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We like life easy, so when following Jesus brings bumps instead of the smoother path we expected, we wonder what went wrong. Luke 9 reminds us that Jesus never promised following him would meet that expectation.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
So tonight we’re going to talk about a very, very cheerful topic. We’re going to talk about how hard it is to follow Jesus. And isn’t that what we always like to think about when we’re going to try to encourage someone? Maybe you should follow Jesus. It’s going to be really, really hard. Is that how we approach it normally? No, no, no, we don’t do that because we don’t like to think in those terms, right? We like things to be easy. That’s not a bad thing, by the way. We shouldn’t desire things to be harder than they need to be. But sometimes then we’re not really preparing ourselves for what it looks like to follow Jesus.
And if you’ve started to follow Jesus and then you start to run into bumps in the road, you think, well, am I not following Him correctly? Of course, the very biblical answer is, well, none of us follow Him correctly. And yet, I thought this was supposed to be a path to something easier, something better. I listened to the pastor speaking on the television, and he said if I just followed Jesus and sent Him a donation, that I would be rich, I’d have a private yacht by now. I don’t even have a boat that leaks. What am I doing wrong?
But as we watch the everyday Jesus that we’ve been exploring over these past few weeks, as we’ve been thinking about what does it look like as Jesus speaks to His disciples and also to potential disciples, He doesn’t promise miraculous ease. He promises something else. And it really comes down to what are we looking for when we follow Jesus?
If you already follow Jesus, it’s not a bad question to ask. Well, what am I looking for as I follow Jesus? If you haven’t yet committed your life to Jesus and you’re thinking, “Well, I wonder what that would be like.” I’d really kind of like a free trial of it. It comes down to what is it that you think is going to be and is that what’s really of value?
Thinking on those terms, I was reading a story a few weeks ago about a man, Romulato, who is a fisherman, I believe in Brazil, and he was out on his boat. And like the boat I just was joking about, his boat sunk out in the ocean. He had been fishing. And it must have been a fairly good size boat. It had various amenities on it to be out at sea for days fishing, doing big deep sea fishing. So that because he was a professional fisherman, he wasn’t doing it as a hobby. He’s actually, that’s his profession.
And so he’s out there on the open sea, his ship’s going down. And the next thing he knows, he’s just in the water. And I don’t quite know how this happens. Maybe it happens frequently. But as it turns out, though his life’s work was at sea, he didn’t ever learn how to swim. So here he is out in the ocean. His ship’s gone down, doesn’t know how to swim. And he starts looking around. And he sees the various debris from his ship.
And his ship had all kinds of things on it. You know, you’d have things to store the fish, a table to sit at, chairs, a freezer. And the freezer’s kind of an interesting thing, isn’t it? What do we look for when we buy a freezer? Airtight. Pardon? Airtight. Airtight, right. We want our freezers to be airtight. Why do we want them to be airtight? Because things are going to be frosting. Yeah. Yeah, the more airtight it is, the less the frosting necessary. And the less the frosting, the less freezer burn. So you put that great food in there. Maybe you do a big barbecue at the end of the season before it gets cold. You load it up. Still going to be good, right?
And so I’d imagine Romulado, when he was looking at freezers shopping for this boat, he wasn’t expecting to sink. He was probably looking for a freezer that would hold his food really well protected while he was out at sea. Well, he sees this freezer floating in the water now. And the key thing is, he sees the freezer floating in the water. I’m pretty certain when he shopped for a freezer, he wasn’t shopping for a flotation device. But now, a man who can’t swim out in the middle of the ocean, ship down. What does he see? He sees something that floats.
And in the moment, as he’s looking at this freezer, he said he’d been praying to God, trying to figure out what could possibly happen that might prevent death by drowning. He’s thinking of his wife and his kids. He’s thinking about his parents and how he’s going to leave this family whom he loves so much. And he begs God for an opportunity to live a little longer. There’s his freezer there. Since I was desperate, I thought my end was coming. But thanks, God. God gave me one more chance. I saw it. The freezer wasn’t sinking. I jumped inside it. It fell to one side and kept normal.
And so it was that he found that this freezer could actually float and float even with him in it. Now, I’d imagine he still was trying to figure out how to make sense of the situation. Now he has a floating freezer, but he still is stuck. And apparently, there were sharks circling around the freezer. They knew the idea that freezers contained food, and it smelled pretty good. They were thinking this sounds pretty good. So he didn’t sleep. He was in that freezer for 11 days until another fishing boat came by, and they saw this freezer. And he said he was starting to lose consciousness. It was leaking a little bit, even bailing out with his hands. But he hears this boat, and he manages to muster enough energy to wave outside the freezer, and they rescue him.
And it’s reading that story, and I thought, here is a man who had one set of values for a freezer. It keeps food stored nice and cold so it doesn’t spoil it. It keeps it without having to defrost a lot so it doesn’t get all freezer burn, all these sorts of things. Now he has a very different sense of what a good freezer does. A good freezer just saved his life. Rather, God saved his life using a freezer. But it changed his perspective. And that’s the sort of thing that we need in this world, as well as we think about what it looks like to follow Jesus, because we’re evaluating the box of Jesus that we see at the store.
We have the Bible. We start reading the Bible, and we say, “Okay, what features do I get in this Christian life?” Hmm, so God adopts me. That sounds pretty nice. But what does it say about sickness? Well, sometimes He heals people. Maybe He’ll heal me. So sometimes if I do what is good and pleasing in God’s eyes, there are material blessings. Those sound like pretty good things. And we start to evaluate following Jesus on the context of, “Can I have earthly blessings?” The problem is we’re treating our lives like we’re on land with a nice, stable place to plug in our life freezer. But we’re really out in the ocean. What we need to be evaluating is, “Will this thing float so that I don’t sink and get eaten by sharks?”
We need to be challenged about the radical difference between what we value, what we think we need in this world, what’s going to somehow make this life okay for us and what God says will do that, and what indeed will do that. Do we know Jesus? Great if we do, but are we willing to follow Him? Even when we find that the freezer of life isn’t actually freezing, it’s just saving us from sinking.
Sometimes we really, we climb into that freezer and we say, “But all my ice cream’s melted.” We don’t realize that there’s sharks circling outside.
We turn to Luke 9, verse 57. It says, “As they were going along the road, someone said to Him,” to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus said, “Boxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”
We contemplate what Jesus is referring to here and how it applies to our own lives and our own attempts to follow Jesus and what that actually looks like. Let’s come before the Lord in prayer and ask that He would guide us. Let’s pray.
Father, we come before you and we come with a whole wish list of things, and some of them are very good things. Some of them are things that you even say we should attempt in life and we should cling to and seek to do in life, and yet we come with this and too often we lose sight of what you really value. Would you help us to better understand what it is that you value and to be able to cling to that even as the sharks of life circle around? We might find comfort in your word and that we might be reminded continually that you are with us. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, here we have an interesting story, don’t we? We have a man who comes up to Jesus. This man, maybe he’d been evaluating different Jewish teachers. You had different rabbis competing for followers. This was a very common thing in the ancient world, and so he sees Jesus and he says, “Well, Jesus sounds pretty nice.” He talks about caring for the poor. He seems to heal some people. He has some unique insights. Maybe I’d like to follow Jesus. Maybe he’s the one I’ve been looking for.
And so he says, “You know what? I’m going to impress Jesus. I’m going to say, not only Jesus, I want to follow you. I want to sign up. I’m going to text in the number to join and become a member of Jesus’ first church. I’m going to go ahead and text that, but I’m going to text. Not only do I want to join, but I’m going to follow you, Jesus, wherever it is that you go. It doesn’t matter where you go. I am going to follow you.”
I have a Chris Tomlin song in my head right now. But he was referring, of course, back to an earlier Bible story, the story of Ruth and Naomi, and what a wonderful story that is. Ruth evaluated the cost, and this disciple, or potential disciple, probably thinks he’s evaluated the cost, too. It might be difficult. There are some people that don’t like Jesus. There are different competing rabbinical schools. On the one hand, I get the bonus. I’m following this up-and-coming, rising superstar teacher. And so people, just like we were talking about last week, the disciples evaluating who was going to be the greatest. Just sort of like that.
This guy might be thinking, on the one hand, “Well, this could really do something for me.” But he’s also probably thinking, “Yeah, there’s going to be a few bumps in the road. Nothing ever gets started, and it’s perfectly smooth and easy.” Doesn’t sound too bad, though. So he says, “Okay, I’ll sign up.”
How many of you have ever had to deal with a salesperson trying to sell you something? Most of us have, right? Maybe it’s a cold call, right? Someone calls you up on your phone and says, “Would you like to buy, insert product here?” I actually had that happen to me years ago. I was just coming off of one health insurance plan. I needed a new health insurance plan. Phone rings, local agencies calling. “Would you be interested, sir, in buying health insurance?” I said, “Actually, yes, I would be.”
A salesperson didn’t even know what to do at first. “Oh, okay, yeah. Okay, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about your needs,” and so on. Completely threw the person off, though. And I ended up actually buying the insurance. It worked out pretty well. But imagine if you talked to this salesperson. If I talked to that salesperson and said, “Okay, I’d like to buy that insurance,” and the salesperson said, “Do you really? Do you want to buy insurance? Do you realize how expensive health insurance is?” And as long as nothing’s wrong with you, you’re not even going to need it. It’s just going to make you miserable. You’re going to owe more money. And if you actually use it, that’s because you’re probably sick and you’re going to maybe die. And so you might as well just not buy it because it’s just going to be a life of misery if you buy this health insurance.
Well, I might have reconsidered buying it if that had been the sales pitch. That’s sort of what Jesus says here to this potential disciple. He says, “You say you want to follow me, and you even say, ‘Wherever I go, you’ll go.’” Are you willing to go without a home, though? Are you willing to be chased to and fro that you are worse off than the birds of the air or the foxes of the field? You look at those wild animals out there. God’s provided for them. You’re going to suffer in ways that they don’t suffer. Are you willing to do that? When you say you want to follow me, are you willing to do that?
We might say, “Jesus, don’t you realize this guy wants to follow you?” I kind of imagine the disciples sitting there scratching their heads, thinking, “Come on, Jesus. We have enough people that don’t like us. Why are you… What’s Jesus doing?” He’s saying to this man, he, of course, knows this man’s heart, and he knows that while this man has said the right words, “I want to follow you, and I’ll go wherever you go,” the man hasn’t really evaluated what he’s getting himself into.
Jesus isn’t interested in making a sales pitch. Jesus doesn’t want to check off the numbers so when he reports to the International Society of Rabbis that they say, “Wow, look. Jesus has more recruits this year than anyone else.” That’s not what Jesus is trying to do. And he wants to disabuse this man of any notion that there’s going to be any luxury or comfort with following him. Not about that.
Disciples often, I believe, couldn’t get their minds around this. This man couldn’t get his mind around the idea. It really does. It echoes exactly where we were last week, thinking about those disciples, trying to think, “Well, who’s going to be the most important in God’s kingdom? Who’s going to be the one that Jesus promotes to senior vice president?”
And what it really is, he is going to promote them. He’s going to promote them to show God’s glory, but how’s he going to do it? He’s going to do it as they die for him. Next week we’re going to look at the very end of the Gospel of John as we wrap up this series and think about what Jesus says to Peter. How does he finish that final conversation with Peter? He talks about how Peter’s going to be led away and executed.
Now, a young Peter, I don’t think, would have signed up for that. A Peter in the initial stages of Jesus’ ministry would have said, “Whoa, wait a second here, Jesus. I’m in this competition to see who’s greatest in God’s kingdom. Keeping my head attached is part of that. Having breath still is part of that. If I’m dead, I’m not greatest, I’m rotting away. That doesn’t sound so appealing, Jesus.”
It’s not exactly the recruitment poster that we would make for Jesus, because we’re not looking for that kind of thing. Well, I shouldn’t say no one, but no one thinking rightly in the moment says, “I’m going to sign up for this program because it’s probably going to kill me.” In fact, we should rightly worry about someone who would do that. That is exactly where the disciples are going to go.
That’s the picture for the disciples, the very friends of Jesus. He’s encouraging us to have a different perspective on following Him than we often have in this world. Because what we’re looking for is not, “How can I follow God’s kingdom even when it’s difficult?” We’re looking at, “How can I follow God’s kingdom so that my life gets easier and smoother and things are better?”
Think about if you drive down the road and you go out into the country, sometimes you’ll see a sign like this, scenic view. You don’t see as many of these signs as you used to, but you’ll see them still occasionally. This particular one’s down not far from Branson, Missouri. It has indeed a scenic view. It’s a beautiful, beautiful spot there. It’s Lake Taneycomo there. There’s another picture of it. Isn’t that just beautiful there? Just so beautiful. That sign says scenic view. You go over to the edge of it. Guess what? There is a definite scenic view. It’s wonderful.
Now, imagine though if that sign or sign like it instead said, “Miserable view.” Come over here to just see things that will scar your eyes. They’re so ugly. You go to where it says scenic view and you always see people standing there right by the fence with their cameras taking pictures, right? Because it’s beautiful. Or I guess we don’t really, you know, phone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Jim. Yes. People want to see something beautiful, but miserable view? And let’s add to that. Miserable view, five mile hike. Would anyone do that? No. I’m not looking to make myself miserable so that then I can be even more miserable by what I’m going to see.
But Jesus is saying to this man, you’re looking not for true discipleship. You’re not looking to really understand what God’s kingdom looks like and what really is valued in God’s kingdom. You’re looking for a quick pull off of the highway at a scenic view that you can say, “Oh, isn’t it beautiful? Look at God’s kingdom out there. It’s really nice. And now I feel better. I have some beautiful pictures. I have some likes on Instagram. It’s going to be great.”
Am I looking for a spiritual scenic view? Is that what I’m doing when I follow Jesus? Too often the answer is yes. We need to understand that following Jesus is going to make us people who are rejected. I don’t think right now in this moment in our culture we’re comfortable with that. I’m not saying we should love being rejected. There are times in church history where some of the even the very church fathers got really messed up ideas where they thought it would be good if people were trying to kill them because that meant that God was with them.
I’m not saying that we should crave being rejected, that we should crave a day when there’s persecution that actually brings our lives in danger. We shouldn’t crave that. We shouldn’t be surprised by it. The problem for this man is he wants something that’s going to make him connected to God’s kingdom without any kind of cost or maybe a more controllable cost. The Pharisees had very controllable costs. You do enough law keeping. You keep enough laws. You look righteous enough and guess what? You’re in. You’re doing everything you need to do.
Jesus says, “No, you can’t do that. You’re going to sin. You need to follow me. You need to actually receive my grace.” But guess what? It’s going to be hard because the world’s going to hate you. We’re not looking for that. We’re looking for self-help books. Something they’ll tell me how to be fulfilled. They’ll tell me how life can feel pretty good in the moment.
Then we start to hesitate when we run into the real cost of following Jesus. In our current moment where we do struggle with this as a culture, we’re used to an American church that’s sort of the majority in the country, and so it’s respected. And people generally, at least if they’re not really faithful believers, at least you’re okay with it. And now suddenly we find a world in which many of our neighbors around us actually think we’re weird if we’re going to follow Jesus, actually maybe even don’t like us if we’re going to follow Jesus.
We say, “Wait a second. This makes me angry. This makes me uncomfortable. I don’t like this.” And so we start to say, “Well, maybe there’s a different way of following God’s kingdom that has more scenic views that I can sign up for, one that will make my life go more smoothly, one that somehow works better so that it’s not so uncomfortable.” And we hear the preachers that promise that, and it sounds so enticing, and so we start to let go of the real kingdom of God and start to grip onto something that promises an easier time.
And while Jesus has offered us a freezer that floats when we’re in shark-infested waters, we say, “Everything that was in there is melted. I don’t want this freezer. I’ll try the water instead.” It’s not going to go well. We end up becoming half-hearted and discouraged, and this is natural because it is hard to follow Jesus, and yet it’s not unexpected if we actually look at what Jesus promises us.
Let’s go on to verses 59 and following in Luke, chapter 9. To another he said, “Follow me.” But he, the man that Jesus is speaking to, said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” And Jesus said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
Yet another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
Sounds kind of harsh, doesn’t it? A little bit? Is Jesus really saying to a man, “Your father just died. He’s still laying in the bed. Just let him rot there unless some zombies get up and bury him because let the dead bury the dead?” Is that what Jesus is really saying? Is he really saying that if you or I get the sense that we’re called to some part of the work of his kingdom, we just pick up and leave and let our families file missing persons reports on us, wondering where we went? Is that what he’s really getting at here?
I don’t think so. I think it’s a little more nuanced than that. Part of it, particularly this man and his father who is said to have died, there are a number of possibilities of what’s going on here. And I think just as Jesus gives that really sort of anti-sales pitch to the one man who says, “I’ll follow you wherever,” Jesus knows this man that he’s calling needs to wrestle with what it really means to follow.
Because if he says, “Okay, I’m going to call you,” but you can hesitate for a while before you follow me. He’s not actually doing that man any favors. And so what is that man saying when he says, “Well, let me bury my father first.”
Many who have wrestled with this passage have suggested what the man means is, “My father is still alive. I’m not expecting him to die at this moment. But let me take care of him. Let me stick around until he dies. And once I no longer have any family responsibilities, then I’ll follow you, Jesus.” It can be kind of my retirement job. Yeah, you know, I’ll take care of the family business a little longer, get everything smoothed out. I still need to graduate from Jerusalem University. Once I get all that done, then Jesus, let’s talk.
Another possibility that may be a little bit more limited but also could very well be what the man is saying is that his father has already died. And in this case, it comes down to the burial customs of the day. So like some parts of Europe where there isn’t enough room to bury the dead, what they would do in that time is they would take a person, they’d put the person in the tomb, and they would wait a year, let the flesh of the person decay, and then they would, you know, yeah. You take, you gather the bones of the person and put them in a little burial box. And that way you could keep using the tomb, and it would work. It was more space efficient. And it could be that the man is in the middle of this process. His father has died, but his father hasn’t been put in his final traditional burial spot yet.
Now, notably, what doesn’t seem to be possible is that his father has just died, that his father took his last breath moments ago. Because particularly in the customs of the day where people would mourn very expressively, and there was this week-long process of very intense mourning that you made sure everyone, there was weeping and gnashing of teeth, there was no doubt that you were mourning. What you weren’t doing is going and talking and listening to the local rabbi on what he was preaching.
Today, we can almost imagine that, right? A family member dies while you still go to church on a Sunday, maybe. You go there, you’re sad, but you go and you hope to be comforted. That wasn’t what they were doing in that time period. And so the one thing that we typically jump to with this, that the man’s father has just died and he’s being told he can’t even bury his father, Jesus, how can you be so unsympathetic, is the one thing that seems almost impossible in the context.
So the man is either delaying for a little while, I hear your call, God, but I’d like to wait a year to deal with it, or maybe longer. I hear your call, God, but maybe in a few years. Let me get my life straightened out a little first. Jesus says you’re putting your priorities in the wrong place. You’re putting your priorities in the flesh of the world, the spiritually dead world. And you know what? Only one thing is going to show up there, more death. I’m offering you life. You need to follow me.
And likewise today, when we hear God’s call, we need to be aware of those times that we come up with an excuse. Likewise, the man who says he wants to go home and say farewell, it seems likely what he’s saying is something rather extended, not just simply he’s outside the house and Jesus is saying, “Don’t go inside and knock on the door and say goodbye to your parents before you leave.” It doesn’t seem that. He seems to know the man has a sense of hesitancy in what he’s doing. And he wants the man to understand that the kingdom of God is urgent, that the sharks are in the water and that you don’t want to just keep floating in the water for a while longer.
That urgency of this moment that Jesus is finally here is an interesting contrast if you go back to the first Kings 19 when Elisha is called by Elijah. God tells the prophet Elijah to go get Elisha to be his successor. So he departed from there and found Elisha, the son of Shepat, who was plowing with 12 yoke of oxen in front of him and was with the 12th. Elijah passed by him and cast his cloak upon him. And he left the oxen and ran after Elijah and said, “Let me kiss my father and mother and then I will follow you.” And he said to him, “Go back again for what have I done to you?” And he returned from following and took the yoke of oxen and sacrificed them and boiled their flesh with the yokes of the oxen and gave it to the people and they ate. And then he arose and went after Elijah and assisted him.
Here we see a call of God and someone going and saying farewell to his family. And I think the difference here between this man who says he wants to go back and Elisha is the decisiveness of Elisha’s farewell. What does Elisha do? He hears the call, says, “I want to go, say, farewell to my family.” But on the way to say farewell to his family, he goes and sells the family tractor. He’s getting rid of every bit of farm equipment. He’s not going to pretend that he’s coming back. He knows that God has called him and this is what he’s going to do. And he’s not going to leave an option to return and say, “Well, if this whole profit gig doesn’t work out, maybe I can go back to farming.”
He takes the oxen and he serves up a giant barbecue. There’s nothing left to plow with. And Jesus is saying, “This is even more urgent. The kingdom of God is here right now with me. Don’t hesitate.” The man, as he says he wants to go back, probably contemplating, “Well, maybe I’ll go back and we can talk it over and maybe I can see if I can try this for a little while and the family business can be kept open. I’m going to do an internship with Jesus and see if I like this. I might change majors next year. I don’t know.” He wants to have one foot in and one foot out.
And just like if that man at sea had put one foot in the boat or in the freezer and one foot out of the freezer, what would have happened? Well, he wouldn’t have had the one foot any longer because the sharks would have bitten it off. So too, this man wants to keep one foot in the security of what he knows in this world and one foot in the kingdom of God, and Jesus says, “That’s not going to work.”
A few weeks ago, we finally got to where it’s a little warmer outside and over the winter, every year, I try to save some of my pepper plants. I love growing pepper plants and jalapenos and habaneros, different kinds of spicy peppers. And it is theoretically possible to help them survive the winter. Not easy, but possible. And so I’ve been trying for a few years now to get a second or third year out of pepper plants.
Well, we finally got to where it was warm enough to bring them out. And I have to say, I’m pretty excited. This was just a couple days ago. If you look here, here’s some of my plants. I have pepper plants, some mimosa trees that are sprouting up seedlings, a geranium, all kinds of different things that have made it through the winter. Take a look at this pepper. This is a second or third year pepper here. And you can see all that nice fresh growth on it.
Yeah, I’m showing off my plants. I’m pretty excited about them. This is so good. I am so excited that they’ve made it. But here’s the key thing. I didn’t decide, you know, I’d like these pepper plants to make it through the winter. I think what I’m going to do is I’m going to open the door and set them on the threshold of the door and leave them there, halfway inside. That way they’ll still get some sun outside, right? They’ll be great. No, it wouldn’t be great because the cold weather would have killed them on the threshold of the door. There wouldn’t have been some magic in setting them on the threshold.
They need to be brought where it was safe inside and kept warm. If I tried to halfway protect them, they would be just as dead as if I hadn’t protected them at all. What if I’d done that? I wouldn’t be showing you these pictures, and maybe you’re saying, “Well, I’ve seen enough pictures today, Tim. I wish you’d left them outside. I’m sick of seeing your pictures.” I have to say, I’m really looking forward to those first peppers of the year, and it wouldn’t have happened if I’d been half-hearted about it. Neither will the kingdom of God advance when we’re half-hearted about it.
God calls us to be surrendered with our whole heart, to follow Him with our whole heart. I know next to nothing about farming beyond keeping pepper plants and pots and such, but I’m told if you have a hand plow, one like what we see here in this story, one that we see with Elisha, if you’re plowing with that, you have this plow and you’re holding onto it, you have your oxen carrying it, and it doesn’t have GPS in it or anything, you have to keep looking exactly where you’re supposed to be going with it, or you’re going to go off to the sides, and if you start crossing over different lines and so on, it’s going to not be useful for planting your field.
But oftentimes when it comes to following Jesus, we kind of want to do that. This man wants to look back at what he has right now and figure out whether it might be better than following Jesus, and so he’s saying, “Okay, I’m going to follow you, Jesus. I’m going to put my hands on the kingdom plow and start trying to reach people. I’m going to come into your disciples.”
But he’s plowing like this, and Jesus knows that’s not going to work. He has to decide, “Am I going to follow or not? Are we going to follow or not?” We have examples throughout Scripture of people that follow half-heartedly. We have, for example, Lot and his family. God calls them out of the wicked city as he brings judgment down on Sodom and Gomorrah, and what does Lot’s wife do? She turns back. Why? She’s fleeing. A lot of the people didn’t want to hear the warning and flee the city, but what does she do? She does flee, but she flees with her heart still back in the city.
I don’t want to leave that place. I’m going to follow God, but I kind of really know where my loyalty is, and it’s back there. She doesn’t experience God’s rescue. Later on, when God calls his people out of Egypt and they’re out traveling towards the Promised Land, what do they do? They start to turn their eyes away from the plow of going forward and establishing a people that will proclaim God’s kingdom, and instead start looking and saying, “But there are scary people over there in that land that might kill us. We don’t know. Yes, God can part the sea and conquer to help us to escape the Egyptian army, but there are some scary people over there. Maybe God won’t do it again. Maybe it won’t work,” and they turn and they hesitate, and they say, “Well, can we kind of think about this for a while? Form an advisory committee, God. We’ll think about it, maybe in a few years. We can order some more weapons first.”
They hesitate. Those people don’t get to experience the Promised Land. Here’s what we need to ask ourselves. What sort of hesitation do I have? Where am I holding back? Where are you holding back? What part of what God’s calling you to do in your life have you said, “Maybe next year. Seems a little too hard right now.” What sort of hesitation do I have in this moment? Do you have in this moment?
Here’s something I think that’s really important to recognize as we wrestle with God’s call and relation to that. When we think about what’s causing us to hesitate in following God faithfully, what are we seeing? We’re seeing the things that really are idols. We’re looking at them and saying, “Yes, God’s over here. Yes, God wants me here, but I’m not sure that that’s better than where I am right now.” God wants us to let go of those things. But we’re stuck on that scenic view. We’re looking over, looking at that scenic view. There’s a lot of tourists there. It’s really kind of crowded. Can’t really maybe even always get to the edge of the wall to take the picture for Instagram because there’s too many people there.
We might need to go further. It might be a little more difficult. Here’s another picture. Same area. This is my favorite picture from that same day. But if you notice, it’s a lot closer to the water. It’s not from the scenic overlook. It’s from the road that takes a little while to get to, that drives down and gets you straight to the water.
Going down there, you can see the beautiful rocky bottom of the lake, and you can see the fog rolling over the lake. It was absolutely breathtaking. This picture doesn’t even begin to do it justice. Breathtaking. But it wasn’t enough simply to go to the scenic overlook. You had to fully commit. I’m not going to just look and gaze on God’s kingdom. I want to be in it. I’m going to drive down into God’s kingdom. I’m going to experience the fullness of it.
And what we need to understand is that as we’re looking at the promises of God and we’re looking at some of them, they look pretty nice, and some of the things He says about the difficulty of life we’re not so sure about, we’re kind of just staying there looking for the best scenic overlook. When Jesus is calling us to instead turn and drive down the road and take the hike, He’s not calling us to some place of misery, ultimately. He’s calling us to be in His very presence. He’s calling us into His ultimate victory. It really is there. The Promised Land is there. God’s love is there. But it is costly on the way. It takes commitment on the way. But God awaits us there.
That’s where we need to be. Would you pray with me, please? Lord, as we weigh in that question, what is it that causes me to hesitate in doing the things You’ve called me to do? As we wrestle with Your purposes for our own lives, there’s probably some things there that we know that You’ve called us to do that are sitting there on the shelf, and we’re thinking, “Well, there are a million reasons I should wait a little longer to do this.”
Wait for a moment that it seems a little safer. Wait for a moment that it seems a little clearer. Wait for a moment we can get things that our life has sorted out a little bit better first. Maybe it’ll get easier to be a Christian down the road or to live out our faith around other people down the road.
Lord, would You help us not to run to those sorts of half-lies and false promises, but would You help us instead to turn down the road and drive further towards Your kingdom? We can’t do it on our own. But through Your Spirit, would You enable us that we would experience the fullness of it, that we’d be fully immersed in the beauty of what You’re doing, even when it’s hard, even when it’s painful, even when the hike is long and we’re not sure where we’re going? Would You give us the confidence that Your kingdom awaits, that Your presence awaits us, and that You are with us all the way?
We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Jesus awaits.
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