Come To Jesus Moments
As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
He said to another man, “Follow me.” But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.” Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.” - Luke 9:57-62
Jesus is not afraid to say some really, really direct things about the cost of following him! If we don’t read them in context, they can sound downright harsh. But given the fact that he’s just been coaching his followers on how to find and hold on to true life, these sayings take on a different shade of meaning. Jesus isn’t willy-nilly telling people that homes, traditions, or families don’t matter (because surely they do) - but he’s giving them a particular chance to connect with him in his earthly ministry and few would ever get that opportunity to experience that kind of fullness of life.
Have you experienced God speaking into your life with that kind of radical candor before? Think over your life back to moments when you had a face-to-face encounter with the truth. There’s even a phrase for it in our culture at large: ‘come-to-Jesus-moments.’ That’s because Jesus often reveals things about ourselves or our calling or destiny that are really hard to face (like the people he was talking to in the passage above) but that make a huge difference in our lives.
As you recall those turning point moments, they may not have felt like the hand of God, but ask yourself if God might have been in them somewhere. Take one in particular and look for the kairos in it and take it around the Learning Circle (below).
Walk one of those Kairos ‘come-to-Jesus’ moments around the Learning Circle right now, asking God for a new layer of meaning from the radical candor that was brought to you in that moment.
