The originator of the Follow Me Ministry is our Heavenly Father. And the man into whose heart Father sowed the seeds of this ministry is named John Marquez. John has worked with several Christian ministries for many years. There are two articles posted on this website that give ample information on his personal background, how he became what he is, and why he does what he does.
The first article is biographical. You can find it in the ‘Biblical Meditations’ section of this website. It is article number 1 in the Genesis section, and it’s entitled ‘My Discipleship Journey’. The second article is booklet sized. You’ll find it in the ‘Articles and Teachings’ section. The title is: ‘Insights From My Past’. This gives more detailed information about significant events that exerted enormous influence on John and that have, therefore, a direct bearing on the character and thrust of this ministry and its ultimate purpose.
Other people have stepped forward to assist John in spreading the FMM message. Some of them live in the USA, but there are also others who live and work in continents and countries around the world. So Holy Spirit continues to fulfill in our day, what the Lord promised He would be doing in and to, and for His disciples throughout the New Covenant’s Last Days Era. (See John 3:5-8; 7:37-39; and chapters 13-17. See also Acts 2)
Our awesome Follow Me Family of disciples-in-training is not recruited, or closely-supervised, or hyper-managed and motivated. Human desires, urges, initiatives and self-effort are not the engines that power and move us. Follow Me disciples are Spirit-led and Bible-directed. Holy Spirit motivates and moves people to step forward to join our ranks and and volunteer their services.
But aside from the unique Spirit empowered qualities listed above, the Follow Me Family members are just like you and everyone else. We too are mortal, weak, dependent, and highly limited, in every way. We’re frail and prone to human error, and to the selfishness, laziness and cowardice that lurks in the fallen fleshy depths of every human heart. We’ve all sinned against God and have hurt other people and have been hurt in return. So we’re all part of the maddening and highly frustrating ‘human condition’ that everyone on earth shares. And like many of you, we’ve searched for most of our lives for answers to questions like ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What is this life all about?’ and ‘Why am I here?’
“What profit is there to the worker from that in which he toils? I have seen the task which God has given the sons of men with which to occupy themselves. He has made everything appropriate in its time. HE HAS ALSO SET ETERNITY IN THEIR HEART, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.” (Ecclesiastes 3:9-11 NASB 1995. Emphasis added.)
In the course of our search to satisfy our hunger for God’s Truth, we have been encountered by Someone who has proven to be exactly what we’ve been waiting and looking for… and much, much more! And, ever since we’ve gotten to really know His Reality, Goodness and Truth for ourselves, we’ve felt compelled, in one way or another, to spread the news that He really and truly is as electrifyingly real and shocking and soul-shaking as a bolt of lightning! He is astoundingly Present… everywhere, and He doesn’t need our help or advice! But He does need us to trust Him enough to render to Him our obedience to His Word, which comes into us through His written and Living Word.
He has proven to be utterly credible and reliable to us. So we know that His revelations, commands and promises are absolutely true… and All-Sufficient… and utterly worthy of our airtight trust, full acceptance, and unbounded joy and excitement! And, because of His Perfect Presence abiding in our midst and in our hearts, we are learning that we can afford to rejoice in Him, and rest in peace and joy because of Him, regardless of what may or may not be happening in the passing world around us!
Like many others, we too tried to know Him by going from one church to another, and reading books, and attending classes that in one way or another, pertained to Him. But knowing things about Him falls far short of the electrifying Reality of actually having Him personally invade your space and cause you to experience the Fullness that is in His unforgettable Living Presence! All of those other earthly temporal things to which we all are in the habit of looking and seeking always prove to be poor created counterfeits that fall far short of His overwhelming Reality.
Consider how different your experience would be in each of the following two scenarios:
- You attend lectures, church services, conferences, and group gatherings devoted to talking, teaching, and discussing things ABOUT electricity, year after year. Or,
- You encounter a downed live electric cable lying on the ground before you… and actually pick it up and hold it in your hands!
How different will those two experiences be from each other? How vast will the difference be between knowing all ABOUT electricity, as opposed to KNOWING ELECTRICITY DIRECTLY AND INTIMATELY FOR YOURSELF, AS IT SURGES THROUGHOUT YOUR ENTIRE BEING?
Beloved, can you begin to get a sense what we’re trying to convey to you here? Things that are merely, ‘about’ God’s Living Resurrected Word, are just as empty and fleeting as we are! Nothing at that level will ever be able to directly and personally connect us with the real Person of God’s Living Word. No, God Himself must take the initiative. He must send His Holy Spirit to pierce, penetrate, invade and permeate our heart of hearts. He must transmit the very Presence and Life of His Living Word into our innermost being! His Word is our one and only Source of life, provision and sustenance. He is Everything to us! So we must have God’s beloved resurrected Son Himself, just as He really is, abiding within us. And nothing short of having His Living Presence abiding and working within us will do! And nothing short of that could actually be real or effective in sustaining us!
There are many who claim to know Jesus, the risen Son of God. We all claim to have been touched by Him to one degree or another. The world knows us as, ‘Christians’. But that is a confusing term that is nowhere near specific enough. No doubt you have noticed that considerable confusion and division exists among those of us who claim to know and serve Jesus, or Yeshua. To curious uninvolved onlookers, Christendom presents a puzzling enigmatic panorama. Even though many who belong to that category claim to believe in and follow after this special Someone, we remain habitually divided and strife-ridden when it comes to really knowing Him as He is, and loving what He loves, rejecting what He rejects, wanting what He wants, and doing what He commands. In other words, habitually, on many levels, there are many things concerning Him about which we are unwilling to agree! So therefore, we give a mixed, confusing message to the rest of the world.
Thus, over the centuries, we’ve displayed something that has now grown to resemble a huge, ‘Big Christian Buffet’… a vast conglomeration of different, and at times, mutually-hostile conflicting denominations, movements, sects, groups and theologies! We’ve come to resemble an enormous ‘bazaar-like’ religious expo, filled with row upon row of booths, stands and tables that are manned by people that do their utmost to draw attention to themselves and to what they have to offer. And just like various business interests that compete against each other for survival and supremacy, these people also strive to persuade as many people as possible to join their group and promote and support their causes and agendas. But those are all created temporary things! And when needy created people incessantly focus only on other things that are created, what they obsess over and depend upon proves to be just as temporal and empty and needy as they are!
The trouble with that is that they keep losing sight and falling short of, the Creator of all things, the One who brought us all into being and who sustains us all in existence! Therefore, such so-called ‘believers’ never find what they need and seek in those counterfeit substitute ‘sources’. Instead, they continue to fragment and divide from each other more and more, because when we remain at a distance from Him who is our Life Source, we remain dismembered and scattered, and, from a world-wide perspective, that scattered, disjointed mess closely resembles a corpse-strewn battlefield immediately after the shooting and bombing have finally ceased!
But the Follow Me Ministry Family is not to be found in one of those competitive midway ‘expo booths.’ We don’t draw attention to ourselves. We’re not a formal, organized business corporation or constitutionalized denominational organization. We hold no official religious titles, nor do we promote any specific sectarian theology. We do not recruit anyone to join our group or any other. Instead, we leave it to God to direct the steps of the people that feel drawn to us and to our Message. We leave it to the Lord to deploy His own as He sees fit. So we don’t advertise or promote ourselves, or our website. And because we don’t have anything to sell, or jobs to protect, we don’t collect tithes or charge fees for what we do. And since we receive no ministry-generated salaries and have no goal-oriented budget, we have no reason to solicit funds for our personal support. Instead, our survival, growth and influence depend on God, and our numbers grow and spread by word of mouth, purely by the Authority of God’s Word and the Power of His Holy Spirit. It was on this basis that our Lord commissions His true disciples:
“And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven has come near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those with leprosy, cast out demons. Freely you received, freely give. Do not acquire gold, or silver, or copper for your money belts, or a bag for your journey, or even two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for the worker is deserving of his support.’ (Matthew 10:7-10 NASB.)
“Philip *found Nathanael and *said to him, “We have found Him of whom Moses wrote in the Law, and the prophets also wrote: Jesus the son of Joseph, from Nazareth!” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good be from Nazareth?” Philip *said to him, “COME AND SEE!” (John 1:45-46 NASB. Emphasis added.)
Everything in this ministry is done on a purely volunteer basis, depending on whether or not the Spirit of God puts it into someone’s heart to step forward to help us carry the load of the responsibility of fulfilling what we believe is a God-given commission. We refrain from any attempt to manipulate or control what we may think is supposed to happen because disciples are mandated to learn to follow the one and only Lord and Commander of us all, and to leave the planning and strategy setting, and daily ‘duty roster instructions’ up to Him.
We refrain from thinking of FMM as ‘my ministry’ or, ‘my dream and vision for the future’ or ‘my responsibility’, because we’ve noticed that the energies and focus of the people that pass through Christendom’s ‘bazaar’ are very often so scattered in all kinds of ‘man-centered flesh-driven directions and that much of their common energy and focus dissipates and evaporates before they have any real opportunity to connect in a personal and intimately interactive way with the dynamic, All-Sufficient Presence and Active Leadership of our indwelling risen Lord. The One who abides and works from within us is the one that we are commissioned to follow, abide with, rely upon, draw what we need from, and proclaim. And it is to Him that we are commissioned to draw the world’s attention!
People that belong to this fallen world’s system, and depend on the many diversions and distractions by which ‘pop culture’ keeps engulfing and mesmerizing the masses, are prevented from enjoying true lasting peace, joy, security, and satisfaction. Putting faith and trust in what is here today, and gone tomorrow, such as, churches, ministries, paychecks, human promises, current trends, public favor, and man-given ecclesiastical titles and positions, is not what this special Person we’ve encountered, is here to offer. Instead He gives Himself to us and cautions us to seek things that are Heavenly and Eternal, and that do not originate from anything this world has to offer. We believe that what Man can give us, Man can also take away. But what God gives, nothing in all of Creation will ever be able to touch or destroy or take away from us.
“For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?
“And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin; yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. BUT SEEK FIRST HIS KINGDOM AND HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS, AND ALL THESE THINGS WILL BE ADDED TO YOU!” (Matthew 6:25-33 Emphasis added.)
Yes, we’re talking about the Living Word of God made flesh… Yeshua (Jesus), the Eternal Son of the Living God of the Bible… the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob! He is our Eternal Life and the one who leads. And He is the one we are being trained by Holy Spirit to follow. He is our awesome, totally Transcendent, Infinitely Perfect and All-Sufficient Shepherd! He is so electrifyingly real and amazing, that all His Father has to do is speak forth His Living Word, and the Word immediately creates exactly what His Father says, just the way He intends it to be!
So God doesn’t need our help, or advice. It’s not our job to supply Him with our ‘to do lists’. His Living Word made flesh has already done everything necessary to cover the past, the present, and the future leading into Eternity. So our God requires that we believe and receive all we need from Him and learn to be faithful to and embrace and care for each other. All as we learn to do that, our Shepherd, the Creator and Sustainer of all things, trains us to look only to Him and rely exclusively on Him and what He has already done to cover and provide for Everything!
“And the earth was a formless and desolate emptiness, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God (through His Living creative Word) said, “Let there be light”; AND THERE WAS LIGHT!” (Genesis 1:2-3 NASB. Amplification and emphasis added.)
“Therefore Jesus (God’s Living Word made flesh) answered and was saying to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, THESE THINGS THE SON ALSO DOES IN THE SAME WAY.” (John 5:19 NASB. Amplification and emphasis added.)
And this awesome God, sent His All-Authoritative Word to became human, just like us. He did the very specific and vitally important reason that, in ourselves, our fall into Sin has made us to be spiritually bankrupt, helpless, and in desperate need to have God give His Son to us to serve as our Perfect, All-Sufficient Covenant Representative and Champion. He has come to be and do in our name, everything God requires of us that in ourselves, we are utterly incapable of accomplishing!
So our ministry purpose is to learn to give proper worship and hospitality to Him as He indwells us, and to help each other to unfold, unpack and explain as much as we can about Him to the rest of the world. We learn to practice following Him and abiding in His ways until we master the art and science of embodying what His words, “Follow Me”, actually mean. And we endeavor to help others explore and get a taste of the lifestyle into which His invitation will lead anyone who will love, obey, and follow Him… on His terms!
When Yeshua was on Earth in the first century, He taught and trained a small mixed handful of His fellow Jews… men and women who are known today as, ‘disciples’. And from their midst, He chose twelve men to be His Apostles’ (or, the emissaries) that He would send forth to proclaim Him and His Resurrection Reality all across the earth. One of these men was brought into that group a short time after it had been formed and launched. He entered the picture shortly after the Resurrection and Ascension of Messiah Yeshua. The world today knows him as, ‘The apostle Paul.’ But when he first heard about Yeshua, he was violently opposed to Him and anything associated with Him. In those days, he was known as, ‘Shaul’, or, ‘Saul of Tarsus’.
So, in the beginning. Saul may have seen and heard about Yeshua from a distance, but he did not yet come to know Him personally in the days before His death. But because of what he had heard about Him from others, he was virulently opposed to Him. At that time, Saul sincerely saw himself to be, ‘a Pharisee of Pharisees’. In other words, he was as ‘religious and ‘proper’ as any man could be. And after Yeshua was crucified, Saul believed that it was his duty, as a good God-obeying Israelite, to stamp out His memory and get rid of any Jew that was foolish enough to believe and follow Him. Like many of his contemporaries, Saul was convinced that the claims about Yeshua’s Resurrection were nothing but lies, and that His claim to be the long-awaited Messiah of Israel, was utterly fraudulent. And, according to the directives God gave to Israel in Deuteronomy 13, Saul believed that Yeshua had rightly and justly been crucified, and that anyone who would follow Him should also be eliminated.
But then, one day, Saul was on his way to fulfill a commission given to him by the high priest of Israel, to hunt down any of Yeshua’s followers that he could find in the city of Damascus. He was to arrest and bring them before Israel’s Sanhedrin ruling council in Jerusalem, to be judged and punished. But somewhere along the way, Yeshua Himself, who Saul knew had been publicly crucified and executed by Roman soldiers, suddenly appeared before Saul. And His electrifying Perfect Resurrected Presence suddenly blotted out the sun and literally threw Saul to the ground! The risen Lord confronted Saul, and required him to explain his behavior and participation in the recent murder of His disciple, Stephen. Thus Saul received a firsthand revelation of just how Real, and Risen from the dead and Supernaturally Present God’s Living Word actually is!
And of course this mind-blowing invasion into Saul’s space completely destroyed his former arrogance and self-assured hostility. He was absolutely, completely humbled and undone! The risen Lord’s soul-gripping Reality stripped away all of his delusions, biases, and false assumptions. And the Lord proved to Saul just how tragically wrong and misguided he had been!
“Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have no need of anything,” and you do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked, I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed; and eye salve to apply to your eyes so that you may see!” Revelation 3:17-18 NASB.)
So Saul was forced to admit that Yeshua is the long-awaited Messiah that Moses and the prophets had been announcing and proclaiming for so many centuries. And, to his dismay, he now realized what he had been doing was defying the Living Word and Son of God made flesh! He had dared to try to erase Him from the consciousness of the people to whom God Himself had sent His beloved Son! And after that soul-shattering awakening, this poor man underwent a total change of mind and heart. From that time forward, since he was born a citizen of the Roman Empire, he began to be known by his Roman name, Paulus, or Paul. And His God-given commission thereafter was to serve as Yeshua’s chosen Israelite apostle… sent to proclaim His Lord and Master… not only to Jewish people, but also to the diverse people groups of the entire Gentile world!
As you may well imagine, after Yeshua revealed Himself, Paul wasn’t able to think, speak about, or seek after anything else! For him, from that point forward, nothing but Yeshua would be able to captivate his heart and his thoughts! And dear friends, that’s exactly what happened to us too. The risen Lord has apprehended us to the same level of overpowering preeminence… perhaps not as dramatically and spectacularly as happened to Saul, but He did impact us enough to break our hardened, self-adoring hearts and bring us to an end of ourselves. Knowing Him has forever changed our thinking, and aspirations, and priorities concerning everything. Just as Yeshua’s Reality changed Saul, so has it changed us, and many, many others besides.
So now, our risen Lord is what we are all about. He is our entire Life! And we are commissioned by Him to help as many other people as possible to get to know Him and to do whatever we can, to expedite their ability to actually experience His All-Sufficiency also. And we wholeheartedly agree with what Paul once wrote about the Lord who became his Messiah and Master, just as He is ours:
“But whatever things were gain to me, these I have considered as loss for the sake of the Messiah. More than that, I consider all things to be loss in comparison to the surpassing value of the knowledge of Messiah Yeshua my Lord. Because of Him, I have suffered the loss of all things; and I consider them garbage (dung) in order that I might gain Messiah and be found in Him not having my righteousness derived from Torah, but one that is through trusting in Messiah—the righteousness from God based on trust.” (Philippians: 3-7-9 TLV. Amplification added.)
We too have learned that Yeshua contains within Himself all of the Eternal Fullness of Almighty God! And to have Him, is to have Everything! After all, since He’s the only human that has ever been resurrected from the firm grip of Death and now abides within a perfect, indestructible glorified eternal human body, He very justly deserves the rapt attention and credence of every other human being in existence! It’s true that other people have been resuscitated from the grip of death for a while, but they were still mortal. and eventually, they died. But Yeshua rose and will live forever! And we know from our own experiences with Him, that His Father continues to send Him to abide in our midst, by the Power of God’s Holy Spirit, to let all of mankind know that He is here to bring every one of us with Him, into the endless enjoyment of the same awesome resurrected Eternal Life with His Heavenly Father, that is already His Eternal Inheritance and Reward!
Yeshua, and His Father, who speaks Him forth, are One! He is the Living Word of the uncreated Living God who originates and sustains everyone and everything in Creation! And He really is the resurrected Messiah-King of Israel, and the True Destination with whom God wants the entire human race to eventually bond! He is the Perfect Living Eternal Word that proceeds from His Almighty Father – the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And it is to this electrifying Living Word, who proceeds from the heart of Almighty God Himself, and to Him alone, that we look. No one knows the Father the way His own Living Word and Holy Spirit know Him; and so it is to our Messiah, Yeshua, the Word made flesh, that we look, and upon whom we depend for all things, past, present and future. And as we learn to know Him at this depth, He, at the same time, is revealing His Father to us, and continues to draw us nearer and nearer to His Father’s Eternal Embrace.
We do whatever we can to help and to bless anyone we encounter who has also heard Him calling to their heart of hearts, to follow Him, the way He is showing us to follow Him. And so we’re here to help anyone else He has called into His service. So if you’re ready to step forward to enter the FMM sphere of influence, and are ready to join the ranks of His other disciples-in-training, we’re here for you. This is who we are, and this is what we do… no more and no less.
So, our Follow Me Family of disciples-in-training around the world, and this website, are here to serve you. If you have heard the risen Lord say: “Follow Me!” to you too, and you feel Holy Spirit prompting you to connect with us, we welcome you! We’re here to help you to explore the depths of meaning contained in that awesome summons that Yeshua speaks into the innermost being of anyone that He has chosen to become one with Him, as one of His beloved, Last Days Covenant ‘Blood brothers and disciple friends. Just contact us, and let us know; and we will reach out to you and we will pursue together the Enormity that lies behind the words the disciple Phillip said to Nathaniel that ended up changing the entire course of his life:
“The next day He decided to go to Galilee, and He *found Philip. And Jesus *said to him, “Follow Me.” Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip *found Nathanael and *said to him, “We have found Him of whom Moses wrote in the Law, and the prophets also wrote: Jesus the son of Joseph, from Nazareth!” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good be from Nazareth?” Philip *said to him, “COME AND SEE!” (John:1:43-46 NASB. Emphasis added.)