In the digital world, it’s all about being connected. We can be connected with our smart devices and computers to over 900 social media apps. We’re familiar with Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Vine. There are others we may not be so familiar with, but in this digital age, the worst thing we can be is disconnected. Here’s the interesting thing, though. The more connected we become digitally, the more disconnected we become literally. Here’s an example: Last Sunday, I’m sitting at my mother’s house watching the Saints (no comments please), and my brother, my brother’s son-in-law and my son are all sitting on the couch—not talking to each other, but all checking their smart phones for the latest update on their “fantasy” football teams. We can’t even watch real football for checking out our fantasy teams! We’re disconnected in a connected world.

One of the most popular social media platforms is Twitter. Twitter is a free social networking service that allows registered members to broadcast short posts called tweets. Twitter members can broadcast tweets (limited to 140 characters) and “follow” other users’ tweets. There are 974 million people with Twitter accounts worldwide, and 52.7 million in the U. S. That’s a pretty hefty number.

Twitter is about followers and following. You “follow” someone, and someone “follows” you. That means every time I post a “tweet” it goes out into the “Twitterverse” for all the world to see, but especially to those who have chosen to “follow” me. And, every time someone I’m following “tweets,” it shows up on my Twitter page. In case you’re interested, here are the top three Twitter accounts:

1. Katy Perry 76 million followers
2. Justin Bieber 67 million followers
3. Barack Obama 64 million followers

Personally, I tweet @revlynnmalone, and I have 125 followers. Followers and following—it’s what Twitter is all about.

Following on Twitter is easy. Simply click a button on the app. Yes, following is easy, but it has no real impact on our lives. The fact that Katy Perry posts photos of her in the mountains of Machu Picchu makes no difference in the grand scheme of my life. The danger for us is that we too often see following Jesus with the same philosophy. We think it’s great to follow Jesus, but we don’t give much thought to what it means. What difference does it make to say we’re following Jesus?

It really wasn’t much different in Jesus’ day. Jesus had many followers who were simply catching the latest fad. We read in John’s Gospel in chapter 6 about a group who, John says, “went back and walked with him no more” (6:66). He offered those followers some challenging words, and they decided it just wasn’t for them. They weren’t willing to go the distance. They left and Jesus looked at Peter and asked, “Will you go away, too?” It was then that Peter said, “To whom would we go…and we’ve come to believe you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” Interestingly, in Luke 9, Peter makes the same confession about Jesus and when he does, Jesus says, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must put aside your selfish ambition, shoulder your cross daily, and follow me.”

Being a disciple is not simply saying we will follow Christ. It is believing something specific about Jesus that changes our lives. We must know who Christ is before we will even consider following him because if we don’t believe who he is, we won’t be willing to do what he asks us to do. Our love for Christ is directly related to our understanding of who he is. If we understand who Christ is, we will run to him and leave everything else behind. He is faithful and loving and he cares for us more than we can ever know. But we must never forget that he is our Creator and that we are dependent upon him for our next breath and heartbeat. He is God and we are not, and if we will follow him, he asks only two things: 1) self-denial, and 2) self-sacrifice.

Jesus didn’t want any misunderstanding about what discipleship costs. He said, “Deny yourself.” The call to follow Christ is a call to a transformed life. It’s like Paul said to the Corinthian Christians: “What this means is that those who become Christians become new persons. They are not the same anymore, for the old life is gone. A new life has begun” (2 Cor. 5:17). But the call to self-denial is such a radical call. That’s the thing about most social media…including Twitter…it’s so self-centered. Most of the posts we post are focused on the events and attitudes of our lives. We live in a selfie world where one of the top selling gifts last Christmas was the “selfie stick.” Even our President was seen with his new selfie stick! Denying ourselves mean we give up the selfie stick…get the focus off ourselves…and put the focus on Christ, and on others.

Denying self is seldom a dramatic or high profile act, but it is often demanding. It demands we understand that our faith is about far more than our own personal well-being. It is about obeying God and loving humanity.

Secondly, there’s this whole thing about “taking up our cross.” That’s about self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice and self-denial are close cousins. Jesus knew what it meant to take up the cross. He was headed toward Jerusalem and knew what awaited him there. He told his disciples as much. William Barclay tells us that when Jesus was about eleven, Judas the Galilaean led a rebellion against Rome. He had raided the royal armory at Sepphoris, which was only four miles from Nazareth. The Roman vengeance was swift and sudden. Sepphoris was burned to the ground; its inhabitants were sold into slavery; and two thousand of the rebels were crucified on crosses which were set in lines along the road as a warning to others tempted to rebel. To take up our cross means to be prepared to face things like that for loyalty to Jesus; it means to be ready to endure the worst the world can do to us for the sake of being true to him.

For us today, who don’t have a transformative understanding of the image Jesus paints for his disciples, taking up our cross means walking against the grain of cultural values, so that our needs take a back seat to God’s call. Bearing a cross means leaving behind dreams we had in our old life, for new dreams in a new life—a world transformed by the power and glory of God in Jesus Christ.

Our biggest problem is we look at self-denial and self-sacrifice from a negative perspective. What do I mean? Imagine a situation where a homeless man is begging on the streets of New York. A well-dressed man in a long limousine pulls up next to him and offers him a job as vice-president of his company. That seems ludicrous; nothing like that would ever happen. But that is exactly what God has done for us. He rescued us from the gutter. We were homeless and he gave us a new home. We were the rejects of the world, but he gave us self-respect. We had nothing, but he gave us everything. He asks us to be a part of his kingdom and work for it.

But, suppose the homeless man sneers at him and rejects the offer for several reasons. First, he will have to give up what is familiar to him. Obviously, it is a terrible life, but it is the only life he knows how to live. Secondly, he has a few possessions which he pushes around in a cart, and the few clothes he owns are on his back. And one of the conditions the man in the limousine makes is that the man must leave everything and get into the limousine. The third reason is that the man will actually have to work and accept responsibility. Life on the street was bad, but at least no one expected anything from him. No one expected him to be any different. So he turns from the man in the expensive suit and shuffles down the street hoping for a warm grate that he can sleep on for the night.

Does the man in the story understand what he has given up? He would have had a home, a job, a purpose, a great bank account, and a high position in an important business. But he passed it up to keep what he had. This is why Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.” Dallas Willard reminds us that if we are going to talk about the cost of discipleship, we ought to balance it by talking about the cost of non-discipleship.

We are like the homeless man. When Christ comes to ask us to die to ourselves and give up our old life, we refuse. We think about all the stuff in our cart that you will have to give up. We may be miserable, but at least we are used to it, and we know how to get by. We are not sure we would know what to do if we really died to your old life. Besides, change is hard work. We don’t want the responsibility of following Christ fully. We fail to understand that you we’re in line to inherit the business. We’re not merely a partner, we’re an heir. The reason we were selected was that the man in the limousine, unknown to us, was really our father who searched until he found us. He wanted to call us more than vice-president; he wanted to call us son and daughter.

He calls us to follow him so that he might change us, to make us different in the world than we were before we came to know him. He calls us to follow him where he leads. In his leading, he transform us to be more like him, and he reminds us that discipleship is a full-time job, not a weekend hobby. Following Jesus never takes a holiday. We take up the cross daily…multiple times daily. We must be as diligent following Christ as we are posting those tweets to Twitter. That’s when true transformation takes place.

Until next time, keep looking up…

I wrote a sermon a couple of weeks ago that included the line “a tragic mess of a life.” I must say that’s one of the best lines I’ve ever come up with. Perhaps I think it’s such a good line because it could so easily describe my own life. It certainly describes the life of Walter White of Breaking Bad, the AMC series. Certainly, Walt was dealt a crummy hand in life, but his bad decisions lead to his own “tragic mess of a life.”

I can’t think of a “tragic mess of a life” without thinking of Samson, the last in Israel’s line of judges. If you’re like me you remember Samson from Sunday school, and you probably remember him as a hero for killing a lot of Philistines. Samson was held up as a role model for his dedication to God in being willing to follow God all the way to death. As I reflect upon the story of Samson, I’ve come to believe he’s much more a victim of his own decisions than he is a victim of faithful discipleship. There is much about Samson’s story we didn’t hear in Sunday school. His is a tragic story that ends with Samson dealing with the consequences of his own decisions.

Hollywood has nothing on the Bible. In Samson’s story we find supernatural events, intrigue, deception, humor (lots of humor), lust, sex, murder, revenge and obsession, and we find most of it in Samson himself. We read the end of his story and discover he is blind, in prison and being shamed by his captors, the Philistines. In one last heroic act, he cries out to God in prayer to give him strength one more time so he can take revenge on these pagan Philistines. And, God hears his prayer, and amazingly answers him, and Samson, in one final show of strength pushes the pillars of the temple over. The roof falls, crushing everyone in the temple, including Samson, and everyone on the roof of the temple.

Samson’s story begins in Judges 13 with his miraculous birth. His nameless, barren mother is visited by an Angel of the Lord who announced she would have a son (that sounds vaguely familiar), and that he would be dedicated to the Lord as a Nazirite from birth, and he would be the rescuer of Israel from their Philistine oppressors. She named the child Samson which means “sunshine.” If we follow the history of the nation of Israel, we discover the time of the judges are some of the darkest times in its history. God sends “sunshine” in these dark times.

So what is it with this Nazirite vow? Numbers 6 outlines the vows a person had to take to become a Nazirite, and there were three: 1) Drink no wine, nor eat any fruit that grew on a vine, 2) Refrain from touching anything dead, and 3) Never cut your hair for as long as you are under the vow.

Samson grows into a young man, and we are told that “the Lord blessed him as he grew up.” What we hear about in Sunday school is Samson’s strength. We hear about how he slew a lion with his bare hands. What we don’t hear about is that he later returned to the carcass of that lion, and took honey from the bees who had taken residence there, thus breaking one of his Nazirite vows. For some reason, the Sunday school teachers also didn’t tell us that happened while he was in the process of getting married. Nor, do we hear about the woman he jilted and left at the altar after a sumptuous wedding feast, and that feast would include wine, and lots of it. We’re talking gallons here, not bottles. One more time, Samson breaks his vows. And, they neglected to tell us about Samson’s temper that provokes him to kill 30 innocent bystanders at his own wedding so he can settle a gambling debt.

We hear about how he killed 1,000 Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey, but we don’t hear that he killed the 1,000 after he’d been arrested for hunting down 300 foxes, setting their tails on fire, and turning them loose in the grain fields of the people who had done him wrong. They never told us, either, that he broke his Nazirite vow in the act.

We hear about the vixen Delilah who seduces him into telling her the secret of his strength, and we hear of her cutting his hair off, but we don’t hear of his on-going weakness for immoral women. Yes, we hear how, by brute strength, he ripped out the city gates of the Philistine city of Gaza, and carried all 700 pounds of it nearly forty miles to Hebron, but we don’t hear that he was visiting a prostitute at the time. Even though we don’t hear these stories, they are all in Judges 13 – 16. In total, it covers a 20 year period in Israel’s history. We don’t hear them, I think, because in that 20 year period of time, Samson doesn’t do one thing, not one thing to honor or glorify God. Everything he does, he does for his own glory, for his own satisfaction, for his own desires. And, that’s really tragic.

Samson’s is a cautionary tale for us. We encounter Samson at the end of his life in blindness. But, that’s really how he lived his entire life. He was blind to God’s will for his life. He was blind to his sin. He was blind to his need for repentance. He was blind to the consequences of his decisions. He was blinded by his own arrogance and pride. Former NFL coach Eric Mangini. Mangini said, “With confidence you believe you can overcome your weaknesses, with arrogance you don’t believe you have weaknesses.” Samson was arrogant, and his arrogance defeated him.
 

It’s also serves to caution us that an outpouring of the Holy Spirit does not automatically make us godly. The Holy Spirit gives us the resources to live godly lives, but He doesn’t “do it to us.” We can be wonderfully gifted by the Holy Spirit and yet spiritually, we remain infants. We still have decisions to make, and every gift we have is in our own hands. It remains for us to have our passions under proper discipline, and the fear of God continually before our eyes. We must not think for one moment that our disobedience, our selfishness, or our sin will derail God’s plan. God used even Samson, in all his “tragic mess of a life,” to drive a wedge between the Israelites and the Philistines. That was necessary. King David would complete what Samson started some 50 years later.

God calls us, and desires for us, to live holy lives. God gives us the power through His Holy Spirit; but power for something far more important than ripping apart lions. The Holy Spirit comes to empower us to live for God as we should. God did use Samson mightily; but God used Samson despite his sin, not because of it. Commentator David Guzik says, “Samson shows the danger of underestimating our own sinfulness. He probably figured he had things under control with his own fleshly lusts, but his desire for love, romance, and sex led directly to his destruction. Samson was the great conqueror who never allowed God to properly conquer him.”

Mine will be a tragic story, too, if the same is said about me as I come to the end of my life. You see, we decide to live in the fullness of God’s promise, or we decide not to. It’s our choice. God lets us make it. If we decide not to live in the fullness of who God calls us to be, we must be prepared to live with the consequences, and some of those consequences have an eternal impact.

One of the most transformative ways we can live for Christ is through accountability. Samson shows us the danger of being a loner. Everything Samson did he did alone. He judged for 20 years and never sought or used help from others. The life of discipleship is not meant to be lived alone, and Christian fellowship is not sitting around a table sharing a meal in the fellowship hall. It is being in a relationship with one another where we do as James instructed us:

“¹³ Are any of you suffering hardships? You should pray. Are any of you happy? You should sing praises. ¹⁴ Are any of you sick? You should call for the elders of the church to come and pray over you, anointing you with oil in the name of the Lord. ¹⁵ Such a prayer offered in faith will heal the sick, and the Lord will make you well. And if you have committed any sins, you will be forgiven. ¹⁶ Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.” James 5: 13-16 (NLT)

Fellowship is praying together, for one another and with one another. It is prayer, and it is confession. It is getting in the nitty, gritty of everyday life where temptations lie, and giving ourselves to God in the process, so that He might work His grace in us. Without accountability in our lives, each of us stands to have our lives end as tragically as Samson’s. With accountability, we increase exponentially the capacity to live faithful, holy lives.

I pray, by God’s grace, that mine will not end, and others will say his was a “tragic mess of a life.” I pray that don’t say it about you, either.

Until next time, keep looking up…