Should we live as Jesus did?

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Christphr

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Jesus lived a simple life. He fasted and was poor. He and his family weren’t striving to reach the middle class. It would be a great moral challenge to follow Jesus example physically, economically, and socially.

Is Jesus life, not simply his words, the gospel?
 
Christphr said:
Jesus lived a simple life. He fasted and was poor. He and his family weren’t striving to reach the middle class. It would be a great moral challenge to follow Jesus example physically, economically, and socially.

Is Jesus life, not simply his words, the gospel?
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The thing is we don’t know how he lived exactly for most of his life, but most of his time in the Bible was spent preaching and teaching, and traveling, which might not be practicable for many.

Each has their own call in life, and Jesus allows for us to have money, even lots of it, as long as we are good stewards of wealth.
 
I think living simply as Jesus did, has a much different meaning in today’s world. Just try walking everywhere, having no means of communication other that spoken word, living with the medical environment of His day, just to name a few. Living simply in this world today is a different kettle of fish. Besides poor in spirit probably best captures the essence of your question.
 
I am slighty over middle class. Sometimes I do feel guilty to see the excesses in my possession. They are not something I’ve gotten ilegally or even beyond the moral, just income and even without working very hard.

I try to live a simple life and try to leave them to the children to reduce the sense of personal guilt. I involve in lots of church work and ministries, and would use my own resources to do them and more. Sometimes it is like giving assistance to the needy when necessary.

Yes, I believe we should live like Jesus and to use our resources for the glory of God as far as it is reasonably possible according to our state of life. In my case as a family man, a husband and a father.

God bless.
 
Christphr said:
He fasted and was poor.
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He wasn’t the poor class though. He belongs to the majority common people. But it would be wrong to place him in the middle class as that’s a modern term. People lived just above subsistence but can be easily become below subsistence when affected by drought etc. so he is poor by today’s standards but he would be just the average common person in his times. But he wasn’t the poorest. For example he would have a house to live in. Archaeological remains in Galilee have shown what a typical dwelling was like. There is this place where they found bigger dwellings on one side of the street belonging to rich people presumably but then the other side the dwellings are more cramped. Presumably Jesus would have lived in one of those.

Joseph was also a “handyman” and Sepphoris was being built and expanded by Herod at the time, so presumably Joseph would have lots of jobs to do there since it’s so close to Nazareth. Did Jesus also go to Sepphoris? We can only speculate.

Happy to be corrected.
 
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Christphr said:
Is Jesus life, not simply his words, the gospel?
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Jesus’ life is the gospel to the extent that he was loving God and loving his neighbor. He was in constant communication with God, always trying to do what God wanted, and always helping others by curing their ills, giving them advice, or just spending time with them.

It’s not clear whether Jesus was actually that poor. From what I have read, Joseph was actually a reasonably skilled worker and Mary was more educated than the average poor person. They were more like comfortably middle-class. You don’t see Jesus out begging for his dinner. He also seems to have relied quite a bit on the largesse of others who presumably were working. Peter and the lot are still out fishing from time to time even after they start following Jesus, a rich man donates a tomb for Jesus, and somebody had to buy the Passover dinner and may even have had to pay some rent on that upper room.

What Jesus was, was detached from material possessions; he put people ahead of those things even though he wasn’t above enjoying some good food with friends, or appreciating that time when a lady poured some perfume on his feet. Money didn’t run Jesus’ life. He specifically rejected the idea of being an economic messiah when the devil was tempting him.

So in that sense, we should be like Jesus. We can enjoy some material goods if we also share our wealth and do not put the need to make money ahead of the need to serve others. Where one draws the line is up to the individual, but it seems pretty clear all throughout the Bible that just being well off, in and of itself, was not necessarily an evil thing. Wealth does expose you to a lot more temptations and pitfalls, which the Bible also makes clear, multiple times.
 
I agree eith your post,here many saysJesus wasnt poor.
We must try to live like Him-simple
 
Living like Jesus did- traveling from place to place with an entourage of apostles and others really isn’t that practical for very many people.

I don’t know what the real standard of living was in 1st centuryJudea- my guess is probably not that bad, materially.

The Romans did a lot of infrastructure work wherever they conquered and it was part of the Empire. Although stories like the woman at the well would tell me they didn’t have aqueducts and advanced plumbing situations there as they did elsewhere in the RE.
 
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