If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
—Matt. 16:24-25
Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.
—Mark 1:17
I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.
—John 8:12
Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.
—Matt. 8:22
If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.
—Matt. 19:21
We often tend to spiritualize our duty in this command. The disciples didn’t have that luxury since Jesus was standing right in front of them. Jesus call to them was so concrete that they would literally need to put one foot in front of another and follow Jesus. For us there is a slightly different situation but we still follow Jesus. He said, “I am going to him who sent me. . . . I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:5, 7).
Jesus command to take up your cross and follow Him is still relevant and mediated by the Holy Spirit. As Piper points out we can see this in the life of Peter. Jesus told Peter that he would suffer martyrdom someday after Jesus was gone. Peter wondered if he was the only one and asked Jesus what would happen to his fellow apostle, John. Jesus answered, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!” (John 21:22).
So following Jesus was something that was going to continue after Jesus was gone and Peter would do it until he was martyred. So the following is more than walking behind Him if He appears in His physical body. Following Him is something we do as directed and enabled by the Holy Spirit. This is demanded of every follower of Jesus.
Regardless of our secular employment the Church has embraced Jesus’ statement to Peter and Andrew, who were fishermen by trade, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men” (Mark 1:17). Jesus’ other statements made it clear that we were not being called to a “Sunday School Picnic”. He said things like “The Son of Man came . . . to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:32). “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). “What shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name” (John 12:27-28).
He came to “die for the nation [of Israel], and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (John 11:51-52). He calls us to the task as well since He also said “Whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:23).
I was recently reading about a brother of ours who was born in the 670s in Britain. He name is Winfrid but he is called Boniface. He hungered for God even when he was a child and he became a missionary to Germany and the Netherlands. He has been compared to Paul and God clearly used him in a similar way. He was a good organizer and gifted in administration. He worked in the south-central Germany and the Netherlands and saw fruit but wanted to keep going to new areas (718-722). He then went into north-central Germany. His success in north-central Germany was remarkable. He had some hard core pagans who worshiped Thor. They had a huge sacred oak that was dedicated to the worship of Thor. So Boniface, not being polluted with seeker sensitive doctrines, thought that it might be effective if he cut it down and made a church out of it. Then the native population, by the Grace of God, displayed that rare thing called common sense and reasoned that if Thor couldn’t stop some Brit from chopping down his tree then he wasn’t much of a god. This led to thousands of conversions and began the Christianization of Germany. He then worked back into south-central Germany organizing and preaching. Finally he worked all the way into southern Germany (Bavaria) and France. He continued to seek to destroy pagan worship and eventually some pagans, who were offended for their dead idols, attacked Boniface and his men and they refused to defend themselves and were martyred. Boniface may have been over 80 at this time. Those who killed him soon repented and followed Christ so Boniface accomplished with his death what he couldn’t with his life. Boniface loved the Gospel and laid down his life for it. Boniface took up his cross and followed Christ.
We need to love lasting things lastingly and passing things passingly. The world gets it backwards. The stuff in your life will not go into eternity but the people will. Our culture suggests that you should love people passingly with relationships that start and stop. Our culture also suggests that the person that dies with the most toys wins.
Continuing the work that Jesus came to do even includes the suffering he came to do. When Jesus calls us to follow him, this is where he puts the emphasis. “If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20). “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24). Jesus puts the emphasis on self-denial and cross-bearing.
He did not die to give us an easy button of prayer or to make us rich and prosperous. As Piper said, “He died to remove every obstacle to our everlasting joy in making much of him.” He calls us to follow him in his sufferings (Matt. 5:12) to show that he is more valuable than all the earthly rewards that the world lives for (Matt. 13:44; 6:19-20). If you follow Jesus because He makes life easy now then you have the same motivations and lusts that the world has. You love what they love and Jesus provides it for you. Sometimes we even hear evangelism that sounds as if Christianity is a method to get the material blessings that you want. When we suffer with Jesus in love because He is your supreme treasure, then it will be apparent to the world that your heart is set on a different fortune than theirs. This is why Jesus demands that we deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow him.
I have an exercise instructor who likes to say, “The pain is only temporary but quitting lasts forever”. Jesus does not call us to eternal suffering and on the contrary He rescues us from eternal suffering. “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:25). “Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35). Suffering for Jesus is temporary. Pleasure in Jesus is eternal.
When Peter said (perhaps with a tinge of self-pity), “See, we have left everything and followed you,” Jesus responded, without coddling Peter’s self-pity, Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life” (Matt. 19:27, 29). In other words, there is no ultimate sacrifice in following Jesus. “You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just” (Luke 14:14). “Your reward is great in heaven” (Matt. 5:12).
Even right now, nothing can compare with the joy of walking in the light with Jesus as opposed to walking in the darkness without him. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). Jesus promised, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). Our joy is based on the finished work of Christ and is not dependant on our present conditions.
This is why the ruptures caused by following Jesus are not devastating. There are ruptures in relationships with people, relationships with possessions, and relationships with our vocation. Jesus has jolting ways of describing the cost of following him in relation to people. “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead” (Matt. 8:22). “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26 ). It isn’t easy to keep our life and values aligned to this standard but don’t think that nobody has lived out this standard. People have, by the Grace of God, lived out this standard. Our lives in this place and time are typically embarrassingly easy.
Following Jesus also ruptures our relationship with possessions. There once was a rich young man who loved his possessions too much. So Jesus cut to the heart of his idolatry with the demand, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Matt. 19:21). If something gets in the way of following Jesus, we must get rid of it. And this is not unique to that rich man but applies to all of us: “Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). Renouncing what you have may not always mean selling it all. Jesus commended Zacchaeus for giving half of his goods to the poor (Luke 19:8-9). But renouncing all does mean that everything we have is totally at Jesus’ disposal for purposes that please him and that it must never get in the way of radical obedience to his command of love.
Then there is the rupture that following Jesus brings to our vocation. When Jesus called the twelve to follow him they were fishermen and tax collectors and the like. They had jobs. Incredibly, it went something like this: “As [Jesus] passed by, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he rose and followed him” (Mark 2:14). Just like that! (As far as we know.) God had probably prepared Him. God will stir up our hearts if yield to the Holy Spirit. Not everyone should leave his vocation to follow Jesus. When one man wanted to leave his homeland and follow Jesus, Jesus said, “Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you” (Mark 5:19). Most of us should stay where we are and follow Jesus in all the radical ways of love demanded by our present position and relationships. Do not be afraid to follow him away from the familiar we’ve seen members of our congregation leave to follow Him.
Jesus is very clear about the cost. He urges you to count the cost. “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? . . . Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?” (Luke 14:28, 31). Jesus wants us to be aware of how much we are drawn to the world. Jesus died to remove the obstacles that kept us from loving and serving God. We would perish otherwise but we are both saved from something (hell, the wrath of God) and saved too something (loving and serving God). Our sin nature can make us want to be saved from hell to love and serve ourselves. Learning to be selfless is not something we will adapt to without pain.
Jesus told us that “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Following Him is costly but it is worth it.
Demand #9 – Love God with all Your Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength
Jesus answered, “The most important [commandment] is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’”
—Mark 12:29-30
Woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.
—Luke 11:42
But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him.
—John 5:42-43
Part of being a disciple is maintaining a passion for your discipleship. If all you have is the discipline but no passion then you will likely simply become legalistic. You’ll preach the Gospel like Jonah with a grudging heart and no love for the lost. If all you have is passion and no discipline then you will likely fail to communicate the Gospel. You may communicate an excitement but without the necessary content and there are many people in the world today who call themselves Christians but reject the essentials of the Gospel such as the atonement. In effect, they allow a passion for the lost to change their doctrine from a biblical one to a Universalist doctrine.
Jesus demands that our love combine heart, soul, mind, and strength. So as men called to be disciples we pursue discipline to keep heart, soul, mind, and body pleasing to God as well as nurturing a passion for God and the Gospel. All of this is accomplished by the power of the Holy Spirit who leads us on to maturity and this is the kind of relationship with God that we are made to enjoy. If we know God as He is then a Christian will respond with a passionate love for Him.
One of the primary purposes of the incarnation was to reveal even more about God that we might love Him more. He is our creator (Matt. 19:4) and created all things (Mark 13:19) but He didn’t walk away when He was done because He knows every detail and reassures us that He is watching us by saying “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father” (Matt. 10:29; 6:30). He is wise (Luke 11:49), righteousness (Matt. 6:33), powerful (Matt. 22:29), angered by sin (John 3:36), full of compassion (Luke 15:20), and love (John 3:16). He is a person and can be known as a Father who loves us as his children (John 1:12; 16:27).
Piper says that Jesus essentially demands, “Love God with all that you are for all that He is.” You must know God to love Him. There is no such thing as groundless love. Love at first sight is not truly love. I think we are old enough to know that. The revelation in Scripture is given to awaken love in our hearts for God. The attraction in our heart and gratitude in our souls at salvation is supposed to grow into a deep and abiding love as we increase in our knowledge of God. This is why no one is left alone by the Holy Spirit at the “no creed by Christ” phase. There simply isn’t any “no creed by Christ” because the person and work of Christ form the Gospel and reveal God and His riches in a beauty and depth to which there is no end.
Just consider these Scriptures and the way Paul prays for the believers.
Philippians 1:9 -10
And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ,
Ephesians 1:16-18
I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his
glorious inheritance in the saints,
Colossians 1:9-12
And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.
When we focus on Scripture it is so that we can know God. “You search the Scriptures,” Jesus said, “because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me” (John 5:39). Jesus said to his disciples: “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (John 14:7-9) Jesus shows us the Father and, if we submit to Scripture, the Holy Spirit stirs up the passion for God or, to use the term Piper uses, makes God “compellingly beautiful”.
So we recognize that our sin nature is an issue that opposes this passion for God. Loving God is not just a decision although your will is involved. This is part of our sanctification and we work synergistically with the Holy Spirit to change. It is not just a decision because you cannot simply decide to change what you prefer. God has told you that you’ve got a problem with your sin nature and the preferences generated by it. You will not naturally (i.e., apart from the Holy Spirit) have a passion for God. You may have a passion for being better than other people and exercising spiritual superiority but you won’t have a natural passion to glorify God and be satisfied in Him. Things must change inside of you so that your appetites are pure and righteous. When your appetite is pure and righteous then you find God compellingly attractive. As Piper says, “His glory—his beauty—compels your admiration and delight.” Knowing this should make us cautious and should make us live differently.
As Piper also stresses, love for God is not behavior but affection. We start to see our appetites change and we begin to prefer knowing Him, spending time with Him, and being like Him above all else. Our behavior changes in response to our change in appetite. The spiritual appetite that was dead is alive and our behavior changes and our love for God becomes the primary love of our life. We begin to fulfill the first and greatest commandment. Properly obeying the second command (to love our neighbor) depends on seeing the first command take a right place in our life and living.
Religious activity apart from a compelling love for God is pointless. Jesus said to the Pharisees, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me’” (Mark 7:6-7). Tares can look a lot like wheat but God sees the heart.
Allowing another master into your life is only going to be a point of conflict for you and bring discipline from God. Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” (Matt. 6:24). Note that you’ll pick a master to love and be devoted to if you try to have two masters.
Another thing that we do that shows our lack of love for Jesus is ask for signs. The Pharisees didn’t love Jesus or God (John 5:42) and said, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you,” Jesus said, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah” (Matt. 12:39). They were adulterous because they wanted Jesus to prove Himself better than the idols that they had prostituted themselves to. We compare benefits of serving God to benefits of serving our favorite idol. We find peace and enjoyment somewhere else so why should we serve God. God calls that attitude adultery. We are the Bride of Christ. Asking Him to prove again that He is worthy of our passion and greatest love means that we are comparing Him to all the toys and trash of this world. We take things that could be good and make them bad.
Jesus calls for us to treasure Him in all of our life.
1) “Heart” highlights the center of our volitional and emotional life without excluding thought (Luke 1:51).
2) “Soul” highlights our life as a whole, though sometimes distinguished from the body (Matt. 10:28).
3) “Mind” highlights our thinking capacity.
4) “Strength” highlights the capacity to make vigorous efforts both bodily and mentally (Mark 5:4; Luke 21:36).
Piper speculates that “heart” may be mentioned first because it is seen as the source of love that is expressed through the soul (life), mind (thought), and strength (effort). To love God is to treasure God. The command to love Him with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength means that every faculty I have treasures God above all things and in such a way that if I treasure any other thing then it is also a treasuring of God. There may be other good things that we may rightly treasure in some measure but never in the place of God. We may only treasure them as expressions of treasuring God. We love the blessings of God as a way of loving Him more. In this way we align ourselves with the psalmist who says of God “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you” (Ps. 73:25). “I say to the LORD, ‘You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you’” (Ps. 16:2). God expects us to love other people (Ps. 16:3). But God is to be our exceeding joy as the psalmist says, “Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy.” (Ps 43.4). Augustine prayed, “He loves thee too little who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for thy sake.”(Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book 10, Chapter XXIX).
“Because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold” (Matt. 24:12, NASB). We have been warned that our love for God may grow cold in these days. We will love Him to the degree that we know him and only Jesus can make Him known in truth and fullness (Matt. 11:27). Focus on Jesus and pray that He would reveal God as compellingly beautiful since to see Him is to see the Father (John 14:9).
No comments:
Post a Comment