Why does following Jesus “work” 3
Healing, redemption, and hope
Continued from a previous post
Healing and hope
The last two blog posts seek to begin to answer, “What is the ‘mechanism’ at work in the lives of believers that results in joyful, meaningful life?”
The cliché “While there’s life there’s hope” sometimes is true and sometimes isn’t. When we consider that Jesus brings hope to the hopeless, though, the saying can be true more often than not. As one of my pastors said, “Despair went out with the Resurrection.”
Here’s a summary of the hope Jesus brought to a self-described “Financial Accountant, Passionate Writer, and Speaker,” and “born-again Christian,” Mpolo’ Phutheho:
I feel a lot lighter than I used to. I feel at ease knowing I have a Saviour and a Father in Christ to resolve matters beyond my control. People can be judgemental and they change but God listens and never judges me. It is hard to explain but you feel it. I take all my issues to him. I rely on him wholeheartedly. There was also a time where I was bothered about being rejected by my biological father and had issues with men. But since I received Christ, I have grown to realise that his grace truly is sufficient. I am no longer needy or beg people to stay in my life because having him reside in me and around me is just so awesome. I feel peace when I ought to be crying because of the storms of life. I feel peace knowing that he is handling everything. The tests of life intensify though as one is no longer living in darkness and sometimes you feel like giving up but each time you want to give up you have to realise how worse off you will be without Christ's help and the relationship with him. Having him around makes everything okay, even the storms. He brings peace to every storm and he is love. With that said, I no longer worry about what others think of me because in him I have found love in my brokenness and have become whole. (Phutheho)
The living presence of Christ
I leave to last the final “mechanism” I’m listing for why the Christian life “works” to bring us meaning, satisfaction, and joy. This is the living presence of Jesus, who promised to be with us always, even to the end of the age. I left it to last, because what could possibly be more powerful than having the living God, the Creator of the universe, living within us, gently offering guidance, help, and strength? Christians often talk about the presence of the Holy Spirit and his influence in their lives. To the skeptic, this may sound like so much hocus-pocus, and of course, what could be harder to explain than the living presence of Jesus in one’s life? So, in a way, this isn’t a mechanism at all: it is the presence of a person, whose power is beyond imagination, whose depth of good will and love for us beyond description, and whose presence inexplicable to those who have not experienced him.
One reason the Christian life “works” is that Jesus himself is right there with those who love him and have decided to follow him, tipping the scales toward success and wholeness. He doesn’t leave his followers to do the best they can on their own. It is as though the fictional therapist from the beginning of this chapter was invited to come home with his client; and did so to offer counsel, strength, encouragement, and support, 24/7. The therapist’s client still can make choices to avail or deny the therapist’s help, just as followers of Jesus still make choices, and sometimes we choose badly. Even so, Jesus is right there, providing a resource, to help us find meaning and joy, to recover from our failures and setbacks, and to live the life he has in mind for us.
Followers of Jesus often times beat the odds of overcoming the hopelessness of this world because our counselor is there whispering in our ears, so to speak, and he has a divine perspective on our world. This is why simply trying to adopt some of the symptoms of the Christian life—such as love, joy, and peace—does not in the end work. A key component of the “mechanism” is omitted, namely the living presence of Jesus himself. One does not paste on the “peace that transcends all understanding” (Philippians 4:7) as if one was changing shoes or applying makeup. The living presence of Jesus is required to truly have that kind of peace.
Persecution
Commitment to Jesus often results in persecution and harassment. Right off, I want to distinguish between the persecution of Christians and the self-inflicted sufferings in other religions. I am not speaking here, for example, of the suicide bomber who, through a desire to win, or even extort, approval and rewards from God commits some “heroic” act of self-destruction. By contrast, though Jesus warned that persecution would come to his followers (Mark 10:30), he did not suggest that people should seek it.
Ironically, the level of persecution Christians experience actually argues for the truth of the pragmatic evidence thesis, namely that to the extent that we follow Jesus’s commands, we find our lives to be abundant, meaningful, and transcendently satisfying. People across the globe must have done a “cost-benefit analysis” and found that enduring persecution is worth it when it comes to loyalty to Jesus.
In the preface to Nina Shea’s book In the Lion’s Den¸ Chuck Colson noted the extensive nature of brutal and inhuman cruelty in the current persecution of Christians. “More Christians have been martyred for their faith in this [twentieth] century than in the previous nineteen centuries combined” (Shea, 1997, p. ix). This fact counter-intuitively demonstrates that following Jesus improves peoples’ lives. For believers reeling under persecution and even the threat of death, the rewards for following the Lord go far beyond material wealth, social acceptance, and physical well-being. Believers down through the centuries have given up their lives because of their faith. Our most recent century provides more abundant, pragmatic evidence than ever before.
This blog post is an excerpt from my recently published book, Is Jesus Real? available on Amazon in print and Kindle. It is the concluding post on a three-part article on the subject.
