Is Christianity about believing in Jesus or following Jesus?
The Church speaks of both.
The Bible speaks of both.
What is Christianity about? Believing or following?
You might say - Don’t we need to do both?
Aren’t they just two ways of saying the same thing?
It might seem like a inconsequential question of semantics but there is a vital distinction to be made.
You can believe without following.
But you can’t follow without believing.
You can believe certain things about Jesus in your head and refuse to let that affect you – refuse to let that change your life in any real way.
But you can’t strive to follow Jesus if you don’t even believe in him.
Why would you do that?
You can’t decide you want to live God’s way and not even believe in God.
How could you do that?
So I think that following Jesus is what matters – not simply belief. Because following includes believing but goes further to make a difference in a person’s life.
And also, by the way, it’s what Jesus asked for.
Jesus almost never asked people to believe in him. Nearly always his plea was “Follow me.”
Christians are people who follow Jesus.
One of the biggest mistakes the church has made to is to overemphasise the “believing” element in our relationship with Jesus.
It has become for many people a formula.
Believe that Jesus has died for you, ask God to forgive you, and you are “born again”. That’s it! You are a Christian.
The problem with just that is that it implies that all that Jesus was about was dying on a cross. That’s really the whole story.
Everything else about Jesus doesn’t really matter so much. It misses out on all that Jesus said and was and believed and strived for and did – except for the last moment of his life.
It’s as if all the things that Jesus said and did were just some kind of warm up – some kind of marking time before the “main” event.
The funny thing is that the people who spend most time talking about Jesus – you know the ones that say “Jeeeeeesus!” aren’t often really all that interested in him – not the whole person..
They want everyone to believe in Jesus and they go and on and on about Jesus’ death and the cross and even his blood but they don’t seem that interested in what Jesus actually said or did or taught.
They don’t seem to care much about his priorities, his goals or his ideals.
Christianity is all about accepting a formula, saying you “believe” and working out the benefits for you and your family.
But Jesus didn’t come to be our personal life-coach and trainer.
Jesus came into this world to change it around, and we need to recover his radical message if we want to imagine we are following him.
Today and for the next few weeks our Bible readings will be from the Sermon on the Mount. This is the heart of Jesus teachings. It goes from Matthew 5 to Matthew 7 – three whole chapters. It wasn’t one sermon but a collection of some of the things that Jesus said at different times.
A very well known American Christian writer and speaker called Jim Wallis (whom I once met in Ireland) said that all the years growing up (and he was always at church) he never once heard a sermon based on the Sermon on the Mount.
Recently someone I know very well who goes to a very conservative church in Glasgow said – “I just wish for once I could hear a sermon about Jesus!”
His minister spends his time wading through books like Genesis and Revelation or Romans and Galatians. It’s all about doctrine.
That minister talks often enough about believing in Jesus and why that matters. But he doesn’t talk much about Jesus himself.
Many churches use the Lectionary which is set Bible readings for each Sunday. We usually follow the lectionary here in Langside.
Every week there is four readings – one from the Psalms, one from elsewhere in the Old Testament, one from the Gospels and one from another part of the New Testament.
One thing that may surprise you is that for most of us ministers there is no difficulty in finding subjects we could address. It may take us a while to put into words exactly what we want to say but the Bible provides us with subject matter that is basically endless. There is so much in the Bible and we can never exhaust its meaning.
So one of the issues for us ministers is in trying to get the balance right.
In Langside we tend to major on our gospel reading most weeks and try to learn more of (and from) Jesus. There is nothing wrong with looking at other books of the Bible and preaching on them too, and that happens, but if I am to get the balance wrong, I’d rather give too much of Jesus than too little.
Jesus is the one who matters above all else.
Of course we need to look at the whole Bible.
But first and foremost the emphases needs to be about Jesus.
Jesus is the one who needs to be encountered.
Jesus is the one who challenges us to live as God intended us.
Jesus calls us to life’s greatest adventure.
I was reading a book recently by a guy called Robin Meyers and he was pointing out a strange contrast between Jesus and the Church.
The Sermon on the Mount is all about who we are – our lives and our attitudes and actions. There is nothing there about stuff to believe.
It’s all about who we are as people outwardly and inwardly too.
A few centuries later the Church created the Nicene Creed. It becomes the official outline of Christian faith.
Everything is about belief – nothing there about lifestyles or action!
The church has overemphasised “believing” at the expense of “being”.
In other words its not simply what we believe – it’s who we are.
That’s what will make the difference to us personally.
And that’s what will make the difference to the world around us.
Believing stuff is easy.
Believing stuff asks nothing of us.
But Jesus calls us to a whole new life. That a lot more radical than saying you “believe” in Jesus.
If we are to be true followers of Jesus we need to take seriously not just his death but all that he did and said and taught.
Today the children lay on the floor and got another angle on their surroundings.
Every day Jesus invites us to consider the world through God’s eyes and gain a perspective which will often be different from that of our neighbours.
In today’s reading we hear the opening words of the Sermon on the Mount and the words that have been called the beatitudes. Can I suggest that we all take the time to look again at these words over the next weeks, as we work through these chapters, asking God to speak to us and guide us as we try to learn from Jesus perspective on life.
I’m not going to explore these words right now in this sermon. All I want to do today is reiterate the truth that in church we need to recover the whole Jesus and not just the death of Jesus - important though that is.
Our task as Christians is to take up the mission of Christ, to walk in his steps, to live by his priorities, to serve those in need, and to follow where he leads us.
I was never a great fan of the song we sung today before the sermon – “The Heart of Worship”. It was a typical modern worship song – the music was interesting but the words a wee bit sugary or something.
But I’ve now come to like it because I believe that the message in it is one that we need to hear.
It doesn’t matter how nice our church is or how comfortable we feel in our church. What matters is not the church but Jesus.
What the world outside the church needs to hear and what we inside the church needs to hear is, amazingly, the same thing.
Jesus.
For those people on the outside of faith it is Jesus who needs to be encountered.
Because Jesus is the Word of God.
Jesus is the one who can change people’s lives and bring to life meaning and purpose and new direction.
And for you and me it is Jesus that we need to continually encounter.
We never stop learning.
There is always another chance to reflect and adjust our lives in the light of the lifestyle of Jesus, his priorities, his parables and his teaching.
We never complete this learning.
We never get to the stage where we have “done” Jesus - when we can put him aside knowing all we need to know.
Jesus is ever new, ever fresh.
He continues to guide and inspire - and open our eyes to new truth.