You Can’t Follow Jesus if You Don’t Know Your Bible

You can’t follow Jesus unless you discover where He’s going. 

If you dare to follow Jesus where He leads, one thing must be immediately clarified in the first place: the direction He is going. How can we determine that? We discover the will of God in the Word of God. 

Within the pages of Scripture, we learn how to love what God loves. We can comprehend how to value what He prioritizes. If we attempt to live for God without consulting His Word, we have fallen victim to a temptation that goes back to humanity’s origin. Once we doubt what God’s Word says, we start to make up our own rules for what is right and what is wrong. We attempt to dethrone God and act as if we are in charge.

If you follow Jesus on the path of discipleship, you must navigate through life according to the Bible. We must know what direction He is taking and what opportunity He is extending. For our sake, He has navigated and communicated a path through the Bible.

A book? Yes, a book. The rumors are true: the Bible is a really long book.

As if you don’t have enough textbooks crammed in your bookbag and documents stuffed in your folders, we understand that you might hear this initial step as discouraging. Even if you are one of those students who like to read, the Bible is a complex book full of sayings that don’t always effortlessly translate into your world. We are growing more accustomed to short texts and expressive emojis, and that hinders our ability to read something that initially appears as complex.

In addition, you might believe this daring call to a radical lifestyle just got watered down by basing it on an ancient book written in a context different than yours. That might show that you are mishandling Scripture. If you believe that the Bible is nothing but a dull book archiving a rigid belief system, we would understand why you wouldn’t be eager to read it. But that’s the problem. Scripture is nothing like that.