Follow Me . . . Hmm?

In His day, Jesus was considered by many to be one really strange dude. The fact is, a lot of people who were intrigued by Christ when He first burst on the scene ended up completely discounting Him as a nut and totally rejecting Him as a fraud. Why? Because Jesus did do some truly weird things ... like invite one of the most dishonest and despised people in all of society to be in His inner circle of friends and to be one of the main guys to represent Him in public. Who are we talking about? A Jewish man named Levi (also known as Matthew) was a member of the guild of crooked tax collectors that were considered traitors to Israel because they worked for the Roman Empire extorting exorbitant life crushing taxes from their own people. On top of that, Levi (and those like him) made a ton of money by charging more taxes than he had to so that he could line his own pockets with wealth taken from those in poverty. Seriously, Levi was everyone's definition of a dirt bag! And yet, it was to this man that Jesus said, "Follow Me." The question then and for now is ... what does that mean? What does it look like to follow Jesus? The Gospel of Mark ties together four short stories that give us the answer.