Life is a precious gift from God, and we can do three
things with that gift. We can waste our lives having a “good time” and one day
come to the end only to discover we had not really lived. Or we can spend our
lives, living comfortably like our friends and neighbors but lacking purpose
and the blessing of God. We live only to please ourselves. We might leave
something behind, but we have not sent anything ahead.
Our choice must be to
invest our lives, to give everything to the Lord, follow Him in everything, and
let Him determine the dividends. This kind of life is called “discipleship.”
It is what Jesus meant when He said to the disciples and the crowd, “Whoever
desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and
follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it. but whoever loses
his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:34–35).
Luke 9:57–62 presents three potential disciples, two who
offered themselves to Jesus and one who was called by Jesus. And all three
failed.
Now it happened as they journeyed on the road, that
someone said to Him, “Lord, I will follow You wherever You go.” And Jesus said
to him, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man
has nowhere to lay His head.” Then He said to another, “Follow Me.” But he
said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” Jesus said to him, “Let the
dead bury their own dead, but you go and preach the kingdom of God.” And
another also said, “Lord, I will follow you, but let me first go and bid them
farewell who are at my house.” But Jesus said to him, “No one, having put his
hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
The phrase “me first” shows up twice in this narrative
(vv. 59, 61), but “me first” should never be on the lips or in the mind of a
true disciple. It must be “Jesus first.” Here’s how Jesus describes a disciple
in Mark 8:34: “Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take
up his cross, and follow Me.”
None of the three men involved in this episode really
understood discipleship. The first one wanted assured comfort, but disciples
must deny themselves. The second man wanted to wait for his father to die, but
the son was supposed to take up his cross and die daily! The third man wanted
to enjoy a farewell party, something he could look back upon with good
memories. But true disciples do not look back; they look ahead and follow
Jesus.
Our Lord’s message is clear: every believer is not
called into “full-time Christian service,” but every believer is called into
full-time Christian living, which is discipleship. It is important to
notice the tenses of the verbs in Mark 8:34: we deny ourselves once and for all
(Rom. 12:1–2); we take up our cross once and for all (Gal. 2:20); we follow Him
obediently and never look back.
- Warren W. Wiersbe, Truth on Its Head: Unusual Wisdom
in the Paradoxes of the Bible, 2016.
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