Parallel Faith: Being a Disciple of Jesusናሙና

Day 4 | Living For Jesus

Are you young enough to know anyone old enough who remembers that nostalgic board game The Game of Life? It was first created in 1860 by Milton Bradley, a successful lithographer whose only major product until that time was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln with a clean-shaven face—that did not do well once his subject grew that famous beard!

The Game of Life allowed players to imagine the dream life they want to live by choosing their path to success. It classically involved getting rich, having a perfect family, and buying a beach house by the sea. There have been several versions of the game over the years and, interestingly, the criteria of success shifted as definitions of happiness changed in modern culture.

When it comes to the real game of life, there seem to be winners—and then there are losers. According to popular culture, success is often defined as achieving fame, wealth, and status. It’s often measured by external factors, such as the size of one’s bank account, the number of followers on social media, or the level of recognition you receive from the public.

But when we follow him, Jesus wants us to question these measures of success.

Jesus taught that you can’t win according to the world’s standards and still win with him. You need to make a choice. The key to discipleship is choosing to say, “Not my will, but yours be done.” Whoever wants to gain their life needs to lose it. Jesus commanded us to deny ourselves and take up our cross to follow him.

Being a disciple means living for Jesus and letting him lead every aspect of our lives. In crude terms, all disciples are losers. To deny yourself is to say no to being led by your own will and to being dictated by the ways of the world. It’s about letting your lived experience be shaped by Jesus.

Taking up your cross is a deliberate act of paying the price to walk with Christ. On a surface level, this isn’t exactly all that appealing. By our twenty-first standards, many would say Jesus wasn’t a very good evangelist! Whenever he seemed to gather a big crowd, he tried his hardest to talk them out of following him. Jesus wasn’t exactly an effective marketer either. And that’s because he wasn’t offering a product; he was offering a side-by-side journey with him, a parallel journey.

As we take this walk with Jesus, we start to realize that the things we let go of to follow him were the very things holding us back in the first place.