Following Jesus: A friendship with room to fail

Choosing to follow Jesus feels big. Say it out loud and it sounds big, as if the words just might echo back in a booming voice.

It’s normal to feel hesitant, fearful, or uncertain. People who have followed Jesus for decades still bump up against these feelings. If you’re wondering whether it’s like signing a contract full of fine print and secret demands, that’s a fair thing to want to know up front.

What Jesus invites you into is called a covenant. Contracts are for business. Covenants are for relationships, and marriage, for better or worse, is one of the closest pictures we have.

In God's covenant, he promises to be faithful no matter our failure or shortcoming. The whole story of the Bible is God’s loving pursuit of humans, whatever it costs him. Jesus is the clearest picture of this pursuit. 

Following Jesus shapes how a person lives, with risk and failure a guaranteed part of it. When love waits on the other side of risk and failure, they become part of growing into who we were made to be.

Since God knows people carry real goodness and real brokenness, he expects us to fall short and has more patience with us than we have with ourselves. 

He longs for us to learn to trust and love him. And as we do, we discover more of the love and good things he has for us, and more of the person he made us to be. 

His motive is love. Any love worth having wants more good for the person it loves. 

All who choose to follow Jesus can rest knowing that no failure, past or future, moves them farther from God’s love.* 

There’s room for all of you in this friendship.

* For more on this, you can read Romans 8:31-39, part of a letter to early followers of Jesus.