Where Does Jesus Live?

In his book entitled Windows of the Soul, Ken Gire tells the story of a young English missionary who had gone to India to help reach people for Christ. During his time of service, the young missionary was required to do extensive bookkeeping, which as everyone soon discovered, he was not very good at. It turned out that “his balances were always off, and the separate accounts he was supposed to keep kept getting mixed.” As a result, the mission board for whom he worked released him as being unfit for the mission field. The young man left without incident and simply disappeared.

Years later, the story is picked up once again by a young woman missionary who was visiting a remote village in the jungle where she felt called to tell the people living there about the Lord Jesus. As Ken Gire tells the story, “She told them of His kindness and His love for the poor, how He went to their homes to eat with them, how He visited them when they were sick, how He fed the hungry, healed the sick, bound up the wounds of the brokenhearted, and how children loved Him.” As she told about Jesus, the eyes of the natives lit up, and their faces beamed with joy. “Miss Sahib, Miss Sahib, one of them said, “We know Him well; he has been living here for years!”

When the people in the village took the young lady to meet the man, guess who it was she discovered? It was the missionary who years earlier had been released from the Mission Board in India. He had traveled to this remote village in the jungle and settled there to share the good news of Jesus Christ with the people. He had visited the sick, fed the hungry, looked after the old and infirm, and when cholera had broken out in the village, he went from hut to hut in order to help where he could. His life had become a testimony of how Jesus would have lived if He had been there in the flesh. But of course, Jesus was there in the life of the young English missionary, for the natives could not distinguish between the Jesus they heard about in the Scriptures and the way the young man had lived amongst them for so many years.

It was Francis of Assisi (1182-1216) who once said, “Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words.” Perhaps Francis said this because he understood that the words which impact the world the most are those which have been incarnated into our very lives. These are words that have “become flesh” and are “dwelling among us” (Jn. 1:14, NIV). They are no longer simply printed words on a page, or even messages that speak about the Lord when He was on earth, but now, they are words that actually have a life of their own, for they are in you and in me! Perhaps this is why the apostle John wrote, “Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did” (1 Jn. 2:6, NIV).

This leads to an important question for each one of us to consider. It is a question that probes the depth of our commitment to the Lord Jesus and His gospel. If someone was to come to our place of employment, or to one of the schools in our area, or to one of our neighborhoods and began to describe to all who would listen what Jesus is like, would the people quickly respond by saying, “We know Him well; He has been living here for years!” If this were the case, then truly we would catch a glimpse of the word becoming flesh right in the country where we live – countries that so desperately need a demonstration of the good news in both word and deed.