He…said to them, "Behold, we are
going up to Jerusalem…" —Luke 18:31
In our natural life our ambitions change as we
grow, but in the Christian life the goal is given at the very beginning, and
the beginning and the end are exactly the same, namely, our Lord Himself. We
start with Christ and we end with Him— “…till we all come…to the measure of the
stature of the fullness of Christ…” (Ephesians 4:13), not simply to our own
idea of what the Christian life should be. The goal of the missionary is to do
God’s will, not to be useful or to win the lost. A missionary is useful
and he does win the lost, but that is not his goal. His goal
is to do the will of his Lord.
In our Lord’s life, Jerusalem was the place
where He reached the culmination of His Father’s will upon the cross, and
unless we go there with Jesus we will have no friendship or fellowship with
Him. Nothing ever diverted our Lord on His way to Jerusalem. He never hurried
through certain villages where He was persecuted, or lingered in others where
He was blessed. Neither gratitude nor ingratitude turned our Lord even the
slightest degree away from His purpose to go “up to Jerusalem.”
“A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a
servant above his master” (Matthew 10:24). In other words, the same things that
happened to our Lord will happen to us on our way to our “Jerusalem.” There
will be works of God exhibited through us, people will get blessed, and one or
two will show gratitude while the rest will show total ingratitude, but nothing
must divert us from going “up to [our] Jerusalem.”
“…there they crucified Him…” (Luke 23:33).
That is what happened when our Lord reached Jerusalem, and that event is the
doorway to our salvation. The saints, however, do not end in crucifixion; by
the Lord’s grace they end in glory. In the meantime our watchword should be
summed up by each of us saying, “I too go ‘up to Jerusalem.’ ”
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