Know and follow Jesus

You were made on purpose

Somewhere in the ordinary middle of your life — a Tuesday afternoon, a red light, a hospital corridor at two in the morning — you have had the thought that you are here for something. Not a large thought. A quiet one.

That instinct is not sentimentality. The Bible opens with a God who makes, who keeps calling what he has made good, and who saves his last and most careful word for people. You were not assembled by accident, and you were not manufactured for output. You were intended.

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Psalm 139:13–14, ESV

Which means the ache to matter that you have carried since you were a child is not a defect in you. It is a memory of what you are for.

Something is broken, and you already know it

Nobody has to be talked into this part. You have watched it in the news and you have watched it in yourself — the promise you meant to keep and did not, the temper that arrives before you decide to have it, the version of you that only your family sees.

The Bible has a plain word for this, and the word is sin. Not infractions logged by a disappointed accountant. A severed connection — we were made to live turned toward God, we live turned away, and everything downstream of that runs crooked.

This is the paragraph where you expect to be scolded. You will not be. The diagnosis can afford to be honest, because the God who gives it had already made arrangements for the cure.

God came for you himself

Every other religion in the world is a set of instructions for climbing. Do this, avoid that, try harder, and perhaps one day you will be close enough.

Christianity is the only one that runs the other direction. God did not wait at the summit to see who could make it.

He came down.

Jesus lived the life we could not live, and then went to a Roman cross and died the death we had earned. Not as a gesture. As a substitution — him in our place, taking what belonged to us, so that what belongs to him could be given to us instead.

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.

1 Peter 3:18, ESV

Then, on the third day, he walked out of the grave. That is the hinge of everything.

If the tomb is empty, anything is possible.

This is yours to receive

Here is where most people begin doing arithmetic. They start totalling what they would have to change, and how long it would take, and whether they could keep it up. It is the wrong arithmetic, because a gift is not a wage.

What Jesus asks for is not a performance. It is trust — turning around, and putting the weight of your life on him rather than on yourself. Christians have a word for that turn. They call it faith, and it is less like passing an examination and more like letting go of the side of the pool.

You do not have to clean yourself up first. That was never the arrangement. Come as you are, and let him do what only he can do.

If something in you is saying yes — even a small, uncertain yes — tell us. We would love to walk the next part with you.