Do you follow?

"In terms of his discipleship ethic, [Jesus] called for followers, not just believers. It wasn´t good enough to confess that he was "very God of very God"; he called people to an active trust in his rather dangerous promises (Matt 8:18-22). In fact he sent people away on precisely this basis. He nowhere asks us to commit to a creed but calls on us to trust in God and what he is doing. In his teaching, he used common relational metaphors, for example, Father-Son, to express his relationship with God, and other daily metaphors (sheep, gates, houses, and so on) to express other great truths of faith.He constantly used subversive parablethat reflected ordinary life to confer profound spiritual meaning. His teaching style was definitely nonacedemic: he discipled his followers into a lifestyle (called the Way) rather than send them to an academy to learn about God divorced from the context of life and mission.

His love of life was infectious. His form of holiness was not the alienating form so often associated with religious types. It was thoroughly redemptive. We have often pondered what kind of holiness was present in Jesus that ordinary people- broken, sinful, margenalized people- loved to hang around him. They didn´t feel condemned by Him. Sadly, these same types don´t ordinarily like to hang around church people today. What´s the difference? Jesus was even accused by religious types of being a bit of a drunkard and a glutton and of fraternizing with all the wrong kinds of people. He was certainly not afraid of pleasure but oriented it toward God. He is an all of life religion,with no separation of the private and the public. He should be the church´s hero, the one we all aspire to become like. Instead we have so emphasized his divinity over his humanity that Jesus seems otherworldy, nonhuman, inaccessible."


Excerpt from The Shaping of things to Come
By Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch