Our Lord’s words hit home most forcefully when he talks in simple ways. Like the disciples in this passage, we are aware of who Jesus is; we know him and love him. But he still asks if we are going to leave him. Why? Jesus wants to drive home that the attitude we have to maintain toward him is one of total trust and abandon. We must always be journeying forth in his name, following wherever he leads. “From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him” (John 6:66). These disciples lost the bold and reckless commitment Jesus wanted them to have. They didn’t stop believing or fall back into sin, but they gave up their intimacy with him.
Many of us today are guilty of this. We may be spending ourselves and being spent in Jesus’s name, but we aren’t walking with him; we aren’t drawing close to him with perfect trust and confidence. Yet this is the one thing God holds us to steadily: that we be one with Jesus as Jesus is one with the Father.
After Christ is formed inside us, the discipline of our spiritual life centers on this question of oneness. If God gives you a clear and emphatic message about something he wants you to accomplish, let oneness be your guide in how to pursue it. Don’t struggle to find any particular method; don’t create a plan that isn’t his. Simply live a natural life of absolute dependence on Jesus Christ, and God will bring about the thing he wants.
Never try to live in any way other than God’s, and remember that God’s way is absolute devotion to him. The certainty that I know I do not know—that is the secret of going with Jesus.
