Live Like Jesus

If you went on a YouthWorks trip this summer, you heard all about how Jesus demonstrated how to live, love and serve. At home, we hope you’ll keep thinking about ways you can live like Jesus every day! That’s why, each Thursday for 5 weeks, we’ll post a new reflection helping you apply the same ideas you heard on your mission trip to your everyday life back home.

I was a very bad piano student. In grade school, I would show up to lessons having neglected to play a single note since the week before. My teacher didn’t have much patience for this. I distinctly remember her turning to me one day and letting her frustration overflow: “You’re wasting my time, you’re wasting your time and you’re wasting your parents’ money.” It was a rough start. But things eventually got better.

Let me clarify: My practice habits didn’t improve greatly. But what made piano better was Eleanor Froehlick [froi-lik]. She was this little elderly woman with knotty knuckles and big glasses who replaced my previous teacher on the bench. I spent hours sitting next to her, struggling to play bar after bar of music, often messing up the tempo, until she would reach in and her wrinkled hands would dance across the keys before me with just the right rhythm. And I would try again.

There were weeks when I had practiced a lot and gotten a little better, and she would pat me on the shoulder and say, “You’re doing great.” There were many other weeks when I wasn’t any better than the week before, and she would say, “It’s OK. Let’s work on this together.” She would then demonstrate, and I would follow.

Looking back at those piano lessons, I learned a lot from Mrs. Froelick’s patient teaching, and I know I would have never been able to understand some of those notes and tempos without her patiently demonstrating them first.

A great demo is exactly what I want these reflections to be about. I expect that you have probably seen tons of demos in your life. If you’ve ever taken a language class, you’ve heard the teacher demonstrate how to correctly say a word. If you’ve gone through CPR training, you saw a video demoing how to do chest compressions. One of my favorite demonstrations ever is the demo of how to beat Super Mario Bros in 5 minutes!

Now, I think learning how to do chest compressions, how to pronounce a word in another language, how to beat Mario and, yes, how to play the right piano tempos are great skills to learn, but there are also some bigger things to learn, aren’t there? Like, how do I love someone who is hard to love? Or, how can I live a good life for God? Or, how do I keep focused on what’s most important when there are so many important things happening? It’s unlikely that a YouTube video is going to show me what I should do. But there is one demo that shows us how to do all of those things and much more.

Go ahead and read about this demo in John 13. As you read, consider how the disciples, who had committed themselves to following Jesus, must have felt about Jesus’ actions.

Read John 13:1–12a.

What you’ve read so far sets the stage for what Jesus says next. But before you read on, pause for a moment and consider what just happened. Jesus was the teacher who the disciples respected, loved and followed; Jesus is the Lord of all things! But washing dirty feet was the job of a house slave. The disciples were shocked to see what Jesus was doing.

Imagine how you’d feel if someone you really respected showed up one afternoon to scrub down your dirty bathroom and do all your smelly laundry for you. You might have the same knee-jerk reaction Peter does: “Thanks for the offer, but please don’t bother. I can take care of it.” But by washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus was showing them what it looks like to humbly love and serve others – no matter what the task.

With this in mind, go ahead and read what Jesus says next.

Read John 13:12b–17.

I love what Jesus says in those verses. His disciples already know that he is “Lord” and “Teacher” and Jesus agrees with them. He says, “Hey! You’re right! I am Lord and I am Teacher.” But Jesus doesn’t stop there, and he says his followers shouldn’t stop there either. If they really believe these things about Jesus, then they need to do something about it! And Jesus sums up what that “something” is when he says this: