Come, follow Jesus!
(the real Jesus)
ONLINE EDITION
The Gospel
in simple terms
for nonbelievers
and new believers
view/save as PDF
also available as a
paperback book
Home
Jesus said, "Come, follow me."
How can you follow Jesus?
"But I'm a sinful person, not fit to be a follower of Jesus!"
Your new life as a follower of Jesus
Find fellowship with other followers of Jesus
Your prayer life
Know your Bible
Your service to God
"Jezebel" in the churches
"If we deliberately keep on sinning . . ."
Why believe the Bible?
Who is Jesus?
What did Jesus teach?
What is life really all about
Angels and demons
Gray areas, mysteries and religious authorities
What Jesus revealed about life after death
'But my relatives won't like it if I follow Jesus!'
Watching for Christ's return
How I came to follow Jesus: the testimony of David A. Reed
Why this book?
Dedication, copyright, ISBN & Scripture references
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Come, follow Jesus! (the real Jesus)
online edition of the book by David A. Reed
The Gospel in simple terms for nonbelievers and new believers.
How to become a follower of Jesus Christ, and live as Jesus commanded
Home |  
Jesus said, "Come, follow me." |  
How can you follow Jesus? |  
"But I'm a sinful person, not fit to be a follower of Jesus!" |  
Your new life as a follower of Jesus |  
Find fellowship with other followers of Jesus |  
Your prayer life |  
Know your Bible |  
Your service to God |  
"Jezebel" in the churches |  
"If we deliberately keep on sinning . . ." |  
Why believe the Bible? |  
Who is Jesus? |  
What did Jesus teach? |  
What is life really all about |  
Angels and demons |  
Gray areas, mysteries and religious authorities |  
What Jesus revealed about life after death |  
'But my relatives won't like it if I follow Jesus!' |  
Watching for Christ's return |  
How I came to follow Jesus: the testimony of David A. Reed |  
Why this book? |  
Dedication, copyright, ISBN & Scripture references
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How I Came to
Follow Jesus
The Personal Testimony of David A. Reed
Figuring out what life is really all about, and coming to
follow Jesus—the real Jesus—has been a long journey for me. My early religious training was in a big,
white Unitarian church in rural New England, just south
of Boston. I still remember the time when, in my boyish
innocence, I expressed to the pastor my belief that God had actually parted the
Red Sea to let Moses and the Israelites pass through; he turned to the
assistant pastor and said, with a laugh,
“This boy has a lot to learn.” As
I grew older I did, in fact, learn what this church taught. Encountering their pamphlet What
Unitarians Believe ,
I read that “Some Unitarians believe in God, and some do not”—and quickly
realized the ministers must have been among those who did not believe.
By the time I was fourteen years old, I had reached my own
conclusion that religion was “the opium of the people,” a convenient thought
for an adolescent who preferred not to have God watching him all the time. And when I went on to Harvard
University, I found that atheism
and agnosticism flourished there, too.
So, between the Unitarian Church
and my Ivy League schooling, I seldom encountered any strong pressure to
believe in God.
By the time I was twenty-two, though, I had thought through
atheistic evolution to it its ultimate end:
a pointless existence, followed by death. After all, if humans were nothing more than
the last in a series of chemical and biological accidents, then any ‘meaning’
or ‘purpose’ we might try to find in life would just be a self-deceptive
fiction produced in our own minds. It
would have no real connection with the harsh, cold reality of a universe where
nothing really mattered. So, I saw
myself faced with two choices: God or
suicide. Since suicide would be an easy
way out for me—I believed there was nothing after death—but would leave those
who cared about me to face the pain I would cause, I began to think about God.
Coincidentally (perhaps?), a Jehovah’s Witness was assigned
to work alongside me at my job. Since
God was on my mind, I began asking him questions about his beliefs. His answers amazed me. It was the first time that I had ever heard
religious thoughts presented in a tight-knit logical framework. Everything that he said fit together. He had an answer for every question, and so I
kept coming up with more questions.
Before long, he was conducting a study with me twice a week in the
Watchtower Society’s new (1968) book The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life.
In no time, I became a very zealous Witness. After receiving my initial indoctrination and
getting baptized, I served as a full-time ‘pioneer minister.’ This required that I spend at least one
hundred hours each month preaching from house to house and conducting home
Bible studies—actually a commitment of much more than a hundred hours, since
travel time could not be included in my monthly ‘field service report.’ I kept on ‘pioneering’ until 1971, when I
married Penni, who had been raised in the organization and who also ‘pioneered.’
My zeal for Jehovah and my proficiency in preaching were
rewarded, after a few years, with appointment as an elder. In that capacity I taught the 150-odd people
in my home congregation on a regular basis, and made frequent visits to other congregations
as a Sunday morning speaker.
Occasionally, I also received assignments to speak to audiences ranging
in the thousands at Jehovah’s Witness assemblies.
Other responsibilities I cared for included presiding over
the other local elders, handling correspondence between the local congregation
and the Society’s Brooklyn headquarters, and serving on judicial committees set
up to deal with cases of wrongdoing in the congregation. (I can recall disfellowshipping
people for such offenses as selling drugs at Kingdom Hall, smoking cigarettes,
wife-swapping, and having a Christmas decoration in the home.)
Although we were not able to continue ‘pioneering’ after
our marriage, Penni and I remained very zealous for the preaching work. Between the two of us, we conducted ‘home
Bible studies’ with dozens of people, and brought well over twenty of them into
the organization as baptized Jehovah’s Witnesses. We also put ‘the Kingdom’ first in our
personal lives by keeping our secular employment to a minimum and living in an
inexpensive three-room apartment in order to be able to devote more time to the
door-to-door preaching activity.
What interrupted this life of full dedication to the
Watchtower organization, and caused us to enter a path that would lead us
out? In one word, it was Jesus . Let me
explain:
When Penni and I were at a large Witness convention, we saw
a handful of opposers picketing outside. One of them carried a sign that said, “READ
THE BIBLE, NOT
THE WATCHTOWER.” We had no sympathy for
the picketers, but we did feel convicted by this sign, because we knew that we
had been reading Watchtower publications to the exclusion of reading the
Bible. (Later on, we actually counted up
all of the material that the organization expected Witnesses to read. The books, magazines, lessons, etc. added up
to over three thousand pages each year, compared with less than two hundred
pages of Bible reading assigned—and most of that was in the Old Testament.
The majority of Witnesses were so bogged down by the three thousand
pages of the organization’s literature that they never got around to doing the
Bible reading.)
After seeing the picket sign Penni turned to me and said, “We
should be reading the Bible and The Watchtower.” I agreed; so, we began doing
regular personal Bible reading.
That’s when we began to think about Jesus. Not that we began to question the
Watchtower’s teaching that Christ was just Michael the archangel in human flesh—It
didn’t even occur to us to question that.
But we were really impressed with Jesus as a person: what he said and did,
how he treated people. We wanted to be his
followers. Especially, we were struck
with how Jesus responded to the hypocritical religious leaders of the day, the
Scribes and Pharisees. I remember
reading, over and over again, the accounts relating how the Pharisees objected
to Jesus’ healing on the Sabbath, his disciples’ eating with unwashed hands,
and other details of behavior that violated their traditions. How I loved Jesus’ response: “You hypocrites, Isaiah aptly prophesied about
you, when he said, ‘This people honors me with their
lips, yet their heart is far removed from me.
It is in vain that they keep worshiping me, because they teach commands
of men as doctrines.’” (Matt. 15:7-9 the
JWs’ New World Translation )
Commands of men as doctrines! That thought stuck in my mind. And I began to realize that, in fulfilling my
role as an elder, I was acting more like a Pharisee than a follower of Jesus. I was teaching commands of men as
doctrines. For example, the elders were
the enforcers of all sorts of petty rules about dress and grooming. We told ‘sisters’ how long they could wear
their dresses, and we told ‘brothers’ how to comb their hair, how to trim their
sideburns, and what sort of flare or taper they could wear in their pants. We actually told people that they could not
please God unless they conformed. It
reminded me of the Pharisees who condemned Jesus’ disciples for eating with
unwashed hands.
My own dress and grooming conformed to the letter. But I ran into problems with newly interested
young men that I brought to Kingdom Hall.
Instead of telling them to buy a white shirt
and sport coat, and to cut their hair short, I now told them, “Don’t be
disturbed if people at Kingdom Hall dress and groom a little on the
old-fashioned side. You can continue as
you are. God doesn’t judge people by
their haircut or their clothing.” But
that didn’t work. Someone else would
tell them to get a haircut, or offer to give them a white shirt—or they would
simply feel so out of place that they left never to return.
This upset me, because I believed their life depended on
joining ‘God’s organization.’ If we
Witnesses acted like Pharisees to the point of driving young people away from
the only way to salvation, their innocent blood would be on our hands. Talking to the other elders about it didn’t
help. They felt that the old styles were
inherently righteous. But then Jesus’ example
came to mind:
“And he went on from there and entered their
synagogue. And behold, there was a man
with a withered hand. And they asked
him, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath?’
so that they might accuse him. He said
to them, ‘What man of you, if he has one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath, will not lay hold of it
and lift it out? Of how much more value
is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful
to do good on the sabbath.’ Then he said to the man, ‘Stretch out your
hand.’” (Matt. 12:9-13 RSV)
If I were truly to follow Jesus, instead of men, I saw only
one course open to me. I personally
violated the tradition of the elders by letting my hair grow a half inch over
my ears. My reasoning was: How can they pressure a newcomer to get a
haircut, now, with one of the elders wearing the same style?
Well, the other elders reacted the same way the Pharisees
did when Jesus told the man to stretch out his hand. Scripture says they “went out and took
counsel against him, how to destroy him.”
(Matt. 12:14 RSV) It took them a while to react, but the
elders actually put me on trial, called in witnesses to testify, and spent
dozens of hours discussing half an inch of hair.
Grooming was not the real issue, however. For me it was a question of whose disciple I
was. Was I a follower of Jesus, or an
obedient servant to a human hierarchy?
The elders who put me on trial knew that that was the real issue,
too. They kept asking, “Do you believe
that the Watchtower Society is God’s organization? Do you believe that the Society speaks as Jehovah’s
mouthpiece?” At that time I answered Yes because I still did believe it was God’s organization—but
that it had become corrupt, like the Jewish religious system at the time when
Jesus was opposed by the Pharisees.
It was what I said at the congregation meetings that got me
into real trouble, though. I was still
an elder, so, when I was assigned to give a 15-minute talk on the book of
Zechariah at the Thursday night ‘Theocratic Ministry School’ meeting, I took
advantage of the opportunity to encourage the audience to read the Bible. In fact, I told them that, if their time was
limited and they had to choose between reading the Bible and reading The Watchtower magazine, they should
choose the Bible, because it was inspired by God while The Watchtower was not inspired and often taught errors that
had to be corrected later.
Not surprisingly, that was the last time they allowed me to
give a talk. But I could still speak
from my seat during question-and-answer periods at the meetings. Everyone was expected to answer in their own
words, but not in their own thoughts.
You were to give the thought found in the paragraph of the lesson being
discussed. But, after I said a few
things they didn’t like, they stopped giving me the microphone.
With the new perspective that I was gaining from Bible
reading, it upset me to see the organization elevate itself above Scripture, as
it did when the December 1, 1981, Watchtower said: “Jehovah God has also provided his visible
organization . . . Unless we are in touch with this channel of communication
that God is using, we will not progress along the road to life, no matter how
much Bible reading we do.” (page 27, ¶ 4) It
really disturbed me to see those men elevate themselves above God’s Word. Since I could not speak out at the meetings,
I decided to try writing.
That’s when I started publishing the newsletter Comments
from the Friends. I wrote articles
questioning what the organization was teaching, and signed them with the pen
name ‘Bill Tyndale, Jr.’—a reference to sixteenth
century English Bible translator William Tyndale, who
was burned at the stake for what he wrote.
To avoid getting caught, Penni and I drove across the state line at
night to an out-of-state post office and mailed the articles in unmarked
envelopes. We sent them to local
Witnesses and also to hundreds of Kingdom Halls all across the country, whose
addresses we had obtained from telephone books at the town library.
Penni and I knew that we had to leave the Jehovah’s
Witnesses. But, to us, it was similar to
the question of what to do in a burning apartment building. Do you escape through the nearest exit? Or, do you bang on doors first,
waking the neighbors and helping them escape, too? We felt an obligation to help others get out—especially
our families and our ‘students’ that we had brought into the organization. If we had just walked out, our families left
behind would have been forbidden to associate with us.
But, after a few weeks a friend discovered that I was the
publisher of the newsletter and turned me in. So, one night when Penni and I
were returning home from conducting a Bible study, two elders stepped out of a
parked car, accosted us in the street, and questioned us about the
newsletter. They wanted to put us on
trial for publishing it, but we simply stopped going to the Kingdom Hall. By that time most of our former friends there
had become quite hostile toward us. One
young man called on the phone and threatened to “come over and take care of” me
if he got another one of our newsletters.
And another Witness actually left a couple of death threats on our
answering machine. The elders went ahead
and tried us in absentia and disfellowshipped
us.
This meant that other JWs—including our close friends—were
now forbidden to speak to us, even to say hello if they passed us on the
street. If they chose to associate with
us, they too would face disfellowshipping. It was as if everyone we knew had died. This was an especially painful time for
Penni. But we had our new friend Jesus. We identified with Paul, who wrote, “I count
all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus
my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish
so that I may gain Christ.” (Phil. 3:8 NASB)
It was a great relief to be out from under the oppressive
yoke of that organization. But, we now
had to face the immediate challenge of where to go and what to believe. It takes some time to re-think your entire
religious outlook on life. Before
leaving the Watchtower, we had rejected the claims that the organization was
God’s ‘channel of communication,’ that Christ returned invisibly in the year
1914, and that the ‘great crowd’ of believers since 1935 should not partake of
the communion loaf and cup. But, we were
only beginning to re-examine other doctrines.
And we had not yet come into fellowship with Christians outside the JW
organization.
All Penni and I knew was that we wanted to follow Jesus and
that the Bible contained all the information we needed. So, we really devoted ourselves to reading
the Bible, and to prayer. We also
invited our families and remaining friends to meet in our apartment on Sunday
mornings. While the Witnesses gathered
at Kingdom Hall to hear a lecture and study The
Watchtower, we met to read the Bible.
As many as fifteen attended—mostly family, but some friends also.
We were just amazed at what we found in prayerfully reading
the New Testament over and over again—things that we had never appreciated
before, like the closeness that the early disciples had with the risen Lord,
the activity of the Holy Spirit in the early church, and Jesus’ words about
being ‘born again.’
All those years as Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Watchtower had
taken us on a guided tour through the Bible.
We gained a lot of knowledge about the Old Testament, and we could quote
a lot of Scripture, but we never heard the Gospel of salvation in Christ. We never learned to depend on Jesus for our
salvation and to look to him personally as our Lord. Everything centered around
the Watchtower’s works program, and people were expected to come to Jehovah God
through the organization.
When I realized from reading Romans, chapter 8, and John,
chapter 3, that I needed to be ‘born of the Spirit,’ I was afraid at
first. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that
some ‘born again’ people, who claim to have the Holy Spirit, are actually
possessed by demons. And so I feared
that, if I prayed out loud to turn my life over to Jesus Christ, some demon
might be listening; and the demon might jump in and possess me, pretending to
be the Holy Spirit. (Many Jehovah’s
Witnesses live in constant fear of the demons.
Some of our friends would even throw out second-hand furniture and
clothing, fearing that demons could enter their homes through such
articles.) But, then I read Jesus’ words
at Luke 11:9-13. In a context where he
was teaching about prayer and casting out unclean spirits, Jesus said: “And I
say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks
receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. If a son asks for bread from any of you who is a father, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a
serpent instead of a fish? Or if he asks
for an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?
If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children,
how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!” (NKJV)
I knew, after reading those words, that I could safely ask
for Christ’s Spirit (Rom.
8:9), without fearing that I would receive a demon. So, in the early morning privacy of our
kitchen, I proceeded to confess my need for salvation and to commit my life to
Christ.
About a half hour later, I was on my way to work, and I was
about to pray again. It had been my
custom for many years to start out my prayers by saying, ‘Jehovah God, . . .’ But, this time when
I opened my mouth to pray, I started out by saying, ‘Father, . . .’ It was not because I had reasoned on the
subject and reached the conclusion that I should address God differently; the
word Father just came out,
without my even thinking about it.
Immediately, I understood why:
‘God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out,
“Abba , Father!”’ (Galatians 4:6 NKJV) I wept with joy at God’s confirmation of this
new, more intimate relationship with him.
When I returned home that evening and sat down at the
dinner table, it occurred to me as I was about to pray before our meal that I
had always been in the habit of beginning my prayer by addressing “Jehovah
God,” as the Watchtower Society had taught us.
How would I explain to Penni that I now addressed God as “Father”? But, to my surprise, just as I opened my
mouth to pray, Penni interrupted me and said, “You know, David, we should
really be calling God ‘Father’ when we pray.”
Penni and I soon developed the desire to worship and praise
the Lord in a congregation of believers, and to benefit from the wisdom of
mature Christians. Since the small group
of ex-JWs was still meeting in our apartment on Sunday mornings for Bible
reading, and most of them were not yet ready to venture into a church, we began
visiting churches that had evening services.
One church we attended was so legalistic that we almost felt as though
we were back in the Kingdom Hall.
Another was so liberal that the sermon always seemed to be on philosophy
or politics—instead of Jesus. Finally,
though, the Lord led us to a congregation where we felt comfortable, and where
the focus was on Jesus Christ and his Gospel, rather than on side issues. And, desiring to be obedient to Jesus’
command to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” (Matthew 28:19 NIV), Penni and I
received Christian baptism.
Penni went on to teach Fifth Grade in a Christian school
that had students from about seventeen different churches. She really enjoyed it, because she could tie in
the Scriptures with all sorts of subjects.
For some eighteen years I continued publishing Comments from the Friends as a quarterly newsletter
aimed at reaching Jehovah’s Witnesses with the Gospel, and helping Christians interested
in talking to JWs. It also contained
articles of special interest to ex-Witnesses.
Subscribers were found in a dozen foreign countries, as well as all across the United
States and Canada. Many back issues are still available in web
format at http://www.AnswerJW.com. I have
also written a number of books on Jehovah’s Witnesses, on Mormonism (with an
ex-Mormon co-author),
on end-times prophecies, and on other Bible topics. My web sites encourage Bible reading and
belief in the Bible as God’s unfailing inspired Word. Besides continuing to write, I speak
occasionally to church groups on these matters.
The thrust of my outreach ministry is to help people break
free from deception and put faith in the original Gospel of Christ as it is
presented in the Bible. The most
important lesson Penni and I learned since leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses is that
Jesus is not just a historical figure that we read about. He is alive and is actively involved with
Christians today, just as he was back in the first century. He personally saves
us, teaches us, and leads us. This personal relationship with God through his
Son Jesus Christ is so wonderful! The
individual who knows Jesus and follows him will not even think about following
anyone else: “A stranger they will not
follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of
strangers. . . . My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give them
eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of
my hand.” (John 10:5,27-28
RSV)
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