While at the Battlecry event in Detroit, last month, Ron Luce asked this question to everyone, “Are we asking the right question?” Before this moment, I had often thought that when people do recoginize their need for God and Christ, that they don’t often realize what that means. It’s more than accept him and be blessed. It means following Jesus and that means doing the Great Commandments (Matt 22:37) and the Great Commission(Matt 28:19), which means doing the messy things that this brings you into conflict with, like correcting sinful behavior in yourself, helping people when you may get persecuted, and standing up for what you believe in.

The question that often gets asked is, “Do you want to (receive/accept) Christ?” This is the wrong question, because it is passive. Asking someone if they want to follow Jesus is more active and requires an explanation into what that means. God wants us to be active with our faith, like it says in James 2:18b, I’ll show you my faith by my works.

So are you ready to follow? Do you know what Jesus wants you to do? What is your purpose here? Are you ready to radically follow a counter-cultural Messiah that has modelled for us helping the poor and oppressed, ticking off the religious folks by confronting them with their gods of tradition and culture like the pharisees (not that tradition is bad, but some refuse to change things just because we have always done it that way), and giving your life to do it?