The Challenge
Church, a question: What would it look like if, in 2025—with every decision you face, in every relationship you have, toward every feeling and attitude that is within you, and over the overall direction of your life—you made a deliberate, intentional decision to ask, “What is The Jesus Way in this situation?” and then you determined to live out The Jesus Way?
What would happen to you as an individual if you sought out and then enacted The Jesus Way in every, single situation you faced this year?
And what would happen to this church if all of our members did this, individually and corporately?
In his beautiful book, Homage to a Broken Man: The Life of J. Heinrich Arnold—A true story of faith, forgiveness, sacrifice, and community, Peter Mommsen wrote the following about the effect that his great grandfather Eberhard Arnold’s Christian teachings had on his grandfather, Heinrich Arnold.
Heiner felt a certain excitement whenever his father began to speak: “We people of today need an upheaval—the complete reversal and re-evaluation of all norms and social conditions….The answer will be found in the teachings of Jesus.” Many of the guests were openly incredulous: “But is that realistic? Can we actually build a society based on the Golden Rule? Isn’t that fanaticism? How is it possible to truly love your enemy?”[1]
The Jesus Way challenge agrees with Eberhard Arnold that we need a complete reversal, a complete upheaval, and that the stuff of this revolution will be found in the teachings of Jesus. Furthermore, it believes it is realistic and it is possible.
I agree with John Poulton, who writes:
The most effective preaching comes from those who embody the things they are saying. They are their message…Christians…need to look like what they are talking about. It is people who communicate primarily, not words or ideas…Authenticity…gets across from deep down inside people…A momentary insincerity can cast doubt on all that has made for communication up to that point…What communicates now is basically personal authenticity.[2]
So here is our challenge this morning and every day of this year: In 2025—with every decision you face, in every relationship you have, toward every feeling and attitude that is within you, and over the overall direction of your life—will you make a deliberate, intentional decision to ask, “What is The Jesus Way in this situation?” and then live out The Jesus Way?
The Premise
Behind this challenge rests a premise, a belief that makes the challenge intelligible. The premise is this: Jesus has a way, and we can both know it and walk it.
When Jesus told us to follow Him, He believed that we could actually do so.
Church: We can do what Jesus called us to do. If you believe deep down that we cannot, His own words become unintelligible and almost cruel.
For instance, in Jesus’ great call from Matthew 16, we read:
24 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
The question is, do you think that is an actual command that Jesus thought people could actually do? Can we actually follow Jesus?
Or take Jesus’ very plain and simple words in John 15:
14 You are my friends if you do what I command you.
Do you think Jesus meant that? Or is this a game? Is He toying with us? Or can we actually do what Jesus commands us to do? And is our doing so really very important to our friendship with Jesus, like He says?
The New Testament writers seemed to think it was possible. For instance, in Galatians 2, Paul writes:
20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Paul writes that His life has been fundamentally and ontologically altered and changed and shaped like Jesus. He did not say he was Jesus. But Paul said that he lived now “by faith in the Son of God.”
So here is the premise behind the challenge: We can do what Jesus asks us to do. We can obey Him. We can actually follow Him.
The Problem
But here is the problem: We do not walk The Jesus Way. Not as we should. Not on the whole. Not in the main.
In his book, What’s Wrong with the World, G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”[3]
George Barnard Shaw once wrote that “Christianity never got any grip of the world until it virtually reduced its claims on the ordinary citizen’s attention to a couple of hours every seventh day and let him alone on week-days.”[4]
In his book, The Radical Disciple, John Stott wrote:
…[A] Hindu professor, identifying one of his students as a Christian, once said, “If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ, India would be at your feet tomorrow.”
…[T]he Reverend Iskandar Jadeed, a former Arab Muslim, who has said, “If all Christians were Christians there would be no more Islam today.”[5]
These are challenging words, indeed, and there is truth in them. Why do we seem to fail to follow Jesus as we should? I believe it is because of a number of faulty views we have, views that we need to rid ourselves of. Let me name a few.
The unattainable ideal view of Jesus.
The most common faulty idea we have of Jesus is the “unattainable ideal” view. This view goes like this: Jesus realized that we could never actually do what He asked us to do, so His intent in asking us to do these things was to create a crisis moment where we would run into His arms in faith. So His point is not actual obedience, but intense relationship. (One hears this frequently around The Sermon on the Mount.)
The problem with this view is that it is never articulated in the New Testament, it goes against the plain meaning of the words of Jesus, and, most damning of all, it sidesteps the question of whether or not we can actually do what Jesus calls us to do after we run into His arms in faith.
Simply put: The crisis moment is part of conversion, not part of sanctification. We run to Jesus when realize that we cannot do these things on our own. But do you believe that, with Jesus’ help, we can, in fact, do what Jesus asked us to do?
The vampire approach to Jesus.
I am taking language here from the late Dallas Willard. Willard, in a chapter he wrote entitled “Why Bother with Discipleship?” condemns as a “heresy” the idea that a person can say, “I’d like a little of your blood, please. But I don’t care to be your student or have your character. In fact, won’t you just excuse me while I get on with my life, and I’ll see you in heaven.”[6]
This, Willard argues, basically makes us vampires and Jesus our victim. We take His blood. We live forever. We otherwise do not have a great deal to do with him.
The life insurance salesman view of Jesus.
By “the life insurance salesman Jesus” I mean the view that Jesus’ is mainly concerned with getting you to Heaven and not with how you live now. So, the point of Jesus, in this faulty idea, is to get you ready to die, not to get you ready to live. Jesus came to secure for you a policy and then to sell it to you. You buy it with belief, and you cash it in when you die. In this way, we can sidestep actually doing what Jesus said here and now because the really important thing is that you get to go to heaven.
The overcomplication of Jesus.
Finally, there is a rampant overcomplication of Jesus. The problem here is that we have seemingly ruled out the idea that we could simply determine, with the Holy Spirit’s power, to do what Jesus said and then do it. We believe that becoming like Jesus involves some strange, ethereal reality and not a determination to actually do it. We read the so-called Sermon on the Plain from Luke 6 and think, “Well, that sounds good, but how would I ever do it? How could I bless those who curse me (v.28)?” But whatever else is involved in blessing those who curse you, surely included in that is a simple determination that the next time you are cursed, you will bless! In short, we have seemingly ruled out the possibility that we can simply obey Jesus and that, in many ways, it is not that complicated.
All of this has created a crisis situation in the church today, a situation powerfully summarized by Dallas Willard in The Divine Conspiracy:
More than any other single thing…the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God. It also accounts for the practical irrelevance of Christian faith to individual character development and overall personal sanity and well-being.[7]
The Possibility
But these faulty ways of thinking are wrong. And if they are wrong, it opens up an amazing possibility: We can walk The Jesus Way, become like Jesus, and do what Jesus called us to do!
To walk The Jesus Way, we need to embrace four realities.
Our walking The Jesus Way needs to be (1) salvifically grounded, (2) biblically informed, (3) Holy Spirit empowered, and (4) community encouraged.
That is to say, we need to be:
- born again
- knowledgeable of the scriptures
- filled with the Holy Spirit
- encouraged and assisted by our Christians brothers and sisters
This is so because:
- If you are not born again then you are not in relationship with Jesus. Thus, The Jesus Way will seem absurd to you.
- If you are not knowledgeable of the scriptures you will not know the content of The Jesus Way and how it is to be lived out.
- If you are not filled with the Holy Spirit, you will be operating out of your own power and thus be, inevitably, doomed to fail.
- If you are not encouraged by the body of Christ, you will not only struggle to walk The Jesus Away alone, but you will lack the wisdom of your brothers and sisters who can help you think through what it is and how to walk it.
Yes, we need these four realities. But this much is true: It begins with a choice, with a determination.
Will you determine to walk The Jesus Way?
Church, what would it look like if, in 2025—with every decision you face, in every relationship you have, toward every feeling and attitude that is within you, and over the overall direction of your life—you made a deliberate, intentional decision to ask, “What is The Jesus Way in this situation?” and then you determined to live out The Jesus Way?
Why do we offer this challenge? Do we offer it merely as a social experiment? Do we offer it in an effort to grow the church? Do we offer it so that we will have something to do this year? No. A thousand times no!
We offer this challenge because Jesus is Lord and that means that The Jesus Way is the only true path to peace, to flourishing, and not only to our betterment, but to the betterment of the world. What is more, The Jesus Way must be seen as the absolutely necessary calling of all who make the Jesus profession!
If we say we know Him, then we must walk His way! We dare not profess Jesus and then walk any other way.
Will you walk The Jesus Way?
[1] Mommsen, Peter (2015-04-30). Homage to a Broken Man: The Life of J. Heinrich Arnold—A true story of faith, forgiveness, sacrifice, and community. (p. 17). Plough Publishing House. Kindle Edition.
[2] John Stott, The Radical Disciple. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), p.35-36.
[3] https://www.chesterton.org/the-christian-ideal/
[4] http://shawquotations.blogspot.com/2014/09/christianity-might-be-good-thing-if.html
[5] John Stott, The Radical Disciple (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), p.35-36.
[6] Willard, Dallas. The Great Omission. (), p.14.
[7] Willard, Dallas. The Divine Conspiracy. (New York, NY: HarperOne, 1997), p.xv.