Following JesusSýnishorn

Day 2 Devotional

Declining to Follow Jesus

Verse 51 tells us about Jesus’ firm resolution to travel to Jerusalem in Judea, in the southern part of Israel, after three years of preaching and teaching in Galilee, in the northern part of the Israel.

Verse 52 shows us that Christ deliberately chose to pass through Samaria. So, Christ sent messengers ahead into one of the Samaritan villages to book hotel rooms for the night.

In verse 53, we read that the residents of that Samaritan village refused to welcome Christ and His disciples because they were Jews, and they were heading to Jerusalem.

The Samaritans’ rejection of Christ and His entourage is the first common response to following Jesus; the response of declining to follow Jesus.

The Samaritans, like many people today, wanted nothing to do with this Jew, even if they had heard that He was a special prophet of God.

Many people, hearing about Christ today, decline to follow Him for various reasons. Some decline to follow Jesus because they belong to other religions or because they hold to a humanistic worldview that ignores God and His will in their lives.

Others decline to follow Christ because they simply do not understand why they should take seriously someone who lived so long ago in a different culture.

For example, there are many young people, who although they were raised in Christian homes, when they leave home, turn away from the Christian faith and decline to follow Jesus.

Some people decline to follow Jesus because they associate Christ with religion in general which they consider to be backward, superstitious, and primitive. Others decline to follow Jesus because they are too busy with the daily concerns of their lives.

Many others, however, decline to follow Jesus because they would rather run their own lives than hand it over to the God who created them.

Some decline to follow Jesus because they say that if there is a God who is as good as Christians claim Him to be, how can He allow so many terrible things to happen in this world, such as war, sickness, poverty, injustice, and death?

These people ignore the Bible’s teaching that God originally created a perfect world and that the evil of pain and suffering came into this world as a result of our first parents’ sin of disobedience to God in the Garden of Eden that we read about in Genesis 3.

So, we can summarise our first D from this passage by saying that, like these Samaritans in this passage, for whatever reason, we can simply decline to follow Jesus.