Luke 9:57-58 (NIV) As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”
Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
Many people wanted to follow Jesus, to become His disciple, and even more so as they got closer to Jerusalem, and what they believed would be His coronation as king. In a sense, many of them were not so much longing to be a disciple, but were making a bid to be part of Jesus’ cabinet when He became king.
This man volunteered to go with Jesus wherever He went. But he had no idea where Jesus was actually going, where this road would ultimately lead. He, like the disciples, believed that the path that He was taking would lead Him to adulation and glory.
But Jesus wanted to set Him straight. Jesus owned nothing more than the clothes on His back. (And even those would, in just a couple of weeks, be divided among the guards who had crucified Him!) He didn’t have a fine palace to live in, or even a humble shack in which to lay His weary head. His only home was in heaven, and He had some long days to go before He returned there.
Jesus wanted to make it clear that anyone who chose to follow Him had to be willing to live the same kind of rootless, homeless, unsettled life that He was living, going wherever the Father sent Him to go on a moment’s notice, doing whatever the Father told Him to do immediately and without question, satisfied without any stabilizing possessions of His own.
The same is true today. Those who follow Jesus wholeheartedly must be willing to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit, whatever that leading is, and wherever that leading may take them. To follow Jesus means to set aside every personal agenda, and the security that most people derive from possessions, and from having whatever the latest “stuff” happens to be. To follow Jesus, in the end, means to live His life alongside of Him.
Father, Jesus was much clearer about what it means to follow Him than we generally are with those we try to reach with the gospel. He leveled with people completely, and urged them to count the cost before signing on. The life of Jesus is not one of comfort, and ease, and pleasure. It is a life of absolute obedience and self-denial. But it is also a blessed life, because it is lived consciously in Your presence every day. Lord, I choose that life. Amen.