Unlimited: Go Where Jesus Goes
Dec 12, 2019 1187
If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me (Matthew 16:24, NIV).
In the upper room, before the Cross, Peter asked Jesus where he was going, and he assured the Lord that he was ready to follow him. But Jesus told Peter that he couldn’t follow him now, but that he would follow him later (Matthew 20:36-37, NIV).
Jesus wanted the disciples to always be with him (John 14:1-3). But he knew that they weren’t ready to follow him then.
If you want to follow Jesus, you’d better be ready to go where he goes. To become a follower of Jesus, you have to go through the experience of the Cross. Jesus said that if anyone would follow him, they had to deny themselves and take up their cross.
The disciples weren’t ready to follow Jesus until they had been through the experience of his crucifixion and they had witnessed his resurrection. In the same way, we won’t be ready to follow him until we have faced the reality of what Christ has done at Calvary and through his resurrection and what it means for our lives.
And Jesus told us what it meant: self-denial – the death of self. It’s painful because wherever there is death, there will be pain.
But on the other side is resurrection: new life in Christ. On the other side is to be where Jesus is.
– Eliezer Gonzalez
Eli’s Reflection:It’s important that Jesus didn’t tell us to take up his Cross. We could never do that! That’s the Cross by which we are justified: a Cross that only he could bear. Instead, Jesus tells us that anyone who would follow him must take up “his” cross. In other words, there’s a cross for every follower of Jesus. What might be your cross?
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