Where He Leads Me, I Will Follow

    A woman once asked a preacher, “Will you please tell me what true consecration is?” Holding out a blank sheet of paper, the preacher replied, “True consecration is signing your name at the bottom of the blank sheet, and letting God fill in the rest as He wills.” E. W. Blandy said a similar thing in lyrical form in 1890 with his beautiful song, “Where He Leads Me, I Will Follow.” The chorus of the song captures the sum and substance of New Testament teaching about being a disciple of Jesus – “Where He leads me I will follow, Where He leads me I will follow, Where He leads me I will follow, I’ll go with Him, with Him all the way.” Jesus Himself declared this most fundamental requirement of discipleship in Luke 9:23 – “If anyone desires to come after Me, let Him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” He emphasizes the demand this places on our lives in Luke

6:46 – “But why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do the things which I say?” His words in Matthew 7:21-23 are as shocking and controversial now (or should be) as they were when He first proclaimed them 2,000 years ago –“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’ ” Men and women are slow to believe it, but being in a church building and saying all kinds of religious things “in the name of Jesus” is not automatically the same thing as following Him all the way in gospel obedience and going with Him wherever He leads!

    Along this vein of thought, a statement by Jesus to a scribe in Mark

12:34 is pertinent. After a brief dialogue (verses 28-33), Jesus told the scribe (himself a very religious man), “You are not far from the kingdom of God” (vs 34). Those words help yet haunt my heart. The scribe had commended Jesus as a wise Teacher, the only Jewish scribe in Mark’s gospel to do so. Jesus then commended the scribe and his proximity to God’s kingdom, also a singular occurrence in Mark. The guy clearly impressed the Lord, and was close to where he needed to be. And yet, close as he was, there’s not a syllable in the New Testament suggesting he ever responded to Jesus’ costly call to take up the cross to follow and obey Jesus as a fully committed disciple of Jesus. He would have paid a high price had he done so – his fellow Jewish scribes who rejected Jesus would have seen to that. The inescapable implication is that he came close to God’s kingdom, right to the door of it, but never followed through and came in! His modern-day counterparts are legion. Millions believe in Jesus, are impressed with His teachings, acknowledge His greatness, and sing His praise – coming near, and yet quite unwilling to follow Him in full gospel obedience – not only to believe He is God’s Son but also to repent of sin, confess Him as the Son of God, be buried with Him in baptism for the forgiveness of sins, and then live the faithful Christian life as a part of His body, the church. Salvation is for those who are in Christ, not those who are near Him (2 Timothy 2:10; Galatians 3:27). My friend, are you just close to Christ, or are you actually in Him?  Think about it.

Dan Gulley