There is a great passage in the first chapter of Mark. You can find it in verses 16-21. Jesus has started to gather people around him who will share in his message and he encounters Simon and Andrew, simple fisherman who are, well…fishing. Jesus invites them to follow and we are told that they do so, AT ONCE. Later, Jesus makes the same invitation to James and John and they too leave their nets, their father, and their lives to follow Jesus, AT ONCE. I love this passage, even if it challenges me and makes me feel uncomfortable. I love the response these guys give to the awesome invitation that Jesus makes. I love that they waste no time in deciding whether it makes good practical sense to follow Jesus. They have heard of him, believed in him and because of that, there is no other appropriate response but to GO.
I want to be more like that. I want to make decisions that seem reckless to others simply because I know it’s what I’m supposed to do. I want to go without pausing to consider the pros and cons. There is something important that the decision that Simon, Andrew, James, and John made and what it says about who Jesus was to them. It shows an amazing amount of trust. They put their faith in him immediately, trusted him with their very lives and they left everything they had to follow. We can take a lesson from that. I am as big a fan of prayer as anyone. Believe me, I have seen the power of prayer in my life over the last year. I’m curious though how much time we waste praying about things that we already know the answer to. In this passage in Mark, there was nothing to pray about. The King made an invitation and there was but one viable option…Just Follow.
