Following Hard After Christ: What It Really Means to Pursue God

There is a difference between following someone on social media and following Jesus Christ. One requires the tap of a finger and costs you nothing. The other demands everything. And yet, paradoxically, it is the one that costs everything that gives everything in return.

The word "follow" has been flattened by modern culture into something almost meaningless. We follow accounts, celebrities, sports teams, and market trends. We follow as long as something entertains us, serves our interests, or satisfies our curiosity. And when it no longer does, we unfollow just as effortlessly. No commitment. No cost. No transformation.

But when Jesus walked along the Sea of Galilee and called two brothers away from their fishing nets, he was not asking them to tap a button. In Matthew 4:18-20, he called Simon Peter and Andrew to leave behind their livelihood and walk after him. Immediately, they left their nets. Later, in Matthew 9, he said the same two words to Matthew the tax collector, a man whose entire identity was wrapped up in his profession and the social world it sustained. Follow me. And Matthew got up and followed.

This is a different kind of following entirely.

More Than Movement

In the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the word most often translated as "follow" carries the meaning of to pursue or to run after. It is the language of intensity, not passivity. The prophet Isaiah uses it to describe men who rise early and stay up late in pursuit of strong drink, that is how consumed they are by their desire. The psalmist in Psalm 34 uses it to describe the pursuit of peace. And the prophet Hosea calls God's people to press on to know the Lord, with the same urgency a farmer watches for rain.

This is the posture Scripture calls us to when it speaks of following God. Not casual interest. Not comfortable agreement. A pressing on. A running after. A hunger that will not be satisfied by anything less than God himself.

The New Testament carries the same weight. When Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 16 that anyone who would come after him must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow, he is describing a reorientation of the entire self. The will, the desires, the goals, the identity, all of it brought into alignment with Christ. It is not optional. It is not namby-pamby. It is the defining posture of a life given to Jesus.

Why We Pursue at All

Here is where the good news becomes almost too good to fully absorb. We do not pursue God in order to earn his attention or accumulate spiritual merit. We pursue God because he first pursued us.

From the very beginning of the biblical story, God is the one doing the seeking. After Adam sinned in the garden, it was God who called out, asking where he was. Not because God did not know, but because God was pursuing the one he loved. The entire arc of Scripture is the story of a God who relentlessly moves toward his people, culminating in the sending of his own Son to walk among us, die for us, and rise again so that the barrier between us and him could be permanently removed.

A.W. Tozer captured this beautifully when he wrote that we pursue God because and only because he has first put an urge within us that spurs us to pursue him. Any desire you feel to draw near to God, that desire itself is a gift from God. He initiates. He draws. He calls. Our pursuit is always a response to his.

This means that if you find yourself lacking desire, the answer is not to manufacture it through sheer willpower. It is to ask the one who gives desire to give more of it. The prayer is simple and honest: Lord, give me more desire for you. Make me willing to be willing. That kind of prayer is never turned away.

The Paradox of Holy Hunger

Psalm 42 opens with one of the most evocative images in all of Scripture. A deer, exhausted and desperate, panting for flowing streams. That is the image the psalmist reaches for to describe the soul's longing for God. And Psalm 34:8 invites us to taste and see that the Lord is good, appealing not to intellect alone but to appetite, to the senses, to the whole person.

Here is the paradox that those who pursue Christ discover over time: the more you pursue, the more you want to pursue. The more you taste, the hungrier you become. The more you drink, the deeper your thirst grows. This is not frustration. It is the nature of an infinite God encountered by a finite soul. There is always more of him to know. There is no bottom to reach, no ceiling to hit. Tozer wrote that where we stop in this pursuit, no man has yet discovered, for there is in the depths of the triune God neither limit nor end.

This is the life Jesus is inviting us into.

The Cost of Not Following

In John 6, Jesus taught something difficult about his own identity, and many of those who had been following him decided it was too much. The text records, plainly and painfully, that many of his disciples withdrew and were not walking with him any longer. They unfollowed. The teaching was hard, the cost felt too high, and they walked away.

Jesus turned to the twelve and asked whether they wanted to leave as well. Peter's answer is one of the most clarifying statements in the Gospels. He asked where else they would go, because Jesus alone had the words of eternal life.

That is the question worth sitting with. When following Christ becomes costly, when the teaching is hard or the call is inconvenient, where else would you go? What else offers what he offers?

Colossians 3 paints a picture of what a life oriented toward Christ actually looks like. It means setting the mind on things above. It means putting to death what is earthly. It means putting on compassion, kindness, humility, patience, and forgiveness. It means letting the peace of Christ rule in your heart and letting his word dwell in you richly.

That is the life of someone following hard after Jesus. And it is the best life available to any human being, now and into eternity.