I Will Follow Him. . . .

Have you ever felt like you just don’t belong? You don’t fit in?

The last week was a tough one, considering that the battles of the mind are sometimes the biggest challenges we face. God always sends His angels. All my cousin said was, God takes care of everything. And I suddenly felt all charged up and I recalled the words from the Bible, 

And Jesus said unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath no where to lay his head. Matthew 8:20 KJV

We need to put this statement into its context. It says, "A scribe came and said to Jesus, 'Teacher, I will follow You wherever You go.' Our Lord tests the sincerity of the scribe’s loyalty by warning him that He was so poor that beasts of the fields and birds of the air have nicer accommodations than He Himself had. 

To follow Jesus means to forsake all. As for the Son of man (Jesus) having no place to lay His head, think about it. Jesus came into our world, not to build a physical kingdom for Himself. From the cross, He would return to the heavens. During His stay in the earth, Jesus owned nothing. He was actually buried in a borrowed grave. Think about it. Jesus said that we do not belong to the world, even as He did not belong to the world.

Jesus's statement reveals His poverty from an earthly viewpoint; and yet “we through His poverty are made rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). We are not told if the scribe chose to follow Jesus after this outright disclosure; but the strong implication is that he did not.

A person who makes the commitment to follow Jesus to the ends of the earth, this person will hold fast to his confession. We who follow Jesus must do so without ulterior motive. In fact we must be willing to die to selfish ambition and vain conceits if we are to follow Christ in the humility which pleases Him.  Are we willing to do so today?

We cannot love the world and love God at the same time because the values of the world are not compatible with the values of the kingdom of God.

Not having anywhere to lay your head in the way that Jesus did means that you have to endure a certain hardship. If you want to follow Me, says Jesus, you have to be prepared to take hardship. This is not because God wants us to suffer, but because we are bound to suffer in the course of discipleship. To follow Jesus means to share His persecutions.

Becoming a Christian then is to burn your bridges behind you. There is no turning back. Paul says, ‘Forgetting the things which are behind, I press forward towards the mark.’ That means to say, ‘I have made the decision to go forward and serve the Lord. I don’t look back. I look ahead with a singular dedication to the task.’

Following Jesus is tough, but it is worth it because it is to be with God.

REMEMBER: Does it surprise you to hear that Jesus lived his whole life this way? As the passage says, the foxes and birds, all the animals of creation have a place, but the Son of Man does not. The One who proclaims the empire of God knows deep down that He does not belong to the empires of this world. He comes to the world because God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son so that all should have life. But those to whom He went rejected Him.

PRAYER:  Father, You have given us the greatest example of a humble spirit in the person of Your Son, Jesus Christ, who had nowhere to lay His head.  He went to where the needs were rather than the place where comforts awaited Him.  Jesus humbled Himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross!  From the heights of the heavens to the depths of the earth we submit our will and our attitudes to Your Holy Will for our lives in Jesus’ name.  Amen.