Make Jesus your Standard and Example!

Today and tomorrow, I want to point out to you four simple facts, each of which is a reason why we should continue to focus on Jesus.

The first one is this: Jesus is our Lord. We can only enter into salvation through confessing Jesus as our Lord. If He is our Lord, then our supreme purpose is to please Him. That is what it means when we say that He is our Lord. We need to continually keep our eyes on Jesus, to make sure that everything we are doing pleases Him. If at any time, as we look at Him, we get an indication that what we are considering would not please Him, that is a sufficient reason for not doing it. But we cannot receive such an indication unless we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.

The second one is Jesus is the only standard of righteousness. This is brought out by a statement that Paul made to the men of Athens:

“[God] has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.” (Acts 17:31 NKJV)

The one who is going to be God’s Judge of the world is the Man whom He raised from the dead, Jesus Christ. God is going to judge the world in righteousness by that Man.

That tells us two things: Jesus is the Judge, and He is also our standard of righteousness. We are going to be judged by the standard of Jesus. It is important to see that God has only one standard of righteousness. If we want to know what is righteous in the eyes of God, the ultimate place we must look is always Jesus. We may look at Christians, but they do things that Jesus would not have done. We cannot accept them as our standard of righteousness, because they are not God’s standard. To find out God’s standard of righteousness, we must keep our eyes focused on Jesus.

The third one is: Jesus is our pattern or our example, as we see in the book of First Peter:

“To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.” (1 Peter 2:21)

Jesus is our example because He has gone before us. To follow in the right path, we must see where He planted His steps and plant our foot-steps in the same places. All of that is involved in this one important requirement: that we focus on Jesus by keeping our eyes fixed on Him.

(The small booklet ‘God’s Will for your Life’ may be of help for you to follow Jesus in His footsteps.)