Following Jesus looks like… living in the Spirit

As Southern Baptists we don’t talk much about the Holy Spirit, which is odd because the Bible has a lot to say about the Spirit. Paul says in Romans 8 that if you do not have the Spirit in you (he talks both about the Spirit of Jesus and the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead), then you are not a child of God. Pretty simple actually. The Spirit is what testifies to the fact that we are children of God (Romans 8:16), not whether we prayed a prayer or walked an aisle. If you have the Spirit you are a Christian; if you don’t, you’re not.

Also, if we are followers of Jesus, disciples, then we will follow the leading of the Holy Spirit. Period. Paul said that those who are living in the flesh (as opposed to in the Spirit) can’t please God (Romans 8:8). So if the Spirit is a defining marker for us as Christians, and if being led by the Spirit is a sign that we are God’s children (Romans 8:14), why do we talk so little about the Spirit in discussions about discipleship today?

I think the answer is quite simple: we’re scared of where the Spirit will lead. In Poke the Box, Seth Godin argues that many employers and schools today work to shut down initiative and creativity. They are looking for workers and students who will do exactly as they are told, not people who will take initiative and try new things. Godin claims that to be successful today, you need to poke the box: initiate, take risks, and step outside the box, something many employees are afraid to do for fear of being wrong and getting fired.

If you replace the concepts of initiative and creativity with the prompting of the Holy Spirit, you have a fair description of many Christians today. Many of us are afraid to follow the Holy Spirit. We are scared because of where the Spirit might lead, but we are also scared because of how our church family might react. If we follow the Spirit, we might be labeled as crazy, overly spiritual, different, weird, or wrong. If we follow the Spirit in many churches today, we will upset the norm, make people uncomfortable, and run the risk of getting shunned. You know, pretty much like most people who followed the Spirit in the Bible.

Think about it, how often did God act in ways that religious people expected? Ask the Pharisees and experts in the law why they wouldn’t believe Jesus was the Messiah. Ask the Israelites why they weren’t content with God as their king. Ask the disciples why they were so slow to understand that the Messiah had to suffer and die. God works in ways we don’t understand and leads us to do things we never would have expected. So why are people who push the envelope considered outsiders and troublemakers in our churches today? Why don’t we celebrate people who step out in following the Spirit instead of condemning them for not fitting into our molds and following our traditions?

I’m not talking about pushing boundaries for the sake of pushing boundaries. But I think we need to be ready. If we want to follow Jesus, which means following the leading of the Holy Spirit, then we will overstep some boundaries, and we will upset some norms and traditions, and we will be led to do things we never dreamed of doing. Following Jesus isn’t about conforming ourselves to other people; it’s about being transformed into his image and walking in step with the Spirit. Don’t expect to be popular or well liked, after all if the world rejected Jesus why should Christians expect any different response (John 15:18-19). We need to be committed to following the guidance of the Spirit wherever he leads, not matter the consequences and regardless of what others think. It’s what followers of Jesus do.

The Cross Life in My Life

So if following Jesus means living the cross life, and if the cross life means sacrifice and selflessness, what does the cross life mean for me? Talk of living the cross life is simply chatter unless we actually begin to sacrifice and live selflessly. I have certainly not mastered these truths, but I would like to share some of what God has been teaching me about sacrifice and selflessness.

Sacrifice

• I’m a tightwad. I like to have money in the bank, and I find security in savings. I was taught tithing at a very early age, so I’ve never really had an issue with giving 10% of my money to the church (well, there were those college years, but…). The problem is that I came to view tithing as sacrificial giving, but God has been showing me that tithing, for me, is far from giving sacrificially (think of the story of the widow who put her two small coins into the temple treasury in Mark 12:41-44). My desire to have money in the bank has kept me from going on mission trips and helping others in need. I’m not proud of this, but it’s true. So what has God been teaching me? He’s been teaching me that as much as I’ve tried to convince myself that I was just exercising good common sense, what I was really showing was a lack of faith. I lack faith in God to provide. I found more security in a bank statement than in the God who owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 50:10). Recently God has led us to give in ways that I probably would not have given in the past. I don’t know that I could call anything I’ve done so far sacrificial (I’m writing this on a laptop using the wireless internet in our home while checking emails on my phone after I just finished a large hot mocha from McDonalds). Let’s just say I’ve not given to the point where it hurts, but at I am beginning to see more of what giving sacrificially means.

Selflessness

• Certain events in life cause us to see how selfish we really are. Getting married was one of those events for me. Living with another person, a person that I am called on to love like Christ loved the church, giving myself up for her, makes me realize what a selfish human being I am. Becoming foster parents was another one of those events. When I really stop and think about it, far too much of my life is spent fighting for self. For example, do I want our church to grow because I want God to be glorified and for people to know him, or do I want our church to grow so that people will think I’m awesome? Do I want our foster kids to be well behaved because of my desire to grow them up in the Lord, or do I want them to act right so that people will think I’m a great foster dad? Maybe I’m the only one that struggles with these issues, and maybe I’ve admitted too much already, but God is showing me my great need to deny myself and to commit myself to seek his glory and the welfare of others. As Paul said, I need to learn to treat others as more important than myself (Philippians 2:3-4). Ironically that passage was the text of the first sermon I preached on at our church, but it’s a concept I’m still trying to master. Selflessness is a lot about motives. Why am I doing what I’m doing? If I’m working to please others, to get my way, or to make a name for myself, I’ve left the cross life behind and instead chosen the road of self-glorification. Selfishness creeps in very subtly in my own life, and I pray that God will grant me the wisdom and strength to seek his honor and his glory above all else.

Does anything I’ve talked about so far really look that much like the cross? Not really. I am still too far from sacrificial, and I am far too selfish, but little by little God is showing me what it means to live the cross life of sacrifice and selflessness. To compare my giving to Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross is almost comical. I have a long way to go. But rather than be discouraged by the long journey ahead of me, I thank God for how far he’s brought me, and continue to pray that day by day, I will pick up my cross, deny myself, and follow him, because that’s what a disciple, a follower of Jesus, does.

Following Jesus looks like… the cross

Or to say it another way, followers of Jesus will follow Jesus to the cross. Jesus said, “Whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:38). But our image of the cross is far different from the first disciples’ image of the cross. For them the cross was an instrument of torture, humiliation, and shame. Crucifixion meant suffering, suffocation, and death.

Our image of the cross is sterile. We have cleaned the blood off the cross, taken down the dead body, coated the cross in gold and hung it around our necks and on our walls. In one sense this triumphant view of the cross is absolutely correct. In the cross, God overcame human attempts to defeat his Messiah and instead he defeated sin and death. There is beauty to be found at the wonderful cross, a symbol of God’s mercy, grace, and love. But the triumph came only after the pain and misery.

I fear we want the triumph of the cross without the sacrifice of the cross. I fear we want to live the glory of the cross without dying the death of the cross. Jesus prayed that the cup of his suffering might be taken away from him, but instead he followed God’s will to his gruesome death (Luke 22:42). God’s will meant suffering and death, only then to be followed by resurrection and exaltation. When Jesus told his disciples to take up their cross and follow him, he really meant that they would have to follow him to their deaths. They would be beaten, bruised, imprisoned, mocked, and killed.

Little in the American church looks like the suffering Messiah we claim to serve. When we gather to worship, our buildings, our outfits, and our technology reek of opulence, not suffering. We’ve come a long way from a wandering Son of Man with no place to lay his head. But if wearing rags and meeting in a shack will not necessarily get us any closer to the cross life, what might the cross life look like for our church today?

Following Jesus to the cross today will mean at least two things: sacrifice and selflessness. I see far too little sacrifice in my own life and in the church. To us, sacrificial giving often means going without a luxury most people in the world will never experience (cable TV or internet on our phones). Worse still, these luxuries are often considered necessities that prevent sacrificial giving. To us, sacrificing our time often means missing the first quarter of a football game to endure a lengthy sermon, or missing the live airing of our favorite TV show to go to Bible study or prayer meeting. If Jesus calls us to pick up our cross and follow him, we seem to think the sacrifice required is no heavier than the physical weight of carrying a literal, wooden cross. How far we have to go in truly understanding what the sacrifice of the cross means.

Following Jesus to the cross today means selflessness. Unfortunately my life is so often characterized by selfishness. Most disagreements in a church can be traced back to selfishness. We want the music we want and the programs we want and the activities we want, and if we don’t get them, we won’t be happy. We want honor and recognition, and if we don’t get them we will make sure no one else does. So much of our lives are spent clinging to and fighting for self, when so much of Jesus’ life was spent dying to self.

I don’t write these words because I pretend that I have mastered the life of the cross. But if we want to claim that we are followers of Jesus Christ, we cannot measure the success of our lives and the extent of our discipleship without looking to the sacrificial, selfless death of our Savior on the cross. If we want to follow Jesus, our lives will look like the cross. But the cross life is far harder to measure than church attendance and giving. So how do we know when we are living the cross life as individuals or as a church? Perhaps a first step is to look at our own examples of sacrifice and selflessness, and then to look at the death of Jesus on the cross and see if we can still even bear to label our lives as sacrificial and selfless. And when we find ourselves woefully lacking, as we undoubtedly will, we kneel down once more, pick up our cross, deny our selfish desires, and once more start down the road following our Master through suffering to glory.

Go make converts, church members, or disciples?

I’m sure I sometimes come across as critical of the church and church members. Being critical, or certainly being hypocritical, is never my goal, but I have recently been reflecting on the concerns I have with church as I have experienced traditional Southern Baptist church in my life. Judging from my limited experiences, I think we have lost sight of the mission of the church. I can’t speak for every church, every traditional church, or even exclusively for my church, but I just can’t help but feel that we have turned the church into something other than what God intended His church to be. I don’t mean that everything we do is wrong or that only people who do church my way are right, but I believe many of our churches have drifted off course into something other than what we find in Scripture. We have lost sight of the aim of the Christian and the goal of the church, to make disciples of all nations.

The mission Jesus gave his followers was to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey everything He commanded (Matthew 28:18-20). Jesus gave us this Great Commission, but I’m not sure that we have made this commission the mission of our church. At our worst we find ourselves trying to keep the programs of the church alive, but even at our best sometimes we are doing little more than trying to make converts and church members, not disciples.

Making converts involves seeing people profess belief in Jesus. A convert is someone who has changed his or her religion from something else to Christianity. Wrapped up in the idea of a convert are important concepts. We do want people to profess Jesus as Lord, but conversion is only the beginning of teaching people to obey everything Jesus commanded. You can’t be a disciple without becoming a convert, but you can convert and never really commit yourself to following Jesus.

Perhaps a step further down the road, many churches work hard to make people into church members. We go to great efforts to convince people to participate in our programs. But is church membership and being active in the programs of a local church really the aim of discipleship? You can’t be a disciple without being committed to the church, but you can be an active church member without being a disciple.

What Jesus really called us to do was to make disciples. Simply put, disciples are people who learn from Jesus and follow him. Scot McKnight, in One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow, said, “We have too many Christians who have accepted Jesus into their hearts and who have been baptized and who have confessed their sins and who have joined the Church and who are in Bible studies and who are absolutely 100 percent convinced they are going to heaven, but who are not followers of Jesus. There are many who haven’t made it real. The mark of a follower of Jesus is following.”

My fear for our church is that we have been satisfied with getting people into heaven, as best we understand what that means, and we have neglected the task to which Jesus called us, teaching people to follow him. It sounds so simple to say that the mark of a follower of Jesus is following Jesus, but then why does my life often look so little like his? Why are his priorities not always my priorities? Too often I’ve been satisfied with my own conversion and with the many gold stars I am sure I “deserve” for my faithful attendance at church. But why is it that I don’t forgive others like Jesus forgave me? Why don’t I sacrifice like He sacrificed?

I firmly believe that our churches today need to change our scorecards, as a pastor friend of mine loves to say. We should rejoice when people profess Jesus as Lord and are baptized, but we should not be content. We should be glad over those who commit to being a part of our church family, but we should not stop there. We should judge the success of our church by Jesus’ call to follow Him, to live like He lived. We are successful as a church not when people are showing up, and not even when they are being baptized, but when they are becoming disciples of Jesus and giving all of their lives to follow him as Lord. More than by attendance at church, even more than by baptisms alone, discipleship is measured as we deny ourselves and daily take up the cross to follow him. This is discipleship, and it must be what we are about as a church, and we cannot consider ourselves successful as a church until we are following Jesus that closely and calling others to do the same.

We ask a lot of questions as churches to help us decide what we will do. What have we always done? Will people come to this event? What do people want? But our foundational question should be, “Does this make disciples?” If we are willing to ask this question both biblically and honestly, I sincerely believe that what we do as a church will change drastically, but more importantly I believe that then God will be glorified as people are formed into the image of His Son. So what does following Jesus look like? I plan to give some of my thoughts on an answer to that question in upcoming posts, but it all begins with a commitment to follow Jesus Christ and to give our lives to fulfilling His commission to make disciples of all nations.

Driving down memory lane…

Many of us delight in trips down memory lane. I remember driving through the Mississippi Delta with my dad, visiting places from his childhood and hearing how much bigger the house he grew up in was when he was a kid. For years my family spent Christmas with my mom’s parents in the house her dad built years ago. I will likely never see many of the houses I remember living in as a child. Some of them have been torn down, and some of them are halfway across the world. The more mobile we become as a society, and the less we build things to last, the fewer opportunities we have to take those trips down memory lane. Perhaps for this very reason, we often fight to keep memories from our past alive.

I recently read about several schools in Gulfport that might either be shut down or torn down. Each time, a group of alumni from the school banded together to try to prevent the closing. Usually the alumni talked about preserving the school’s heritage. Likewise, Churches close down regularly today as congregations get older and membership dwindles to a level that can no longer sustain the church’s existence. When churches are dying, members usually struggle to preserve the legacy of their church. The same happens with ministries inside the church. Churches will often continue events long after those activities ceased being effective because they want to continue to remember the successes of the past.

We love to remember the past. I recently officiated the wedding of one of my college roommates. We spent a lot of the weekend reminiscing about good times from our college years. There’s nothing wrong with remembering the past, learning from the past, or preserving the past, but I wonder when we cross the line into living in the past. How do we know when a new school and a fresh start are better for the next generation than preserving the legacy of a once effective educational institution? How do we know when a new church start is better than continuing the heritage of a church that stopped making disciples years ago? How does a church know when ending a ministry and starting a new work will be more effective than providing the next generation with the same ministries we had “when we were kids?”

One particular concept from the book Radical Together stuck with me. Platt suggested that we often ask whether a church activity is right or wrong when we should be asking what is best. I wonder if that one simple question might help us focus our attempts to preserve the past while still moving into the future. If we ask if ministry X is right or wrong, we would probably never quit doing anything as a church. Little of what we do as churches can definitively be labeled as wrong. But when we begin to ask what is best for the Kingdom, the whole conversation changes. Unfortunately many Christians are simply unwilling to ask what is best. If we were, our churches might start changing the way they operate, ending many ministries from the past and starting new, more effective works for the future. While many things might stay the same, changing the conversation from right versus wrong to good versus best can help us see what we do in a whole new light, perhaps helping us to move on to the better things God has in store for us, as Christians and as churches.