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How Can We Follow Jesus?

by Jerry Ousley  
11/07/2014 / Christian Living

Years ago I found myself in a position where I needed to find a job. The place I had worked for five years was closing the doors. At that time my title was "Administrative Assistant" which was an important sounding name for the person who did nearly all the office jobs working underneath the plant manager. That had nothing to do with losing my job but it had everything to do with what kind of physical shape I was in when searching for a new job.

Like most people I scanned the paper every week looking for openings. I really wanted to stay in administrative work because, even though it can be a lot of hustle and bustle, I enjoyed that type of work. One week there was a posting for a job with the construction crew building a new smoke stack for the power plant at Madison, Indiana. The description said that it was mostly administrative type work and so I sent in a resume' and got an interview. The job would only last around five years (those are big stacks and they take a lot of time to build) but that would give me time to find something else while I was working. Besides, who knew what might open up right there at the power plant?

During the interview I was informed that part of the job was checking up on the crews doing the work. It required a lot of walking and climbing stairs. These stairways were metal and were built on the outside of the base of the structure. He asked if I had a fear of heights. I told him that I was normally okay once I got up where I was going and got my head together, and that was true at that time not now. He decided to give me a test of sorts. He asked me to follow him and he began a near run up and down those metal staircases. I kept up fairly well, although I was out of shape and did some huffing and puffing, but I thought I did okay. I could tell that he had his doubts.

Once again, at the conclusion of the interview he asked me about my fear of heights. I thought for a moment and told him once again that as long as I had some time to get my head together once I arrived at the level I was going that I'd be okay. Then I said one more thing. I looked up at that stack looming several hundred feet in the air. "I'm okay on these stairways," I started, "but if you ask me to follow you up those rungs on the side of the stack, well, that's something I just can't do." He had never mentioned going up the stack, but I felt like that it would be something I'd have been asked to do because I never heard from them again and I didn't get that job. I could follow the guy as long as my feet were planted on something solid but the thought of hanging onto those rungs hundreds of feet in the air, well I wasn't prepared to follow any one up there! Sometimes it requires a sacrifice to follow.

In talking about following Jesus we must be prepared to go wherever He may take us. In the Gospels a rich, young ruler came to Him asking what he had to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus told him to keep the commandments. The young man replied that he had done that his entire life. Then Jesus took that look inside his heart. He said, "Sell all that you have, give the money to the poor and follow Me." We're told that the young man hung his head and walked away. He loved his things more than he loved Jesus.

We are called to follow Jesus. Just because He asked the young ruler to sell all and follow Him doesn't mean that we all have to do that. But in a way we do. We can't necessarily follow Jesus physically today. He may call some as missionaries and require them to go to foreign lands. He may ask some to be a pastor in a city in which they have never lived, but most of the time He asks us to follow Him right where we are. Since He isn't here in the flesh right now we can't follow Him physically unless we are called to do something similar to what we've just described. But we do follow Him spiritually each and every day of our lives. Once we come to Christ it is our duty to ask each day, "Where are we going today Lord?" Some days the answer may be crystal clear. Other days we may be told to not worry about it but just follow Him.

We are required to put Him first. We may have a fine home, an automobile or two and some nice things. There's nothing wrong with that in itself. But we must be willing to put Him in front of all those things and in a way that is giving up all to follow Christ. Are you ready to follow Jesus?

Jerry D. Ousley is the author of ?Soul Challenge?, ?Soul Journey?, ?Ordeal?, ?The Spirit Bread Daily Devotional and his first novel ?The Shoe Tree.? Visit our website at spiritbread.com to download these and more completely free of charge.

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