Jesus is the good teacher, and surely the beginning of wisdom is to simply acknowledge that Jesus has the best advice on how to organize our life. What is left for us to do, then, is to learn his ways. Only believing Jesus is right won’t do much good, we must learn what he taught.

I’m not sure when it happened exactly, but at some point in my Christian life I realized I didn’t really know what Jesus said. I was baptized at the age of nine, largely because I attended a Baptist Church, and they, as you might imagine, are very big on baptizing people. Unfortunately, when I came up out of the sauna-like waters, I didn’t immediately know all about Jesus.

I do recall an incident over a hair-dryer. The church’s changing room had the same exact hair-dryer that mom used. I looked at the thing and in my heart I knew it wasn’t mom’s, but I sort of convinced myself it was hers and put it in my bag. Later, I asked her if she had packed the dryer and she said she hadn’t. I felt terrible. It was as if I had pulled money out of the offering plate. I took the hair dryer back promptly, but I had never felt so bad about doing something wrong. Even though I didn’t immediately know all about Jesus after taking the plunge, his law was written on my heart.

What I’m saying is, if you follow Jesus, he sends the helper to teach us how to live after Jesus. In John 14:26 Jesus said he’d “send the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name. He will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.� One of my problems as a disciple is that I’ve not read the scriptures enough on the front end for the Lord to remind me much of anything later. He could maybe remind me to consider the lilies of the field, and then that would be it. I wouldn’t know why I was thinking about flowers, and Jesus’ great teaching would remain out of reach.

Here’s the deal about taking stuff that isn’t mine. I always had a problem with it, and I taught myself to believe that it was ok. One day, when I was three years old I was at my grandma’s house and she had a lot of toys for her grandkids to play with. One of them was great enough that I held onto it while mom carried me out of the front door. When I was all buckled into my car-seat I looked at it and I realized it wasn’t mine. I knew I had stolen something from grandma, and as a three year old I felt bad. I let my heart deceive me as a kid. I knew I wanted the toy so I put it in my hands and felt weird when grandma said goodbye to me at the door.

Once we were driving away, I told mom about it, but I didn’t tell her that I knew it hadn’t been right to take it. I simply announced that I had grandma’s toy in my hands. Mom said it was okay; we could take the thing back on the next visit, and I let her words comfort me, even though I knew I hadn’t told her the truth. The same thing happened with the hair-dryer. Somewhere deep inside there was a dialogue going on between what is right and what is wrong, and I knew that I had chosen against wisdom.

The wisdom of the wise is to give thought to their ways, and it would be wonderful to do that before doing something terrible. I have sort of known all along that sooner or later, I’m going to be accountable for every sin I commit. I have known this because my heart doesn’t let me rest until I have made things right. I think Jesus wants me to grow straight up, so he has me tied to a perfectly straight rod in the ground, and when I try to contort myself off in a different direction, he’s there pulling me back to the center, back to what’s right.

Perhaps the most lasting way to know the Lord is through our character. In Ephesians it says that Jesus is our peace. So maybe, taking on the likeness of Christ is to walk in a way that puts us at peace with other men and with our own hearts. If we allow Him, Jesus will teach us his ways and instruct us so that we can follow his commands. I don’t think we will always have to feel the pull between right and wrong. It’s this easy: Jesus does teach us, and we can learn his ways. So to return to the beginning, lets acknowledge that Jesus is the master, and begin learning how to do all the things that he taught.

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