If you're someone who's following Jesus; I'm curious: are you following Him because of where He will take you, or simply because you want to be near Him?
In this doing world we live in, it's really easy to focus on the end and lose sight of the means. We talk about God being our co-pilot, taking the wheel, or carrying us in the sand, but what about this idea: "hey, I want to be near Jesus because I love Him and He has the words of life; oh look, He's going over there. I guess that's where I'm going because I want to be near Him."
When you look at the times He called people to follow Him in the Bible, it's interesting how rarely He gave any other details or even a reason why. Often it was simply: "come follow me". It seems like we're so desperate to be needed and to feel special that we attach all sorts of goals and visions to our lives in place of simply following Him. Of course, when we're following Him there are bound to be plenty of things He asks us to do along the way, but doing out of love and adoration is far different than doing for its own sake. Too often it seems like we follow Him until we find something to do and then we lock into doing that thing and forget how we even got there in the first place.
Have you ever heard the phrase: "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life"? Personally, I think that phrase should be shorter: "God loves you and has a wonderful plan". The problem I have with the last part of the phrase is that it tends to lead us down the road of constantly trying to figure out what His plan is for us personally, rather than just letting Him insert us into His big plan wherever He needs us. (Remind me again who the story of history is about??) What I'm saying is that It's really easy to get sucked into focusing on His plan for our life and to wind up following Jesus because of where we think He's taking us and what we think He's leading us into. It's true that those things will probably happen, but I think we should learn to view them as the wonderful result of our following, rather than the main point.
What's vicious about focusing on His plan for our life is that when nothing significant is happening in our life we tend to beat our heads against the wall and spin our wheels in desperation or frustration (or both).
How many hours have been spent languishing over the question "what's God's will for my life!?" that could have been spent just following Him into whatever He had for us that day?
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