Jesus calls us to follow Him. By His grace, mercy, and love, Jesus comes to us and for our good and His glory, wants us to pursue Him. I can’t overemphasize here how graceful and loving an act it is for Jesus to ask us to follow Him. It is what we, as people who have become rebellious against Him, need most. Meaning in life cannot be found apart from God. So how wonderful it is that Jesus is sent to us to rescue us from ourselves. To follow Christ is to find what it means to be truly human.
So what happens when we follow Christ? Where does Jesus lead us? No doubt we become like Him in character, but I want us to think about another aspect of where following Christ leads. To do so, consider the story of Jesus calling His first disciples in Matthew 4…
While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
Jesus told these first disciples that if they follow Him, they will become fishers of men. They will, like Him, be about seeking and saving that which is lost. I love what Douglas John Hall said about following a crucified Messiah. He wrote:
Discipleship of the crucified Christ is characterized by a faith that drives its adherents into the world with a relentlessness and a daring they could not manage on the basis of human volition alone.
In other words, following Christ is going to compel you to go into the world. It’s going to push you to go to where those who hurt.
So as you go deeper in your walk with Christ, you are going to go deeper into the world. You are going to have your eyes opened to see those around you as Jesus sees them. And you are going to offer to them the call of Jesus to follow Him because only in doing so, will our mission, purpose, peace, fulfillment, and meaning of life come together.
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