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Purpose of today
Help you focus on the most important question you could ever ask: “Why Follow Jesus?”
Give you some clarity and focus around the answer
Why Follow Jesus? Outline:
Tell five stories (including my own)
Ask anyone here to add their stories
Discuss what it means in practice
Story 1. The big story of the Bible:
Who is your allegiance to?
Who are you going to follow?
Everything started to go wrong when Satan persuaded Adam & Eve that they couldn’t trust God, they should trust him instead.
God could have destroyed Satan immediately, but he began a massive project, culminating in Jesus coming to earth, to prove that he was the one we should trust.
For thousands of years God demonstrated that he would care for those who trusted him, and trust in anything else would lead to disaster.
This culminated in God himself coming in the form of a human, Jesus. He gave us the ultimate reason to trust him—he loves us so much he would die in our place.
But not only that, he’s building together the people who trust him to be the leaders of a new universe when this present one is destroyed.
2 Kings 5:1-19
Luke 23:33-47
Sarah Irving
“My identity lay in academic achievement, and my secular humanism was based on self-evident truths. As an undergrad, I won the University Medal and a Commonwealth Scholarship to undertake my Ph.D. in History at King’s College, Cambridge. King’s is known for its secular ideology and my perception of Christianity fitted well with the views of my fellow students: Christians were anti-intellectual and self-righteous.”
“A vexing problem in relation to the issue of human worth: The natural world yields no egalitarian picture of human capacities. What about the child whose disabilities or illness compromises her abilities to reason? Yet, without reference to some set of capacities as the basis of human worth, the intrinsic value of all human beings becomes an ungrounded assertion.”
“With an awkward but humble reluctance, I opened a book of sermons by philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich. As I read, I was struck at how intellectually compelling, complex, and profound the gospel was. I was attracted, but I wasn’t convinced.”
“I was able to see an active Christianity in people who lived their lives guided by the gospel: feeding the homeless every week, running community centres, and housing and advocating for migrant farm laborers.”
“One Sunday, shortly before my 28th birthday, I walked into a church for the first time as someone earnestly seeking God. Before long I found myself overwhelmed. At last I was fully known and seen and, I realised, unconditionally loved – perhaps I had a sense of relief from no longer running from God.”
Christianity, it turned out, looked nothing like the caricature I once held. I found the story of Jacob wrestling with God especially compelling: God wants anything but the unthinking faith I had once assumed characterized Christianity. God wants us to wrestle with him; to struggle through doubt and faith, sorrow and hope. Moreover, God wants broken people, not self-righteous ones. And salvation is not about us earning our way to some place in the clouds through good works. On the contrary; there is nothing we can do to reconcile ourselves to God.
Christianity was also, to my surprise, radical – far more radical than the leftist ideologies with which I had previously been enamored. The love of God was unlike anything which I expected, or of which I could make sense. In becoming fully human in Jesus, God behaved decidedly unlike a god. Why deign to walk through death’s dark valley, or hold the weeping limbs of lepers, if you are God? Why submit to humiliation and death on a cross, in order to save those who hate you? God suffered punishment in our place because of a radical love. This sacrificial love is utterly opposed to the individualism, consumerism, exploitation, and objectification, of our culture.
Just as radical, I realized, was the new creation which Christ began to initiate. This turned on its head the sentimental caricature of ‘heaven’ I’d once held as an atheist. I learned that Jesus’ resurrection initiated the kingdom of God, which will “bring good news to the poor, release the captives, restore sight to the blind, free the oppressed.” (Luke 4:18) To live as a Christian is a call to be part of this new, radical, creation.
Why Follow Jesus? Outline:
Tell five stories (including my own)
Ask anyone here to add their stories
Discuss what it means in practice
3. What does it means to give Jesus your allegiance?
“Jesus is Lord”
Doing his will is my purpose for living
My goals and his goals become the same thing
Career, relationships, finance, use of time
I can relax and trust him totally because following him I cannot fail!
How to become a Christ-follower?
Stop following other things, and acknowledge their uselessness and your helplessness
Commit to giving Jesus your allegiance, and trusting him with your life and eternity