Follow Me
Mark 2:13,14 Jesus went to the lake again, and many people followed him there. So Jesus taught them. He was walking beside the lake, and he saw a man named Levi, son of Alphaeus. Levi was sitting at his place for collecting taxes. Jesus said to him, “Follow me.” Then Levi stood up and followed Jesus.
I don’t think I’d be alone in saying that there have been times in my life when I felt so inadequate within myself that I was afraid to follow my dreams. How about you?
The challenges often seem so great, while we feel so small. Add to that the knowledge that honestly, we’ve made so many blunders in the past, then how easy is it to allow that sense of inadequacy to nobble us; to prevent us from moving forward?
Imagine if you added another layer to that – the certainty that the people around you despise you! Such was the case for the Jewish tax collector, Levi, back in the first century. The Jews hated tax collectors because they were collaborators in cahoots with the occupying Romans to extort money from their countrymen and line their own pockets.
And then Jesus who, let’s face it, had rockstar status, comes to town.
Mark 2:13,14 Jesus went to the lake again, and many people followed him there. So Jesus taught them. He was walking beside the lake, and he saw a man named Levi, son of Alphaeus. Levi was sitting at his place for collecting taxes. Jesus said to him, “Follow me.” Then Levi stood up and followed Jesus.
Back then, if you wanted to follow a rabbi, you had to apply; you had to demonstrate that you deserved to be one of his disciples; you had to have the right pedigree. But here, this Jesus to whom the crowds flocked, completely, outrageously, turns the tables and says to Levi – a tax collector no less! – “Follow me.”
If you, in your sense of inadequacy, have been hanging back from following Jesus, know this: He came for one such as you.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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