Re-Discovering

“Immediately they left their nets and followed Him.”-Matthew 4:20

I’ve always wondered about the details that the Bible doesn’t fill in. Thoughts, facial expressions, emotions, background or prior events, or sometimes even how the story ended.

The accounts of the disciples leaving everything behind to follow Jesus have always intrigued and baffled me. As far as I know, the Bible does not tell us if these fishermen knew much at all about Jesus before this interaction. Had they heard about him? Had they heard him teach? Talked to him? Ever? Did they even know his name?

And yet they literally just dropped their work, not to mention every familiar part of their lives, in one moment and fell in line behind him in the next. It’s easy in our (well, mine at least) pharisee-prone views to read this story as one more thing we should be doing. We should have faith that great. We should be willing to leave everything in order to follow him, too.  

But something greater stirs in my heart at that sentence at the top of the page. Regardless of the details Matthew doesn’t tell us, these men were so intrigued and captivated by this Man that it was worth it to them to go all in. No backup plan. No time to think it over or talk themselves out of it. He was that compelling, exciting, welcoming, and irresistible.

Jesus has never stopped being intriguing, compelling, or irresistible. Somewhere along the way, most of us have let life and the enemy dull that sense of longing for him. Like the church in Ephesus, we have forgotten our first love (Rev. 2) and our lives as Christians have become mundane at best and drudgery at worst.

So pray with me that we re-discover the sense of joy, captivation, and urgency that those first disciples understood so well. I want that again-I can’t be the only one.  

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Blessings, 

Connie Hartman