Living the Good Life: Jesus' Blueprint for Fulfillment

The journey to becoming a good person, as Jesus taught, begins with an internal transformation. This transformation is not about merely adhering to external behaviors but about cultivating a renovated heart, as Dallas Willard describes. It involves trusting Jesus with our whole lives and learning to live like Him, moment by moment. [00:03:03]

Blessed, he says, are the poor in spirit. The good life comes to even unlikely candidates. That word is always a little tricky to translate. Some translations simply say happy. The poor in spirit, those who mourn, not because those are happy conditions but because now life together with God in his kingdom is available to absolutely anybody. [00:02:36]

The most fundamental thing is to be clear on what an apprentice of Jesus is. It's people who have learned to trust Jesus with our whole lives and therefore make our ultimate goal trying to be with him from one moment to the next to learn from him how to live like him. [00:03:49]

Two different though inseparable aspects of discipleship need to be singled out. The first is what we might in misleading language describe as the specifically religious aspect. Here we are learning to understand and do the things Jesus gave us in specific commandments and teachings. [00:04:13]

While developed in the gatherings of disciples, this learning is only completed as we take it into all our life activities, especially at home and at work, and increasingly practiced there as a matter of course. The things that Jesus taught, so those are the direct teachings. [00:05:50]

A second aspect of discipleship concerns all the details of what for lack of a better term we call our secular, our non-churchy life. How do you run a business, how do you live with your parents, or live with a maid or raise a family, how do you get along with neighbors? [00:06:14]

In these matters of ordinary human existence also, Jesus is our constant teacher and we his constant apprentices. He walks with me and he talks with me as the old hymn says about all these matters. Nothing is too small, nothing is too ordinary. [00:07:11]

To be an apprentice of Jesus means taking something as ordinary and as walking and beginning to do it with him. What we do with our bodies impacts our souls. I was out running real early this morning and I remembered both Dallas and my son Johnny talked about how you cannot skip and be sad. [00:09:42]

How would Jesus stamp an envelope? Would he do it with a little pizzazz, with a little elegance, with a little style, with a desire that when people get that envelope they say oh there must be something special going on here. And there is no detail too small to be unable to reflect the beauty and goodness. [00:11:09]

We are learning from Jesus not just the big religious stuff, love your enemies, don't swear, that's all good, we try to obey all that. How do you walk, how do you put a stamp on an envelope, that's the invitation today, guard your heart. [00:11:48]

The reason why these courses at such august institutions are popular is because of a basic truth about human beings. Far, far more than we need to know how to make a living, we need to know how to make a life. How should we live our lives, where do we find wisdom? [00:01:44]

He would do those things if he were we, and they are not just matters of keeping his commandments, though they presuppose that we are seeking with his help to keep his commandments. But way beyond that, in these matters of ordinary human existence also, Jesus is our constant teacher. [00:07:01]