According to Pew Research, about 65% of American’s claim to be Christian, and about half of this 65% group believes the Bible completely true and attends church on an almost weekly basis.²⁷ I hope we see an issue immediately with this. Jesus does not come to us as a savoir who has us say a magical prayer and then let go back to running our own lives. When Jesus saw Simon fishing, He told him to abandon those things, follow Him, and even gave Simon a new name. When we look at the apostles, we do not see a Jesus who is afraid to interfere with the lives of His disciples. We see a Jesus who commands and guides them. If we are in Christ, Jesus is our Lord. We are not just to surrender Sunday morning to Him, but every moment. If He is our Lord on Sunday, he better be our Lord on Monday too. He should not only change and control our Sunday morning alarm clock, but should affect every word we speak and action we take. When we look at the percentage of nominal Christians compared to those who are really following after Jesus, we do not see an attitude and reverence that those who claim the name of Christ should have. Nationwide, we are comfortable with Jesus being our Savior, but we do not want to make Him our Lord.

John the Baptist had a reverence for Jesus that caused him to say, “I am unworthy to even take your sandals off for you.” Is that the kind of Jesus our speech portrays and our actions show? Or is Jesus profaned in our jokes and hidden in the way we treat others. Following Jesus means that we are making Him lord of our life. Kyle Idleman in a study you may know, summarizes Christians into two categories: fans and followers. Are you following Jesus, or just a fan of His?

I do not want to mislead us on Jesus being the Lord of your life. Following Jesus does not mean that you need to burn your home down and disown everyone you know. It does mean that you show Christ as Lord through the use of your things and the way you foster relationships. As with the apostles, they did not always know where they were going, but they were following Jesus’s lead. Their primary focus was not comfort, wealth, or even family. Their primary focus was Jesus.

“Following Jesus isn’t something you can do at night where no one notices. It’s a twenty-four-hour-a-day commitment that will interfere with your life. That’s not the small print—that’s a guarantee.” ― Kyle Idleman