Following Jesus. It’s the mission that the Bible has left humanity with: to follow God to the very end. I’m sure you’ve heard this time and time again; from Sunday School all the way to our respective youth groups and church sermons. The concept of “following” has been so engraved in the doctrine and teachings of the church; I’ve even met many teens who would go so far as to define Christianity as “following Him.” But it wasn’t until a few months ago, when I was asked to write an article about that term “following” that I realised just how little I actually understood it.
Of course, I knew the basic knowledge. To follow Jesus, you have to deny yourself, carry your cross and live out the Word. At that time, I was satisfied with that basic knowledge and began to write. And then I stopped. Because I realised that I didn’t exactly understand what that meant. I couldn’t even define following Jesus in my own words, let alone find examples for it and call other teens to follow Him too. In short, I didn’t know “what I was signing up for” as a Christian. In fact, it wasn’t until a sermon in our annual REGEN retreat (which I invite all of you to go to by the way) that I could finally identify what the term meant. And now I find it my pleasure to tell you what I learnt.
All or Nothing
Simply put, a Christian means a follower of Christ. It’s a calling that requires an answer, either a yes or no. We see this calling in Matthew 4:19 when Jesus calls Peter and Andrew to “follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” On the surface, it seems like a simple verse in which Jesus calls his first disciples but it’s the verse after that gives us a sense of what it means to follow Jesus. Matthew 4:20 says “Immediately, they left their nets and followed Him.”
Peter and Andrew left everything to follow Jesus. Whilst Satan’s strategy is only to ask for a little bit at a time to lure and tempt you into sin, Jesus is transparent from the beginning and asks you for your whole heart or nothing at all. The Bible is teaching us a lesson; if we don’t give our everything and pour out the contents of our hearts for Jesus and God’s kingdom, then it is all in vain. No matter how hard we work or how much we do, if even a little bit of our heart is reserved for a sin or an idol or anything but God, we will never truly follow Jesus.
So the first thing we have to do if we want to have any hope in following God is to do a little introspection. Which sins are you still hiding and taking pleasure from? What part of your heart still craves your own glory and ego? And what is still reigning over your life that is stopping you from surrendering full control to Jesus and his will? Ask yourself these questions before moving on to the second point.
Against the World
Persecution has always been a weapon the world uses to pull you back into its ways, whether social, emotional or physical. It’s the main forefront in which the spiritual war is fought, where a Christian can either be strengthened in their faith or submit to the world and fall back into temptation. That’s what the second part of following Jesus is; following Jesus into a spiritual battle in which the whole world is your enemy.
It’s a fact that as a Christian, you’re going to face some sort of opposition for your faith. Said opposition can appear at any time: school, work, home, friendships, social media, you name it. In fact, carrying your cross means to be “emptied out” until the will of God is complete. While that “emptying out” is usually carried out by persecutors or those actively against Christianity, sometimes it can be done by even those we try to save.
I’m sure we’ve all heard the story of the Auca Five; five brave men who decided to surrender their lives to Jesus and preach the gospel as missionaries to those who had never heard it before in Ecuador. The group consisted of Jim Eliott, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming and Roger Youderian. As they landed, they made contact with the tribe and engaged in some mild conversation, unbeknownst to them, the rest of the tribe was slowly surrounding them completely. It wasn’t until it was too late that they realised but when they did, they made a break for it. They never took off. All five of them, who were trying to spread the gospel and save these souls, left their wives and kids fatherless without even being given the chance to preach.
In this world, they would have been perceived as tragedies who failed miserably at what they set out to achieve. They had basically thrown their lives away for nothing. But God doesn’t see through the same eyes as we do. These men gave up their entire lives to follow where God would take them, even to death, and I believe God saw them as successes. And that’s what we’re called to do if we are Christians – that is what it means to truly follow God.
I’m not saying it’s gonna be easy. It isn’t natural for our sinful hearts to give up everything to follow where God would take us. It isn’t natural for us to oppose the world. But following Jesus is always going to be counter-cultural and sometime, somewhere you are going to be challenged by the world. I urge us all to push forward, hold on to the cross and never let go of His word.
So to recap…
Following God has been something I’ve never really thought hard about until now but I’m glad I did. To follow Jesus means to deny yourself wholeheartedly, without withholding any part of yourself from God. It means to carry your cross as the world opposes you and looks down on you as a failure, knowing that God’s judgement is infinitely more important. And, lastly, it means to live out the Word, to read it everyday, to study it and to base your life and being around it. I hope you have gained some clarity as to what it means to follow Him as it did for me and I pray that all of you will choose to do so and live for God.
Written only through the wonderful grace of God and the sacrifice of his only son, Jesus Christ.
