Scot McKnight - One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow

ONE.LIFE

JESUS CALLS,
WE FOLLOW

SCOT MCKNIGHT

CONTENTS

A t twelve years old, I was a picture-perfect Christian. Having grown up in a Christian home, I had read the Bible and memorized handfuls of scripture. I prayed as much as I could bear (as an alternative to counting sheep). Id pretty much learned all the rules and had mastered the social game of behaving when people were looking. Seamlessly checking off my churchs list of dos and donts became an obsession, but I continued to fall short again and again.

Questions swirled in my mind. I wondered if this was what Jesus intended and if this rules-based, internalized struggle was the sum total of faith. For the first time, I was confronted with what has become the keystone question of my life: What does it really mean to follow Jesus?

Like many Western Christians, I felt a tension between the religion promoted by my church and the radical faith Jesus modeled. Much of what I heard from the preacher and those in authority over me seemed good and right, but a creeping curiosity camped out in my mind. What would happen if I lived the life Jesus described? Would my faith look different? How could I move from a follow the rules religion to a follow me faith?

Years later, a friend and colleague of mine asked that same question in his seminal book, The Jesus Creed. As I read it, a flood of emotions rushed over me. Finally, someone has defined the Jesus way in terms the average person can understand! He left me wanting to know more about the first-century Jewish Messiah and foundation of our faith. Through his writing, Scot provoked me to begin unfolding the answer to my childhood question. But the influence of Scots work has stretched well beyond me. He has inspired debate and conversation about what a Jesus-shaped life looks like among scholars, ministers, and laypersons. His love for Jesus pushes him beyond surface inquiry and his passion for Christ invites spiritual seekers into a new way of living.

Following the tradition of Scots earlier work, One.Life paints a beautiful, inviting picture of what Jesus meant when he said, Come and follow me. Leaving no stone unturned, this book presents surprising truths that will upset your preconceived notions about the Christian experience and challenge you to embrace Christ as if for the first time.

Perhaps you feel like I did as a child. Youve encountered some permutation of spirituality but it has left you wanting. The gospel is your heartbeat but your current religious experience hasnt given you an outlet to fully bleed it. Youre trying to make sense of your inclination towards justice and your compulsion to restore the brokenness of the world. You want to know what it really means to follow Jesus.

In the pages that follow, I cant guarantee that every question on your mind will be answered. But I can promise you that the life of Jesus will be as accessible and as powerful as it has ever been. Its been twenty-three years since I first considered what it means to follow Christ, but the question has never left me. Along the way, Ive encountered competent and passionate tour guides like Scot who have helped guide me on my journey. Im still walking the path of inquiry, but thankfully I can see more clearly.

And the clearer I see, the more encouraged I am. Not only have I come to rediscover Christ, but Ive grown acquainted to a new generation of seekers, thinkers, and creatives who are on the same journey. They want life to matter but are hard-pressed to figure out the how. They are hungry for the sweetness, restless for the fragrance, and trembling for the embrace of Jesus Christ.

I have a feeling you may be part of that generation. If so, One.Life has been written for you.

Gabe Lyons
Author, The Next Christians
qideas.org

T here are two ways to answer one very important question, and it is the question that will shape this book. Before the question can be asked, or an answer given, two stories two of my life lessons need to be told. These stories will tell you that I used to answer the question one way and now I answer it a different way. The answer completely changed my life.

SAVED

At six I got saved. My family had just attended an evening service at our church and before my father came home I asked my mother if I could accept Christ into my heart so I could be forgiven of my sins. I had heard the message of the gospel, that God loved me and had sent his Son for me and that forgiveness awaited my decision. So I asked my mother if I could get saved, and she hesitated only slightly, asking me if I could wait until my father got home from church. I told her I was afraid I might die before he got home. So we went through a short prayer, and right then and there I accepted Christ. I had learned through bold images that I was a sinner, but Jesus had come to earth to die for my sins. I had also learned that all I had to do was accept Christs death for me, trusting Christ completely, and I would go to heaven. Through graphic images of damnation and potent warnings about eternity, I was told if I didnt accept Christ I would go to hell. My church, as you can see, believed in the real monsters in Satan and demons and a fire stoked by Gods wrath.

Our monsters were real, not like those in Maurice Sendaks book Where the Wild Things Are. Our monsters had a mission to keep us from believing, and their goal was to get kids like me into hell. But I escaped the clutches of the monsters on the night I accepted Christ.

This is the first story and was the first lesson I learned as a young kid: A Christian is someone who has personally accepted Jesus Christ, who has found forgiveness through his death, and who is now on their way to heaven when they die.

My second lesson came years later.

INSTRUCTED

I was seventeen years old when my life was dramatically changed by a second, more profound encounter with Jesus Christ. Immediately after this encounter, my youth pastor took me under his wing to teach me even more what it meant to be a Christian. His teaching involved four things:

First, being a Christian meant reading my Bible every daypreferably in the morning just after getting up and at night just before going to bed. So I did that. Every morning and every night.

Second, alongside Bible reading, the Christian life was about praying, and the longer I prayed the more it showed how devoted I was. So I got down on my knees next to my bed and talked with God, sometimes (but not very often) for a long time.

Third, in addition to Bible reading and praying, the Christian life involved witnessing meaning evangelizing and telling my friends that they needed to be saved from their sins. The more people I could save, the more it showed I was in touch with the real God. In fact, the most honored kind of life was to become a missionary to the heathen. I thought about being a missionary and had some success telling my friends about Jesus.

Fourth, the Christian life was about going to church every time the doors opened, and for us that meant Sunday morning for Sunday school, Sunday morning for the church service, Sunday evening for the evening worship service, and then often after the Sunday evening service, we had youth group. It also meant Wednesday evening prayer meeting, and at that time it also meant Thursday evening for a class in evangelism. I was at the church all the time. I was a Christian.

There was another side to the Christian life involving things we werent to do. The biggest ones especially tailored for hot-blooded young adults were: not dancing, not drinking alcohol, not smoking pot, not having sex, and not going to movies. This also meant that we were not to have close friendships with the unsaved, because they did those things. The unsaved were as neatly separated from us as the red and white lines on the American flag: Whoever didnt go to our church was unsaved. (Unless you went to a church that was similar to ours.) My youth pastor called this whole approach separation.