Faithful Followers

Posted on by korgrocker

“Who may worship in your sanctuary, Lord? Who may enter your presence on your holy hill? … Those who despise flagrant sinners, and honour the faithful followers of the Lord, and keep their promises even when it hurts.”
Psalm 15:1, 4 NLT

We continue to explore the attributes necessary for a believer to worship the Lord and enter into His sanctuary. We despise the “flagrant sinners” and now we turn to honouring the “faithful followers of the Lord”. It must be easy, one would think. After all there are many people who call themselves Christians and we only have to walk into a church on a Sunday morning to find them. There they are, seated in the pews, looking towards the minister speaking from an elevated platform called a pulpit. Or they might all be standing singing a song or hymn, accompanied by the sounds of a pipe organ, or in more modern times, a small band of musicians complete with guitars and drums. Surely we won’t have any problems honouring them. But if only it was that simple. There are many people who call themselves Christians but Jesus said, “Not everyone who calls out to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter” (Matthew 7:21). 

So how do we discern who the “faithful followers of the Lord” really are? In fact, are we ourselves counted in their number? And do we really know and understand what God’s will is for each one of us? Jesus continued in Matthew 7:22-23, “On judgment day many will say to me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.’ But I will reply, ‘I never knew you. Get away from me, you who break God’s laws.’” I know a successful pastor who said to me once that this Scripture worries him personally. Surely this bar is far too high for believers in God to reach, let alone jump over. But doing the will of God is to believe in Jesus, to receive the gift of the forgiveness of sin made possible by His death on the cross and to be declared righteous before God. Our standing before God is not about us but it is all about Jesus. Those who do tremendous things for God, even in His name, but who don’t know Him personally, are in danger of rejection on judgement day.

But we’ll consider the question again. How do we discern who the “faithful followers of the Lord” are? I would say we pray for that discernment and, if in any doubt, treat other Christians as though they were indeed “faithful followers of the Lord.” Not all members of a denomination other that the one we follow will be true Christians. Some “Christian” fellowships may not be following the same “Lord” that we do. And there are sects around like the JW’s who consider themselves to be Christian, but are they really, in the true sense? They think so, but does the Lord? 

We don’t want to get tied up with this, and instead we follow what Paul wrote in Romans 12;10, “Love each other with genuine affection, and take delight in honouring each other“. We start with our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ in the fellowship where we worship. Paul wrote in Philippians 2:3-4, “Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too“. The body of Christ where God has put us will have many different people. Different ages, backgrounds, skin colours, professions and so on, but before the cross we are all equal. And before Jesus we honour them, whether or not they are faithful. How faithful they are in following the Lord is between them and God, but regardless, we pilgrims honour our brothers and sisters in Christ. And we will be blessed through doing it.

Dear Father God. There are those around us who profess to be Your followers and we remember that they too are Your blood-bought children. Help us to concern ourselves with them, praying for them and loving them. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Jesus the Non-Conformist

Posted on by korgrocker

““Where have you put him?” he asked them. They told him, “Lord, come and see.” Then Jesus wept. The people who were standing nearby said, “See how much he loved him!” But some said, “This man healed a blind man. Couldn’t he have kept Lazarus from dying?””
John 11:34-37 NLT

There must have been quite a crowd of people in the area where Jesus was because His emotions were seen and commented on. The kinder ones in the crowd observed Jesus’ tears and put them down to His relationship with Lazarus, now ended after his death, or so they thought. So to them tears were a sign of a grieving Jesus. However, there were others in the crowd who were not so impressed and came to the conclusion that Jesus wasn’t all-powerful, because the Healer of the blind man obviously, to them, couldn’t have saved Lazarus. Well, as we know, they were about to receive quite a shock!

A major problem within Israel was false expectations. The people had drawn their own conclusions about the Messiah they were expecting, based on Scripture that portrayed Him as the coming King, who would restore to Israel their autonomy, and political and emotional stability. Scriptures such as Zechariah 9:9-10, “Rejoice, O people of Zion! Shout in triumph, O people of Jerusalem! Look, your king is coming to you. He is righteous and victorious, yet he is humble, riding on a donkey— riding on a donkey’s colt. I will remove the battle chariots from Israel and the warhorses from Jerusalem. I will destroy all the weapons used in battle, and your king will bring peace to the nations. His realm will stretch from sea to sea and from the Euphrates River to the ends of the earth”. The Jewish people extrapolated the prophetic writings into an imagined situation where the Messiah would destroy the Roman occupiers and fulfil their expectations, even if He was riding a donkey.

Such was Jesus’ impression on the people of Galilee after He fed the crowd of five thousand men and their families, that we read, “When the people saw him do this miraculous sign, they exclaimed, “Surely, he is the Prophet we have been expecting!” When Jesus saw that they were ready to force him to be their king, he slipped away into the hills by himself” (John 6:14-15). They wanted Jesus to lead a rebellion to be free of the Romans, just as their ancestors had been freed from slavery to Egypt. But the same attitude to Jesus was present when faced with His miracles. Some people wanted to dictate to Him what He should and shouldn’t do. Their expectation was that the Healer of Mr Blind-no-more was also supposed to be the Healer of His friend Lazarus. So in their eyes Jesus wasn’t as powerful as He seemed to say He was. 

Jesus was never going to conform to an earthly or human agenda. He was counter-cultural and non-conformist within the Israeli society. His work was in accordance with His Father’s instructions, not the expectations of the people. Jesus said to the Pharisees,  “ … When you have lifted up the Son of Man on the cross, then you will understand that I Am he. I do nothing on my own but say only what the Father taught me. And the one who sent me is with me—he has not deserted me. For I always do what pleases him” (John 8:28-29). Jesus was not a man-pleaser and was never going to conform to human expectations.

We pilgrims are also counter-cultural and non-conformist in the sense that we are not going to always behave in a way that unbelievers expect. We are citizens of the Kingdom of God living as ambassadors in our natural world, the kingdom of darkness, and that will expose us to all sorts of criticism and expectations. We are not followers of the crowd walking long the broad way that leads to hell. We are journeying on the narrow way, a path paved with ridicule and abuse from the broad way people. But that matters little to God’s counter-cultural and non-conformist children.

Dear father God. Please help us on our journey to the Promised Land, a place where we will find the glory of the Lord. Amen.