Its about Jesus

A person not a program

My faith started as a 3-year-old as I prayed with my mother, and then really became mine when as an 18-year-old when I left home and moved to Broken Hill. In Broken Hill I chose to be baptized (by my Dad who was visiting) and began my adult journey of faith.

As a child I loved the stories of the Old Testament, but as I began my adult journey of faith it was the epistles that I found most helpful. They told me what to do. Faith became about doing the right thing for God.

Gradually as I grew, I realised I couldn’t . The more I tried to do the right things the more I failed.

After a few years I started to discover God’s grace.. which made such a difference for someone who thought he had to “get it right”. God however was still kind of amorphous.

It really has been only the last 3 or so years that I have been on the journey of really discovering the person of Jesus. For some reason I had found it easier to relate to “God” than to Jesus.

As I have mentioned previously, I am currently reading “the Jesus Way” by Eugene Peterson and there have been several parts of the book that have really stood out to me.

Over the next while I’ll include quotes from some of the bits I have found most helpful.

Peterson says of the book:

The intent through this conversation is to explore the ways in which Christians follow Jesus. The ways become clear in the act, and only in the act, of following Jesus on the terms enacted by Jesus.

None of the ways can be abstracted from Jesus, depersonalised into a principle or strategy. I also want to post warnings against the many well advertised ways and means that send us off  on tangled detours or hopeless dead ends….

Ways and means that are removed or abstracted from Jesus and the Scriptures that give witness to him amount sooner or later to a betrayal of Jesus. In the kingdom-of-God world, the person that we follow is the primary shaping influence on the person that we become.

Christians follow Jesus.

I am on a journey to follow Jesus, and in many ways this blog is about that journey.