In Mark 3:14 it says: He chose them to be with Him. So number one, to be following Jesus, is to be with Him. Now to be with Him doesn't mean I've got to have an hour of prayer every day. That'd be a great help for you. Being with Jesus means: I consciously and intentionally allow Him to come in and around whatever I'm doing through the day. In other words, I just turn my mind to Him, and say: Lord, what do you think about that; or Lord, what about this? How do I handle that Lord? It's like praying continually. It's just being in a flow, where actually whatever I'm doing, Jesus is with me. Otherwise you've got this thing: when I'm in church and ministry, Jesus is with me; but when I'm in my workplace, Jesus is not with me. This is not true; and that kind of thinking has created this - it's a Greek thinking of: this is spiritual; and that's secular. In God's eyes there's no division. If you're at home, and you're a mother and a wife, and you're fully involved there, bring Jesus into your life, and into your home, and you're following Jesus. But I'm not out preaching. No, no, you don't need to - or I'm not out doing this, I'm not out doing that. No, you don't need to. Do what you're doing now, being a great wife, a great mother, and do it with great joy, and bring Jesus into it, and you'll be following Jesus, so that means talking with Him. It means commune with Him, talking with Him about life. Sometimes we think we've got to run everything ourselves, and we get stressed out unnecessarily. One of the signs you brought Jesus into it is: in His presence, there is joy. Ha ha! You lose your joy, lose your peace? Jesus isn't there anymore. You've shifted. Start to open up again.
The second thing is, we need to develop a relationship with Him. That means: listening to His voice; and responding. In John 15:27 He says: My sheep hear My voice, I know them and they follow Me. So get this, so the biggest skill you can learn, if you're going to learn any skill, is this one skill: how to hear what God is saying. If there's one thing every believer must learn, it's how to hear the voice of God, recognise it, and then trust Him that this is the best way for my life. It's about knowing He loves me; and trusting Him ,by listening to what He says, and doing it. There's no following Jesus, without doing what He says to do. How can there be? How can there be?
John 14:21, He who has My commandments, and does them, is the one who loves Me. Now let me ask you this. Don't put your hand up, because this is not to embarrass you. How many people can remember the last time that Jesus spoke clearly to do something? Don't put your hand up. Here's the question, that's the starter question, here's the real question. Have you done it? Have you done it? You're in a meeting, and you felt God speak to you about something. Did you write it down, and go do it, or did you say: man that's great, God spoke to me; but didn't do it? So responding to the Holy Spirit in obedience is a crucial part of being a follower of Jesus. There's no other way. So this is the interesting thing; God puts His spirit in us, so you'll always have Jesus with you, have the spirit of God with you. You've just got to decide whether you become conscious of His spirit within, and attuned to listen to the flow of spontaneity. As soon as you lose your peace, stop. You're disconnecting from following Jesus. You're going your own way, and you'll be stressed out. Why so many people are stressed out is, they've got burdens on them, that God never intended them to have, because they're no longer following Jesus. They've actually gone their own way, thinking: I have to work it all out myself. It's learning how to bring these things to the Lord, and listen to Him, and respond to what He has to say.
It's all so complicated isn't it? So that's a very decisive question: what was the last thing Jesus said to you? Are you doing it? You know, one of the things God spoke to me of a little while ago, and it really saved me huge grief, He spoke at a personal level: get rid of your mortgage. Get rid of debt, so we started to work hard on getting rid of our mortgage. Now that was just before the building boom, and then the building boom came. Everyone's saying: you need to do this; in fact many were saying: you need to mortgage the church, and expand, and all this kind of thing; and I listened to it all. In the end I thought: what was the last thing Jesus said to me? I prayed, and asked Him: speak to me, tell me something, what do I do? I'm a leader, tell me? - and nothing. So when nothing comes, go back to what the last thing Jesus said was. I went back to the last thing, and I said: you know something? The last thing Jesus said was: get rid of my debt. If He said it personally, then there's no difference between personal and corporate, we keep it the same way corporate. Then of course, within about two years, that whole building thing went, prices of everything dropped; we'd have been carrying a mortgage up to our eyeballs, and no way of servicing it. So sometimes you just don't get a fresh direction. You've got to follow the old one, until you get a new one. That's not sort of rocket science, all this stuff is it? Following Jesus. [Laughs]