When Jesus called His first disciples, He said to them, “follow me,” and they immediately left their nets and followed Him. The words ‘left their nets’ meant to give up, keep no longer, to abandon and leave something behind. The first time we see Jesus inviting men to follow Him, there was the distinct severing of their personal pursuits in life and abandoning all to follow Him. We see this same pattern when Elijah threw his mantle on Elisha who happened to be plowing with twelve yoke of oxen. Elisha slaughtered a yoke of oxen, boiled their flesh using the oxen’s equipment, and gave the meat to the people to eat. Then he followed Elijah and became his servant, never looking back. In the vernacular, he burned all his bridges.

The Bible cannot be any more clear that responding to the call of God means a severing of your past and never going back. As Romans 6:4 states, Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. Welcome to salvation. Welcome to death.

In one of Jesus’ most important declarations, as seen in Luke 9:23, the cross is the ultimate symbol of choice. It is the proverbial fork in the road. There are only two options, and yet only one is right. You are forced to choose; “if anyone desires to come after Me…” For the people of that day, they knew the cross all too well. They saw crucifixions on a regular basis, as it was Rome’s preferred method of punishment. To them, the cross symbolized death. Once you were on the cross, there was no escape. So, Jesus declared to His disciples that if they wanted to follow Him, they had to make a choice. They had to choose death.

In short, salvation is just that, death. To follow Jesus is to take up your cross, to die to self, ambition, desires, and plans. It means a total surrender of self and a total commitment to Christ and His ways. As I have said, that is what it means to have a Lord and to call Him Lord. ‘Lord’ is not a fancy title we say when we pray as if to honor him by saying it. If we dare call Him Lord, we better mean it. Jesus wasn’t kidding when He said in Luke 6:46, But why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do the things which I say?

If the expression, ‘Follow Me’ isn’t familiar, it should be. Those who have given their lives to Christ through the salvation experience call themselves Christians, and the very essence of this word is, ‘follower of Christ.’ If we really believe we are Christians, then we need to understand it means to drop everything and follow Him, and the first place we follow Him into, is to death.