Drunken Mystic

Gonna do a little series here, more to further continue the ideas on my last post.

One of the neat tricks modern Christianity has done is to take all those passages and teachings of Jesus where He talks about being one of His followers, and  explain away our personal obligation to obey those passages by differentiating between those called to be disciples and those who are still believers, like there are different levels of commitment to Christ that are still acceptable even though way less than the standards provided in the gospels.

I’m going to tackle this and probably really upset a few people who might casually read my blog.  Those who read this blog regularly have had to deal with my insane ramblings before and you’re still around … so you can at least handle this without too much of a surprise.

Not once do we see a difference in the scripture between those who are believers and those called to be disciples of Christ as He called and taught them.  Not once.  But people who “just” believe without being disciples are treated as very different.

That should be the end of it, really, but people don’t actually know the Bible well enough to check that out in their memory.  So after this introduction, important in its own right, I will go over what makes someone a follower of Christ … and then what the Bible says about those who just believe … or maybe the other way around … we’ll see.

I hear it all the time.  “Oh, I know I don’t live it, and I know I’m not doing what I’m supposed to … but I still believe.”  And the problem is that people teach that this is Christianity.  The Bible is clear on this point.  If you don’t live it, you don’t believe it.

At the end of Matthew, Jesus gives what we call the Great Commission (an important subject for perhaps another time).  It goes like this:  “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”  (italics mine)  That makes, in context, every passage about what it means and takes to a be a disciple absolutely relevant to each one of us.

So this is what the Apostles do.  The thousands of new disciples in Acts show extreme change in their lifestyle and in their attitudes and in the power with which they operate.  It is a completely unique time in history … where a nation was born without borders or violence or bureaucracy.  They make, in essence and in truth, disciples … thousands of them through the message of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Church in Jerusalem spent time in the Apostles’ teaching every day.  What were those Apostles teaching?  “To observe all things that I have commanded you.”  Maybe they disobeyed God and taught something different … but I don’t think so.

Time goes by and the Church begins to grow and is ultimately scattered by persecution.  The focus  was still teaching each believer (sorry … disciple) to “observe all things that I have commanded you”, but stuff is spread out.  Apostles have to travel around a little more to make sure sound doctrine is being taught and that people are observing all that Christ commanded.

More time passes and people have the idea: you know, we’re telling all these people about Jesus, His life, His death, His resurrection, and His commission to obey all that He said.  What if we wrote it down?  You know, the important stuff that everyone needs to hear and know to be a real follower of Jesus.

So they did.  They wrote down the words and acts of Jesus as a testimony to His death and resurrection and to clearly teach what Jesus wanted taught.  So we have Matthew, Mark, Luke/Acts, and John.

Where I’m going with all this is that all those passages in the gospels that deal with the crazy level of commitment and action that a follower of Christ must take is in there precisely because every Christian is supposed to do them.  No excuses and no exceptions.

That is why modern Christianity looks so different from the testimony of the Bible, which we say we believe.  It is not the passage of thousands of years or a different culture we live in or that we’ve progressed so far in theology.  They called people to those teachings of Jesus and if you didn’t or couldn’t follow them, you weren’t a Christian.  And they produced a people that turned the world upside down.

Before I peace-out, it’s like this:  There are these comics of Superman.  Books and books of them.  He can fly.  He’s super fast.  Bullets can’t hurt him.  He’s incredibly strong.  He shoots laser beams from his eyes and his breath can freeze things.  He can hear stuff from far away.  He saves people.  He is Superman.

Then people see a dude and put him in the Superman suit.  They call him Superman.  Don’t pay attention to the fact that he’s skinny, weak, slow, afraid of heights, blind as a bat, lactose intolerant and speaks with a lisp.  We put him in the suit, he’s got the cape and a big S on his chest.  He’s Superman.

But any idiot can see he’s not Superman.  You can go to a college or university and get a doctorate on how he is actually Superman, but that doesn’t make it true.  It doesn’t match up with the testimony of what those comics say Superman is like.  Even a child can see this.  He’s not Superman and a lot of things have to change before he could be.

That’s what we’ve done with Christianity.  It’s not just about house church or mega church or any of that stuff.  It goes WAY deeper, and it is more challenging than any of those discussions can address.

If you’re still with me … hold on, it gets better.

Peace.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 4th, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Disciples and Believers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.