By Jackson Posey | Sports Writer
There’s a difference between going to church and following Jesus.
One is a cultural norm, albeit a fading one. It’s a once-weekly (or monthly, or yearly) time to wake up early, dress up and drink coffee in a fancier building than normal. Perhaps the sermon is “good.” Perhaps not. The same qualitative test is applied to musical worship. It can become a time of consumption or a mere veneer to feel better about oneself.
But that’s not what Jesus calls us to do.
“When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die,” German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said.
That’s a weighty call. But then, Jesus lived a weighty life. The Jewish carpenter-turned-rabbi spent three years wrestling with everything the devil could throw at Him, from howling tempests to desert temptations. Even the rocks worshiped Him, Luke 19:40 says, and yet He willingly died on a tree He created. Truly, Christ was born to die — and died that we might live.
Ancient Jewish rabbis had what was known as a “yoke” — a style of reading scripture that their talmidim (or disciples) would emulate. But as John Mark Comer wrote in his seminal work on Sabbath, “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry,” that yoke was about far more than academic theology. It represented the rabbis’ teaching on “how to be human.”
Disciples didn’t merely learn to agree with their rabbi or follow him around like ducklings behind their mother. They learned to become like their rabbi — to live like he lived, talk like he talked, think like he thought. The call to follow Jesus, then, isn’t just a call to believe certain things or recite a certain prayer. It isn’t a call to vote Republican or go to a Baptist church, to wear WWJD bracelets or to put Bible verses in an Instagram bio.
It’s ultimately a call to die.
As Jesus Himself said in Matthew 16, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
That yoke sounds bone-crushingly heavy. To follow a rabbi — albeit one who performed unexplainable miracles — to the death. To model our lives after a man killed by a defunct empire nearly two millennia ago. To set aside empty platitudes like “thoughts and prayers” to actually serve the widow and orphan. To leave everything familiar and comfortable to follow a Great Commission that always sounded like it was for someone else. Atlas groaned holding the world; how could any of us carry the yoke of God?
And therein lies our mistake. We assume that following Christ must be a weightier endeavor than following the whims of the world around us. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. What made Jesus unique, as Comer points out, isn’t that He had a yoke. All rabbis had one. What made Jesus unique, though, was that He had an “easy” yoke.
“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” Jesus said in Matthew 11. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Following Jesus and modeling our whole lives after Him sounds like an impossible weight. Living like the one who fasted for 40 days, walked on water, raised the dead — how could that possibly be easy? The key lies in his character: Jesus is “gentle and lowly in heart.”
Nowhere else in scripture does Jesus describe His heart, the center of His being, but here. “Gentle and lowly.” What a savior! He doesn’t call Himself “high and exalted,” though He is. He doesn’t call Himself “mighty and powerful,” though He creates galaxies with a breath. He doesn’t even call Himself “holy and high above us,” though all of heaven’s angels have been testifying to that reality since the dawn of creation.
No, when it comes to His care for humanity, Jesus calls Himself gentle and lowly in heart. His yoke is easy and His burden is light because He carries it with us. Like a powerful ox yoked with a young calf, He carries the weight of our burdens. Forever. In all of our shortcomings, He still draws near. He wraps us in His loving arms and never lets us go. Come storms or still waters, famines or feasting, laughter or lament, He will never cast us out.
Following Jesus, then, isn’t just a call to go to church on Easter or keep a Bible on a bookshelf. It’s a call to become like Him. To think how He thought, to live like He lived, to treat others in light of His sacrifice for them. It’s a call to live every moment of our lives in the presence of God, trusting His plan and carrying that glorious yoke that can only lighten our load.
So don’t just follow Jesus to church.
Follow Him to wherever He is.
