Heart Tracks - Things Undone

       Something we tend to not spend much time thinking on in the ministry of Christ is the number of people He strongly discouraged from following Him.  Quite different from the present-day church where we'll joyfully take most anyone who's willing to sign up.  As I heard the great missionary/pastor Earl Lee say years ago, "Everyone gets in, no one gets out."  This was not the way of Jesus.  His call was to everyone, yet His acceptance was only to those who were truly willing to leave all to be His, and to follow Him.  He was not looking for those with good intentions, or even with passion.  He sought those who had been "undone."  If you doubt this, look to His exchange in Luke 9 with 3 different men who said they would follow Him.  All 3 were turned away because all 3 had an "undone thing" standing between they and Christ, and this undone thing prevented them from fully surrendering to Him and going with Him wherever He led them.  Oswald Chambers, commenting on this passage said, " The one whos says, 'Yes Lord, but', is the one who is fiercely ready, but never goes."  Perhaps this is seen nowhere more clearly than it is in the life of the rich young ruler, and his desire to follow Christ.

    In Matthew 19, Jesus speaks with a young man who was, as Chambers writes, fiercely ready to follow Jesus.  When asked if he had observed the commandments faithfully, his reply was a quick "yes."  Yet, in him, Jesus saw what was for him, the "undone thing."  His inability to surrender his possessions.  He could give Jesus all, but he could not give him those.  The young man went away grieved in his heart.  The possessions themselves were not the problem.  His inability, refusal, to release them to Christ were.  They were the undone thing in his life, but our own "undone thing" may be something entirely different.  It could be our mate, our children, a cherished relationship, a job, an attitude, a treasure, a desire, even a ministry.  We cannot yield it to Him, and so it remains in our lives, undone, and since it is undone, we cannot truly follow Him.  we cannot truly be His.  There were, and will always be, blockages between He and we.  Blockages that will keep us from coming after Him, keeping us from His path.  As Patrick Morley writes in Walking With Christ In The Details of Life, the question we must be asked, and only His Spirit can bring forth an answer to, is, "What do i still lack?  What impediment to true faith is blocking you?"  The rich young man asked this, but could not abide with the answer Christ gave.  Can we?
    Jesus calls us, right now, to come, and go with Him.  Can we?  Will we?  Chambers said, "When once the call of God comes, begin to go, and never stop going."  The call has come, but we cannot begin to go until we, like Isaiah, have been undone.  We cannot go and keep going, until the undone thing, has been done, has been yielded, has been given over, completely, to Him.  Have we done the undone thing?

Blessings,
Pastor O