Fan Or Follower - What Is The Difference? Series

Fan or Follower - What is the Difference?

John 6:1-29

Being a Fan requires nothing

Being a Follower requires heart belief

Slide

Thank you Margie. We appreciate PASS and all they do to help protect the life of the unborn.

I am excited to start this new year and one of the things we are doing that is new will be to each month highlight one of the missions we support and keep us all better informed and mission minded remembering that sharing the gospel in both word and action is our mission as a church.

So be looking for our Mission Moments on the second Sunday of each month.

I am also excited for another reason this year.

The Bears are in the playoffs.

Chicago Bears Fan

The Bears have a bye this week so they will be playing either Seattle or Philadelphia next Sunday.

And being the fan that I am and I know many others are, we adjusted our time for the Back to Basics Seminar until 3pm or right after the Bears game so you would not have to choose between the 2.

Now, I grew up in the Chicago area. I saw the Bears win the Super Bowl in 1986 (25 years ago) and attended the rally for them in Chicago. Being the fan that I am, I loved watching the Super Bowl Shuffle with the punky QB (Jim McMahon), the Fridge (William Perry), Sweetness (Walter Payton), and all the others.

I am still a fan, though I would not go to another Chicago rally to celebrate them. I had enough of crowds in 1986.

But being a fan doesn’t mean I have to go. There may be times I do celebrate and times I don’t celebrate. You don’t have to do everything to be a fan.

Facebook Fans

In fact, registering your support as a fan of something is so easy that it only requires clicking a button on Facebook. When Facebook was becoming popular, they had a button called “become a fan.” Today it is called the “like” button.

You press a button to register that you like something.

You could register your feelings toward Hickory Creek by becoming a fan of ours or by pressing the ‘Like” button.

You can like or become a fan of almost anything on Facebook. If you go to my Facebook page you will see that I am a fan of Reese’s peanut butter cups as well as various musical artists like Jason Gray and Cloverton among others.

You can even register your support of Jesus by becoming a fan.

Now this is not a bad or evil thing.

It is certainly not wrong to be a fan of Jesus, but is just being a fan of Jesus what he wanted for us?

You see there are a lot of people who are fans of Jesus, who might even claim to be Christians, but the reality is that they are only fans and not real followers.

Definition of Christian

The definition of being a Christian is to be a follower of Christ, not a fan.

Jesus did not call us to be fans of his. He did call us to be followers.

Over and over through the gospels, we see Jesus say, “Come, follow me.”

Now as we read through the gospels, we see that Jesus did have a lot of fans;

people who liked a lot of what He said,

who liked to hang around him and see what He might do next or

how he even might feed them;

but we find that many of these fans were not real followers.

Transition

This morning we are going to begin a series called not a fan.

Slide

The idea for this series comes from Kyle Idleman, a pastor from Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Ky, and I think he has done a good job of capturing in a contemporary phrase what the church at large is always in danger of becoming, a church full of fans instead of really being followers.

I think it is important for all churches to stop and assess where they are and ask difficult questions that may make some of us uncomfortable.

Over the next 4 weeks, we are going to look at some differences between fans and followers and ask some questions of ourselves so that we truly might grow into the followers the Lord wants us to be and not just a fan.

So this morning, we are going to open our Bibles to John 6:1-29

Slide

We are going to look at some of the details around the story of the feeding of the 5000, not so much the story itself, but I want us to consider the people who were there and see what Jesus had to say to them, and as we do that, I want us to consider why it is that we are here today, why it is that we come to church and want to be around Jesus and ask if we are fans or followers of Christ.