So what makes someone a follower of Jesus? Is it head-knowledge? Is it a commitment in your heart? What does that even mean? I've really been mulling all of this over recently after some conversations with a pastor friend who is working with a student who is a professed atheist. He recently attended a church camp of sorts in Colorado and he "found God" (I'm not 100% sure what that means other than to say that he now believes that there is a benevolent God out there somewhere). He still isn't sure about Jesus. He believes that there was a man named Jesus long ago, but he still isn't sure about the claims Christians make about him. So is it possible for him to follow Jesus even is he doesn't necessarily believe all of the claims of Jesus?
If you look in the gospels, people stumbled into God's Kingdom in a million ways. One of my favorite stories in the gospels is about a man who is paralyzed. Jesus is sitting in a house teaching and healing people, and there is no room for anyone else to get in. It then says that the friends made an opening in the roof (the original Greek actually reads "they un-roofed the roof" how awesome is that?) and lowered their paralyzed friend down on a mat. The text then says something weird, "When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, "Son, your sins are forgiven." He later heals the man of his paralysis. I find Jesus' words very interesting. When he sees the faith of the guy's friends, he forgives his sins. So in other words, this man found his way into God's Kingdom by having the right friends. We never read anywhere that this guy even wanted his sins forgiven or wanted to be a part of what Jesus was doing. All we can assume is that he just wanted to walk, so his friends ripped a freakin' roof off of a house in order to make that happen. Because he had the right friends, he was saved.
This obviously flies directly in the face of what churches teach. Each church has their own "program" of being saved. Bear in mind, hardly any churches agree on what someone needs to do in order to become a follower of Jesus. The church where I work basically has this pattern: 1)Something happens in a person and they express interest in following Jesus. 2)Said person then talks to one of the pastors about all of this. 3)Said person generally comes forward during a church service to publicly profess their faith in Jesus as God, etc. 4)Person gets baptized.
It isn't that I have anything necessarily wrong with that series of events, I'm just wondering how much of it is necessary. It's just that when I look at Jesus' life, I don't see any pattern develop of people following him. You never even read of any of Jesus' disciples being baptized. Peter is the only one that makes any sort of a public statement of Jesus being the Messiah, and we've already seen that he obviously didn't fully grasp anything he said until much later.
I understand that these patterns develop because humans naturally want things nice and formulated. We always gravitate toward what is easiest to measure and calculate. However, Jesus doesn't work that way. There isn't a set pattern for people following him. So, once again, I ask, how much do you have to know?
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