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Letter to a Young Man Desiring to Follow Jesus

God also chooses to use His people in each other’s lives as instruments of grace and truth.  We need each other! I came to Jesus in high school, and I had close friends who studied the Bible together, prayed together, and read great books together. We stayed away from the things that tempted us toward evil. We asked each other how we were doing in our walk with God. Find friends like that. They might not just naturally come your way. Look for them. Seek them. Hang on to them.

Of course, it’s not just accountability to people that keeps us from sin. Our primary accountability is to the Lord whose judgment seat is the only one we will stand before. God that says “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3). He has given us in Christ all the resources we need to live lives of character, which includes moral purity. God alone can mold your character to the image of Christ, yet you yourself must make the choice to submit to His transforming work. “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (Romans 12:2).

2.  Practice Social Justice.

There are many definitions of “social justice” in the world today. We need to define this term according to what God says, understanding that when we follow Jesus, we will sometimes look like conservatives, sometimes liberals. But what we look like to people shouldn’t matter. What we look like to God, the Audience of One, should.

Micah 6:8 says, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” This verse lays out three requirements which our King will hold us accountable for: justice, mercy, and humility. The more we walk with God, the more we will be characterized by these attributes.

We should ask ourselves: are we dealing honestly and fairly with others, and caring and intervening for the weak, vulnerable and oppressed? (Or are we compromising in matters of morals and integrity, and passively accepting society’s mistreatment of those for whom God says we should speak up?)

One caution: if your life is centered on being against evils as abortion, pornography, sex trafficking, and racial injustice, that single issue isn’t enough. To endure in a cause, make sure it’s really about Jesus. And then keep reminding yourself it’s about Him, lest you end up really making it about you and your feelings of self-righteousness as you congratulate yourself for being spiritually impressive and better than those smug conservatives or foolish liberals:  “The King will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, as you did it for one of the least of these brothers, you did it to me’” (Matthew 25:40).

My family and I have stood against abortionists, and I have confronted adulterers, not because we hate them, but because we love God and the people He has created. Certainly, we should hate abuse in all its forms—God calls upon us to defend the poor and needy. But some people hate evil more than they love good. While love strengthens you for the long haul, hatred has a way of embittering you and burning you out.

3. Have Mellowness of Heart and Spirit.

I’m guessing that you might have meant “meekness,” which is another word for “gentleness”? Either way, God is clear how He wants His children to act: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:21-22). Our need today is for Christ-followers who bear the fruit of the Spirit and love our neighbors in doing so.

In his marvelous book Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortland says,

In the one place in the Bible (Matthew 11:28-30) where the Son of God pulls back the veil and lets us peer way down into the core of who he is, we are not told that he is “austere and demanding in heart.” We are not told that he is “exalted and dignified in heart.” We are not even told that he is “joyful and generous in heart.” Letting Jesus set the terms, his surprising claim is that he is “gentle and lowly in heart.”

Jesus came full of grace and truth (John 1:14). Not either instead of the other, but both together. We need to be bold enough to speak up and tell the truth even when it’s unpopular. But that doesn’t mean we have to be mean-spirited and graceless when we do it! Jesus told the truth, but He wasn’t malicious or ill-tempered, the way many professing Christians behave online and sometimes in real life as well.

David Powlison writes, “Jesus dealt gently with the ignorant and misguided, even when he suffered at their hands. Such meekness is incalculably powerful. …It’s unfortunate that ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ has become a picture of someone weak and ineffectual, a sentimental, pablum savior, good for children, but not good enough for grown-ups. May the God of the Lord Jesus Christ give us his true gentleness. Such strength is a royal attribute.”

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Randy Alcorn is the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries (www.epm.org), a nonprofit ministry dedicated to teaching principles of God’s Word and assisting the church in ministering to the unreached, unfed, unborn, uneducated, unreconciled, and unsupported people around the world. Before starting EPM in 1990, Randy served as a pastor for fourteen years. He is a New York Times best-selling author of over fifty books, including Heaven (over one million sold), The Treasure Principle (over two million sold), If God Is Good, Happiness, and the award-winning novel Safely Home. His books sold exceed ten million copies and have been translated into over seventy languages.