Getting To Know Jesus
Better and Better

Who is this Jesus, this Savior we talk about more during the Christmas season? Please join us as we try to get to know Him better.

We can never be like Jesus because He is Jesus and we are not. He is worthy and we are not. But we can know Him better and become more like Him tomorrow than we are today. To do so, we must learn and understand more about Him. We must get to know Him better and better:

Why is knowing Jesus important? Because we cannot have faith in God until we know Jesus. When we believe Jesus as He says, "He that has seen Me has seen the Father," God becomes real to us, and faith has no boundaries.

Once we ask Jesus into our hearts as our Savior and Lord, our life totally changes. My goal is no longer self-realization. My purpose, instead, is to know Jesus better. In everything!

Jesus is Light. The Light, of the world. Without the Holy Spirit of Jesus in my heart, I can only know, experience, darkness. It  is the Light that makes  you and me children of God. With The Light within us also comes the Power  of God, the Power that raised Jesus from the dead, to shine His light on everyone else.

With the Holy Spirit, The Light of Christ, within me, my circumstances will never again be haphazard. Every circumstance is now a means of knowing Jesus better. I can realize Jesus in every domain of my life.

As I know Jesus better, I no longer exalt my work. Instead, I exalt Jesus in my work. In fact, no matter what I am doing, eating or playing or helping a neighbor, I must remember that Jesus Christ is right there with me. 

Getting to know Jesus helps us abandon ourselves and hide with Him in God. It is not easy because it is not natural. Only a child is simple enough to do it. But we can learn from Jesus to approach every day, every circumstance with the simple faith of a child.

And when we are simple enough, God gives us our life.

Our life becomes His Life. He lives within us. And gradually within His time, in His Light, we begin to see through the darkness of this world and know that, if the Spirit of God lives within us, He will make our dying bodies live again after we die.

We know this as we become close friends with the Son of God.

And we become the most surprised and delighted creatures on earth!

Jesus already knows us. He wants us to know Him. The Godly teacher Oswald Chambers said, "We slander God by our very eagerness to work for Him without knowing Him."

There is much to know:

- Jesus was with God in heaven before anything else was created. He is Himself God and He created everything.

- Jesus walked through the Garden of Eden in what is now Iraq when Adam and Eve committed mankind's first sins. We know it was Jesus because, unlike God,  He had a physical body and will have through eternity. Those who walk with Jesus on earth, spiritually, will also walk with him in reality forever in heaven.

 - Through Jesus' Cross, every human being can enter into the life of God. Through His resurrection, He has the right to give eternal life to anyone. Through His ascension, Jesus entered heaven and keeps the door open for us -- waiting for us to decide to walk in faith with Him.

- Eternal life is in Jesus and this life gives light to all mankind.

- As predicted hundreds of years before His birth on Earth, Jesus was an Israelite from the nation founded by Abraham, a descendant of King David from the tribe of Judah. He became human to live among us, to become the sacrificial Lamb of God.

- He was born of a virgin in the town of Bethlehem, spent a period of his childhood in Egypt, then lived in Nazareth.

- "Jesus Christ" combines the personal name Jesus with the title Christ. He was and is a man, the central figure of the human race, and also the great High Priest, the anointed, the Messiah, who sits at the right hand of God to intercede for His people.

- Jesus left the wealth of heaven to serve the poor of Palestine.

- He worked miracles and healed the sick and handicapped.

- He came, not to condemn the world, but to save it.

- He came into our world to teach us how to live.

- He came to buy freedom for us, so God could adopt us as His own children. And because we are His children, God sent the Holy Spirit of Jesus into our hearts so we may speak to God as our own dear Father.

- Jesus was humble, pure, full of loving forgiveness and truth, and absolutely devoted to God.

- He called those who knew Him "friends." In His mind, Jesus had no enemies.

- He also called His friends His "sheep."  They hear the voice of "The Good Shepherd" and He knows them, and they follow Him. He gives them eternal life, and nothing can separate the sheep from their Shepherd.

- This "friendship" is based  on the new life created in us. We can no longer relate to our old life, but only with the life of God. It is a life of humility, purity, and absolute devotion to God. When we fail, and we will, Jesus is right there to help.

- As children of God, adopted into His family, we also become little brothers and sisters of Jesus. We need only to follow the example of our older Brother to unite our souls with the Father by His indwelling Spirit, and to achieve our purpose: to become One with the Father like Jesus did.

- Friendship with Jesus means we identify with Him in thought, heart, and spirit. As we discipline ourselves to lknow His Word, took for Jesus in every circumstance,to look for His interest in every person we meet, we receive His blessings. Yet, we still may not know Him.

- To know Jesus better and better takes time. And a slow walk with Him through life.

- Jesus rejoices when one of us, you or me, takes time to step more intimately with Him. In order to learn from Him. As we learn, as we know Him better, He will prune us back so that we can naturally bear fruit for His Kingdom.

- With intimate friendship comes the realization of how much Jesus loves us. He says, "I have loved you even as the Father has loved me."

- As we know Him better, we will want to live within His love, meaning we will obey Jesus just as He obeyed God the Father and lived within His love.

- Jesus tell us He loves us so that we may be filled, even overflow, with joy. Rejoice! And love one another.

- Jesus demands that we love one another.

- He can only make demands of those who call Him "Master." Can we be intimate with a "Master?" Yes, in the same way Jesus was intimate with God. By trusting, loving, and obeying. When we, walking with Jesus, can trust and obey Him, we will bear fruit without even trying, more fruit than we can ever know or imagine.

- He no longer calls us slaves. Now we are His friends. And as we find joys we never dreamed existed.  As we continue to walk and to learn from our Friend, we are never lonely, we never need sympathy, we can pour out Jesus' Light with God's love without being pathetic or expecting anything in return. Each day we can be more like Jesus..

- Jesus wasn't religious -- not even spiritual -- but He walked with God.

- He was willing to be simply Himself. No other friends, no parents, no brothers, no self-interest. Simply ready for death.

- Jesus says to us, "Come unto me." And then He waits. And waits. And waits.
   And waits......

- He does not give us rules and regulations, only truths that must be interpreted by a disposition He puts into us.

- Our Father's purity becomes our motives, our dreams, and our lives when we allow Jesus in and He brings in His own disposition to remake us.

- His Sermon on the Mount describes the life we can live when the Holy Spirit of Jesus is controlling us.

- Jesus teaches us about love by loving us. He loves us so much, in fact, it breaks our hearts to break His. We finally begin serving Christ for who He is and we learn to love like He does, letting Him love through us.

- Love is God's nature, but we have to learn it by walking with Jesus and obeying Him.

- Jesus says, "Feed my sheep," knowing He has some goofy sheep, some dirty, some angry, some straying sheep. Yet God loves each one, and if we love Jesus, we must feed His sheep. When we do, we experience the Joy of pleasing the Shepherd.

- Jesus did not say, "Make my sheep converts to your way of thinking." We are to "feed" His sheep, look after them, encourage them, see they are nourished in the knowledge of Jesus.

- Jesus told us to be perfect, just like God. To demonstrate that Christian perfection, we are to be generous in our relationships with all men and women, even those we don't like, an impossibility had not God transformed us within..

- It is natural to like some people and dislike others. But Jesus says we cannot be natural, we must show to others what God shows us. Grace. Though we might have no interest at all in some people, we must identify with God's interest in them. Deliberately.

- Jesus trusted no one, yet he was never suspicious of anyone, never bitter toward anyone. His confidence in God, and in how God's grace can change people, is so perfect he never views anyone as hopeless.

- Our Lord is willing and able to walk on the chaos of our lives today.  If He can walk on water, he can walk with us on anything. Walking with us is His purpose. Walking  with Him in whatever we do is our success. And our joy.

- As we walk with Jesus, He teaches us about His Father, about Grace, and about obedience. As we obey, He teaches others. Only Jesus can teach. He may teach through His church, through God's Word, through His Creation, and through Little Christs. Our purpose is to walk with Him, obey Him, wait on Him, and leave the consequences, the results, to Him.

- As we walk together, Jesus reveals Himself to us, and we serve Him in the ordinary ways of life out of devotion to Him. There is no call to serve; it is our own little echo of our identification with the nature of God.

- As we walk and serve, as we "multitask, others may glimpse God's nature in us. That is how Jesus teaches.

- Sometimes, we ourselves may try so hard to teach, we prevent Jesus from doing it.

- When Jesus walked the earth, he welcomed children and the childlike into His life.

- Walking with Jesus through today's world, we encounter difficult circumstances, but Jesus tells us to be of good cheer (to laugh) because He has overcome the world.

- As we keep our eyes on Jesus, circumstances don't matter. We can walk on water. If we take our eyes off Jesus and look at our circumstances, we are overwhelmed. We sink. We must let circumstances be what they are and keep recognizing Jesus.

- Jesus steadfastly sought, not His own will, but the will of His father, who sent him.

- After Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, in Jerusalem, and on the mountain top, Jesus began to preach, "Turn from sin, and turn to God, for the Kingdom of heaven is near."

- Just as Jesus took the twelve, He takes us, all the time, not for what we can do for Him but what He can do for us. 

- Jesus lived in another world, inwardly disconnected from this world, but  He was not aloof. He devoted Himself to sinners, lepers, tax collectors, anyone who needed hope. When we, like Jesus, are dedicated to God's interest in every person and every circumstance, He sets us apart from sin and makes us holy. He does it, we don't. Our job is to look for Him in everyone and everything.

- We are of no value to God. That is why He chose us. Jesus can do nothing with those who think they are of use to Him. But blessed are the spiritually poor.

- Jesus' life was a complete failure to everyone but to God. But what seemed like failure to those who didn't understand was a wondrous victory to God.

- When Jesus saw the people wanted to make Him their king, he went higher into the mountains alone.

- Jesus thanked His Father for hiding the truth from those who thought themselves so wise, and for revealing His truth to little children.

- Jesus tells those who are listening to come to Him and He would give them rest.

- Jesus claims to be a gentle and humble teacher and offers rest for the souls of students who wear His perfect-fitting yoke, promising the burdens would be light.

- He asks us, not to decide for Him, but to yield to Him. When we do, He blesses us in our poverty.

- Jesus prayed for us and, thus, taught us to pray for others. By doing so, we reach God.

- As we pray and walk with Jesus, we see Him in the most common people and everyday things around us. When we see the sparrows, doves, finches, and cardinals suddenly fly away from our backyard and never collide with each other, we also see God protecting them -- right in our back yard!

- As our own interests narrow and our interests in God broaden, we begin to want God to do in us all the things He separated us for, particularly to be made one with Jesus so the disposition that rules Him will rule us.

- Jesus asked John to baptize Him because He had to do all that was right.

- When we repent and when Jesus himself baptizes us with His Holy Spirit, our only conscious experience is a sense of absolute unworthiness.

- Jesus stays beside us and within us as we grow up in Him.

- Jesus wants us to put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, being gentle and ready to forgive, always remembering God forgave us so we must forgive others.

- Jesus wants us to understand forgiveness is the divine miracle of grace. God cannot forgive. It is not His nature. We can be forgiven only through the Cross of Jesus and its enormous cost to God. When once we realize what it cost God to forgive us, we are held and constrained by His love.

- Jesus himself often slipped away to lonely places (the wilderness) and prayed.

- Jesus tells us to do as He did and go into a secret place to pray. God is there waiting. In our secret place, we become more sure of God than anything else. And when we open our souls to God in secret, he goes with us everywhere else.

- Jesus delights to do the will of His Father, sacrificing Himself for God and for His friends with indescribable joy.

- Jesus wants us to be His friends. He wants us to identify with Him in thought, heart, and spirit. He already identifies with us.

- When we become friends with Jesus, we can live a life of strong calm sanity, a life that makes it easier for others to see Jesus in us.

- Jesus said, "Let not your heart be troubled." Whatever the problem or circumstance, fret not, don't be disturbed. Don't try to worry it out. Instead, confer with Jesus, and He will leave you with a gift -- "peace of mind and heart."

- Jesus prayed that our joy might evolve into the same joy as His. Jesus' joy was the absolute giving of Himself to His Father.

- Jesus came to save us because we were created to be holy. He said, "You must be holy, for I am holy."

- In all of human history, only Jesus was holy, and it is His holiness that God puts into us. As new spiritual creatures identified with the Cross, we have to keep letting go of sin, and as we let go, Eternal Life -- the Life that is in Jesus -- invades every part of us. And others will know we walk with Jesus.

- When Jesus calls us to follow Him, to be His friend, His sheep, His little brothers and sisters, we become constrained, or gripped, by the love of God. We no longer care what others think of us. We live only to persuade others of God's judgment and of the love of Christ.

- Giving ourselves totally to the love of Jesus is the one thing that bears fruit in our lives. Fruitfulness is when others see the holiness and power of God, never our personal holiness.

- The resurrection of Jesus is the power of God. When we break away from our own spiritual concerns and dwell on the tragedy of  God, Christ on the cross, we can know the power of God in our own flesh. The energy of the  cross is released in our lives and good things happen. When we dwell on the cross, Jesus does  his own work.

- Jesus came to make us what He teaches we should be.

- Jesus wants his brothers and sisters to love each other just as He loves us. Our strong love for each other will prove to the world we are His disciples.

- When we walk with Jesus, we need not fret about sharing His love. We do it automatically without even knowing it.

- The Apostle John heard Jesus say He loves His friends just as God loves Him. and then twice Jesus demanded His friends love one another as much as He loves them.

- Jesus said, when we obey Him and love each other, we are living in His love and our "cup," our life, overflows with joy.

- Just as Jesus did not condemn the world, we are never to find fault or condemn each other. Other brothers and sisters in Christ are God's servants, not ours; responsible to Him, not us. He will tell them whether they are right or wrong, and He is able to make them do as they should.

- In Jesus' life, every project, every thought is disciplined to the will of His Father. Jesus can do nothing of Himself. To emulate Jesus, we must take every project prisoner to make it obey Christ.

- When we obey Christ in one project, instantly He reveals the next. His wisdom, His will is revealed to us when we obey. He will never reveal more about Himself until we obey what we know already.

- Jesus did the most menial and commonplace things. He washed his followers' dirty feet and said, "I have given you an example to follow: do as I have done..."

- When a terrible storm frightens His followers, and they awaken Him, Jesus rebukes the wind and says to the sea, "Quiet down!" And the wind falls, and there is a great calm.

- Jesus demands absolute obedience from us, because he has put into us the very nature of God, the love of God. Thus, he demands we destroy our prejudices, our patriotisms, and our own ideas, and maintain our souls open to God's creative purpose.

- As followers, brothers, sisters, friends of Jesus, our aim is not to be useful, not to win the lost, but with Jesus in our hearts, it is to get to know God better and better until we do His will without even thinking about it. God will be useful; He will win the lost. He may do it through us, but our only aim is to do His will.

- Jesus teaches us to give ourselves. As God loved us so much He gave His only son, and as Jesus loved His Father enough to die for our salvation, we also can give ourselves absolutely to God and to others. Salvation delivers us out of ourselves entirely into union with God. The Holy Spirit brings us into God's personality, absolute abandonment to love, to giving.

- Jesus started his public ministry with His friends at a wedding feast. He ended it by preparing a simple seaside breakfast for them.

- Jesus was homeless. He had no place to lay his head.

- Jesus takes us, his friends, to the mountaintop to see His glory and feel His power. But we can't live His glory on the mountaintop, so we can't stay there. We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff, to walk with Jesus among the devil-possessed, to lift them up.

- Jesus urges us to build up ourselves on our most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, laboring along the line of the Father's direction, laboring in prayer.

- We must be devoted to Jesus. Who He is is the source of our devotion.  His first obedience was to His Father, not to our needs. But, praise God, our Salvation was a natural outgrowth of His obedience.

- To love Jesus personally and passionately is the purpose of our lives.

- Jesus wants us to pray because prayer is the key to the harvest. We pray to the Owner of the harvest. Prayer produces fruit, but it is prayer based, not on our agony, but on the agony of Christ's Redemption.

- Jesus tells us what to do, but He never makes us do it. He does not give us rules. He makes his standard clear, and when my relationship to Him is based on love, I do what he says automatically. When I obey, I fulfill my spiritual destiny, and the Redemption of God rushes through me to other lives.

- Jesus expects to do with us the same way His Father did with Him. He can place us in joyful situations and in unpleasant difficult circumstances.  Wherever he places us, there is joy because he stays right beside us all the time.

- When I get into difficult circumstances, when I struggle down into myself to reach Christ's living water, I must remember He is Almighty. I have limitations, He doesn't. I must not limit Jesus by forgetting He is all powerful.

- Jesus wants us to learn the purpose in life is God's, not ours. All He asks is that we trust Him completely. When I stop telling God what I want, He can catch me up on what He wants.

- Jesus says emphatically to everyone who listens to His message and believes in God the Father has eternal life, and will never be condemned for his sins, but already has passed out of death into life.

- Jesus entered Jerusalem as a triumphant king riding on a donkey.

- Jesus was betrayed by a friend for 30 pieces of silver and this money was used to buy a Potter's Field, a grave yard for the poor.

- His hands and feet were pierced and nailed to a cross. He prayed for those who did not know what they were doing.

- He died with criminals on both sides of Him.

- Though guards broke the legs of the criminals beside him, not a bone in Jesus' body was broken.

- While He hang on the cross, guards gambled for His clothes.

- His dying words, foretold hundreds of years before: "It is finished!"

- He was buried in a tomb borrowed from a wealthy man, who had been one of His secret followers.

- Jesus was in the tomb three days, then rose from the dead.

- He died on a cross so that we might be forgiven. He was raised from the dead by God's infinite power.

- The agony of the cross was Jesus fulfilling His destiny as Savior of the world. Because of what Jesus endured on the cross, every human being, including you and I, can now talk directly to God, can enter into union with God.

- The cross of Jesus is the center of salvation. It is the gateway into His life. His resurrection gives Him the power to give His life to you and I.

- Jesus rose to a new life that had never been before. One day we can have a body like His, but today we can know Him in the power of the resurrection.

- Entering into union with God brings His Holy Spirit to guide us into a new Eternal Life, working in us here and now. The Holy Spirit can work in us the very nature of Jesus if we obey Him.

- At this moment, Jesus represents us, His friends, as our advocate at God's right hand.

- Jesus will return to judge all people -- and provide believers life with Him forever.

- Jesus hates the wrong in us. The Cross was the estimate of His hatred. Yet the Cross heard the greatest sound of love and victory ever uttered in a lost universe: "It is finished," the last word in the redemptive salvation of mankind.

- Jesus came to serve others, and to walk with Him we also must serve others. He tell us, in fact, the more lowly our service to others, the greater we are.

- Jesus stresses humility in His teaching, and challenges us to eat and drink, walk and talk, whatever we do, do it to the glory of God. Thus, the most lowly things we do are ordained of God.

- Jesus, who knew no sin, was humble and He stresses to us the humble repentant sinner is forgiven while the proud self-righteous sinner will be humbled.

- Jesus became sin, taking the massed sin of the human race onto his shoulders, so He might make the sinner a saint.

- We can't be like Jesus. It's impossible because He is perfect and holy and we are not. But we can obey Him and walk with Him. And when we do that, He comes into our lives and we begin to share the blessing and joy of His perfection and His holiness.

- Our commitment to God allows the Holy Spirit to share with us the holiness of Jesus. We are still living, but a part of Christ is also living in us.

- As we walk with Jesus, like Him, we seek only to please God. Other ambitions may be tempting, so we must live facing Jesus, and He helps us relate everything in our lives to our master ambition.

- Jesus tells us to constantly restate to ourselves the purpose of our life -- not health, not happiness, but holiness. I need to be holy, I believe God can come into me and make me holy. Jesus came to save us because God created us to be holy. And we needed help.

- I need Jesus' help to walk, talk, think, and bring every detail of my life under God's scrutiny. For one purpose, my purpose, your purpose, to be holy.

- Jesus teaches us we not only can walk with Him, but we also can delight in a real friendship with God. Since God knows our needs before we ask, the point of prayer is to get to know God better, to become one with God. When that happens, when our relationship is right with God, we live a life of freedom and delight.

- Just as we trusted Christ to save us, He wants us to trust Him, too, for each day's problems; to live in vital union with Him, to let our roots grow into Him, and let our lives overflow with joy and thanksgiving.

- To know Jesus is to love Jesus. And no man has ever seen, heard or even imagined what wonderful things God has ready for those who love Jesus.

As we study and pray and try to know Jesus better and better, we can add to the above. Meeting Jesus regularly in prayer can add immeasurably to our knowledge of Him, building a relationship begun with factual knowledge. I pray that you will join in this never-ending effort.

And May God bless you with an ever-increasing knowledge of our Lord and Savior,.our Shepherd, our Big Brother -- and our best friend.