12.
WWJD? You Might Be Surprised!
Somewhere in the last couple of decades,
probably in the Nineties, the fad of wearing bracelets with the initials “WWJD”
began – the initials standing for the expression, “What Would Jesus Do?” The
idea was that the bracelets would serve as a reminder to the wearer to behave
in a Christ-like manner. (The fact that
the people wearing these bracelets would need to be reminded that
they were Christians always frightened me – if you’re not living the life of a Christian 24/7 already; if
you’re not carrying the Spirit within you already; if you haven’t been born
again in the likeness of Christ and saved in His Grace already, what good would
a little bracelet do you?) More often, they served as a badge
of honor, like wearing a cross necklace – they were intended to be an
indication that the wearer was a
Christian, and perhaps be a spark for a conversation with a non-believer that
might lead to a successful venture in the Great Commission. (OK, that sounds worthwhile. I
rescind my previous rant…)
It might surprise many of the
“trendsetters” that WWJD actually dates back to the nineties – I mean the “Gay
Nineties”, the 1890’s. (As an
aside, I’ve always been bothered that the words gay and straight
were absconded from the English vocabulary to become adjectives describing
sexual preferences.)
Charles Sheldon, a preacher from Topeka,
Kansas, converted a series of sermons he’d given into a play, featuring a
homeless man who walks into a church and is immediately looked down upon by the
well-dressed, proper parishioners of the day. His observations are as pertinent
today as they were in the nineteenth century:
"I heard some people singing
at a church prayer meeting the other night…
'All for Jesus, all for Jesus,
All my being's ransomed powers,
All my thoughts, and all my
doings,
All my days, and all my hours.'
…and I kept
wondering as I sat on the steps outside just what they meant by it. It seems to me there's an awful lot of
trouble in the world that somehow wouldn't exist if all the people who sing
such songs went and lived them out. I suppose I don't understand. But
what would Jesus do? Is that what you mean by following His steps?
It seems to me sometimes as if the people in the big churches had good clothes
and nice houses to live in, and money to spend for luxuries, and could go away
on summer vacations and all that, while the people outside the churches,
thousands of them, I mean, die in tenements, and walk the streets for jobs, and
never have a piano or a picture in the house, and grow up in misery and
drunkenness and sin."
[Sheldon, C. (1896). In His Steps. First published by the Chicago
Advance in serial form.]
As you would expect, the parishioners are struck to
the core, and several of them begin their own introspections with the same
question: What would Jesus do?
The play became a book that was hugely successful, a best-seller, translated
into a score of different languages and (I
dearly hope) a motivation for thousands of “Christian-in-name-onlies” to
rethink their beliefs and become true disciples of Christ, not just followers.
(Another aside: How many people in your church are disciples,
and how many are just followers? In the course of most people’s lives,
there comes a moment when the Lord challenges you to step out beyond your
comfort zone, to make a sacrifice you really don’t want to make.
Think back to John 6:51-61, 66-69.
51 “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of
this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life
of the world is my flesh.” 52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give
us his flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you,
unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no
life in you. 54 Whoever
feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up
on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in
him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so
whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the
fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 Jesus said these things
in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum.
60 When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying;
who can listen to it?” 61 But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about
this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this?”
66 After this many of his disciples turned back and no
longer walked with him. 67 So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” 68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we
go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that
you are the Holy One of God.”
When it was cool, trendy, easy to follow
Jesus, multitudes did. But when His “sayings” became “hard”, “many of his disciples turned back and no
longer walked with Him” (6:66, a very appropriate chapter and verse number for the occasion). Followers
aren’t saved Christians; they go to church for appearances, or the social
atmosphere, or whatever their own reasons are – not for Christ. Disciples
are there for Christ.
To be born again, to be saved, to have
your eternal ticket punched for the up escalator rather than down,
you must do more than just obey Christ’s teaching when it’s EASY. You’ve got to
obey Him when it’s HARD, too, as Peter and the apostles did in verses 68-69.
That’s
enough aside for one chapter. Back to our main feature…)
The “WWJD” movement was revived in the more recent
Nineties, the 1990s, by a church youth group in Michigan, and it spread
throughout the United States and beyond. Like a family, where the children are
expected to emulate their parents, the concept of WWJD is that we as children
of the Lord are expected to emulate Christ’s behaviors when He walked the
earth.
So, what
were those behaviors?
Many of them we’ve touched on already in this book, of
course. The most obvious one is the cliché – “God is Love”. We are indeed expected to “love our neighbor as we love ourselves”, which Christ calls the
second commandment, almost as important as the first (Love your God with all of your mind and soul and heart and strength).
We are to love even those we dislike, which is
the most difficult aspect, of course, but here again relating God to
Fatherhood will help us understand this better:
If you grew
up in a family with more than one other sibling, there was probably one of
those siblings that you disliked more often than you did the others. Not all
the time, perhaps – most often, it’d be the one closest to you in age, probably
the same or similar gender, or the one you shared a bedroom with; if all three
were the same sibling, bingo.
But if push
came to shove and something were to happen to that sibling? You’re probably the
first one by their side, in the hospital room or wherever. Disliking
your brother or sister didn’t mean you didn’t love them. I can guarantee
that as a parent, there are moments when although I love my children as much as
humanly possible, I may not like one or more of them very much; after a
particularly terrible behavior, for example. Same thing held true when I was
growing up and my mom or dad would do something or demand something that
irritated me no end, especially when my busy schedule said I was supposed to be
outside playing that afternoon instead of doing the chores I was being
assigned. My love for my family members never changes, but my like
for them may go up and down.
What other
behaviors WJD? Help others in need…always tell the truth…stand
up for what’s right…share wisdom and knowledge wherever
appropriate…pray as often as possible (and probably much more than you’re already doing)…all that sort of
thing.
But if you’re not
a student of Scripture, you might be surprised what else falls under the WWJD umbrella…and as a parent, there’s one particular
incident that we need to point out to you. This is Mark 11:15-17,
occurring on the Monday of the Passion week, the final week of Jesus’ earthly
life. Ã
15 And they
came to Jerusalem. And He entered the
temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the
temple, and He overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of
those who sold pigeons. 16 And He would not allow anyone to
carry anything through the temple. 17 And He was teaching them and saying
to them, “Is it
not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’?
But you have made it a den of robbers.”
The Temple in Jerusalem was a huge building,
and its outer vestiges were filled with
vendors who considered it their duty to help
the travelling folks who came to temple to sacrifice an animal to pay for their
sins; these vendors would sell the
travelers animals to sacrifice, which would probably have been fine except for
the incredible profit margin they insisted on adding to their price (the reading I’ve done suggests they
generally charged double the worth of the animals). In a capitalist venue,
maybe that would have been all right – but within the Temple of God, Who
expressly forbid such profiteering
off other believers ever since the Exodus? No. That will never do,
thought Jesus, undoubtedly.
So Christ calmly walked into the Temple complex and
made a huge disruptive scene. And when
Jesus makes a scene… “He entered the
Temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the
temple, AND He overturned to tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those
who sold pigeons.” (11:15) Basically, He became a one-man whirlwind,
moving quickly from table to table and flipping them over, causing as much
havoc as He reasonably could. (Yes, He
could theoretically have “called twelve legions of angels”, as He told us all
in Gethsemane, but that wasn’t the point. He was trying to make a scene!)
The Man who had spent three years trying to play down His true nature had
decided upon entering Jerusalem to a parade of followers on donkey-back that it
was time to stir the pot. His accusation (“But you have made it a den of robbers”) was just as blunt as His
actions. I’m sure He looked like a madman to all of those folks just trying to
make a dishonest living!
BUT…don’t think that means that if we emulate Christ,
we can simply “fly off the handle” at a moment’s notice! There’s one more verse we need to consider
before we get the full picture of this event, and it took place the night
before, the Sunday night following the Triumphal Entry, just before heading
back to Bethany to spend the night. This is John 11:11:
11And he
entered Jerusalem and went into the
temple. And when he had looked around at everything, as it was already
late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.
Jesus had scoped the Temple out the night before! His
seemingly impulsive rampage was a carefully-planned
and staged rampage. He knew exactly
what He was going to do when He walked into town the next morning – there was
none of this “suddenly flying into a
rage”, as the incident is often depicted. Even without the access to the omniscience of God the Father while He
was a human, Christ was careful to think out His actions in advance. He knew
what would happen, more or less, during the last week of His life – not
because He was God, but because He planned, He pushed people’s “buttons”
to get them to do what He needed them to do, and as you’ll read later in “Saturday”, He manipulated Judas and
Pilate and Herod into doing exactly what He needed them to do.
As a
parent, being “angry” with your children can be an effective “tool” in your
arsenal – IF you use it
correctly, with forethought, and NEVER fly off-the-cuff. We’ve seen that
tactic from God the Father earlier, when the golden calf “just jumped out of
the pot” at Mount Sinai, and in other places as well. But God always
plans ahead, if only because “ahead” has no real meaning for a being outside of
time and space. Even when Moses thought he was “talking God out of a
spur-of-the-moment reaction”, God knew what He was doing the whole time.
Don’t let
your anger get the best of you, EVER. But especially with your children!
If you ever feel like you’re going to fly off the handle with them
– and particularly if you feel an urge to use physical force on a
child of ANY age – STOP. Do
whatever you have to in order to catch your breath: walk away for a few
moments, a couple of minutes, whatever it takes. Send them to their rooms until
you’re prepared to deal rationally with your anger. This holds true no matter what the age of the child! If the child’s
an infant, they’ll survive a couple of minutes without you there, especially if
the alternative is that you’d be using physical forms of reaction on them! If
the “kid” is in his or her twenties, you be the one you send to your
room if need be until you’re equipped to handle the situation.
Anger is
not a forbidden tool. Undisciplined anger IS.
But when someone tries to say “Ah-ah-ah! What would Jesus do?”
Don’t be afraid to answer, “He might be flipping every table in this building upside down and
scattering everybody out of the room in fear!”
