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Welcome to Bayside Uniting Church
The Front Page
Last Updated on Friday, 18 May 2012 08:30 Written by Bayside UC Friday, 03 June 2011 00:00
‘FOLLOW ME’
Dear Friends,
Over the past weeks we have been exploring what is involved in ‘Christian Discipleship’ from our reading of the Bible. What I have tried to do is to present to you a Biblical framework as our foundational platform from which we could launch when considering discipleship.
What have we learnt from the Gospel accounts on discipleship? Jesus said: ‘Follow Me’.
Well, I hope it has become clear that the call goes forth and the immediate response is one of obedience to the call. "Follow me", is a call to a definite and concrete action. The call is to simply run along behind Him as He leads the way. It is an act of obedience following the incarnate Son of God and along the way the Holy Spirit shapes our lives by the example of the life of Jesus as sketched in the gospels. We have also come to appreciate that discipleship essentially means adherence to Christ in an exclusive attachment to His being. It is not a model of ethics, not a general religious knowledge, not a doctrinal system but a living relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ the sole mediator of our relationship with God.
What’s the content of the call? “Follow Me”.
I don’t believe we will ever come across such powerful and potent words in our life time. These two words are the absolute claim of God over our lives. There’s no room for manoeuvring or evading Jesus’ call on our lives. We may try as the gospel accounts remind us to evade the call by throwing up all kinds of “moral difficulties” to mask our conscious or unconscious disobedience, and we may try to find a loophole in this call by using the law as a way of establishing a so called independent space from which we can retain the controls over our lives, but at the end of the day, we are faced with the choice of either being obedient or disobedient to Jesus’ call. I guess it’s a difficult call and it’s compounded by the fact that we can’t even follow Jesus on our own terms and conditions.
But you know, the most baffling and astounding thing about discipleship is the fact that God calls and it is God who provides the way for us to hear the call to life and to create the response of obedience and faith to forsake all because of Christ. It is by God’s grace and power that the Apostles and we have been called to be a disciple of Christ. It is by God’s grace.
Along our journey, we have also come to understand that the call to follow Jesus is a deeply threatening and offensive call. Our lifestyle and our very being is stormed by the absolute claim of Christ because it tears us away from all other attachments in this life to follow Him. The claim of Christ drags us out of our hiding place which we all built for ourselves and He looks directly in to our faces and says: drop the academic questions and your series of “moral dilemmas” and get on with the simple obedience to the will of God as revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Indeed it seems that ‘only those who obey... can believe’ and ‘only those who believe.... can obey’.
Praise be to God. It is God who does all these things in us and sets us free to live in the freedom of obedience.
Rev. L. Senituli
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