Scripture and Commentary

43. The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.”

            Everyone here knows that in the past couple of years, we’ve spoken in Adult Bible Study and in the sermons on what it means to follow Jesus.  What does it mean to accept the call into a life in Christ, whether it’s in full-time vocational ministry or as a full-time, servant of the Lord in a ‘secular’ occupation.

            The word Jesus uses here is instructive.            The Greek word used for the imperative, ‘Follow,’ in the command “’Follow Me,’” is ἀ.κο.λού.θει. 

            The only other place the word for follow occurs in this form in the New Testament is in Revelation 19.14, in the context of the soldiers of the Lord following Him into the final battle.

            So this is what it means:  It means to be one who follows with a sense of deep dedication.  It means to be one who follows with the thought that the following is unto the ultimate level, as a soldier who goes into battle.

            That’s the word Jesus uses to call Philip to serve Him. 

            The point here is that the call and command to follow Christ as a disciple and full-time preacher or as a simple soldier in the Lord’s army are indisting-uishable one from another.

            The intensity of the command to follow Christ is the same whatever the vocation in which one finds oneself. 

            The difference is the context, location and vocation in which we are directed to do the serving.

            Why?

            In a recent article, Fitzsimmons Allison quotes Anglican Archbishop William Temple as saying, “When we open our eyes as babies we see the world stretching out around us; we are in the middle of it; all we see is determined by the relation of all objects to ourselves. This will be true as long as we live. I am the center of the world I see; where the horizon is depends on where I stand. The same is true of our mental and spiritual vision. Some things hurt us; we hope they will not happen again; we call them bad. Some things please us; we hope they will happen again; we call them good. Our standard of value is the way things affect ourselves. So each of us takes his place in the center of his own world.”

            This is the problem the Lord Jesus is trying to address in His call to us.  His call asks us to be people of greater substance than self-absorbed pleasure seekers.

         In this month’s issue of R. C. Sproul’s Ligonier Ministries devotion book, Tabletalk, there’s an article about Jonathan Edwards’ Resolutions, the list of things he wanted to master.  The remarkable thing about this list is that they weren’t like the self-help resolutions most of us make at New Year’s.  His were Christ-centred and filled with a heart-felt desire to glorify the Lord in his life.

            The article about Edwards observes that the fulfillment we all seek in this life isn’t obtained by the empty efforts at self-centred living.  The fulfillment we all say we want only comes through a life lived for the higher purpose of serving Christ. 

            This then is why Jesus makes such a call.  It’s His loving desire to mould our hearts into something with greater meaning and depth. 

            Let us then not hear these things and merely lament the possibility that the Lord wants us to work.  The Lord lovingly desires us to find greater meaning and purpose through a life of depth lived beyond the limits of our own selves.