Just Following Jesus (P2) — K.P. Yohannan

1 John, chapter 2. We read there that anyone who is a Christian is to live as Jesus lived. Is that really possible? Be encouraged in that very direction today on the Road to Reality. This is me, Richard Bews, welcoming you to this week's Road to Reality with Brother K .P. Yohannan.

This is a ministry of gospel for Asia. Just to think about Christ, His universal claims, worldwide love, and the victory He won through His blood upon the cross that paved the way for our salvation. Talk about something to be grateful for and even to die for as thousands of martyrs are showing us in today's world.

Christ calls us now to get to know Him and follow Him. Here is K .P. about to draw our attention to the first letter of John, chapter 2 and verse 6 as he shares from his heart how we can and should follow the Lord.

Jesus Uses Imperfect Disciples to Change the World

Join us, won't you, for the Road to Reality. You know, my brothers and sisters, maybe the more important thing about this whole meeting is that you know, Jesus didn't need 12 million people to change the world.

He only needed 11 people. And out of 12, Judas happened to be one of those people who didn't make it. But He just had 11 people. And they were not perfect people. I mean, you got Judas there, you got Peter here.

They both denied Christ, if you know it or not. But one committed suicide and one became the greatest leader of the church, Apostle Peter, who opened the door for the whole world and for the kingdom and the church.

Judas's Deception and Peter's Sincere Faith

What was the difference? Judas had the privileges that Peter had. He was one of the people that went out to heal the sick, cast out demons and preach the gospel because he sent all of them out two by two.

But all through this learning and getting his degrees and his information and being tutored by God Himself, he was not honest. There was deception, the duplicity, the dichotomy, a pretense to be one of the saints.

But deep inside, he was not that. But Peter, no matter how you look at him, he was blasting off and making all kind of blunders and you know, crazy stuff he did, you would say. But his faith was sincere.

There was no deception in him. I mean, here we are a bunch of people and I think God is always looking for people who are not necessarily perfect people who know all the answers, but honest, simple people that he can show himself mighty on their behalf in the generation they live in.

And Judas didn't make it, not because any other reason than his faith was insincere. And Peter made it simply because his faith was weak and God could make it strong. He was not insincere. And this is where the Western Christianity that no matter what you talk about revival and all this fancy stuff you talk about, I think there need to be individuals like you and even a minority need to come to the place.

Following Jesus Instead of Denominations and Agendas

We are not following denominations and doctrines and agendas. We just want to follow the humble, simple Jesus of the New Testament. And for me, in my brief journey with the Lord, I found out that the safest thing in the whole world is just to follow him and learn more of him.

Gail Irwin, who is the author of Jesus Style, a book that I almost insist everyone must read, that book called Jesus Style talks about the real Jesus of the New Testament and is called an invitation for us to follow him.

The Illustration of Simply Following Jesus

And he has this illustration. He says, you know, if I tell you to come to my house for dinner and I give you the direction. Now, this is where you go. This is a street and all these different things. And you get in the car and you drive along and you just don't know what to do, especially a place like Dallas, Texas.

And then you get lost and then you call and say, hey, I don't know what to do. I'm running late. I don't know how to get to your place. And then your host says, where are you? Oh, OK, this is a street.

Is there any building? Yeah, there is one. OK, you wait there. You just wait there. And I'm going to come. And this is my car. This is the color of my car. This is a license plate. And I will come there.

Then you just follow me. So for me, it would be a very easy thing to say. You will say, hello, 1962 bug. You cannot make a mistake. And so I come and you are waiting there saying, oh, man, I'm half an hour late, you know, and what?

Then he said, don't worry, you just follow me. And then I go off and I take off with my bug. You cannot. There's no other car like my car anyway. And you follow me. And you are not looking at the street.

You are not looking for the signs. You're looking for any particular landmark. You are simply just following me. And finally, we get to my house and say, I would have never made it. I just followed you.

Recovering the Christ of the New Testament

And I think, you know, during my radio interviews, which I do quite a lot, people call me up and talk to them from different parts of the country. And I keep insisting on one issue. That is, we have lost Christ of the New Testament.

And we have followed politics, agendas, and doctrines and denominations. Roy Harrison, who wrote Calvary Road, I never had the privilege to meet him in person, but my wife had. And when I was barely 17 years of age, I was given two books from Operation Mobilization Leadership.

One is Calvary Road by Roy Harrison. The next one is True Discipleship by William Macdonald. Then, of course, you know, I was given a huge amount of writings by Watchman Lee and A. W. Chaucer, and Alan Redpath, and all those things, and Puritan writers.

All these people became my mentors. But Calvary Road is a classic. By the way, it is in 85 languages today. It's an 80-page booklet. If you never got it, you must get it. Next to the Bible, I say, Calvary Road and True Discipleship by William Macdonald are two important books you should have.

Revival as the Life of Christ in Ordinary People

Now, Calvary Road talks about revival. What is revival? It is nothing other than, less than, more than, simply the life of Christ in these earthen vessels and flowing through it. It is not putting a new party in the government.

It is not people picketing 100 ,000 people for this right, that right, any of those things. And God, unlike most Americans think, is not terribly worried about majority. No. He would destroy the whole world to save one family, Noah and his family.

And God, in the words of George Verver, is looking for a mighty minority that he can show himself strong. And so, if that is our agenda, our goal, our hopes, I think our individual lives will make a difference.

Knowing God Better Than Pursuing More Work

And that's what I want. And for me, it's been 40 plus years I've been serving the Lord, and I remember the day I turned 50. And I'm 60 now, by the way. You thought I was 29. That's not true. But this is true, by the way.

I still can't sleep more than six hours a day. I'm nervous or paranoid, whatever reason. I do quite well, by God's grace. But I remember the day I turned 50, and I said, Lord, I want to talk to you. I want to hear from you.

And I spent that day with the Lord alone. Again, I wasn't looking for anything strange, you know, events to happen, anything like that. I just, I'm a simple disciple who read the Bible and obey the Lord and keep a clear conscience before God and before people.

That's all my life journeys. And it's a strange experience that afternoon. It was an interesting day when the Lord spoke to me. He said, Son, a few more years left. Get to know me. I was actually expecting Him to say, you know, you have a lot more work to do.

The world is going to hell, and I want you to do this. And I mean, humanly speaking, I live and dream and breathe one thing that is reaching the lost world and seeing people come to know the Lord, all these different things.

And so the way the Lord spoke to my heart was, just a few more years, Son, get to know me better. And it's been 10 years since I heard Him speak that, you know, that kind of word. Did my passion for the lost get diluted?

No, it only increased. But the key to all that we dream about is Jesus, nothing else and no one else. Why is it so important? Because having lived in Western culture for all these four decades or being encountered with it all these years, we can easily be drawn to various fights and agendas.

Living as Jesus Lived in 1 John 2:6

This issue, that issue, and all these different things. And we will become the proponents or leaders of issues rather than Christ himself. And that's where we need to be careful. So if you're thinking, where is the Bible verse?

Here it is. 1 John 2, verse 6. 1 John 2, verse 6. This is a kind of an application to what I've been talking about. What does it mean to know Him and follow Him in our individual life as we seek that?

1 John 2, verse 6. In my translation, NIV, it says, whoever claims to live in Him must walk as He did. Now that applies to you, applies to me. In the Living Bible, it reads, anyone who says he's a Christian should live as Christ lived.

I don't think, you know, Greek and Hebrew and philosophy explain that. Well, it's not hard to understand, but then we wonder really whether that seems out of reach. Yet God wouldn't give us such a verse as this if He didn't provide the means to help us accomplish it.

And He has. By His grace, men and women today can live as Jesus lived. Here's, friends, a good resource that we've come across in learning how Jesus lived. It's the book, Jesus Style by Gail Irwin. It's an inspiring soul-to-soul look at our world master.

It's both eye-opening and encouraging. As we read it, we can learn to know the Lord more closely. It's a suggested donation of £5 plus post and packing. To order your copy, go to roadtoreality .org .uk or call us on 01904 643 233.

Now, if you're between the ages of 18 to 25, or know of someone who is, would you read about our School of Discipleship at our website? Spend a year at Gospel For Asia's home office in Carrollton, Texas, and can your life ever remain the same?

Find out more at roadtoreality .org .uk or phone us on 01904 643 233. You know, one lady said to us, I've never been before challenged to yield my life to Him in such a total and absolute way. Now, here's KP with more about following Jesus.

Reflecting Christ as the Light of the World

You know, I was listening to a dear friend of mine, Brother Zach, the other day during my time of exercise. I don't know if you do this, I do push-ups and all these things to keep me alive, and so I'm listening to these teachings, and I heard him speak so many times.

So Brother Zach was saying, you know, Jesus said, I am the light of the world. Then he turns to his disciples, weak and frail and failing people said, you are the light of the world. So, right now, we are, you and I, we are Christ for the people around us.

They can't see the Christ who died on the cross and buried and rose again, and sitting in the right hand of the Father, but they can see us. And again, it brings us to the place of realization that whatever the Lord asked us to do, He simply said, follow me and I will make you.

So again, not that we are perfect people, but as we follow Him, He transforms us and changes us. Second Corinthians 3 .18, the Holy Spirit changes us and makes us to become more like Christ. So in our generation, people who view us in our family, our children, our wife, husband, they see Christ and His life through our life.

Spiritual Growth Requires Daily Practice

And that's what scripture says. Anyone who says he's a Christian should live as Christ did. Is it possible? I believe it is. Now, I did a teaching recently in India called Doing Spirituality. It's a strange title, by the way.

For us often, spirituality is God doing some special thing like alien invasion. All of a sudden, you know, everything changes and all of a sudden the wicked, rotten sinner turns into Saint Augustine. Microwave, you know, it's an amazing machine that ever made a thing.

You know, just put something in the press, few seconds and it's steaming hot. It just don't work like that in Christian life. We want that. How do we learn to pray? Read EM bounds books, power through prayer.

How do we learn to fast? Read all the Wallace, God's chosen fast. Good, but you will never do it. You can preach about it. You can make four point sermon and you can talk about it and think, oh man, but your alarm never went off one in the morning to wake you up, to spend two hours on your face.

We learn to pray on our knees alone with other people, which means buffeting our body, bringing into subjection. We learned godliness not by memorizing theology and reading books, but by saying no to ourself and saying no to sin and no to the things we want that makes us happy.

Faith Demonstrated Through Works and Suffering

And this is the missing jewel from the Christian Western theology. James says, yeah, you say your faith, wonderful, but show it through your works. Works without faith is just useless. Faith need to be supported with our discipline, our suffering, and that is not so easy.

So the illusion that we have that we can have great noises made about all these wonderful things and something is going to happen, it is not. Being spiritual and godly and being like Christ happens as it says in scripture.

He, about Christ says, learned obedience through suffering. I, you know, I used to be more black and white, very put people on the spot kind of guy, but all the years of my working with the Lord, I learned that I am weak, everybody's weak, so I have no agenda to put you on a trip and make you, you know, crawl under the hole and say I'm a bad sinner.

No, but I want to ask a simple question. When was the last time you spent an hour or two alone with the Lord? When was the last time you spent a few days in fasting? When was the last time you said, I am no more going to get all the catalogs that comes to my house that tells me to buy this, buy that, buy that, all this stuff?

You see, you cannot divorce spirituality from your doing things and there are some things in the scripture that we read about Christ as we read through the four gospels that kind of stands out. I got about a dozen of them, but there's no way to go through all of them, but I will just mention them to you.

Loving Others as Christ Loved

As he was in the world, so we are now. How did he live in the world? One you find in John 13, he said, I want you to know I love you and I want you to love one another as I have loved you. Now, until now, they saw how much Christ loved them and cared for them.

Now he says, I'm going to leave and I want you to follow my example. And I think especially in this culture where people fight over every little doctrine you can imagine. I remember reading a book, I mean, a couple of hundred pages, this guy wrote this book saying that if you are not reading King James and only King James, you are promoting false doctrines.

Now, my problem is I hardly can understand kindergarten English, reading King James. I mean, it's like Greek to me. I have no way to figure this out. And I don't say King James, I mean, I do have King James Bible and I study it and all the different translations.

The Scandal of Christian Division

But the body of Christ is so divided over so many insignificant issues that we call for revival and authenticity and the world is going to hell and they can't see God's love in us. And I'll never forget talking to a politician in India.

The guy is a PhD in a high level position in the Indian government. And he's a Hindu, by the way. And he asked me the question. He said, you know, can I ask you a question? I said, yeah. He said, you know, the place I live in Bangalore, there are so many churches with so many different names and they all seem to be so segregated.

One group cannot go to the other place. But us Hindus, we got 300 million gods and anyone can go to any temples, no barriers. But you only got one God. But everybody is all divided into so many groups.

He said, how does that work? I never had anybody asked me that question, by the way. So I said, yeah, you got a good question. But, you know, I mean, he said, we got 300 million gods, but we are one. You got one God, you got thousands of groups.

And then, of course, you know, this is a longer conversation. He talked about the court case going on between this group and that group. And he had to deal with some of those issues and all these different things, all among Christians.

Holding Essential Doctrines Without Losing Love

And now, my brothers and sisters, this I will tell you, you know, we need to have conservative godly doctrines. There's no way we can negotiate about certain doctrines, the uniqueness of Christ, the scripture, infallibility of the scripture, salvation.

Jesus is the only way. There's no two different ways. And his call for us to be his. But we fight over a thousand things that are not at all significant. And usually leaders are doing the whole thing, not the people.

And as people of God, if we can embrace the reality of Christ loving the prostitutes, the drunkards, the weak, the mean, the one who was condemned by the religious crowd, he loved them all. It is one thing to maintain our convictions.

It's another thing to love them as Jesus loved. Rather too much, then, of the body of Christ is fighting and competing and bickering over things that really aren't that important. When godly love captivates the center, well, that's to be like Christ.

Friends, as we close, I must make mention again of that book that helps us to live out this life of love, The Jesus Style by Gail Irwin. Get it and maybe keep it with your Bible at your bedside. We suggest five pounds plus postage and packaging for this book.

And as we've been thinking about what it means to follow Jesus, don't forget what we said earlier too about Gospel for Asia's School of Discipleship in Texas. It's for young people aged between 18 and 25.

It offers a chance to spend a year radically growing and serving Jesus and helping to reach people apparently unreachable. To order The Jesus Style or find out more about the School of Discipleship, would you go to roadtoreality .org .uk or call us on 01904 643 233.

That's roadtoreality .org .uk or 01904 643 233. Hey, thank you for joining us today. This is Richard Bews with Gospel for Asia, sharing we hope with you in walking daily beside Jesus Christ in His world mission and in reaching the most unreached.