opinions and musings

In our first “Following Jesus” lesson we looked at an overview of the New Testament and what it means for someone to follow Jesus.   Now in this second lesson we will look at why someone would want to follow Jesus.   We’ll also get into a bit more of the practical day to day aspects of following Jesus. The most important thing to know about following Jesus is that Jesus is a living person.   He has feelings, thoughts and dreams.   We humans have been created in his likeness so that’s why we have feelings, thoughts, desires and dreams.   We were created to have a relationship with this amazing Creator who has revealed himself to us in the Jewish man named Jesus of Nazareth.   Jesus died a criminal's death to free us from our self-centeredness (sin) and three days later He rose again from the dead.  He is alive forever.  Now He offers us His own Divine life to live inside of us.   The greatest reason to follow Jesus is to enter into an incredible friendship with the Creator

What does following Jesus mean?  Who was Jesus?  What is the New Testament?  I will answer those questions in this blog.  What I want to offer here is a very concise introduction to Christianity to all my friends who are interested in learning more about my beliefs.  The term Christianity has a great deal of negative baggage and cultural associations, so I prefer to use the term “following Jesus” to describe the practice of surrendering one’s life on a daily basis to the Lordship of Jesus. In order to understand what following Jesus means, first we need to know who Jesus was.  In order to do that we must first understand a little bit about Judaism and a little bit about the Bible.  Jesus can only be correctly understood in the context of 1 st century Judaism.  Judaism is one of the oldest religions in the world.  It is a monotheistic religion, meaning that it proclaims the existence of one God.  According to Judaism, God revealed himself about 4,000 years ago to a man named Abrah

Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans that the followers of Jesus as Lord are collectively the members of the Body of Christ: “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us.  "If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith;   if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully." (Romans 12:4-8, NIV translation) Christ is simply the Greek word for Messiah, which means the “anointed one” or King.   When we trust in Messiah Jesus as our Lord, we are spiritually placed into the Messiah.   The New Testament calls this being “in Christ.”   We sh

In our previous two studies we found that the word “salvation” in the Old and New Testaments simply means “rescue."   We realized that the context of the Bible passage tells us what someone or some group of people is being rescued from.  Many times in Scripture the people were being rescued by God from physical enemies.  Other times God was rescuing people from their sins and sometimes from sicknesses or from spiritual oppression. As we move now to our final study let’s look at the use of the word “salvation” in the writings of Paul the apostle.   We don’t have time to cover each time that Paul uses the Greek word soterion or one of its derivatives in his writings, but let’s look at three key passages in his letter to the believers at Rome.  (All Bible quotations are from the New American Standard Bible translation, NASB) Romans 1:16, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel , for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to th

In part one of this study on salvation, I wrote about the confusion that we 21 st century folks run into when we read the Bible.   We often read meanings into words that are really not there in the original languages.     Even when we do understand the original meanings of the words, we often add meanings from our 21 st century Christian traditions that the author of those words never intended to convey. We do this so easily that we are not even aware of it. The word “salvation” is a prime example.   When many Christians hear the word salvation, they tend to think of God’s actions in forgiving our sins, giving us His Divine life and placing us in his family.   While it is true that God does all these things for us, the Biblical word salvation in both the Old and New Testaments simply means “rescue.”   I think it is important to reclaim the true Biblical definitions of words like “salvation”, “repentance” and “kingdom” to help us remove the layers of religious tradition that cov