When we become a follower of Jesus, is it more like getting an upgrade on life or is it more switching operating systems completely? That’s an important question to answer. If we were really honest, most of us talk as if is a whole new operating system and live as if it is simply a life upgrade.
We talk new operating system because we can’t get away from a number of passages that meddle with our normal lives. For example, Jesus didn’t ask Peter and Andrew and James and John to drag their nets with them, but to drop them and follow Him. He didn’t tell the rich young ruler who came to inquire about the cost of apprenticeship to divest of 20% of his portfolio, but to cash it all out and give it away. He made it clear he was not treating the twelve disciples and the rich young ruler as exceptions or exceptional by telling the disciples, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Matthew 10:38) Anyone. And notice the price – denial of the old to the point of putting it to death. So much for Jesus as an upgrade.
The Apostle Paul is no friend of a Jesus 3.1 upgrade either. He tells us that before Jesus entered our lives, we were dead in sin, children of darkness, lost, and without hope in the world. (See Ephesians 2:1-3, 12) After eleven chapters of describing life before Jesus in Romans, he begins Romans 12 telling us that the new plan as Jesus followers is transformation. (Not reformation. That’s an upgrade.) The Greek word he uses is metamorpheo. Sound like any English word you know? Yep. That’s the one. Metamorphosis. Meta – to change, morpeo – form or nature. To change form. Does that sound like Jesus comes in to ‘tweak’ our current life? Only if we think the change between the fuzzy worm that crawls in a chrysalis and the Monarch that flies out is simply ‘tweaking.’
Let’s be honest, we live as if our Savior is our 'Tweaker' -kind of like adding a little extra RAM to our motherboards if and when we need Him for processing our overloaded lives. But that mindset is hard to find in the words of Jesus to His disciples, and in the books to the right of the Gospels in the New Testament.
