*Called to Follow

If there is one great principle of Christian living, it is walking in Christ's footsteps (I John 2:6). Sounds easy, but putting it into practice is one of the most difficult tasks of a Christian's life. If we succeed, however, we will be one of those to whom He says in the resurrection, "Well done, good and faithful servant." We will have not only lived as He did, we will have put on His character image, the great goal of the Christian life (Romans 8:29).

In Matthew 4:18-22, Jesus begins to call His disciples, particularly the pairs of brothers, Peter and Andrew and James and John:

And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brothers, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. Then He said to them, "Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men." They immediately left their nets and followed Him. Going on from there, He saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets. He called them, and immediately, they left the boat and their father, and followed Him.

The sparse prose of the gospel account makes it seem as if the four of them just dropped their nets, jumped off the boats, and never looked back!

Evidently, this was Jesus' first command to each of His disciples. Maybe He did not say these exact words to each one, but it seems that Matthew gives this account as an example of Jesus' pattern in calling them: He commanded them, "Follow Me." And they immediately left what they were doing and followed Him.

On the surface, "Follow Me" may appear to mean simply, "Go where I go," but there is far more to it. The disciples would learn over the next three and a half years that "Follow Me" meant a great deal more than just "Walk behind Me." It also means "Do what I do," "Live as I do," and "Experience what I experience." Ultimately, it also means "Suffer and die like Me." Yet, on the other hand, it also means "Share eternal life and My rewards, too." That simple command runs the entire gamut of Christian life and potential.

From a negative perspective, Luke 9:57-62 considers the costs of being a follower of Christ:

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."

Clearly, following Jesus is neither easy nor risk-free. Its sacrifices and hardships are sometimes severe. It involves a commitment that most people are just not willing to make because true discipleship involves absolute devotion and dedication to Christ Himself. Thus, Jesus said these things, testing these men, finding out what was really in their hearts—if they were willing to commit themselves to Him, to His way of life, and to His purposes.

In the final verse, He lets us know the bottom line of what is required: One who is fit for God's Kingdom is willing to give all. German clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who lived under the Nazi regime, wrote a book called The Cost of Discipleship. In it, he sums up the Christian calling with a now well-known quotation, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

In this passage, Luke records three instances in which someone gives an excuse to refuse Christ's calling to follow Him, illustrating three general areas in which people fail. The first reason is that the Christian life is one of discomfort. Jesus tells the man that He did not have a place to lay His head. In God's Word, Christians are often called "strangers" and "sojourners." We are travelers going through a land or residing only temporarily. In a spiritual sense, we are not citizens of the lands in which we live (Philippians 3:20). So, as travelers along the road of life toward the Kingdom of God, we cannot expect to have all the comforts of home.

We cannot allow the accoutrements of this world and of this life to hold us back in our devotion to Christ. Our homes, jobs, vacations, clothes, pastimes—none of these things compare to the importance of this Christian life. We must be willing to forsake all of these things if they inhibit our relationship with God. It may make life uncomfortable, but the rewards are wonderful.

The second reason some fail is because the Christian life is sacrificial. The man asks Jesus if he could first bury his father, but He answers, "No. You go and preach the Kingdom of God." We, because of our calling, must often forsake the customary duties, privileges, associations, and activities of normal life. The Christian's focus, Jesus says, is on the living, those whom God has called and given the truth, whose focus is also on God's work (see John 6:29).

When God calls a person, His will comes first. We may end up "missing out" on many of this world's activities. Some people miss them so much that they feel short-changed by God. Whether we pass or fail on this point depends on our priorities. If our ties to the world and its ways are too strong, we will be unwilling to sacrifice them to follow Christ. To be a true disciple, He says, we have to cut many or most of those ties.

The third reason people refuse Christ's call follows from the second: The Christian life demands new loyalties. The third man wanted to say farewell to his close friends and family. Jesus' reply is that once we commit to God's way, we cannot turn back, or we will be considered unfit. Many Christians are the only ones called from their particular families. They often find that, over time, they must forsake their own blood to a degree because they discover that they have little in common with them. Their ways of life are so dramatically divergent that separation becomes natural. In the church under a new and better way of life, they find a new identity, a new family, and a new purpose.

It is said that blood is thicker than water, but Jesus warns that our devotion to Him and God's way of life must be stronger. It requires an act of will to make our devotion to Him stronger than our blood ties. The Holy Spirit will not just infuse us to be totally committed to God. We have to set our wills to believe and follow through with making God our first priority in life, to go where He says to go. This is the new loyalty that Christ's calling demands.

In this way, we begin to live the life of Christ.

Evil Is Real (Part Six)

From I Peter 2:19-24, we could make a convincing theological argument that Christian suffering is our fight against evil because we receive the slings and arrows of others and experience the most inner turmoil in the midst of our fight against evil. We have a fleshly body and a carnal nature that inhibit us from doing the good we want to do. Thus, we suffer mentally, emotionally, spiritually. We suffer because a great struggle—a war—against evil is taking place inside.

Having ventured into the subject of suffering, the apostle Peter continues on it in I Peter 3:8-9: "Finally, all of you be of one mind, having compassion for one another; love as brothers, be tenderhearted, be courteous; not returning evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary blessing, knowing that you were called to this, that you may inherit a blessing." He repeats, from I Peter 2:21, that we have been called to this. God has called us, not just to suffer, but also to return goodness for evil. We have been called to react the same way to suffering that Jesus Christ did—and as we see in the gospels, He responded by doing good.

So all those who suffer, thinking that they are suffering for righteousness sake, if they are not reacting properly, they are not doing what they were called to do. The suffering and the godly reaction must go together! Otherwise, we are merely suffering to no good end. Peter continues in I Peter 3:10-12, quoting from Psalm 34:12-16:

For "He who would love life and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips from speaking deceit. Let him turn away from evil and do good; let him seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the LORD are on the righteous, and His ears are open to their prayers; but the face of the LORD is against those who do evil."

Notice the situation that Peter applies this idea. In verse 8, he writes, "All of you be of one mind," and then, "Love as brothers." He brings the fight to our community, the church! It is within the church, like it or not, that we may have the most trouble with the evil inside. Why?

In the world, Christians shine like beacons because the contrast between themselves and the uncalled is so stark. We keep God's commandments, the holy days, the food laws. We try to do good. However, when we are among each other, and the contrast is less discernable, how do we react? Do we react as Christians or as carnal? We often seem to be able to get along well with the world because we know where everybody stands, but among church members, we frequently have problems. Sometimes problems crop up because we lower our guard, and at other times, it is because we expect so much of our fellow Christians.

We do not want the evil in us to come out and defile our relationships within the church. Yet, if we see problems arising, then we know that evil is present. We have just allowed ho poneros, the wicked one, among us. It becomes imperative, then, to stamp it out as soon as possible. Thus, Peter advises: "Turn from evil. Do good. Seek peace and pursue it. If you do not, God will turn His face against us"—and we certainly do not want that. In I Peter 4:1-3, he continues:

Therefore, since Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind, for he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, that he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh for the lusts of men, but for the will of God. For we have spent enough of our past lifetime in doing the will of the Gentiles—when we walked in lewdness, lusts, drunkenness, revelries, drinking parties, and abominable idolatries.

What weapon does he say we possess to fight this evil? We have the mind of Christ. Paul fought against disunity at Corinth and came to the same conclusion (see I Corinthians 2:16). We have access to the same Mind that prepared for and resisted the temptations of Satan the Devil for forty days. It is ours to access, if we only will. As Peter says plainly in I Peter 4:1, if we truly arm ourselves with such a mind, we will cease sinning. We will be applying it to our situations and resisting the motivations of the evil within us. We will not let that evil emerge. If we have and use the mind of Christ, we are taking the fight to the enemy. We are not just allowing evil to pull us around by the nose but taking the offensive to confront it and overcome it.

We must ask ourselves, then, if we have truly committed ourselves to the task of recognizing and fighting the evil within us. Peter says that we "should no longer live the rest of [our] time in the flesh." To put it another way, are we committed to stamping out our carnal natures? More positively, have we committed ourselves to live the life of Christ, to do the will of God? Or are we still reserving the right to "enjoy" evil on occasion? Each person has to answer for himself.

If we are not already, it is time to begin evaluating ourselves, trying to plumb the depths of our wicked hearts. We must begin seeing the evil and eradicating it, committing ourselves not to repeat the evils we have done. In Hebrews 12:1, Paul says that we need to "lay aside every weight" that besets us, that holds us back. Throw it off! It is crunch time!

In this vein, Peter provides us two major pieces of counsel. First, in I Peter 4:7, he writes, "But the end of all things is at hand; therefore be serious and watchful in your prayers." With this, he attempts to rouse us with hard, cold reality. We do not have time to indulge our desires and lusts! The return of Christ—the terminus of our period of judgment—is upon us! Besides, we could take a walk and be hit by a bus. Is our current spiritual state what we want to hand in for our final grade? It can be that close! Why do we dilly-dally about this? It is time to get serious!

The second piece of advice is found in I Peter 4:19: "Therefore let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to Him in doing good, as to a faithful Creator." In verses 17-18, the apostle had warned that we will be "scarcely" saved—by the skin of our teeth, as it were. It will happen, not because of any righteousness we possess, but because of the grace of God. Remember that He sees our "desperately wicked" hearts; He knows how depraved we are even still. We must understand this—and be thankful—but it should also motivate us to make the utmost effort to please Him. Our righteousness will never be good enough for salvation, but because the gracious, righteous Judge is watching and evaluating what we do, we are bound to strive to cooperate with Him in being transformed into His image. Thus, Peter says that we must dedicate our lives to doing good. We know that God is faithful and will save us despite ourselves, but we still must show Him that we are serious about living His way of life.

As Christians, we are engaged in a two-pronged maneuver: destroy the evil within ourselves and replace it with acts of goodness. This assault begins with the realization that evil remains in us, but through God's intervention in our lives, there is also in us a germ of good that is ready to grow. With His continued help, we can nurture it to eternal life.

Evil Is Real (Part Five)

Luke 4 contains Satan's temptation of Christ, and it is instructive to see what Jesus did in the face of evil:

Then Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan [where He had just been baptized] and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being tempted for forty days by the devil. And in those days He ate nothing, and afterward, when they had ended, He was hungry. And the devil said to Him, "If You are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread." (Luke 4:1-3)

Just prior to this, Jesus had been highly complimented by the Father: "You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased" (Luke 3:22). Jesus, then, must have been feeling confident, for the voice booming such praise out of heaven was a massive pat on the back. Then, Luke 4:1 relates that He was filled with the Holy Spirit; the power, the strength, of God was pumping through Him. It was at just this point—before He commenced His ministry—that Satan pounced.

We should not think that Satan tempted our Savior with merely three or four temptations, as recorded in this chapter, as well as in Matthew 4. The text says that He was "tempted for forty days"—meaning that He was under constant attack for the full forty days, every day! This was an intense, prolonged test and more personal and powerful than we have ever experienced. The terrible evil that He faced in the wilderness would likely have crushed us.

The passage implies that Satan left the worst temptation to the very end, when Jesus was seemingly at His weakest point. He had not eaten food or drunk water for forty days. But was He passive all that time? Did our Savior just sit or lie on the sand for those nearly six weeks, allowing the Devil's temptations to batter Him like one sandstorm after the next? Luke does not present Him like that. Jesus did not fast because He had nothing to eat in a barren land. Remember, He is the One who inspired the instructions about fasting in Isaiah 58, so He clearly knew the spiritual strength that fasting provides. At the end of the forty days, He may have been weak as a kitten physically, but spiritually, He was the powerful Son of God.

Perhaps the temptations were not just storm after storm, but were like an ever-strengthening tempest that culminated in a hurricane. What did Jesus do? Each successive onslaught was harder to resist. How did He face it? Jesus bent all His will and strength on overcoming each temptation as it broke on Him. He pulled out every spiritual weapon to defeat each one.

Luke does not say that He pulled out His scroll of Deuteronomy and began instructing Satan on the finer points of God's way of life. Jesus already had them deeply embedded in His mind. He was prepared—by long years of study and deep meditation on what He learned—to face Satan's attacks. We also know that, not only was He fasting when out in the wilderness, but as His everyday practice, He prayed regularly, almost constantly.

Here are four tools that we also must use to rid evil from our lives: 1) Bible study, 2) meditation, 3) fasting, and 4) prayer. When Satan hit Him with temptation, Jesus did not need to do some emergency Bible study. Not only was He the Word of God in the flesh, but He also knew Scripture by heart. When Satan sent a temptation, Jesus quoted an opposing scripture verbatim. The right words—words that He had inspired as God of the Old Testament—came immediately to mind, and He hurled them at Satan like a razor-sharp weapon (Ephesians 6:17).

Christ never treated evil as if it did not exist. In addition, He knew the weakness of His own flesh. He is the only person who has ever totally resisted the pulls of the flesh, though He suffered them just as we do (Hebrews 2:14, 18; 4:15). However, He was strong in the Spirit of God and able to resist them. We see in this vignette from His life that, even so, it was no easy task for Him. We know that it is certainly not easy for us, but if we want to be like Him, we have to approach it just as He did.

The apostle Peter, who witnessed the life of Christ firsthand, had a certain approach to life in which events like this made a great impression on him. Thus his epistles, both I and II Peter, are full of advice on how to be diligent to overcome and grow. In the three middle chapters of I Peter, he tells us how we are to resist evil, how we are to do good, how we are not to be as the rest of the world is. Perhaps these things were tough for him to do too, which is why they made such an impression on him and thus is why he passed these instructions along. It is a good thing that he did! God inspired it to be included in His Word because we need the admonition.

Notice I Peter 2:19-24, where Peter is speaking about submitting to masters:

For this is commendable, if because of conscience toward God one endures grief, suffering wrongfully. For what credit is it if, when you are beaten for your faults, you take it patiently? But when you do good and suffer, if you take it patiently, this is commendable before God. For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps: "Who committed no sin, nor was deceit found in His mouth," who, when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously; who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed.

What does he say that we are called to? Suffering! One could say we are called to be hit over the head for doing good. In reality, God's way is so antithetical to the way of Satan and of this world, that it is only natural that doers of good will suffer rather than be rewarded for their good works. Of this, Jesus Christ was the most extreme example—and not just on the last day of His life! He suffered every day He drew breath. Satan never stopped tempting Him for long, and His flesh never stopped trying to pull Him towards evil.

Peter says that Jesus overcame these things by committing Himself to the One who really knows what is in our characters, what our hearts are really like. In that commitment was great faith that the Father, knowing Him intimately, would guard Him and help Him to the very end—that considering Him as the apple of His eye, God would be with Him even through the grave.

Note, too, Christ's reaction to the evil that was done to Him: He did nothing like it in return. He did not return evil for evil; out of Him came no defiling sin. What did He do? He did self-sacrificial acts of goodness toward His revilers and persecutors—and not only for them, but as Peter goes on to say, He also did it for us, His brethren. Throughout His life, He consciously performed self-sacrificial acts of goodness for others. As Peter says in Acts 10:38, Jesus "went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil."

There is our pattern to follow! He did not allow evil to get Him down or to change His course—He just kept on doing good. That is how He fought it: He faced it down with the Word of God, committed Himself to His Father's will, and repaid evil with good. His method will work for us too.

The Ultimate Sacrifice

Sacrifice is not a concept that anyone really enjoys. Although we are hearing the word more often these days due to price inflation in such core areas as food and energy, most of us do everything we can to avoid having to make sacrifices. As ironic as it sounds, we will make sacrifices in one area to circumvent having to make a sacrifice in another! This points out the human tendency to hold some part of our lives closer and dearer than others—and we are loath to let go of even a small bit of what we love the most.

Jesus Christ did not live this way. In His human life, He was all about sacrifice—His whole life was a sacrifice. And His is the life that has been exalted as the perfect pattern for our own.

In terms of Jesus' sacrifice, anyone familiar with the Bible will first think of His sacrificial death at Calvary to atone for the sins of mankind. His crucifixion was indeed the greatest act of sacrifice in the history of the world, a perfect demonstration of His own teaching in John 15:13, "Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends." His supreme offering of His sinless life paid the terrible cost of all of mankind's sins for all time (see Hebrews 9:26-28; 10:10, 12, 14).

In John 3, speaking to Nicodemus, who later helped Joseph of Arimathea to prepare Him for burial, Jesus states a primary purpose of His incarnation: "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up [signifying His crucifixion]. . . . For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved" (John 3:14, 17). He was, as described by John the Baptist, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29), who was "slain from the foundation of the world" (Revelation 13:8). The apostle Peter makes it personal for us:

. . . knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. He indeed was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you. . . ." (I Peter 1:18-20)

His sacrifice had been prophesied in many places in the Old Testament, as in the first recorded prophecy, Genesis 3:15: "And I will put enmity between you [the serpent, Satan] and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel." Isaiah 53:6 encapsulates the prophecy of the Suffering Servant: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all." Jesus Himself refers to the prophecy of His death in Psalm 22 with His cry from the cross, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Psalm 22:1; Matthew 27:46). Many places in the Old Testament show either a need for or a hope in a coming Redeemer (see, for instance, Job 19:25; Psalm 19:14; Isaiah 47:4; 59:20; 63:16).

It is difficult for short-sighted human beings to realize how the foreknowledge of His suffering and death must have weighed on His mind, perhaps from His childhood, since at the age of twelve, He told Joseph and Mary that He "must be about [His] Father's business" (Luke 2:49). Knowing He had come into the world to bear the sins of every man, woman, and child must have been an unimaginably heavy burden for Him. It was an obligation that was constantly before Him. Certainly, the expectation that on His shoulders rested the destinies of countless billions of people was a cup—His weighty lot—that He would gladly forgo if He could (see Luke 22:41-44). However, He was committed to doing God's will in everything (see John 6:38; 8:28-29), so He bore it in faith.

We must look further, deeper, beyond His sacrificial death to His equally sacrificial life. His daily walk was an example of the Golden Rule, doing for others what we would have them do for us (see Luke 6:31). As Jesus says of Himself, "The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:28). Thus, His life was dedicated to exhausting Himself through giving to others. The gospel accounts relate occasion after occasion when He preached or healed or cast out demons or comforted everyone who came to Him for help (see Mark 3:7-11; 6:54-56; Luke 4:40; etc.).

Yet, He made many other sacrifices, ones that we do not often consider. Perhaps the greatest one is that He never married and had children. Of course, His Father had already promised Him the church as His Bride (Ephesians 5:25-27, 32; Revelation 19:7), but He never experienced the joys and comforts of having His own family. He gained all His experience in family matters as an obedient Son and loving Elder Brother in the house of Joseph and Mary.

In addition, He sacrificed things that most people prize as good and worthy, like ambition, wealth, prestige, position, popularity, and many other such elements of "success." He had the wherewithal within Himself to attain any or all of these pinnacles of human achievement, but He shunned them all for the greater reward before Him: "Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, . . . for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God" (Hebrews 12:2). He considered His many fleshly sacrifices as nothing compared to the tremendous future He would enjoy in the Kingdom of God.

This is the lesson that the apostle Paul teaches in Philippians 3. Using his own life as an example, he relates that he had just about anything a person could want: the right genes, the right social standing, the right education, the right enthusiasm, and the right reputation. "But," he writes:

what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. Yet indeed I also count all things . . . as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, . . . that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:7-11)

So he advises in verse 15, "Therefore let us, as many as are mature, have this mind." Like our Savior Jesus Christ, we must be willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to "press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus" (verse 14). The glorious life of the coming Kingdom of God is attained through sacrifice, and the way we know (John 14:4).