I have always heard of people sitting down to dig into a specific passage in the bible and not making it through the first verse. I always thought of this as weird… I mean, for me, I have never been SOO thrown off that I can’t keep reading. It must be a writing trick to emphasize your point, I mean you really can’t get through the first verse?
I just assumed that in order for that to happen, you must be going through something crazy. I understand the power of scripture, I do, but never been impacted so much I had to stop and write.
But today I take that all back…
I was reading tonight a piece of scripture I had read a countless number of times… and I had to stop. I couldn’t carry on without reflecting on three words. Not only was I incapable of reading past the first verse, I was incapable of reading beyond the first three words! Jesus was speaking and said something that jumped off the page at me:
“Come follow me.”
Thats it. However for some reason in my head I imagined it with a sightly different grammatical structure, something more like this:
COME! FOLLOW! ME!
Three words. Three sentences. Three purposes.
I guess i just started to understand a little deeper that life, isn’t about just accepting the gift of grace once in our lives and moving on… its not about saying for just one time in our lives, “ok God, I believe you, and I know that your son died on the cross to save me from my sins!”
no…. I think we have it all wrong… CHRIST SAID, “Come, Follow me.”
“come” means that we are being called by Jesus. The way I heard this was “We don’t find Jesus, Jesus found us!” he wants us to be a part of what HE is doing… and so he is calling us. He is beckoning us. He is asking us to come.
Life isn’t about just believing one day and moving on… Jesus doesn’t just want us to confess our sins and keep living life, no… he wants us to FOLLOW! Following doesn’t meant that we just raise our hand in a powerful moment (like a transaction needing to take place after a shopping experience) in a worship service or walking down the isle at an outreach event…
Follow in the eyes of Jesus means that you’re about to embark on a journey that will be “all-in” and take every ounce of you to begin moving in a different direction. It’s likely that this journey will change your life.
Life with Christ is going to be life-altering… because he doesn’t say “come believe me” no….. he says “Come, FOLLOW me!!!”
Follow…who? JESUS…”me”…
I want you to notice that this isn’t a mandate, but rather an invitation. A choice. And a choice that he WANTS us to make (notice that “wants” is different than “needs”).
And so when we get to the end and we understand finally that life is solely about seeking JESUS, with an all out experience, trusting He is the way to true life. We understand that He is in the center of it all!
We can’t understand pain until we understand Christ.
We can’t understand love until we understand Christ.
We can’t understand life until we understand Christ.
Its all about him…
every moment and every second!
Life… in the core, is his.
And the core is all about the presence and existence of God!
So… maybe you are remotely like me when I read these three words… you began to realize that this thing called life that we are soo blessed to be a part of, is really about following him. If we are doing anything else than following him, we are merely making less of his purpose in the world.
So I wrestle with the question of my pursuit of Jesus and if I’m actually following or staying a close distance behind watching His twitter posts and Facebook likes.
I mean, are you actually doing everything in your power to make a journey toward the heart of Jesus Christ?
Thats what we have to hang on to, because once we understand that life is all about Christ, we may then understand what our purpose is in this world…
and we understand this fully, then and only then, we get to read the next verse.
[photo credit]
