Breaking Links
“If any man serve Me, let him follow Me” (John 12:2626If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there shall also my servant be: if any man serve me, him will my Father honor. (John 12:26)). Service is not doing a great deal, but following the Master, and the world and halfhearted Christians do not like that. There is plenty of doing in the world, but “if any man serve Me, let him follow Me.”
At the end of Luke 9 the Lord shows how the links with this world are to be broken. One says, “Lord, I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest” (vs. 57), but Christ puts him to the test. You cannot go if you do not take up your lot with One who had not where to lay His head, for you may sooner go to the birds of the air for a nest or to the foxes for a hole than to the Son of Man for a home in this world. They were not now to come to Him as the One who had the promises, but to One whose portion was utter and entire rejection. Following Him could not be accompanied with ease and comfort here. He was to be delivered into the hands of men. At His birth we see the same thing. Everyone found room in the inn save He, but any who wanted to find Him whom angels celebrate must go to the manger!
Links to Death and Life
He says to another, “Follow me” (vs. 59). The first one wanted something with Christ, but when He says, “Follow me,” then immediately a difficulty is started, and it is when He calls a man that difficulties are felt. There was no sense of the difficulties of the one who said, “Lord, I will follow thee,” without His call. But this man who is called says, Let me first “go and bury my father.” He is going presently, but there is a link felt. Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their dead”; you must leave them to follow Me. You may be ready to say that the things of the earth have no power over you, but just try what it is to have them, and you will learn the extent of their power. A man may go to the length of his cord, but when he gets to the end he is checked. A father had the first claim in nature, and especially to a Jew, but Christ says, I am calling you out in the power of life, I am putting in My claim for the life I give you, and it breaks every bond here. It is a question of life in the midst of death. The word “first” (let me first “go and bury my father”) shows something put before Christ, as though the man said, There is something I put before Your calling. Death had come in, and this very plea told Christ they were all under death. It was quite a right thing for the man to bury his father, but if life has come in and the question is one of redemption, to be lost or saved, you must give yourself up to it. In the divine light which is in the cross, He saw all dead, and therefore He said, “Let the dead bury their dead.” The one thing to be done now is to follow Christ. The question is, Death in the world or life in Christ? Where are the affections?
Half-Linked to Christ
“Another also said, Lord, I will follow Thee; but let me first go bid them farewell which are at home at my house” (vs. 61). In the previous case it was just this: When my first affections are settled, then will I come and follow Thee. There is no good in that; the Lord says, “Let the dead bury their dead.” But this case shows that those at home were not left in heart. He felt he had to break with them, and yet his heart lingered. “No man . . . looking back is fit for the kingdom of God.” “Remember Lot’s wife.” “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” If Christ be not first and last, He will always be last, for faith is not in exercise.
Links to Affections and the Will
The question is whether we are walking as seeing what the cross tells us. The cross lifts the veil, showing the skeleton of the world, and when I see this sentence on all that is in the world, on self as well as what is outside, and our links of affection with it, I learn that all is to be given up, but there is Christ Himself and the love which is in Him to meet it. It will and must judge self, and it brings out the will too, for there is a great deal of will in all this shunning of the cross. People may speak of the claims of affection, yet it is not really and only family affection, but in the end what is felt is that which is connected with self. Natural affection there should be — indeed it is one of the signs of the last, evil days to be without it, but if you have power to judge yourselves, you will find that many an excuse you make has this secret at the end. So in affliction and bereavement, it is not only the affection that is touched, but the will. There is sweetness in the sorrow, so long as we realize Christ in it, and affection only is sorrowing. But if the will is touched, there is rebellion, resistance, struggling, and all this the Lord must judge, for a mass of flesh and self can never follow Christ. What a wonderful detail all this is! It is God going through our hearts entering into every corner and crevice. Why? Because of the constant, undeviating steadfastness of His love, and as a father loves his child when it is naughty, as well as when it is good, so our God takes pains, as it were, with us all, even when so bad.
The effect of all is not only to make us practically righteous, but happy — “imitators of God, as beloved children.” It is well, on the one hand, for us to judge ourselves and see what there is to detect in us, and, on the other, to see the fullness of His grace in Christ.
May the Lord give us to feel more and more that “the friendship with the world is enmity with God” and that the energy of the flesh cannot accomplish the work of God, so that we may learn to work from God, for God and with God.
J. N. Darby, selected and adapted from
Collected Writings, Vol. 25:103-105