Skip to main content

Why Follow Jesus?


When I was getting ready to graduate from college and go off to seminary, my father sat down with me one day and offered me the chance to take over the nonprofit ministry he had started almost thirty years before. I would have had a steady income, the opportunity to lead a significant Christian ministry, and the freedom to take it in new directions. But I wasn’t sure that following in my father’s footsteps in that way was what God wanted me to do. So I told my father I wasn’t sure. After graduating from seminary, I started into parish ministry and have never looked back.
I do not know how many generations in Simon and Andrew’s, or James and John’s family were in the fishing business. However, I imagine it was quite a few. There must have been great pressure on them to carry on the family tradition, if only to make a living. But they did not. They chose to follow a different dream, the dream of God’s kingdom. Mark tells us about that in Mark 1:14-20….
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.

To my mind, this text raises a very simply question: Why follow Jesus anyway? Obviously, being part of the “kingdom of God” movement got John arrested. Such events as these should have given Simon, Andrew, James, and John, enough reason not to follow Jesus, but they followed anyway. They left their nets and their families, their family businesses, and everything they knew, and they left it all immediately to follow the preacher from Galilee. Why?

I think there was something about Jesus’ message and something about his person that made Simon, Andrew, James, and John want to follow him. Let us look first at Jesus’ message….

Jesus proclaimed the good news of God. There is so much bad news in the world, it is no wonder that Simon, Andrew, James, and John found Jesus’ message refreshing and attractive. In Proverbs 25:25 we read, “Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.”

What was this good news that Jesus proclaimed? The use of this phrase, in the way Jesus used it, goes back at least as far as Isaiah the prophet. In Isaiah 52:7 we read,

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”

Jesus was preaching this same good news of the reign of God, the kingdom of God. Despite outward appearances, with Rome ruling over Palestine, according to Jesus, God was still in charge.

Don’t miss the fact that Jesus is making a great claim here. John the Baptist proclaimed that the kingdom was coming. Jesus said, “The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God has come near.” In other words, “The kingdom has come near in my coming.”

Furthermore, Jesus demanded a response to his message. He was like a waiter asking for the order. He issued a clear invitation: “Repent and believe in the good news.”

Tom Wright explains what repentance would have meant for Jesus’ first century Jewish audience….

First, it meant turning away from the social and political agendas which were driving Israel into a crazy, ruinous war. We can imagine someone saying that today in a country where ideologies are driving half the population into violent behaviour. Second, it meant calling Israel to turn back to a true loyalty to YHWH, their God. And, as anyone with a smattering of knowledge of the Bible would recognize, this was what had to happen before God would redeem Israel at last. The call to repent is part of the announcement that this is the time for the great moment of freedom, of God’s rescue.[1]

So that is repentance. Jesus was calling people to a change of mind that would result in a change of direction. But what does it mean to believe? Jesus invited people to believe in the good news. Jesus called people not simply to believe a certain report, but to believe in it, to entrust themselves to it.

The story is told that a national magazine assigned a photographer to take pictures of a forest fire. They told him a small plane would be waiting at the airport to fly him over the fire.

The photographer arrived at the airstrip just an hour before sundown. Sure enough, a small Cessna airplane stood waiting. He jumped in with his equipment and shouted, “Let’s go!” The pilot, a tense-looking man, turned the plane into the wind, and soon they were in the air, though flying erratically.

“Fly over the north side of the fire,” said the photographer, “and make several low-level passes.”
“Why?” asked the nervous pilot.

“Because I’m going to take pictures!” yelled the photographer. “I’m a photographer, and photographers take pictures.”

The pilot replied, “You mean you’re not the flight instructor?”[2]

Sometimes our trust is misplaced.

However, when Jesus calls us to place our trust in the good news that he proclaims, our trust is not misplaced. I do not know of anyone who has truly trusted in Jesus who has been disappointed.

Part of the invitation that Jesus issues here is not simply to believe in the good news, but to follow him personally. The message and the messenger are inseparably connected. If we believe his message, then we will follow him, not just a set of instructions, but him.

Greg Gilbert writes,

I started trying to teach my son to swim early on. It was a chore. A year or so old at the time, the little guy didn’t like getting water in his face in the bathtub, much less this massive ocean of a pool he was staring at now. At first, “teaching him to swim” meant getting him to splash around a bit on the top step, and maybe putting his lips in the water enough to blow bubbles if he was feeling really brave.

Eventually I convinced him to walk around with me in the shallow end, with a death-grip around my neck of course. Once we mastered that, it was time for the Big Show—Jumping Off the Side. Fulfilling my God-given duty as a daddy, I lifted him out of the pool, stood him on the side, and said, “Come on, jump!”

I think at that moment, my one-year-old son wrote me off as a crazy man.
The look on his face, in about two seconds, went from confusion to dawning understanding, to amused rejection, to outright contempt. He frowned and said, “No. I go see Mommy.” Again acting faithfully on my solemn responsibility as a father, I refused to surrender, chased him down, and eventually convinced him (with various bribes) to come back to the pool.

And so we came to the moment of truth.

I jumped into the water again and stood in front of him with my arms outstretched, watching him bob up and down in his swimmy-diaper as one-year-olds do when they kind of want to jump, but not really. “Come on, kiddo,” I said. “I’m right here. I’ll catch you. I promise!” He looked at me half skeptically, did one more little wind-up, bouncing at the knees, and then fell into the pool with what was more a flop than a jump.

And I caught him.
After that we were off to the races. “Doot ‘gain, Daddy! Doot ‘gain!” And so commenced half an hour of jump, catch, lift, reset, jump, catch, lift, reset.
When it was over, my wife and I started to worry that maybe our son had gotten a bit too comfortable with the water. What if he wandered out to the pool when no one was there with him? Would he remember all the times he’d safely jumped into the water and decide he had this pool thing whipped? Would he jump again?
Over the next few days we watched him around the pool, and what we saw both comforted me as a parent and touched me deeply as a father. Never once did my little boy think about jumping into the water—at least not unless I was standing underneath him with my arms out, promising to catch him. And then he would fly!
You see, despite all his apparent successes, my son’s trust was never in his own ability to handle the water. It was in his father, and in his father’s promise: “Come on kiddo. Jump. I promise I’ll catch you.”[3]
In a similar way I think, Jesus invites us to follow him personally, to trust in him and not our own abilities, to jump when he says jump. He also promises that if we do that, he will make us into fishers of people. He will make us into reproducers who can effectively call others into his kingdom movement.
Why did Simon, Andrew, James and John follow Jesus? I think it was partly because of his message, but it was also because of his person. As I have suggested already: there was something about Jesus that was unlike any other teacher these men had ever met. His claims were unique and his personality was magnetic. Greg Gilbert’s son trusted him and followed him into the water because Greg was his dad. I think there was something about Jesus that made Simon, Andrew, James and John recognize in his words, the sound of their heavenly father’s voice.
Mark Galli writes,
President Theodore Roosevelt was a charismatic figure who made quite an impression on people. One journalist, William Allen White, wrote of his first meeting with Roosevelt in 1897:

He sounded in my heart the first trumpet call of the new time that was to be…. I had never known such a man as he, and never shall again. He overcame me. And in the hour or two we spent that day at lunch, he poured into my heart such vision, such ideals, such hopes, such a new attitude toward life and patriotism and the meaning of things, as I had never dreamed men had…. After that, I was his man.

Then Mark Galli draws this application….
If a mere mortal can have such an effect on another, how much more our Lord? If we will spend time with him in prayer and in Scripture, we too will find our hearts filled with vision, with hopes, with a new attitude toward life and the meaning of things, and afterwards we too will say with thankfulness, “I am his.”[4]



[1] Tom Wright, Mark for Everyone, 9.
[2] Source unknown; submitted by Brett Kays to preachingtoday.com.
[3] Greg Gilbert, What Is the Gospel? (Crossway, 2010), pp. 71-72; submitted by Van Morris, Mount Washington, Kentucky, preachingtoday.com
[4] Mark Galli, managing editor, Christianity Today; source: Thomas Bailey and David Kennedy, The American Pageant, ninth edition (D.C. Heath, 1991) p. 676

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

C. S. Lewis on Homosexuality

Arthur Greeves In light of recent developments in the United States on the issue of gay marriage, I thought it would be interesting to revisit what C. S. Lewis thought about homosexuality. Lewis, who died in 1963, never wrote about same-sex marriage, but he did write, occasionally, about the topic of homosexuality in general. In the following I am quoting from my book, Mere Theology: A Guide to the Thought of C. S. Lewis . For detailed references and footnotes, you may obtain a copy from Amazon, your local library, or by clicking on the book cover at the right.... In Surprised by Joy , Lewis claimed that homosexuality was a vice to which he was never tempted and that he found opaque to the imagination. For this reason he refused to say anything too strongly against the pederasty that he encountered at Malvern College, where he attended school from the age of fifteen to sixteen. Lewis did not rate pederasty as the greatest evil of the school because he felt the cruelty displa

Fact, Faith, Feeling

"Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods 'where to get off', you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith." Mere Christianity Many years ago, when I was a young Christian, I remember seeing the graphic illustration above of what C. S. Lewis has, here, so

C. S. Lewis Tour--London

The final two days of our C. S. Lewis Tour of Ireland & England were spent in London. Upon our arrival we enjoyed a panoramic tour of the city that included Westminster Abbey. A number of our tour participants chose to tour the inside of the Abbey where they were able to view the new C. S. Lewis plaque in Poets' Corner. Though London was not one of Lewis' favorite places to visit, there are a number of locations associated with him. One which I have noted in my new book,  In the Footsteps of C. S. Lewis , is Endsleigh Palace Hospital (25 Gordon Street, London) where Lewis recovered from his wounds received during the First World War.... Not too far away from this location is King's College, part of the University of London, located on the Strand, just off the River Thames. This is the location where Lewis gave the annual commemoration oration entitled The Inner Ring  on 14 December 1944.... C. S. Lewis occasionally attended theatrical events in London.

The Shepherds' Perspective on Christmas

On December 21, 2015, the following headline appeared in the International Business Times: “Bethlehem Christmas 2015 Cancelled”. To be fully accurate, religious celebrations of Jesus’ birth went forward last year in Bethlehem, but many of the secular celebrations of Christmas that usually surround it were toned down due to instability in the area. Looking back a decade, there was even one year when Christian Arabs canceled community celebrations of Christmas in support of the Palestinian uprising. However, the Jewish government would have no part of that, so the Israeli military sponsored its own holiday celebrations in the area. It is also interesting to note who celebrated the first Christmas and who didn’t. The first Christmas was not celebrated by the emperor Caesar Augustus, nor Quirinius, the governor of Syria, nor was it celebrated by the lowly innkeeper. But Christmas was celebrated by a few lonely shepherds along with Joseph and Mary and the angels of heaven. How

A Prayer at Ground Zero

Does the Bible mention treating animals with kindness?

When I solicited questions to be addressed in this series, a member of the congregation wrote this to me: “Animals are mentioned in the Bible as beasts of burden and sacrificial animals.  Is there any mention of treating animals with kindness?” The short answer to that question is: yes. However, it is important to note that what the Bible says about caring for animals comes in the midst of a great narrative. It is a narrative of  Creation, Fall, and Redemption.  Let’s look at these three great acts in the narrative play of world history one by one. First, let’s look at creation. Creation At the very beginning of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, chapter 1, verses 26 through 28, we read this: Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the

Christmas Day Thought from Henri Nouwen

" I keep thinking about the Christmas scene that Anthony arranged under the altar. This probably is the most meaningful "crib" I have ever seen. Three small woodcarved figures made in India: a poor woman, a poor man, and a small child between them. The carving is simple, nearly primitive. No eyes, no ears, no mouths, just the contours of the faces. The figures are smaller than a human hand - nearly too small to attract attention at all. "But then - a beam of light shines on the three figures and projects large shadows on the wall of the sanctuary. That says it all. The light thrown on the smallness of Mary, Joseph, and the Child projects them as large, hopeful shadows against the walls of our life and our world. "While looking at the intimate scene we already see the first outlines of the majesty and glory they represent. While witnessing the most human of human events, I see the majesty of God appearing on the horizon of my existence. While

C. S. Lewis on Church Attendance

A friend's blog written yesterday ( http://wesroberts.typepad.com/ ) got me thinking about C. S. Lewis's experience of the church. I wrote this in a comment on Wes Robert's blog: It is interesting to note that C. S. Lewis attended the same small church for over thirty years. The experience was nothing spectacular on a weekly basis. For most of those years Lewis didn't care much for the sermons; he even sat behind a pillar so that the priest would not see the expression on his face. He attended the service without music because he so disliked hymns. And he left right after holy communion was served probably because he didn't like to engage in small talk with other parishioners after the service. But that life-long obedience in the same direction shaped Lewis in a way that nothing else could. Lewis was once asked, "Is attendance at a place of worship or membership with a Christian community necessary to a Christian way of life?" His answer w

Sheldon Vanauken Remembered

A good crowd gathered at the White Hart Cafe in Lynchburg, Virginia on Saturday, February 7 for a powerpoint presentation I gave on the life and work of Sheldon Vanauken. Van, as he was known to family and friends, was best known as the author of A Severe Mercy , the autobiography of his love relationship with his wife Jean "Davy" Palmer Davis. While living in Oxford, England in the early 1950's, Van and Davy came to faith in Christ through the influence of C. S. Lewis. Van was a professor of history and English literature at Lynchburg College from 1948 until his retirement around 1980. A Severe Mercy tells the story of Davy's death from a mysterious liver ailment in 1955 and Van's subsequent dealing with grief. Van himself died from cancer in 1996. It was my privilege to know Van for a brief period of time during the last year of his life. However, present at the White Hart on February 7 were some who knew Van far better than I did--Floyd Newman, one of Van&

Glenmerle

Glenmerle in the 1950s In 2013 I published a biography on one of my favorite authors, Sheldon Vanauken. If you are interested, you can learn more and/or purchase a signed copy here:  Signed Copy  or an unsigned copy here:  Amazon . One of the things that got me writing the book was my search for the location of Glenmerle, Vanauken's childhood home, so lovingly described in his book, A Severe Mercy . A visit to Van's alma mater, Staunton Military Academy, alerted me to the fact that Van grew up in Carmel, Indiana. Then, with the help of a local historian, we identified the location of Glenmerle.  Because Van had suggested, in my first conversation with him, that Glenmerle was destroyed, I naturally assumed that the house no longer existed. However, another one of Van's fans recently contacted me to let me know that she believed she had found Glenmerle still in existence. I was able to look up the house on a real estate web site and compare current interior photos o