Following Requires Steps

At the end of a heavy sermon on what the Bible says about racial tensions, one of my pastors left the personal application open-ended. He challenged all of us to ask God what our next step in the reconciliation process would look like.

Then, he just threw in a line before closing in prayer. It hit me between the eyes.

“Following always requires steps.”

When Jesus physically left the planet, he charged us—not to convert people to a belief system but to make disciples. So, it would make sense that we’d do it like Jesus and his contemporary apostles did.

Jesus made disciples by going to parties and walking through fishing villages and telling guys to follow him. The apostle Paul charged his disciples to follow him as he followed Christ. After their respective invitations, both Jesus and Paul kept walking. They kept moving.

So, following required more than just understanding who Jesus is and what his mission was. Following was the command both before and after Jesus suffered on a cross and jailbroke a borrowed tomb.

While dying on adjoining crosses, Jesus told the repentant criminal that he would follow Jesus to paradise. So, following didn’t require acts of penance or a checklist of remuneration. Following was just doing the next right thing to keep in step with Jesus.

Personally, I think this makes a relationship with Jesus harder than it’s often been presented to me over the years. The first two decades of my faith journey, I got the impression that we should all be on the sanctification journey; but most preachers didn’t articulate where God was stretching them, chiseling their hard places, or exposing darkness in them. It seemed like we were just told to avoid a bunch of bad stuff, obey a bunch of rules, read our Bibles, and pray more. Then—poof!—we’d start looking more and more different from the secular world. That comparison was given as the primary measurement tool for progress.

Not once during those years was I asked where I was with God that week compared to the week prior. I have a poor memory, but I don’t remember being asked what my recent conversations with God looked like (in both directions). Rarely was I challenged to seek what God was laying on my heart to do—outside of a response to an altar call or similar corporate ask. Following God was rightfully equated to obedience, but there were a lot of Pharisaical caveats and rules added to the ones Jesus actually said.

Interestingly enough, Jesus didn’t measure progress. At least, we see no metrics in the gospels (outside of parables that showed return on investments like seeds and talents). Jesus didn’t talk about comparing ourselves to others’ journeys as a way to measure growth. He just said, “Follow me.” Through sermons and recorded conversations, he delineated hard things to do to follow his example, and he lived the hardest lesson of them all. But he condemned the Pharisees for making up their own way and using artificial standards and external comparison as metrics.

Following requires movement. In most situations, that will be irregular but consistent movement. It will look different for all of us, because we’re all moving toward Jesus from different angles and in different contexts. While there might be big breakthroughs, where we jump multiple spaces on the game board, most of the journey will be small steps in Jesus’ fresh footprints.

Each week or month, we might be only slightly ahead of where we stood just a moment ago. Sometimes, maybe sideways a bit or even back in a retrace of recent steps. Over time, though, we’ll be able to look back over a long path—not so much for progress but perspective.

If the view doesn’t change over time, we have to ask ourselves, “Am I following Jesus?” and “Was I ever?” Regardless to the answers to those questions, the most important ones are “How can I follow him today?” and “What is my next step?”

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