We talk a lot about the “conversion process” as Christians, but it seems Christ spends just as much time talking about following Him and how that would look.

Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.  For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it.  For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and is himself destroyed or lost?  Luke 9:23-25.

In no way do I want to ignore the concept of coming to Christ, but I’ve heard many conversations on “assurance of salvation” (especially through youth groups), hypothesizing about potential situations of potentially lost souls. A friend of mine started the process of shaking up my thinking on these concerns when he said his response to people asking about these things was always, “Are you following Jesus?”.

“Follow Me” is a phrase Christ repeated over and over again during his time on earth. What does it mean to follow Him? It means to do what He did, live how He lived, and be who He was, right? That’s how a rabbi and his disciples worked as I understand it. Not sitting around drawing lines in the sand about who is in an who is out. In fact, within the inner twelve disciples was His eventual betrayer, Judas. Christ, who knew all of their hearts, intentions, and futures, didn’t reject or seperate out Judas or try to label him as a non-disciple. (don’t misunderstand me as trying to reject labels of any type.)

The questions get thrown around all of the time about salvation and sin. What if someone did X unmentionable sin, could they still be saved? Really, what does asking and answering that question help? Wouldn’t Christ’s response to such a situation be to call it sin, and challenge the person to turn from it and follow Him. I’m thinking of the woman at the well, Zacheus, and several others, who were obviously in sin, and Christ isn’t afraid to confront it.

A friend who claims to be a Christian, and is doing X, doesn’t need his salvation questioned, but a true friend who will call him to follow and pursue Christ, and through that to see how his life contains things aren’t right (sin). Christ makes it clear that salvation is a necessary part of following him, and if that’s the step that my friend felt he needed to do in order to follow Christ then great. If he felt that he had already accepted Christ, then great, repent from your sin and follow him.

Please don’t get offended by what is quite possibly my mind’s oversimplification of a complex topic, I’m simply trying to help myself and others follow Him.

I’ve always had what I felt was a conservative view of how God spoke to his children (believers). I felt like I was justified in this position because of how God had spoken in his written word, and how he had chosen prophets and individuals in the Bible to communicate his words. I’ve had this working understanding that for the most part God spoke solely through his word, which the Holy Spirit revealed to us, meaning gave clarity and insight to.

But I’ve recently started reading Hearing God by Dallas Willard, and some of the questions he’s asked have gotten me thinking again about this (which is always a good thing). One quote that challenged me to start thinking was the following quote from his book. Speaking of the experiences of Moses, Adam and Eve, and even Enoch, he writes:

Aside from their obviously unique historical role, however, they are not meant to be exceptional at all. Rather they are examples of the normal human life God intended for us: God’s indwelling his people through personal prescence and fellowship. [p.18]

A thought provoking quote:

The Spirit who inhabits us is not mute, restricting himself to an occasional nudge, a hot flash, a brilliant image or a case of goosebumps.

Holy enough to hear from God?

I’ve been mulling over these two thoughts since reading them over the last few weeks. Along the same lines as the previous quote from Willard:

“We must think of ourselves as capable of having the same kinds of experiences as did Elijah or Paul” [p.37]

He goes on to say that we frequently feel incapable of this because we feel God is too great to deal with the likeness of us, and that he only speaks in this way to the likes of Elijah or Paul. But he goes on to say that we don’t preserve God’s greatness by believing this, because as Willard writes:

“his greatness is precisely what allows him to ‘plan his day’ around me or anyone and everyone else as he chooses.” [p.37]

That Important

Another thought which I’ve been mulling over while reading this book is that we are that important to God that he would speak to us. How do we know this?

• God gave His Son for us, to die for us even though we didn’t deserve it (while we were still in our most terrible awful state of sinfulness)
• God has chosen to dwell in us as believers through the Holy Spirit

God obviously loves us and values us enough to do these two things, which are incredibly amazing, undeserved and unwarranted.

Hearing God doesn’t make us important

The other side of this though is that we are not made important because we hear from God, because he reaches out to us when we are humble before him and in our brokenness. Consider Psalm 25:9

He leads the humble in doing right,

teaching them his way.

Actually the entire Psalm 25 is an amazing testimony to how David cries out to God in spite of the fact that he is a broken, sinful man, and cries out for mercy, grace, forgiveness, and victory. You can find the entire passage on bible.logos.com

I’m glad for reading and books that challenge my thinking about my faith and how I relate to God. I hope that it get’s you thinking as well, regardless of whether you agree with it or not, as I’ve been try to do.