Coming After Him

We have again been privileged to enter a new year. What lies behind us is history, and what lies before us is hidden. What this year will bring us, prosperity or adversity, or whether it will be the year of our death, we do not know. One thing, however, is certain: whoever may come after Him of whom the text speaks, will be happy.

Christ spoke these words to His disciples after He had spoken to them of His death and resurrection. “If any man will come after Me.” Who is able or willing to do that? Not one person, because through sin we have become unable and unwilling. God had done no unrighteousness if He had left all mankind in the depths of the fall, but that was not His desire. It has pleased Him to make unwilling ones willing. In Psalm 110:3 we read, “Thy people shall be willing in the day of Thy power.”

By regeneration a person becomes a student in the school of Christ. It is not that he then knows Him, but then a sinner comes to the knowledge, through the discovering light of the Holy Spirit, that he has sinned against God and is without Him in the world. He uncovers sinners to their nakedness and deadness, and gives Christ excellence in their sight. What a willingness there then is to come after Him out of love and to deny themselves. That means to loathe themselves and to obey Him in all things. That becomes the desire of their heart, wrought by Him, and to count all things but loss and dung for the excellency of the knowledge of His name.

On the other hand, they have to learn that they are unable to perform any of those things in and of themselves, but that they constantly have to be won over. In themselves they remain unwilling. Paul said, “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19). He had a law in his members warring against the law of his mind and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin.

May the Lord by grace teach us in the beginning and by renewal to come after Him and to deny ourselves. Although the future is hidden and dark, and many ask, “Who will show us any good?” yet for those who come after Him, it is applicable that nothing is able to separate them from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.

Can God's people always believe this? Oh, no, for then there would be no more strife here below. Only when faith is in exercise is that their comfort. Therefore it is not only necessary that saving faith be given, but also that it be exercised, for otherwise there is a looking to and a maintaining of self. Life and salvation lie in Him, and in a following of Him, in submissiveness, indeed, in a uniting with His will. It was for this the poet prayed in Psalter 236 (Psalm 86): “Help me Thy will to do.”

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