It isn’t always that hard, either.  Oh, but I haven’t said what “it” is yet, have I?  Sorry. “It” is following Jesus.

In recent posts, I have spoken about guilt, shame, form, tradition and following Jesus.  A quick reading of those posts might seem as though it’s all so easy, maybe too easy.  Isn’t that how Christianity is often portrayed?  Someone comes along who is seeking.  We share the gospel, and we tell the person that all they have to do is X, Y and Z, and them everything is great.  They are excited, all their problems are over, so they do X, Y and Z.

In reality it isn’t quite that easy, is it?  The people are happy, excited; thrilled really.  After a few Sundays you don’t see them any more… What went wrong?

Maybe they didn’t really believe.  Maybe they faked the whole thing.  Maybe they moved to Ohio.  Maybe we misrepresented what it is to follow Jesus Christ by reducing it all down to X, Y and Z!  This would be the “form” part.  Becoming a follower of Jesus is not form, it’s substance. This substance is truth, reality and life.  It comes not from long-held traditions of worship, it comes from the person of Jesus Christ.  It doesn’t come from avoiding a list of no no’s, it comes from seeking Him.

Someone tell me: How will a new Christian know this if nobody is willing to show him or her the way forward?  What about a long time Christian who might have stuck around, but never came to understand what following is?  How will they ever know if nobody will take the time and effort to help them out? What about your brother or sister who is consumed with guilt, shame or baggage from their past who is living a life of pain and hurt; how are they to be healed if we avoid them?

This is the “reaching out” part of following.

The reaching out part of the Christian experience isn’t always comfortable, but it also isn’t that difficult.  It is where the joy is.  It is the part that changes lives, it is the part where we grow and grow in our faith, and that makes everything easier, if not always entirely comfortable.

I have a theory that I’d like to explore, yet I’m not sure that I can explain it as clearly as I’d like, but here goes: Christian theology is not particularly difficult to understand.  Its precepts and premises are fairly simple, it was given to “regular” guys to share with the world, and they did it.  Yes, of course they had a lot of help from the Holy Spirit, but then so do we. Yet we love to argue, follow tradition and form to avoid spiritual growth and reaching out, because they are counter-intuitive, and the fact that they are counter-intuitive is exactly the point of all things being new, for our human intuition isn’t new, it’s the old thing that Jesus died to free us from.

Hopefully, I can explain this more clearly in future posts.  In the meantime, I apologize for my inadequacies as a communicator, and hope that you, dear reader, will ponder these things.