk just as Jesus walked first; we shall be like Him as He is now, second.

Jesus’ heart was 100% human. I hope I have re-defined “human” for us. Human means man filled with God Himself and merged in all ways together as one. We have had a very wrong definition of “human,” – we have looked at man as he is fallen from his glory and filled with shame, and we have defined the human out of the hatred of Satan.

The writer of Hebrews told us very clearly that if we want to see “man,” then look at Jesus. Jesus is Man as man really is – Man filled with God in Person walking together in perfect Oneness.

The human is the container, the dwelling place, both the earthly and heavenly expression of who and what God is.

That is the Biblical definition of man, not the satanic definition that is rooted in Adam’s hatred for himself and revealed in his shame. The Biblical definition of man is rooted in the supreme value Love places upon man, the Blood, and is revealed in man’s glory, eternally making an invisible God visible.

Here is the primary difference between the Lord Jesus Christ and Christians. Christians hold in their minds by wicked definition the belief that shame is appropriate to their hearts. This belief is the sum and the essence of evil.

This belief is the carnal mind that is always at war with God.

There is no shame in our hearts, they are filled with glory. But Paul said that we must guard our hearts. Why? Because shame still seeks to attach itself to our hearts.

And what is it that betrays us, that, in the dead of night sneaks out and opens the gates to allow shame to creep in to our hearts where it does not belong?

 Our minds. And why is it that our minds are so messed up?

 False theology. And what is false theology called in the Bible?

 The Lie.

We must understand the parable of the tares that Jesus shared. After the “servants” have “gone to sleep,” the enemy comes and sows tares among the wheat. Tares look identical to wheat. This parable has more than one application, but I believe that its most important application is this.

Once the original apostles had passed from the scene, having written down their understanding of the revelation of Jesus Christ in what became the New Testament, the serpent came in and found every possible way to mold the lie into Christian thinking and Christian theology. He could not eliminate anything God said in the New Testament. No, the truth is found all through Christian thinking and theology. What he did was to place the lie right alongside the truth so that the two would grow up side by side looking exactly the same.

The most important person through whom he did that was Augustine. Now, it would never have worked if Augustine had not been a true man of God. He was. He is a dear brother in Christ, a mighty man of God, who is waiting on us right now to finish this thing off. But while he walked this earth he took the truth, and he took the lie, and he merged the two together. Much “Christian” thinking and how we read the Bible even today comes down to us from Augustine.

The Lord Jesus Christ did not have two hearts. He did not have two minds. He did not have two natures inside Himself always at war with each other. And neither do we.

Jesus had One heart. When He looked inside Himself He never saw anything but God. Yes, He was human, and as a human His emotions reflected what He had for dinner the night before. Jesus felt “bad.” But what He did not do was ever see anything inside that “bad” feeling except the Father Himself in all glory.

I often lie awake in the middle of the night. When I awake, I almost always feel bad inside. For most of my years, that bad “feeling” extended all through my waking hours. I always interpreted that bad feeling as “the flesh.” I always moved out of that bad feeling, imagining that it meant something. Other people looked at me and said, “You are fleshy.” What they said confirmed the lie that ruled in my mind. They got up and preached – I got up and preached – we preached the lie, that our hearts were evil, that we were divided, flesh versus spirit, shame versus glory. Our theology convinced us that it was right and proper to always “repent” of ourselves, as if we were something other than the glory of Christ.

A few years ago I changed the way I “interpreted” that bad feeling with my mind. For a couple of years it was a battle. I had to “make” myself stop seeing the bad feeling as something bad. I had to “make” myself see Christ in spite of the ugliness. But for the last while, it has been so much simpler. When I awake in the night feeling awful, I look at that awful “feeling” and I think, “Jesus, you are in it and it is in you.” I think of Him as very close, as my life, all of my life. The bad “feeling” then means absolutely nothing.

This one single dynamic, changing the way I see my heart – seeing the Lord Jesus there instead of interpreting its shades and nuances as being “evil,” this one thing of changing my mind is the center of all the transformation inside of me in which I rejoice. And at the center of changing my mind is the closeness of the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ inside of me. 

(I share about myself only to give you an example to follow in your own pursuit of the knowledge of the One who fills your heart.)

My heart is filled with Glory.

My mind must change until it knows nothing else. There is no “secret ingredient” yet to come.

Jesus lives in my heart, what else can be said?

The grace that is to come is the ability to know what is already true.

At the center of Jesus’ heart, and filling it with all fullness, as He walked this earth were these words, “The Father and I are One.” At the center of my heart, filling it with all fullness, are these words, “The Lord Jesus Christ and I are one.”

Why, then, do I still snap at my wife?

It has nothing to do with my heart; I love her deeply. It has everything to do with the broken pathways of my mind. My mind still remembers shame; it still remembers what is not.

Do not harm the earth, the sea, or the trees till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads. Revelation 7:3

I cast myself into this sealing of my mind by the Spirit of God with all the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ inside of me right now.

We are not talking “theology” here, we’re talking about the demonstration of the Spirit and power.

“Father, as You say, seal my mind, right here, right now. Cause all the broken pathways to be forever healed so that I see only as Jesus saw, so that I walk only as He walked.”

The time that is before us in our own personal lives right now is a complete merging of walking as Jesus walked together with seeing as He sees right now, of becoming what we are. Walking as Jesus walked (past tense) is not what we are, but it is the essential pathway to being all that He is (present tense) now.

We must remember our glory at all times and in every way to the exclusion of every lesser thought.