THE IMPORTANCE OF PERSONAL LOYALTY TO JESUS

THE IMPORTANCE OF YOUR PERSONAL LOYALTY TO JESUS

The personal loyalty that David inspired among his fellow warriors:

“At the time of the harvest three of the thirty leaders went down to David at the cave of Adullam. A band of Philistines was camped in the valley of Rephaim. David was in the stronghold at the time, while a Philistine garrison was in Bethlehem. David was thirsty and said, ‘How I wish someone would give me some water to drink from the cistern in Bethlehem near the gate!’ So the three elite warriors broke through the Philistine forces and drew some water from the cistern in Bethlehem near the gate. They carried it back to David, but he refused to drink it. He poured it out as a drink offering to the LORD and said, ‘O LORD, I will not do this! It is equivalent to the blood of the men who risked their lives by going.’ So he refused to drink it. Such were the exploits of the three elite warriors” (2 Samuel 23:13-17).

The personal loyalty inspired by Major Dick Winters (“Band of Brothers”):
[Found by Google Gemini]
The most famous quotation about that loyalty comes from a letter written to Major Winters by 1st Sergeant Floyd Talbert, who wrote, “You are loved and will never be forgotten by any soldier that ever served under you. I would follow you into hell.”

Historian Stephen E. Ambrose’s book Band of Brothers and subsequent veteran interviews capture several other powerful quotes from the men of Easy Company expressing this exact sentiment.

Easy Company Veteran Quotes on Winters’ Leadership

• Sergeant Carwood Lipton: “He was a man who inspired total confidence in those under him. When he gave an order, you knew it was the right thing to do, and you did it without question.”
• Sergeant Mike Ranney: “He had the unquestioned respect of every man in the company from the very beginning. We would have followed him anywhere.”
• Private David Kenyon Webster (from his wartime letters): “Winters is the best combat commander I’ve ever seen. Calm, cool, and totally efficient. He never asks a man to do something he wouldn’t do himself.”

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Jesus drew many people to Himself, but He did so by more than simply teaching His Father’s doctrines, commands and promises or manifesting God’s power. It took more than His “raw truth” or “miraculous power” to get men like Peter and his fellow disciples to say:

“Peter said to Him, “Lord, why can I not follow You right now? I will lay down my life for You” (John 13:37).

“Peter answered and said to Him, ‘Even if all are made to stumble because of You, I will never be made to stumble.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Assuredly, I say to you that today, even this night, before the rooster crows twice, you will deny Me three times.’ But he spoke more vehemently, ‘If I have to die with You, I will not deny You!’ And they ALL said likewise.” (Matthew 26:29-31).

It is rather common to regard Peter as someone who talked more easily than he acted because of the times when Jesus criticized him (e.g., Matthew 16:23, 26:29-31). But I have become confident that I would have fared FAR worse from Jesus’s corrections that Peter ever did! And it actually took a lot of real courage to take a mere knife and attack a member of a militarily armed platoon, who are WELL trained to respond to physical resistance with instant deadly violence!

Their passionate loyalty to Jesus was authentic and deep, even if it could not endure under the violence and hatred of both their own Sanhedrin and the brutality of the Roman Army! Nevertheless, it took more than their student’s love of knowledge for them to tell Him:

“From that moment many of his disciples turned back and no longer accompanied him. So Jesus said to the Twelve, ‘You don’t want to go away too, do you?” Simon Peter answered, ‘Lord, to whom WILL we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God’” (John 6:66-69)

Jesus told them, “I have told you these things so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. ‘This is my command: Love one another AS I HAVE LOVED YOU. No one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for his friends’” (John 15:11-13). When He said this to them, they had very clear and specific memories of just how they had FELT His love for them, in words, looks, and intimate conversations (such as He had had with Nathaniel, “within whom there IS no guile!” – John 1:47).

Private Webster’s above comment about Major Winters also applied to Jesus: “… the best combat commander I’ve ever seen. Calm, cool, and totally efficient. He never asks a man to do something he wouldn’t do himself.” They were surrounding Jesus when He launched His aggressive attack on hypocritical ecclesiastical leaders; please try to graphically visualize what He said, the passion with which He said it, and the increasingly shocked, angry, and violently hateful look on the faces of his assaulted audience: “WOE to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you devour the houses of the widows, while making long prayers as a pretense. Therefore you will receive a greater condemnation. WOE to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!! Because you bar [the entrance to] the kingdom of the heavens in the face of the people; for you neither go in [yourselves] nor do you allow those who are trying to enter to go in. WOE to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!!! Because you travel all over, land and sea, to make one convert, and when he joins up you make him twice as much a son of Hell as yourselves. … WOE to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you pay a tithe of mint and dill and cummin, but have neglected the weightier items of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These it was obligatory to do, while not neglecting those. Blind guides, who strain out a gnat but gulp down a camel! WOE to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!! Because you cleanse the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside they are full of plunder and injustice. Blind Pharisee! First cleanse the inside of the cup and the dish, so that their outside may also be clean. WOE to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!!! Because you resemble whitewashed tombs, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly but inside are full of dead bones and of all uncleanness. Just so you also outwardly appear to be righteous to the people, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. WOE to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!!!! Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous; yet you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets’. Therefore you testify against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. So fill up the measure of your fathers’ guilt! Snakes! Brood of VIPERS! How can you escape from the condemnation of Hell?” (Matthew 23:13…33). Do you think that there was any doubt whatsoever in the mind of Jesus about the affect that He was having on them. He was verbally slashing them to pieces – the “pillars of society,” who had the power to destroy reputations and even exert “life or death” pressure on anyone whom they united to choose for judgment. And He was knowingly PUSHING on them to exert that judgement against Him!

No matter how often they had READ about God’s prophets saying such things to Israel, His traveling companion disciples had to “gulp” when they actually HEARD Him blasting away at them so aggressively! That is certainly no way to get the powerful leaders to join your cause! Possibly, the word “suicidal” might have popped into the heads of some of them! Bit certainly the word “courageous” would have been being whispered into their minds by the Holy Spirit who had been speaking through Him! King David and Major Dick Winters were valiant and courageous warriors, but even they did not aggressively attack their enemies unarmed!

When you and I made our personal decision to hand our lives over to Jesus as our Savior and our “Lord” we had had no previous history of having traipsed around the countryside with Him and getting to know Him as a person in the way that His first disciples did. Therefore, as with me, there was little or no PERSONAL loyalty that you had grown to have for Jesus as a human being. Perhaps you HAD developed such personal loyalty to some other human, a father or mother perhaps? But JESUS is Divinity Incarnated! FAR too exalted a king with whom a mere mortal such as ourselves to expect such a deeply personal human emotion and affection to develop. Such personal human relationships have to be TWO way, and would have to be offered from the exalted KING’s side!

Jesus had to reveal Himself to me as a relational HUMAN being in a most strange way, when rescuing me from Satan’s subtle “hath God INDEED said…,” in which my skeptical/unbelieving “Christian” professors had transformed the Jesus to whom a teenager had surrendered out at sea into the divinely exalted theological “place holder” of their sophisticated religious system that was supposedly the “Historical Christian Faith”! By the time that I had become infected with their “higher criticism” skepticism, Jesus had become transformed into a very fallible first century, pre-scientific Jew. I changed my PhD studies at Fordham University from Early Church History (“Patristics”) to “The Religions of India, China, and Japan.”

As we studied the various religions of each country, I could not help comparing their founders and “religious giants” with the very human Jesus that I had known: comparing their courage with his; their struggle against injustice and hypocrisy with his; their compassion for the, sick, the social outcasts and impoverished with his, their organizational genius with his, and so on. And it surprised me to discover that even by those merely human standards it seemed obvious to me that they did not come up to his KNEECAPS as human beings! It was quite a surprise to see the Jesus that I had learned to look down on – from my modern and scientifically technical perspective – growing in stature and respect. But he was still a first century Jew! The story about how He transformed himself in my eyes to the eternally begotten Son of God that he used to be is too long to relate here, but it started when I was dangerously anxious that I might be only a short distance from some kind of emotional breakdown that seemed horribly similar to the kind of death that he actually HAD gone through. I will never forget that Sunday morning when I was guided to reflect that on his cross he had surrendered his future existence into his Father’s hands: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” And his Father had actually LET him die – three DAYS dead! But later, when the Father DID answer his cry, it was to restore him to a far more exalted and immortal condition than he had been in before! And I was then led to trust that if I did the same thing with the impending emotional “death” that was threatening me, He might let me also “die” – but He would then restore me the in the same way that He had restored His beloved Son! So I just “jumped into the deep end of the pool” and handed myself without conditions or qualifications into His hands. Well, it turns out that He did NOT let me “die” – just the opposite! That dread which had been unshakeable dramatically disappeared, and never, EVER came back!

It took a bit more of God’s surgical “processing” of me, but within a relatively short time, the Jesus that I was drawn back to was a person to whom I now felt PROFOUNDLY personally loyal – loyal in the way that the three men who served under David felt, and in the way that Sergeant Floyd Talbert and others felt about Major Winters (please reread what he had said)!

And that new personal loyalty has only grown stronger over the years. Even though Jesus does not need my efforts to defend Him – not at ALL! – nevertheless that loyalty inspires me to jump to His defense, which also includes defending His apostles, their “fullness” of spiritual maturity and wisdom, and the holy writings that Jesus’s Spirit inspired them to write! But that personally loyalty went beyond the theological understanding level; it also affected the way in which I now felt a strong need to surrender to some of His more threating and “impossible to do” commands – especially that one about “… to NOT resist him who is evil – but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (Matthew 5:39). I had been regularly and thoroughly trained to “accept” that very graphically specific command as being a general, but vague, principle to not be an aggressive person, an example of hyperbolic “poetic exaggeration.” With that interpretation, you could mix “obeying” that command with all sorts of socially-required professional violence and legal wrangling! But now, that new and strong sense of personal loyalty to Jesus got in the way of such a “plastic” interpretation – the way that Jesus and His apostles – and earliest centuries of authentic Christians – modeled that teaching clearly “DE-plasticized” the teaching and made it clear that He meant PRECISELY what His carefully chosen words SEEMED to be saying. So, I had to spend a lot of time with Him before just repeating that “jump into the deep end of the pool” and yielding to what He had actually said. I am a child of World War Two, had a step-father wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, and grew up cheering to see Nazis and Japanese thugs get their lumps in American war movies! I had graduated from the U.S. Navy Chaplain’s School in Newport, Rhode Island in order to test a possible vocation as a Navy Chaplain. So this was not an easy decision for me to make. But that sense of personal loyalty to Jesus overrode my emotional reluctance to reverse a very deeply held instinct that had become a part of me a long time ago! Surrendering to such teachings that threaten our “fight or flight” survival instincts is a two-step process: there is the actual “doing it,” and then there is the “doing it for the same reason that motivated Jesus and apostles.” The motivations of good will, love of those who are “enemies”, and a gentleness that turns you into a lousy combatant, can only be the product of that same Holy and Pentecostal Spirit that turned a sword-swinging Peter into the willing martyr that Jesus prophesied (John 21:18-19; 2 Peter 1:5-15).

It seems that you simply cannot be a “disciple” of Jesus without turning into a surrendered “slave” of Jesus. Being overcome by physical power can turn you into an involuntary slave. But personal loyalty can turn that involuntary into a voluntary enslavement to the best Person you have ever known, a person you would be willing to “follow into Hell,” as Private Talbert felt about his Major Dick Winters!

“But if the servant plainly says, ‘I LOVE my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’ then his master shall bring him to the judges. He shall also bring him to the door, or to the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall serve him forever.”

Make sure that your Jesus is much more than a divine savior who can be “high and lifted up,” but who cannot be for you personally what He had been his disciples when He was “in the flesh!” Even though Paul had been exceedingly unfriendly toward Him in the flesh, he was able to provide one of the most passionate expressions of that personal loyalty to Jesus to be found within the New Testament:

“I have been crucified WITH Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in ME; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved ME and gave Himself up for ME!” (Galatians 2:20).

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Reed Merino, M.Div.
ReedMerino.com
”Blueprint for a Revolution: Building Upon ALL of the New Testament”