“Follow Christ”
What a gracious privilege it is to be called to bear the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But there is no doubt this comes with a high cost. To follow Christ, one must exercise the graces of love, humility, patience, self-denial, and a willingness to lay their life down for the cause of Christ. In other words, we should as Christians be laboring with all diligence to be conformed to the image of Christ by offering our body as a living sacrifice unto God. That is, we should strive to be like Christ in the purity of His human nature, for He emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Recall His self-denial and sacrificial love He demonstrated in the Garden of Gethsemane. The scriptures bring to our fading memory the very moment of suffering where the Son of God entered into an intense conflict within Himself crying in agony, “Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done,” as His sweat became like great drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.
Though His soul was troubled with grief unparalleled to any suffering that one would face today, He did not remove Himself from the trial that awaited Him, but yielded to it knowing that His Father would give Him the strength to endure it. The Lord Jesus did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many. The Savior did not waver in unbelief, but entrusted Himself to the will of the Father. He threw himself into the agony of His sufferings willing to go to the cross to bring glory to the One Who sent Him. Jesus knew that if He was lifted up on the cross as a living sacrifice for the sins of the world, He would draw many to Himself. He knew that there was no other way for man to be saved, so with joy set before Him He endured the cross, despising the shame, for the sake of those whom He loved. The scriptures tell us, “In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered. And having been made perfect, He became to all those who obey Him the source of eternal salvation.”
As we grow day by day more holy, more spiritually minded, more closely resembling Jesus, let us never take lightly our calling and election. For Jesus said Himself, “If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also; if anyone serves Me, the Father will honor him. Now My soul has become troubled; and what shall I say, ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose, I came to this hour.” Christian be done with hypocrisy, for this hour you have been called to follow Christ. Do not revel in the darkness of this world. Do not seek entertainment found in the things that God despises, for you are called to holiness. Follow Christ into the catacombs of death, where the corps of the old nature, along with all of its lust, is buried in Christ. “For if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” May The Lord give you the strength to follow Him wherever He may lead.
DEVOTIONAL
“If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also;”
John 12:26 NASBS