INVITATION

Jesus shows up on the scene and He is this Rabbi who teaches like nobody’s ever taught before. He has power over disease and over the wind and the waves. And He’s getting ready to launch His public ministry so the first thing He does is He gathers a group of men and begins to disciple them.

So the invitation of Jesus over and over and over again in the New Testament is to come and ‘follow me.’ ‘Come live as I lived.” Literally, “Come walk with me.” So He’s walking along the shores of the sea of Galille and He sees Peter and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea and He calls them to be His disciples and the invitation is, ‘follow me.’ And it says, they left their nets and they ‘followed him.’ Then he calls James and John to be His disiples and again it says that they left their boats and they ‘followed Him.’ So the call into discipleship always begins with this invitation to ‘follow Him.’

And here's the thing... When Jesus called them to follow Him, He wasn’t just inviting them to follow his teachings, He was inviting them into a brand new way of doing life. This much is made clear by the fact that when He called them to ‘follow Him’ they literally got up left their nets and physically began to follow Him. You see, back in the days that Jesus walked the earth, those wishing to study with a certain rabbi would follow not only that rabbi's teachings as closely as possible, but they would also physically follow him. The idea was that you would follow so closely, in order to not miss a word, that you would be covered in the dust from the road that your rabbi's sandals kicked up as he walked. So, there is this ancient blessing that is still used today among Rabbis and disciples, and the blessing is ‘May you be covered in the dust of your Rabbi.’ What that means is may you follow so closely behind him that as he walks and kicks-up dust, it gets all on you.

So to be a disciple wasn’t just about adhering to a set of doctrines or following a bunch of teachings, it was a way of doing life. In fact, when you go back and look at the first, Christians, they weren’t called Christians at all. They were called ‘followers of the way.’ In the book of Acts, which gives us a record of the first 30 years or so of church history, Luke uses the term Christians only once to refer to followers of Jesus and the rest of the time he uses this term, ‘followers of the way.’ And so from the very beginning, to be a Christian was all about a way of life. It was all about following the One who said, ‘I am the Way, the truth and the life.’ {John 14:6}

God bless,

Daniel Bentley