What happens when people follow Jesus?
To the extent that we follow Jesus’s commands in relationship with him, we find our lives to be abundant, meaningful, and transcendently satisfying.
I am sure that many of my readers know someone who has “tried” Christianity and found it didn’t work. Similarly, a young person I knew used to complain that “therapists don’t work.” This person had some issues that he was hoping a therapist could solve. He found that visiting a talk therapist did not seem to help him at all. When I asked if the therapist had given some advice and whether he was following it, he said no, he didn’t follow it because it’s bad advice and doesn’t work.
Of course, while the advice possibly indeed was bad and wouldn’t have “worked,” we’ll never know because the young person didn’t follow it. It’s similar to going to the doctor and refusing to take the prescription and then complaining that the doctor didn’t help at all. Following the therapist’s advice and taking the prescription are examples of faith in action—or a lack thereof. The patient has to have enough faith in the doctor to follow the advice. This is true even though therapists and physicians are human beings and therefore fallible, so their directions might not always be efficacious.
It’s possible also to follow the advice and miss some key component of it. When I was taking statins to try to improve my blood work numbers, the medication came with a warning to avoid eating grapefruit, which I heeded. The medication helped my lab results. If I had continued eating grapefruit after starting my statin regimen, I surely would have experienced worse results than I did. The medication might not have worked at all.
There’s a fairly short list of “grapefruit” we can ingest to undermine the work of Jesus in our lives. These include bitterness, moral corruption, dishonesty, pride, and hatred. While we don’t have to live without error in terms of these undermining influences, we do need to take responsibility for ourselves and our failures, acknowledge them, and ask God for help. Jesus said he would not leave us or forsake us. We need to trust that he will keep his word.
We then will find that pragmatic evidences accrue that Jesus is real and the Bible is true. Our own lives improve. Our own lives bear it out.
This blog article is an excerpt from my book: Five Languages of Evidence: How to Speak about Reasons for Christianity in a Post-truth World. Not yet published; available upon request.
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