SATURDAY 18th
John 1:43
NIV – ‘The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip, he said to him, Follow me.’
ESV – ‘The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, Follow me.’
If I were to give this devotion a heading it would be ‘Finding and Following’. Jesus did the finding, and Philip did the following!
In Luke 19:1-10, we have the story about Zacchaeus, this was the first portion of Scripture I ever preached from, it was in a youth meeting in a Church in Hay-On-Wye. We were given opportunity then to give a ten-minute word in the youth meetings which were held every month. I am not sure if I managed ten! I was about 13 years old and just like Zacchaeus I had a stature problem, short! (I still have the same problem) My grandmother was there, and she said to me afterwards, ‘I enjoyed your word, I could hear you, but I couldn’t see you!’ The platform dwarfed me even more. That is all beside the point at this moment, what I am leading to is that this short man met with Jesus and Jesus said to him (v10) ‘. . . For the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost.’ Zacchaeus was lost, not just among the crowd because of his stature but because of his sin. He looked for a vantage point to look for and to watch Jesus as he passed through the city, not realising that Jesus was looking for him!
We were all lost because of our sin, if you are reading this and do not know Jesus as Saviour, you are still lost, and Jesus came looking for you, you may have tried to hide, you may still even be trying to hide from him, but he knows exactly where we are. My grandmother could hear me but not see me, when I was a sinner the Lord Jesus could hear and see me, there was no hiding from him. And the same for you, no matter how hard you try to hide away, even perhaps to try and hide behind your sin, or run away from the convicting power of the Holy Spirit you will never get away, because the mission of the Lord Jesus Christ was and still is ‘to seek and to save the lost.’
For those of us who have been found, then we need to follow! In our text, Jesus was calling Philip to follow him, to become one of his disciples. Following Jesus is a life time commitment, it is a total surrender of who we are to become what he wants us to be, it is a leaving behind of everything that would easily beset us or hinder us (Hebrews 12:1-2) to follow in the pathway that he has prepared for us to walk in, it is a surrender of our will to his will, a conforming not to this world but a transforming renewal of our minds which will discern what is the good, acceptable and perfect will of God. (Romans 12:1-2)
In Johns gospel we read of some of the disciples who had a change of heart. It is in John 6:60-66 ‘When many of his disciples heard it, they said, this is a hard saying; who can listen to it? But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe. (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) And he said, this is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father. After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.’ In the previous verses Jesus had been talking about their partaking of Jesus as the ‘Bread of Life’, They had found some of what Jesus had said difficult to swallow (excuse the pun) and so they chose to walk away. Jesus then turned to the twelve and said, ‘Do you want to go away as well?’ Peter answered, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.’
If we have truly been found, we will want to follow, because once we have tasted of the goodness of God, once we have known what it is to be forgiven, once we have known what it is be to a part of the family of God and to call him our Father, where else would we want to go, or be, for he not only has the words of eternal life, he is that life and he has given it to us.
Remember the hymn, ‘I’ve found the Pearl of greatest price, my heart does sing for joy, and sing I must for Christ I have, Oh, what a Christ have I.’ – I’ve found the pearl of greatest price, have you? Or, he has found me? Whichever or whatever way you want to consider it, let us keep hold of the Pearl, lets follow in his footsteps, let’s make the choice, I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back.