Giving up on Jesus?

Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink”…

From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. John 6:53-66

Normally, when I start a new blog, I aim to write something that will make sense to anybody and everybody who might happen to hit on it, whether Christians or not.

But today is different. I feel it right to target one group of people in particular - anyone who is thinking about giving up on Jesus, like those mentioned in John 6:66: “disciples” (yes, they’re called that) who “turned back and no longer followed him”.

This happens. You don’t have to be a pastor to be aware of people who used to be part of the church, but who now are absent. They might, of course, have decided to go to another church, or to continue to follow Jesus from the privacy of their own home (whether that’s right or wrong is another matter). But there are also those who have simply ceased to follow Jesus: “ex-Christians”, we might call them. I would be delighted if I might say something that deters somebody from taking that step. To have found, only then to give away, the “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:45-6) is truly tragic.

Why does this happen? There are various possible reasons, one of which applies particularly to the people in John 6: they found the teaching of Jesus more than they could stomach – “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” (verse 60).

I remember once reading the verses about “eating my flesh and drinking my blood” at a communion service, only to be confronted at the end by a regular worshipper who seemed part-angry and part-puzzled. I think he thought I must have “gone Catholic”! Certainly, a little more explanation on my part might have helped (the meaning of certain Bible verses isn’t always immediately obvious). But Jesus doesn’t seem to have provided that in these verses; that comes in other parts of the New Testament. He seems content – or perhaps I should use the word “willing” – to let these people go.

It's hard not to have a certain respect for people who stop following Jesus because of genuine intellectual difficulties, however unnecessary they may be. But my impression is that such people are in quite a small minority of people who “fall away”, and I think we can only leave them in the hands of God, who knows every heart and always judges justly.

A second type of person who falls away from Christ can be found in the example of Demas who, says Paul, “has deserted me because he loved this world” (2 Timothy 4:10). Is this the same Demas as the one mentioned in Philemon 24? – if so, it gives us hope that he was eventually restored to his former position as companion to Paul. But we can’t be sure.

Whatever, we are reminded that following Jesus involves a serious choice, the choice to love Christ rather than the kingdoms of this world. And this is a challenge all of us must face up to, no matter how sincere we have been in our discipleship, or how long we have been followers of Jesus.

I suspect that the most common reason for falling away is exemplified in the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:1-23), where Jesus in effect warns us to expect it to happen in certain cases. He speaks of the seed that falls “on rocky ground”, representing “trouble or persecution” – people who start as enthusiastic followers of Jesus, but turn out in the longer term to be essentially rootless and to have no staying power; and of seed sown among thorns, people who are undone by “the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of riches” (verses 20-22).

The parable as a whole gathers up just about every possible reason why a man or woman might fall away - everything from a dramatic, headlong “fall from grace” (witness the various celebrity pastors, much loved by their congregations and greatly used by God, who end up in the headlines for all the wrong reasons), right through to a slow, steady process of what we might call spiritual atrophy, the tragic daily dying of a  once-vibrant faith. The devil is unlimited in his resources and methods.

Many people who fall away probably never make a decision to let that happen; it just, well, does. The pearl of great price somehow loses its lustre and its beauty. And so the warning Paul offers to the Christians of Corinth applies to every generation of Christian people: “So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12).

A word for me? Certainly, yes. A word for you too?

A final warning…

As Jesus and the disciples watched their former companions drift away, Jesus asked a rather pathetic-seeming question: “You don’t want to leave too, do you?” And Simon Peter gave what I think is a wonderful reply: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life…” (verse 68).

Yes indeed! Who else will you go to! To Buddha? Or Mohammed? Or Karl Marx? Or Hare Krishna? Or simply to the world’s multiple false gods – the idols of success, earthly happiness, sex, indulgence, power, money, pleasure?

Of one thing we can be sure: the person who gives up on the one true God will, before long, be worshipping another - and it will be a god that is no god, a god who may seem to promise much but who in the end delivers nothing.

Hold on to Jesus as he holds on to you!

Father, I know my own weaknesses and frailties, my fickleness and proneness to wander. Please hold me firm, I pray, so that by your grace I may hold firm to you through thick and thin. Amen.

O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be!/ Let that grace, Lord, like a fetter bind my wandering heart to Thee./ Prone to wander – Lord, I feel it – prone to leave the God I love;/ Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it from Thy courts above. Amen!  Robert Robinson (1735-1790)