The song goes: “It ain’t what you do, its the way that you do it”. It is a sentiment that resonates well with Jesus’ teaching. When Peter encountered a paralysed man called Aeneas, and was then called out after the death of a woman called Tabitha, he was very careful to do things the way that Jesus did. He told the, now cured, man to sort out his bed, and in Tabitha’s house, he copied what he had seen Jesus do after the death of Jairus’ young daughter. Peter was not just doing what Jesus did, he was consciously doing it how Jesus did.
Life throws us into all sorts of challenges, and it is not always easy to know what we should do. At such times, perhaps, the key thing is to do our best to do whatever we do in the way that Jesus did something similar. When Peter found himself surrounded by the grieving friends of a much loved and now-dead woman, he didn’t immediately know what to do. So he remembered how Jesus had handled a similar situation and followed his example.
We can’t achieve this armed with a few cherry-picked Bible verses. In order to follow Jesus’ style, we need to know what Jesus’ style was. And we can only know that by reading, reflecting on, and re-reading the stories in the four Gospels. It is time well spent. The more we understand Jesus, the more we follow his way of doing things, the more fruitful our lives will be.
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