A New Devotion - Following (Mark 8:34-38)

Below is a copy and a recording of a new devotion. I hope you find it meaningful.

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Mark 8:34-38 [Contemporary English Version]

Jesus then told the crowd and the disciples to come closer, and he said:

If any of you want to be my followers, you must forget about yourself. You must take up your cross and follow me. If you want to save your life, you will destroy it. But if you give up your life for me and for the good news, you will save it. What will you gain, if you own the whole world but destroy yourself? What could you give to get back your soul?

Don't be ashamed of me and my message among these unfaithful and sinful people! If you are, the Son of Man will be ashamed of you when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

Following

Although I was raised in the church and can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t trust in Jesus Christ, as a teenager in the early 1970s, I got involved in a group that believed all that stuff just wasn’t enough. For them, you had to do two things to follow Jesus Christ. First, you had to have an emotional conversion experience, one in which you officially made Jesus Lord and gave him your life. And second, you really needed to be saved from something terrible, you know, like drug addiction or sexual promiscuity or rock music. As we used to say, a person had to be really bad to have a good testimony. Now this was necessary if you were serious about following Christ. But I’ll tell you, it was worth it. You see, once you “made” Jesus something he already was and gave him something he already had, you were now in spiritual fat city. I mean, not only had you gotten saved, now you were ready to start taking in all the health and wealth and happiness God was just champing at the bit to offer those who’d dotted all the “is” and crossed all the “ts” and done all the stuff God expected them to do. Now, that’s what I was taught, and for a long time, that’s exactly what I believed.

But you know, it’s interesting; that’s not what Jesus taught his disciples. You see, according to what he said, following really wasn’t about saving; rather it was about sacrificing. It wasn’t about making promises that were too vague to measure or too intangible to define; rather it was about denying self and taking up a cross and living the kind of life we’ve been called to live. And it wasn’t about enjoying that kind of profit valued by the world; rather it was about focusing on the things of God and being the kind of men and women we were called and created to be. Now that’s what Jesus taught. And so, now it’s up to us to decide if we’ll be following or not.