Luke 9:57-62

Luke 9:57-62

57As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go."
58Jesus replied, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head."
59He said to another man, "Follow me."But the man replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father."
60Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God."
61Still another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say good bye to my family."
62Jesus replied, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."

The NIV calls this section of Luke's Gospel "The cost of following Jesus". One of the key points behind this text is that commitment to Christ should not be taken lightly. For instance, Jesus tells the first man that He has no place to call his own, something that people find very important. In other parts of the New Testament, Christ tells those who would follow him that there WILL be persecution and trouble, not that there MIGHT be, but that there WILL be.

Jesus calls another but this man asks to go back and bury his father. If his father had just died, it was highly unlikely that the man would have been out along the road. He would have been involved with the burial. It is more probable that the man's father was elderly and he would follow Jesus after his father died. Christ's reply indicates that the spiritually dead can bury the physically dead and that those who are in the Sprit should be actively involved in proclaiming the Gospel. Another point here is that when God calls, we need to answer. For if you place a contingency on His call, you may never get to it as there will always be other contingencies. For instance, I can't go into the mission field because I just got married. Then come kids, you can't take them to some foreign country. Then you need a good job as they get older so you can provide a college education and missionaries don't make much money. Well soon you are 70 and you never heeded God's call.

Finally, the last line of this text points out a spiritual and physical truth. "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God." From the physical standpoint: I don't know if any of you have ever had the opportunity to plow behind horses or oxen before. Well, neither have I, but I have put my hands to the handles of a roto-tiller before. Not quite the same, but if you spend all of your time looking backwards, you do not till in straight lines, your work is sloppy and you do not make much progress. This is the final message in this text. From the Spiritual standpoint: If we remain focused on the past, we will be ineffective in the future. Think about it. I sure don't want to be dwelling on my sinfulness and failures when I have asked for and received forgiveness from those things from God. Doing this limits my effectiveness as a Christian witness. Now I am not saying we should ignore the past. Understanding history, both our personal and our country's, is very important in helping us to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

So, here's to plowing a straight line today!

Mark

New International Version (NIV) Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society