Matthew Study 8:22

"... follow me..."

Jesus has his mission. He has his priorities. He knows what he needs to do and is about the business of aligning all shadows to meet the wheels of the Certainty of the Second Coming.

Recently I was on a plane and watched its shadow drawing closer and closer, scrambling over the trees, until both it and the plane touched wheels on the runway beneath me.  That is the Certainty of God's consummation. It is an Ageless Pace which has been racing towards us for two thousand years and, by default, a pace wherein our Lord moved - and still moves today.

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 


Some come to Christ as a Scribe, wanting to  follow him for the sake of his or her own learning. It is a noble thing - to sit in the classroom of the Rabbi. But Christ is moving, he has no classroom. He can't promise the scribe anywhere to lay his head. The demands of Christ's own obedience found in Jesus cancels the idilic dreams of the young Scribe. Jesus cannot promise him a rose garden, only the thorny certainty of a Dogwood tree.

Others approach Christ as one of his own - as a disciple. We essentially tell our Lord we will be forever his - after all, we are his disciples - we have given our entire life for the Life. "So extend some grace here, Lord. Let me first go and bury my father." And - once again - the intensity of God's call of radical obedience in Jesus cancels our most noble desires. Jesus may have well said to this disciple, "This is about Me, and my radical obedience to the Father. It is about his life, and your death. You've gotten it all backwards."

The invitation to "follow me" sets a standard like none other. It is a call to clip the ties of family, friends, and personal dreams and be bound to a Cross for, none other than,  Christ's sake - for his family, for his friends, and for his Personal Dream. And we, like Jesus, enter into that Following with absolutely no assurance of what life will look like on the other side of that Cross, only the assurance that there is life on the other side of that Cross - and, along with it, his promise to walk us through it to the resurrected life.