Conforming (phase 2), Jesus Calls His Followers - Arriving to a Decision (step16), session 6

(John 1, 35-51) When Andrew and (presumably) John begin to follow Jesus, it is at the prompting of John the Baptist. This is often the case with us, too: someone points out to us who Jesus is, and we begin to follow him. Immediately Jesus begins to probe their motivations: What do you seek? (38)  I doubt they are being evasive when they answer a question with a question; they know they're searching, but they probably aren't quite certain what they're searching for, just yet. But when we begin to follow after Jesus, we will find more than whatever we thought we were looking for. Rather than rebuke them for avoiding the question, he simply invites them to Come and see. (39) Likewise, when we are looking for the difference that Jesus will make in our lives, he doesn't tell us from the outset all that we are in for. He just invites us to trust that he will not disappoint us.

As we begin to follow Jesus, life becomes a series of encounters revealing who he is and who we are both in him and without him. Jesus is always infinitely More than we understand him to be. We can only begin to know him more fully as we respond to his invitation, Come and see. As we do, he will amaze us continually, both by who he is and by how he knows us better than we know ourselves (47-48, which is, of course, a natural consequence of who he is).

What about the pain that we nonetheless encounter along the way? On the radio yesterday I heard Chuck Swindoll address the question of why we deal with such crushing hurt in our lives, and the answer he provided seemed spot on: it may serve many purposes, but one of the main ones is to transform our imagined self-sufficiency into God-reliance. Jesus knows already who he is and who we are in him for all eternity, but we do not. Only by his stripping away every other reliance we have in our lives do we begin to know how he is all we need. Many of those events are the natural consequence of living a mortal life among our fellow broken brothers and sisters, but God uses them for a good that ultimately far outweighs the pain in them.