So, what does being a Christian mean according to Scripture? Unlike the 12 Disciples of Jesus in Scripture, we don’t have the physical person of Jesus to walk behind anymore so what does following Jesus look like?
Many people seem to think that following Jesus/being a Christian means having an emotional experience one time, saying a prayer and that pretty much being the end of it. But is that what we see in the Scriptures? When Jesus called His 12 disciples, did they have an emotional experience, say a prayer and go back to their nets, tax booth, fortress, etc? No! After Paul was healed of his blindness from the road to Damascus, did he simply say, “I believe Jesus died for my salvation from sin” and go back to hunting down Christians and imprisoning them? No! Their lives permanently and radically changed forever. In Luke 9:23-24 Jesus describes what it means to follow Him. “Then He said to them all, “If anyone wants to come with Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of Me will save it.” The 12 Disciples (excluding Judas and including Matthias) minus John were all martyred for their faith! Church tradition tells us Peter was crucified upside down because he could not bear to be executed in the same manner as his Savior, Jesus! Paul was martyred after being the one taking care of the robes of those who stoned Stephen, the first recorded martyr in Acts! How can we think, much less teach, or even live a life that says an emotion and a one-time prayer is the totality of what it means to be a Christian/Christ follower?
Unfortunately, I think many of us were never taught any different. The church has tried to sanitize the call of Christ to make it easier for the masses to accept. We have sacrificed truth for numbers, quality for quantity. When Jesus called the first four of the disciples in Matthew 4:19-22, “Immediately they left their nets and followed Him.” (20) When they were called they moved. When James and John were called, “they left the boat and their father and followed Him.” (22). In Matthew 9:9 we see the calling of Matthew the tax collector who left his table and followed Jesus.They left livelihood, family, friends, and possessions in order to follow Christ. What does this look like for us? Do we leave our house and job, pull a Martin Luther and become a monk in a monastery? I don’t think that is a practical or even a good way to live our lives as followers of Christ. Do we cut all ties with people who are not Christians and wall ourselves in to the Christian sub-culture and start rebuking the Dust Devil vacuum cleaner for being a ‘devil’? Again, that would make following Christ’s last command to go and make disciples of all nations pretty difficult. Do we just say we’re following Jesus and go back to business as usual? This seems to be the answer the church has landed on. Sadly, many people who claim to follow Jesus think that because they had an emotional experience one time, repeated a prayer and may have even been baptized, that they’re following Jesus. But is that what leaving our nets and following Jesus looks like in our time? We don’t have nets to leave and we live in America! Our father’s trade isn’t what we’re destined for like most in Jesus’ time! We have the freedom to ‘be whatever we want to be’! So what does it mean to leave our nets and follow Him? That’s what we’re going to dissect in this post.
It has never and will never be a popular teaching that following Jesus costs us our everything. John 6:22-69 is Jesus’ teaching, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you do not have life in yourselves. Anyone who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day because My flesh is real food and My blood is real drink. The one who eats My flesh and drinks My blood lives in Me, and I in Him.” (53b-56) and then in verse 60, “Therefore, when many of His disciples heard this, they said, “This teaching is hard! Who can accept it?”. Then in verse 66, “From that moment, many of His disciples turned back and no longer accompanied Him.” When the teaching got hard and the people saw that following Jesus wasn’t just sitting around listening to him and being miraculously fed by the thousands, they left. Scripture says, “Therefore Jesus said to the Twelve, “You don’t want to go away too, do you?” Simon Peter answered, “Lord, who will we go to? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that You are the Holy One of God!” (67-69). Proximity does not equal intimacy. The ones who turned back and stopped following Jesus thought that following Jesus was literally just following him around the countryside, listening to Him and His teachings, being fed miraculously and that being the end of it. They experienced the proximity but not the intimacy. The disciples had intimacy with Jesus. They knew Him instead of just knowing of Him and wanted to continue to get to know Him more. Jesus mattered more to the disciples. Following Him costs our future. It costs our dreams. It costs who we think we are. It costs our life. That is the cost of following Jesus. There are no other options, no other alternatives. It’s Christ or nothing. It’s the same sentiment Moses had all the way back in Exodus 33-34, “If Your presence does not go,…don’t make us go up from here.” (Exodus 33:15). He didn’t care about the gifts or blessing or anything else. He wanted the presence of God. In Exodus 33:18 Moses makes one of the most astounding requests of the Old Testament, “Then Moses said, “Please, let me see Your glory.” Moses sought God’s face before he sought God’s hand. He understood that the Gift Giver was far more important than the gifts. Have we lost sight of this truth? Have we begun to seek God’s hand more than His face? Have we made the same mistake the Pharisees made when they placed more importance on other things rather than God? (Matthew 23). Can you imagine if churches across this country taught this hard message? Or what if being a Christian was no longer ‘convenient’ and suddenly became an inconvenience or even a danger? Would the numbers stay the same or would we see a dramatic outflow as people turned back and no longer accompanied Him? At this point I think we would see a massive outpouring from the church because it seems that most people have never been taught that following Jesus costs us everything. They haven’t been taught or seen people living the truth that following Jesus costs us our everything.
Matthew 21:28-32
“But what do you think? A man had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘My son, go, work in the vineyard today.’
“He answered, ‘I don’t want to!’ Yet later he changed his mind and went. Then the man went to the other and said the same thing.
‘I will, sir,’ he answered. But he didn’t go.
“Which of the two did his father’s will?”
“The first,” they said.
Jesus said to them, “I assure you: Tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you! For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you didn’t believe him. Tax collectors and prostitutes did believe him, but you, when you saw it, didn’t even change your minds then and believe him.
The old adage rings true in this instance, “Actions speak louder than words”. Jesus said of the Pharisees in Matthew 15:8, quoting Isaiah 29:13, “These people honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. They worship Me in vain, teaching as doctrines the commands of men.” The Pharisees said they served God but their hearts belonged to another, themselves. The Lord is not concerned with words but where our heart is. So where is our heart? Is it under the authority of God or is it still in chains to the flesh? We know where it is regardless of what we say to others. Unfortunately, I see so many people claiming Christianity yet their lives remain submitted to the flesh: sin. We use grace like an ‘unlimited credit card’ when Scripture clearly states that should not be in Romans 6:1-4! “What should we say then? Should we continue in sin so that grace may multiply? Absolutely not! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Or are you unaware that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in a new way of life.” Living an unchanged life is not following Christ! That is the second son in this passage!
So the first piece of what it means to follow Jesus is that it will never leave us unchanged from our previous life. We cannot encounter the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God and remain the same. We must come to the point where Christ is more important than the gifts He gives. Following Jesus will cost us everything. We can say we follow Jesus but God knows our heart and we cannot pull the wool over His eyes.
For His Glory!