I was struck in a way that I wasn’t expecting this week as I was going through my emails one day. This past Labor Day weekend while visiting my brother-in-law and his family, Laura and I attended Redeemer Presbyterian Church-West Side. Redeemer Presbyterian has kind of become our NYC church home as it is a diverse and vibrant congregation.

I signed up for their weekly email updates that always contain a short devotional thought. This past week’s was written by Reverend David Bisgrove. The question he asked was, “Are you an admirer of Jesus or a follower of Jesus?”

A follower of Jesus is someone who is wanting to be more like Jesus in every way. Daily they strive to know Him more and more! Furthermore, a follower of Jesus knows that Jesus “has a claim on their lives”.

Admirers, on the other hand, think that Jesus was a good man and a good teacher. He taught people how to live good lives and said we should do good things to others. Admirers, however, don’t take it any further. They don’t give Jesus a claim on their life. They cling to their own autonomy.

I hate to say this but there are more times than I care to admit that I have I acted more like an admirer of Jesus than a follower of Jesus.

That is why the examined life is so important. Those who say that Jesus was a good teacher and a good man but don’t give Him a claim on their life haven’t truly thought through the words that Jesus spoke. As C.S. Lewis famously said in his book, Mere Christianity:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Your challenge for this week is to do something you may not have done for some time. Stop and seriously answer the question, “Am I an admirer or a follower of Jesus?” Think through the Lewis quote. You can’t have it both ways. If you truly are a follower of Jesus, what will that mean in your life? What will you have to start doing differently? By the same token, what will you have to stop doing?