When seeking to follow Jesus into the world, we must also seek the wise counsel of other Christians.

When facing decisions about where to serve and how to follow Jesus, we must seek the input of others who are also following Jesus and who also seek to love and serve those whom others reject.

I am not going to say much about how to do this since there are so many helpful books and Bible studies on the topic already.

But let me provide a warning.

As we seek to gain the wise counsel and guidance from other Christians, we must be on guard against copying other Christians.

It sometimes seems that Christians and churches spend more time and energy following certain church leaders and churches than they do in actually following Jesus. While Jesus will lead many of us down similar roads, He will also lead different people and different church down completely unique and diverse roads that have never before been travelled.

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Prayer is a traditional form of guidance for Christians seeking to follow Jesus into the world.

Prayer is vitally important as one of the primary ways we communicate with God.

But we must recognize that prayer is not only how God listens to us, but also how we learn to listen to our own hearts.

It is through prayer that we often learn what God wants us to do, where God wants us to serve, and whom God wants us to love.

We learn such things, not just so we can pray about them, but so that we can open our eyes, unfold our hands, get up off our knees, and go out and love and serve those people whom we have prayed about.

Listening to Your Prayers

If you find yourself praying intently for your neighbor who just lost his wife, when you are done praying, go over to him with a plate of cookies and spend some time talking with him.

If you find yourself praying that there would be fewer abortions in this country, when you are done praying, go get involved with a ministry which seeks to love and serve single mothers, or go volunteer at a crisis pregnancy center.

If you find yourself praying for our troops overseas, when you are done praying, find out how to send them care packages.

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To understand how Scripture changes lives, it might be helpful to think of the Bible like a movie.

When you watch a movie, whether you recognize it or not, your outlook on life is changed.

Your life after you watch a movie is never the same as it was before you watched it.

Sometimes the change is noticeable, and based on what you saw and heard, you resolve to live differently. Most of the time, however, the change is imperceptible, and you go on with life thinking that everything is the same.

But it isn’t.

In ways you do not fully understand, you connect with the images on the screen, with the actions of the actors, with the plot of the story, and with the theme and ideas of the script. Consciously or subconsciously, you decide to either become more or less like some of the characters in the story, based on what they did and how the story turned out.

How Scripture Changes Lives

Like a good book or great movie, Scripture changes your life, your perspective, your imagination, and your outlook.

The Bible does not tell us what to do; it tells us what was, what is, and what can be.

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In previous posts, we have suggested that the best way to read the Bible is to read it as a story.

In his books, The Last Word and Scripture and the Authority of God, N. T. Wright uses an extremely helpful illustration for explaining how God’s story functions, and where we fit into the plot. For a brief synopsis of the ideas in these books, see the paper by N. T. Wright, “How Can the Bible be Authoritative?”

History is a 5-Act Play

Wright portrays history as a play with five Acts. The first four Acts of the play are (I) Creation, (II) Fall, (III) Israel, and (IV) Jesus. The book of Acts and the rest of the New Testament are the opening scenes to Act V. If I were to tweak this image a little bit, I would add Act VI from some of what we read in the book of Revelation about the New Heavens and New Earth.

Based on this, Wright argues that we are currently living in the middle of Act V, and we are actors on the stage.

But there is no script, so we must improvise.

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