Follow Me

What on earth am I on earth for? It is one of the most important questions a person can ask, and most of us go years without stopping to answer it. We all know that to discover the purpose of a thing, you don't ask the thing — you go to the one who made it. You read the maker's manual to learn how it is meant to be used, how to get the most out of it, and what will damage it. The same is true of us. If God made us, then God holds the manual for our lives, and many people — even many Christians — live shallow, aimless lives simply because they never consulted it.

By the Sea of Galilee, Jesus shows us in the plainest terms what we are here to do. He sees two fishermen, Simon and Andrew, casting their nets, and He says four words that set the direction of a whole life.

Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

Matthew 4:19

Notice how the responsibilities divide. It is my job to follow. It is God's job to make. Yet how often do we reverse them. We spend ourselves trying to make our marriage work, make our finances work, make our health work, make our relationships work — and somewhere in all that making, we stop following. We forget that our only assignment is to follow, and His promise is to make. That is how important following is: it is the reason Jesus came to save us, and the one thing He has called us to do.

A Call to Discipleship

If following matters this much, we had better ask what it actually means. Simply put, to follow is to become a disciple of Jesus. The very first altar call Jesus gave, after preaching His message, was not a call to salvation but a call to discipleship. Many of us grew up thinking the whole point of Christianity was to make it to heaven. But the call to follow is a call to be like Jesus — and the word disciple comes from discipline. A disciple is someone who has committed to patterning their life after another, who will make every effort to lay down their own ways and take on the ways of the one they follow.

How many of us can honestly say, 'I am a disciple of Jesus,' and mean it? Mark tells us Jesus appointed the twelve first of all so that they might simply be with Him. That is where discipleship begins — spending time with Jesus, soaking in the word of God. In Acts, when the leaders saw the boldness of ordinary, unschooled men like Peter and John, they recognized that these men had been with Jesus. And you cannot follow Him alone. He calls us to follow in the company of others — those we like and those we don't — because that is exactly how He lived.

To Follow, You Have to Leave

There is a cost. To follow Jesus, you have to leave. You have to leave your own ideologies and principles behind. Some of us have to leave behind the way we were raised, when our culture starts getting in the way of following Him. Jesus put it starkly: whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for His sake will find it. For most of us the leaving is not about abandoning our profession or our family — it is about giving up the love of them, refusing to let anything sit on the throne where He belongs. No one can follow Jesus who has not first been willing to leave, because you cannot pursue His purpose while chasing every other purpose at the same time.

This is exactly where the rich young man stumbled. He had kept the commandments from his youth, and Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, 'One thing you lack: go, sell what you have, give to the poor, and come, follow me.' He went away sad, because he had great possessions. It was not that money is evil, but that the love of it held him back from the one thing that mattered. The tragedy was not that he failed a moral test; it was that he could not leave, and so he could not follow. And what he lost was not a rule to keep but a Person to walk with — the very One standing in front of him.

Following is also how we come to know the truth. Jesus told those who believed in Him, 'If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.' He said, 'I am the light of the world; whoever follows me will not walk in darkness.' He describes Himself as the Shepherd whose sheep know His voice and follow Him, and who will not follow a stranger. To follow, then, is to learn His voice well enough to recognize it among all the other voices calling for our attention — and to keep walking toward it.

I'm Too Busy Is Not an Excuse

Here is something easy to miss: Jesus called busy people. Peter and Andrew were casting nets; James and John were mending theirs; Matthew was sitting at his tax booth. He did not wait for people with empty calendars. This matters, because the most common excuse we give for not committing to Him is that we are too busy. But if the fishermen were not too busy, neither are we. The real question underneath is a searching one — am I too busy for Jesus? Too busy for the One who gives me the very breath in my lungs? Too busy for the fellowship of His people?

Following Can Be a Bumpy Ride

When we read this passage quickly, it looks as though the disciples followed once and never wavered. But that is not the whole story. They first met Jesus, followed for a day, then went back to fishing when John was imprisoned. He called them again here by the sea. Even later, after everything, Peter announced, 'I'm going fishing,' and Jesus came and called him yet again. Following Jesus is not smooth sailing. Will you have doubts and questions? Will you stop for a while, trip up, make mistakes? Yes, yes, and yes. But you keep pushing, because the blessing is not only in the arrival — it is in the pursuit itself.

Remember, Jesus did not say the reward for following is that one day I will make you. He said, as you follow, I am making you. The following is the making. It is in the going that you are changed, healed, and transformed. You do not first become worthy and then follow; you follow, and in the following He does the work of making you worthy. Paul understood this. Near the end of his life he wrote that he counted everything he once prized as loss for the sake of knowing Christ — 'this one thing I do,' he said, 'forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead.' A whole life gathered into a single pursuit.

This One Thing

So what are we here for? To do one thing — to follow Jesus. To love like He loves, pray like He prays, forgive like He forgives, believe like He believes. You have a choice: you can spend your life trying to make yourself, or you can let the Master make you. I have made my choice — to let Him make me — and all I will do is my utmost to do that one thing, to follow. Because when we follow Him, He keeps His promise. He makes our lives, He makes our homes, He brings the kingdom of God into the ordinary places of our days. If you have never truly started, or if you stopped somewhere along the way, His invitation is still open and still the same. Follow me.