“For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. Forgiveness and Mellowness of HeartĪfter teaching his disciples what we know as the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus immediately adds a footnote to the part where we are supposed to ask God to “forgive us of our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.”Īt the end of the prayer, Jesus adds this strong warning… A family that is on this journey together to live for God, to love one another and to serve the world.Īnd so, a follower of Jesus is someone who is living and participating in a community with other followers of Jesus - praying together, worshipping together, learning together, sharing their lives together and working together to serve those in need around them. The day that we decided to follow Jesus is the day that we became an adopted member of a new family. his church, his body, his family, his new people, his new humanity, his kingdom of priests, etc). The invitation from Jesus is for us to join him and his “group” (aka. Simply put… following Jesus is not something that we were intended to do on our own. This means that a follower of Jesus is someone who gives generously to the poor AND who actively seeks ways to correct the social, political and economic structures that create poverty and that systematize injustice ( this comes to mind). However - and this is important - Jesus calls us to also go above and beyond charity and to seek justice for the poor and marginalized as well. So yes, followers of Jesus should be generous people who give graciously to take care of those in need. Jesus consistently emphasized the necessity of caring for the poor, the sick, the foreigner and the marginalized. But we must resist the error and the temptation to just throw away concerns for social justice altogether. Many of us get nervous when Christians start talking about justice because social justice has political and economic implications, and it always seems to get intertwined with problematic political and social ideologies. As Rolheiser puts it, “Our prayer is honest only when our lives back it up.” 2. There’s so much I’d love to say here (and I will in future posts) but one of the most basic things to being a follower of Jesus is to cultivate an intimate relationship with God (in private) and to do so with integrity by reorganizing your entire life around the life and teaching of Jesus.Īnd so, at the most basic level, a follower of Jesus is someone who is pursuing intimacy with God and integrity in the way that he/she lives out their allegiance to him. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matt. Jesus teaches us that “when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And these four things are taken directly from a book that I am currently reading for the second time titled, Sacred Fire by Ronald Rolheiser (an excellent book on what discipleship to Jesus looks like during our 30s, 40s, and 50s).Īccording to Rolheiser, “a healthy following of Christ will rest on these four foundational pillars”. I’d like to give us four basic things that are essential to following Jesus. ![]() What are the basic things that we must be practicing and exhibiting in our lives in order to be identified as a follower of Jesus? I’m not trying to bring up the persecution of Christians or the reality of Christianity being illegal in certain countries or anything like that. ![]() Now, just so we’re on the same page here… I’m not asking that question in order to talk about actual situations where this might happen. What are things that you would have to be doing or what characteristics would you have to be exhibiting in order for there to be enough evidence to be declared “guilty” of being a follower of Jesus? If you were put on trial in a court of law because you were being accused of being a follower of Jesus, what evidence would your accusers be able to present before the court in order to convict you of this so-called crime?
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