“Follow Me” (Luke 18:22).
This is the call of God; to follow Christ. This does not mean to follow godly men, or follow Christianity, but to follow Christ, and only Christ.
Typically, what happens after conversion is that the new believer attends a Church, as a means of gathering with others who have also been apprehended by Christ. In that environment, the fragile convert will come to learn that he must sit at the feet of the “ministry” to learn what it means to be a Christian, of the particular sort of which the Church is a meeting place.
He will learn to ask questions and believe the answers given; he will be directed to books of study written by men whose teachings underpin the denominational outlook being paraded by the Church; if his zeal is able to survive the deadening effect of all this, he will gather together reference books, lexicons, analytical studies and amass a whole library of books about Christianity and Christian studies. Eventually, he will be invited to take up the offerings, read a lesson, lead a home group and become an elder.
None of this is following Christ; in fact, it is the surest way to not follow Christ.
Christianity awaits the new believer like a snare of the trapper. However well intentioned those who organise and maintain the system of religious Christianity, they do a great disservice to those new converts who are lured into it. For it is not following Christ.
Religious Christianity assumes that, having done the hard yards of transferring a man from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God, having redeemed him from legal bondage to Satan, having brought him from death into life; Christ Jesus is somehow unable to take the one to whom all this has been done, any further; that it falls to men, educated in Bible seminaries, anointed by other men, equipped for leadership by men yet again, to do what Jesus said the Holy Spirit would do and for which we would not need teachers; that is, the task of guiding, leading, teaching and training those whom Christ has entrusted to Him for just such tasks as these.
The Church stands in the way of truth and righteousness for new believers. It turns the newborn away from following Christ to following Christianity instead and, in doing so, turns him into the path of deception and lawlessness. No-one intends that this should happen; it comes about because of the profound ignorance about following Christ that abounds within organised religious Christianity.
But the end result is that this way is not following Jesus; and He said that those who do not follow Him are not worthy of Him (Matthew 10:38).
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