✨ Those Who Walk With Jesus — Part 13 ✨ The Missing Essential — His Personality

✨ Those Who Walk With Jesus — Part 13 ✨
The Missing Essential — His Personality

📝 Their Message (Summary)
This family reminds us that the missing piece in so many people’s discipleship is not knowledge about Jesus, but actually knowing Him. Too often, we serve, worship, and even defend Him without ever encountering His living personality.

They write of conversations with friends weighed down by trials. When asked, “Have you surrendered this to Jesus?” most confessed, “I don’t feel like I can.” Why? Because they didn’t truly know Him — He remained an idea, not a Friend.

The author recalls the Lord’s correction in prayer: “You judge Me by your perceptions, built from what others have told you. Ask Me to teach you who I AM.”

Scripture warns:

• “For how knoweth a man the master whom he has not served, and who is a stranger unto him?” (Mosiah 5:13)

• “I never knew you; depart from me” (3 Nephi 14:23).

The missing essential is His personality — His humor, His wit, His playfulness, His exasperation, His brilliance, His humanity. Without this, our picture of Him collapses into a two-dimensional “get-well card Jesus,” all softness and halo but no life.

Citing John Eldredge’s Beautiful Outlaw, they reflect that too often we imagine Christ like a pale, wispy figure in classical art or Christmas scenes — a “Superbaby” untouched by real humanity. But the true Jesus laughed, teased, wept, confronted, delighted, played. He is more alive than sunlight on water or songbirds in the forest. His personality is His glory.

🔥 My Reflection
This hit me like a jolt. I’ve been guilty of loving an idea of Jesus — the Christ of paintings, conference talks, and manuals — while struggling to see Him as a living, breathing, joyful, deeply personal Lord.

No wonder surrender feels impossible if He is only an abstraction. How do you trust a silhouette with your life? But if you come to know Him as He truly is — with fire in His eyes, a smile playing at His lips, a voice both tender and piercing — then love and surrender are not forced. They flow.

It makes sense now why Joseph Smith said the first principle of the gospel is to know the character and attributes of God (Lectures on Faith 3). You can’t love who you don’t know. You can’t trust someone whose personality you’ve never encountered.

The invitation, then, is not “try harder” but “ask for the real Him.” Not the hushed, porcelain Jesus of paintings, but the Friend who walks dusty roads, who surprises, who laughs, who reaches through the fog of religion and shows His heart.

🕊️ The Invitation
Are you willing to pray the simplest prayer?

“Jesus, I ask for You. For the real You.”

If you do, the promise is sure. To have Him is to have the greatest treasure in all worlds. To love Him — not the idea of Him, but Him Himself — is to settle the first question of your existence. Everything else flows from there.

🔗 Walking with Jesus — A Family’s Story
This post is part of an ongoing series sharing the six-year testimony of a family who walks closer with the Savior than anyone I know. Read their words, feel the Spirit, and let Jesus meet you where you are.

Post #13 — The Missing Essential: His Personality
Previous: Post #12 — Justice and Mercy
Next: Post #14 — (coming soon)