“To live in the kingdom means to live within the range of God’s effective will with his life flowing through mine. Another good way of putting this is to say that as a disciple I am learning from Jesus to live my life as he would live my life if he were I. I am not necessarily learning to do everything he did, of course: but I am learning how to do everything I do in the manner and from the source from which he did all that he did.”
The old adage "what would Jesus do?" is only partly right. It is right in the sense of looking to the way of Jesus and the implications for our life. It is wrong in that it assumes we live the same life as Jesus, but the scriptures do not speak directly of the complexities of life in 2018. There are no texts that discuss internet usage, democracies, genetically modified foods, etc. But this does not leave us without direction. The scriptures do speak, at length, about the kind of person Jesus was, and here is where we find a better question to ask ourselves. As Willard notes, we must subtly re-write the WWJD question as, "What would Jesus do if he were I?" At the other end of this question we begin to wrestle with our own complexities in our own cultural moment. The question for our following of Jesus is not how to do everything Jesus did, but rather, how would Jesus do all the things I have to do if he lived my life. In this way, our apprenticeship is more practically grounded. It becomes a call to embody the everyday practices of Jesus, recognizing that Jesus’ call is to become the kind of person he was. Put another way, to become the kind of person for whom the way of the Kingdom of God is the natural outpouring of our lives, to “learn how to do everything I do in the manner and from the source from which he did all that he did.”
