Following Jesus Can Be Extremely Costly
In the Bible reading I gave us just now, I deliberately included at the beginning the end of the reading we looked at last time. I thought it'd be helpful just to set the context for us. Jesus predicts how, for Peter, following Jesus will lead him to an extremely painful and involuntary death.
Can I Trust You?
That’s the right question to ask whenever you are given an amazing sales pitch. The past few weeks we’ve been working our way through John chapters 20 and 21, talking about Jesus rising from the dead. We’ve said that we won’t get to see Jesus alive for ourselves, so we are going to have to trust him based on the fact that his first disciples did see him alive. We’re going to have to take their word for it.
What Does It Look Like to Live After the Time of Jesus on Earth?
It’s all well and good to see in the four Gospels how people followed Jesus while he was with them, but what about us as we live between Jesus’s first and second comings? Physically he’s absent from us. What does he leave us to do, to get on with? And if you’re not yet following Jesus, what would it look like for you to do so at this point in history?
It’s good to meet a proper sceptic.
The past couple of Sundays we’ve been talking together about Jesus rising from the dead, and today it’s time to ask, “So what?” Two weeks ago we went with Mary, Peter and John to Jesus’s tomb to see the stone that had been removed from the entrance and the linen cloth left behind in two distinct neat piles. Last week we were with Mary Magdalene looking inside the tomb, where she saw two angels where Jesus’s body had been, and when she then turned around and wonderfully met Jesus himself, alive.
We reached the story where Mary Magdalene meets the risen Jesus.
Do you believe that Jesus is alive? Alive like the person sat next to you, or across the aisle, is alive? That kind of alive? Actually alive? A living person, that if you were in the right geographical space at the same time, you could shake his hand?