First anniversary, I shook my head in amazement at how much I thought I knew about my husband when we married. I was clueless. We learn each other and learn marriage day by day….trusting your husband with vows and an “I do” and beginning the journey together, one step at a time.
Kind of like when you take the training wheels off your kid’s bike and run down the street holding on to him until you get the nerve to let go. He wobbles off and crashes for the eighteenth time. At this moment, visions of him in a yellow jersey leading the Tour de France elude you.
But the first step in the journey to France, however long that takes, is getting on the bike at four years old and trusting your dad to hang on to you until he thinks you’re ready to take off on your own.
Jesus has done countless miracles to build consensus in peoples’ minds that he truly was God. But He wanted far more than intellectual assent that he was God in the form of a person named Jesus. This would be like believing Abraham Lincoln was a person who lived in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War. So what?
He wanted them to believe in and trust him as God who loves them, relates to them and has an impact on their everyday lives. He wanted a relationship, not just people standing at a distance saying, “Wow.”
Jesus expands the meaning of believe beginning in 8:34. “And He summoned the multitude with His disciples and said to them, “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s shall save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”
This is not just intellectual assent. This is God with ramifications. If….he is God….then.
I think you have to go back to the kid riding the bike. When he was four, the dad didn’t take him to France, drive up in the Pyrenees, put him on his little bike sans training wheels, point him downhill and let go. He started him in front of the house in the driveway and then graduated to a flat, quiet little street, holding onto him until he felt it was safe to let him go. The kid might have been skeptical, probably was. He’s used to training wheels holding him up. But Dad says, “Trust me. I won’t let you go until I know you can do it.” And because he’s a kid, he trusts him and hops on.
So Jesus is saying, “If I am God, nothing is too hard for me. I am all powerful, all seeing, self sufficient. I create, I sustain all things. I am sovereign…I’m in control. I have a plan.” And with childlike faith, I trust Him. I believe.
He is not remote…a God who lives in heaven, light years away. This is a God who wanted to make himself known to man so he sent his son who presented himself to the world and said in effect, “This is what God looks like, feels like, loves like….like me, Jesus. I came in a physical body, speaking your language, to make it crystal clear that God loves you. Not the masses in general, but you, personally.”
So when Jesus said to the disciples and the multitude, “If you want to come after me, if you want to be my follower, you must set yourself aside, take up your cross and follow me,” he was saying in effect, if you believe I’m God, trust me. Trust me. Set aside the way the world has programmed you to think and just trust…me. You can’t follow two ways. You must choose. Follow me.
Our response? We act as if God immediately flies us to France, zooms up the highest mountain and points our little bike straight down and lets go because we all freeze up and say, “Oh man, if I do that he’ll send me to the Amazon or Bangladesh or New Guinea; he won’t want me to get married; I’ll never have kids,….” You fill in the blank.
Oh no. He starts us in the driveway, then we graduate to the little street. We start out on a tricycle and then we graduate to a little bike with training wheels. Then he removes them and as we grow and become more proficient, one day we find ourselves in the Pyrenees, pointed straight down hill…but that takes time and practice and all the while, without our realizing, we become more confident…not in ourselves, but in Him. He is loving. He is faithful. He does provide. He is understanding. I have learned to….trust him.
The difference is, with each step, God is the dad. And God is saying, “I’m right here. You are never out of my sight. Your confidence is not in yourself. Your confidence is in me…and I’m here for good…like white on rice.”
Take Moses. God prepared him for leadership by orchestrating an adoption by the pharaoh’s daughter so he’d be educated in the best schools in Egypt. He let him age, marry, stand in the fields in silence watching sheep. Then in God’s perfect time, He told him he wanted him to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt after 400 years of slavery.
Moses response? No sir, no thanks, no way. We have a record of every argument Moses raised in Exodus 3 and 4, every attempt to convince God he was not the man for the job, in fact, that it was a terrible plan. God agreed to send his brother with him and Moses relented, trusting God just enough to show up the first time they had an audience with the pharaoh. He was not an eager participant. He was perfectly happy as a shepherd, thank you.
With each act of God, each plague, Moses’ confidence in God grew so by the time the children of Israel left Egypt, Moses was a fearless leader. He’d been educated in the best schools growing up, but he was ready for leadership because He’d learned to trust God during the showdown with Pharaoh. He found that God always showed up when he said he would and always did what he promised to do. He was faithful. He was trustworthy.
Moses’ part was to listen to God. If he’d listened to his own head and heart, he would have run in the opposite direction. He had to trust that the God who spoke to him by name, one on one at that burning bush, was big enough and powerful enough to direct him, advise him, provide for him and accomplish the plan he’d put into place 400 years before Moses was even born.
He had to listen and believe. And trust. And obey. One step at a time. Deny himself, take up his cross (in Moses’ case his misgivings, his fears), and follow Him.
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