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Living the Adventure By Pastor Samuel Chess Grace Emmanuel Church Port St. Lucie, Florida (Learning to Follow….Jesus way )
I am a follower of Christ I am a follower of Christ I am a follower of Christ I am a follower of Christ I am a follower of Christ Easy to read…exciting to say…but what does it mean to follow Christ? I took you on a preliminary journey last week of several of the passages from Jesus calling his disciples, to his calling of the rich ruler, to his forceful commands to each one of us. They are all short and to the point but very pungent. They all basically come down to two words: Follow me! It was Jesus standard response to anyone who seriously wanted to know God…”You really want to know God?…Do you really want to have a deep personal relationship with your Creator?…There’s only one primary, fundamental truth you need to keep in mind: Follow me! (Mark 8:34) …"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. (NIV) (Matthew 10:38-39) … anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life (without following me) will lose it, and whoever loses his life (becomes absorbed in following me) for my sake will find it. (NIV) Follow- akoloutheo, ak-ol-oo-theh'-o: to be in the same way with….. to accompany The obvious question here is not; “Are you a Christian”…lots of people call themselves Christian…the real question is: “Are you following Christ? I. To Follow or not to Follow Not everyone who claims the title of Christian would qualify as being a “follower of Christ!” We discussed last week how hard it is to follow, the curse of sin has built into us this sense of independence from God and all other authority and society around us works hard to build into us the sense that following anything except what we deem will make us happy is weakness, and “weak, following types” of this world will never know the real joy of living life without any restrictions….. With all this “truth”… the suicide rate is now three times what is was when I was a kid. Mankind has lost his focus…. We were fashioned to follow the one in whose image we were created! That is built in to the very fabric of your being… you can’t escape it…let me say it again: We were fashioned to follow the one in whose image we were created! No other approach to this life will truly satisfy! This was Jesus constant theme: (Matthew 16:26) What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? (NIV)
Follow me…and I will show you why you were born…follow me and I will help it all make sense…If you don’t follow me you will wonder around in circles your whole life trying to make sense of it all and never quite managing to figure it out. I ended last week with this defining paragraph: Following Christ is about positioning a living Savior, as our singular passionate pursuit. With every thought, every choice, moving us closer and closer to intimacy with the Person who gave His life in our place. It’s about receiving love from, and giving love back to, the God who created us, the God who has every right to tell us what to do, but chose to become one of us and show us instead. Following Christ means never feeling him behind us prodding us in the rear….but always out ahead of us, encouraging us and assuring us that he has cleared the path of land mines.
II. Learning to Follow….Jesus way (That’s supposed to be a play on words…) The meat of the gospel is that Jesus, after paying the price for our sins and releasing us from the penalty and the bondage of the evil one then set out to: Pursue us and welcome us back to LIFE the way it was meant to be! LIFE was meant to be a fulfilling, loving, dependent relationship with our Creator who both redeems us and offers to lead us right into life eternal. For the true believer life at it’s fullest is only a commitment away! But we often lag back wondering what complete commitment to Christ in this life might cost us…what might we miss if we completely surrender to HIM? We are often happy at the idea of “belonging to Him” but resist the thought of unconditionally following Him.
Jesus ideas, while quaint are just so contrary to real life around us: 1) The way to gain something is to give it away! 2) The key to really living is to die to ourselves! 3) True greatness is achieved through serving! 4) True independence comes not by throwing off all restrictions but by submitting to the proper Divine restrictions. Most of what you see promoted in the world around you flies directly in the face of the way Jesus presented “real life”. The residue of the curse inside of us says; That’s good stuff, I’m sure it works well for the Mother Theresa’s of this world…but in real life it’s just not realistic.
III. Following is “Directional” When Jesus said follow me, the word used is very specific… We already looked at it: Follow- akoloutheo- to be in the same way with….. to accompany Third meaning…..to come after ….if you are not careful with the two definitions above you could almost get the idea of two people walking side by side…that is not what the word means: You are in the same way with but Jesus is out ahead of you! You are accompanying him in that you are finding out where he is and going to him, you are finding out where he is going and going with him. Following Jesus is a directional pursuit… Remember… Following Christ is about positioning a living Savior, as our singular passionate pursuit. With every thought, every choice, moving us closer and closer to intimacy with the Person who gave His life in our place. Christ Followers For the true Christ follower, every decision moves us closer to the one we are following. Jesus is the leader, we follow the leader. The arrows point toward the middle…. When we get distracted from who is doing the leading or what our position is as a follower of Christ the arrows begin to point in other direction than toward the middle. Sinful decisions move us in the opposite direction from our pursuit of Christ as our Center or sometimes we decide we are close enough and just start to move in a circular orbit. (My experience is that you don’t stay long in an orbit around Christ but you slowly begin to drift outward) We tend to feel righteous when we look at others around us and they are orbiting further our than we are… To be a follower of Christ means that Jesus is the all consuming center of our experience and we are steadily moving toward him.
Many view Christianity very different. They view it as an open space defined by walls on the outside perimeter. The walls are made up of rules, and doctrines and traditions. As long as we stay inside the space without climbing over the walls we are good Christians.
Following Christ means not going over the wall. Following Christ means just not doing things that are obviously anti-Christ Christianity has to be something more than a glorified racket-ball game where we are bouncing off one defining wall and are then propelled across the court slamming into the next defining wall hoping against hop that a stray bounce doesn’t send us clear over the wall. It’s true that Christianity has well defined boundaries, if the life of a Christian is spend huddled up against the walls trying to resist the desire to climb over…that certainly can’t be described as “following Christ”
Christianity is Christ at the center…with followers converging steadily towards him. Life is like a galaxy. There is always something at the center that defines and directs everything else that moves around it. As the sun is to our solar system so the Son is to our spiritual growth! He is the center point that brings light, life, meaning, purpose direction to all that we do. From the early part of the scripture right up to the end we have strong examples of and admonitions against idolatry. Because of the examples in the Old Testament of people who “followed after idols” we come to believe that idolatry means worshipping a carved image. That’s not what it means…. Idolatry- Simply means putting something else at the center of your universe rather than the Creator who fashioned you with that spot designed for himself. What is sometime disturbing is that some modern day Christians tend to place Jesus in the orbit with them circling whatever they have substituted for Him in the center. If you carry the name of Christ with you but your career is the center of your universe…you are not a Christ follower! If you carry the name of Christ with you but your possessions are the center of your universe…you are not a Christ follower! If you carry the name of Christ with you but your self- sufficiency is the center of you universe…you are not a Christ follower! Christ followers refuse to have anything in the center of their universe, but Jesus! The life of a follower spirals closer and closer to the central Savior in intimacy and fellowship. The closer we get to Him as the center of our universe, the more of Him we reflect…. We become more and more like the one we are striving after. It’s a universal principle…the things you focus most on shape who and what you will become. God designed us that way with the full intention that all mankind would place him in the spot in our soul prepared for him. Not all have……
The thing that made the Early Church so effective was that they learned that nothing else really mattered except this relentless pursuit of Christ. The most important phrase an early Christian could recite was “I am a follower of Christ”. For them it often meant total rejection by the rest of their community. It often meant rejection by their family. Later it came to be an almost sure sentence of death. People who made the statement were fed to wild animals for the sport of those watching or covered with pitch and lighted as a torch…but to them reciting the phrase was a badge of honor they were willing to take to the grave. From the first century on the entire Western culture was shaped by the followers of Christ. All of the laws, and art, and literature, music, and moral values were shaped by those who were drawing towards their wonderful Savior. Finally….in the fourth century.. The Emperor Constantine withdrew his opposition, embraced Christianity and made it the official religion of the Roman Empire. Conclusion: That transformation of the world in the first 300 years after Christ happened for one reason only. Those who followers of Christ lived their live with a single question guiding their days.
Does this path lead to Christ? |
