Two Things You Must Leave Behind to Follow Jesus

Last week, we reflected on Jesus’ first discipleship invitation: “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.”

This week, I want to focus on what the disciples leave behind in order to enter into a discipling relationship with their new rabbi.

Let’s look again at Mark 1:

The new disciples leave behind two things: their nets and their father. Their jobs and their families.

Similarly, we must leave things behind when we decide to follow Jesus. Jesus cannot be an add-on to our lives; what he requires is a whole-life transformation.

Indeed, Jesus himself says:

In my first post in this mini-discipleship series, I argued that discipleship is an encounter with King Jesus that leads to a response of reorientation around his leadership and the ways of his kingdom.

Today, I want to argue that the two particular domains that we need to leave behind to follow Jesus truly are our vocation and our families.

In many ways, our vocation and our families encapsulate all of our old lives that we must leave behind when we make a decision to follow Jesus.

1. Vocation

When Simon and his brother hear Jesus’ compelling invitation to become his apprentices, they respond that they immediately leave their fishing nets to become his students.

They leave behind their livelihood, their source of income, and, in what was most likely a family trade passed down from father to son for generations, a sense of identity and purpose in the world.

Yet, this is central to Jesus’ invitation to them: he promises to make them “fishers of people” — to redeem their vocation in the context of the kingdom of God.

This is Jesus’ invitation to us as well — part of our discipleship journey is that he wants to redeem our vocation in the context of the kingdom of God.

God’s goal from the beginning of Genesis has always been to “fill the earth” — for the glory of God to cover the earth like waters cover the sea — for heaven to come to earth.

In Ephesians, Paul writes that this has been God’s plan for the fullness of time to unite heaven and earth (Eph 1:10), and that we (yes! you and me!) have an inheritance within this plan (1:11), and have been given the Holy Spirit to empower us to step into our role within this plan (1:14), and that God has prepared good works beforehand for us to do within the context of this plan (2:10).

Part of our journey of following Jesus is allowing us to shape our vocations within the context of this great plan.

For some of us, that literally means we must step out of our vocations and into new ones. This is the call of many who feel a call to become missionaries, enter into full-time pastoral ministry, or others who decide to follow Jesus and feel him lead them into whole new career fields.

For others of us, that means recontextualizing our jobs within the context of the kingdom of heaven. Rather than simply accounting, we are partnering with heaven’s wisdom to release financial grace and breakthrough to those we are serving. Rather than simply homemaking, we are partnering with heaven’s peace to create homes that reflect the peace of heaven. Rather than simply nursing, we are partnering with heaven’s healing power to bring medical breakthroughs to people.

What was your view of your vocation before you decided to follow Jesus, and how has this shifted, changed, or been clarified in your discipleship journey?

2. Families

When James and John hear Jesus’ invitation, they leave their father behind to follow him.

In a passage I have yet to hear preached in an American church context, Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke:

For many followers of Jesus across the world, this commandment is literally true: all throughout the world, followers of Jesus have to decide between allegiance to Jesus and allegiance to their families of origin.

For some of us in the West as well, the call to follow Jesus is directly at odds with the expectations set by our family, and we quite literally need to prioritize the call to follow Jesus over the call to our families.

Yet for most of us in Western contexts, our allegiance to Jesus does not compete with our relationships with our family, but it probably does compete with the ways and cultures of our families. In other words, we can still engage in deep and even life-giving relationships with our families, but the way we engage must be fundamentally different as followers of Jesus.

For many of us, our first discipleship actually happened in our families of origin. In our families, we learned how to handle conflict, think about finances, make decisions, manage stress, eat, sleep, make friends, think about sexuality, and on and on and on. (These things are also shaped by our ethnicity and religious upbringing as well, but for most of us, our ethnicities and religion were primarily mediated to us in the households we grew up in.)

When we decide to follow Jesus, we are making the decision to reorient our entire lives around his leadership and the ways of his kingdom, and there is a kingdom way to do conflict, think about finances, make deicsions, manage stress, eat, sleep, make friends, thing about sexuality, and on and on and one, that is probably fundamentally different than the ways that our family did these things!

Thus following Jesus for many of us requires leaving behind the ways of our family so that we can pick up the ways of the kingdom of God.

Instead of conflict avoidance, we learn how to do conflict kindly, clearly, and powerfully. Instead of being anxious about finances, we learn how to give generously to the kingdom of God while trusting that God is a good provider. Instead of seeing sex as an area of shame and secrecy, we learn to celebrate God’s beautiful blessing and boundaries for our sexuality.

Is there a posture, thought pattern, or script that you learned from your family that Jesus might be inviting you to unlearn in this season?  

I’d love to invite us to pray today:

• Begin to take a few deep breaths. Perhaps as you breathe in, pray “Come,” and as you breathe out, pray “Holy Spirit.”

• What was your view of your vocation before you decided to follow Jesus, and how has this shifted, changed, or been clarified in your discipleship journey?

• Is there a posture, thought pattern, or script that you learned from your family that Jesus might be inviting you to unlearn in this season?

• What does a response to what God is speaking look like today?

Best,
Ryan

P.S. We made a prayer journal! If you haven’t yet, we’d love to invite you to come alive and live in love with Jesus through a 30-day journey of growing in confidence in hearing God’s voice. Check it out at restlessheartsrestingplaces.com/store.