I suppose I have sung this hymn my entire life. It was written by B.B. McKinney in 1936. If you grew up in church, you likely have sung it as well. Here are the words.

Take up thy cross and follow Me,” I heard my Master say;
“I gave My life to ransom thee, Surrender your all today.”
Wherever He leads I’ll go, Wherever He leads I’ll go,
I’ll follow my Christ who loves me so, Wherever He leads I’ll go.

He drew me closer to His side, I sought His will to know,
And in that will I now abide, Wherever He leads I’ll go.
Wherever He leads I’ll go, Wherever He leads I’ll go,
I’ll follow my Christ who loves me so, Wherever He leads I’ll go.

It may be thro’ the shadows dim, Or o’er the stormy sea,
I take my cross and follow Him, Wherever He leadeth me.
Wherever He leads I’ll go, Wherever He leads I’ll go,
I’ll follow my Christ who loves me so, Wherever He leads I’ll go.

My heart, my life, my all I bring To Christ who loves me so;
He is my Master, Lord, and King, Wherever He leads I’ll go.
Wherever He leads I’ll go, Wherever He leads I’ll go,
I’ll follow my Christ who loves me so, Wherever He leads I’ll go.

The chorus goes like this:

It is true that familiarity usually breeds contempt, but, if it does not breed contempt, it at least breeds indifference. In fact, even the most scandalous ideas, if repeated often enough and ceremonially enough, lose their sharp edges and fail, in time, to shock us. This hymn is a case in point. I mean, honestly, have you considered what it means to sing this…to Jesus?

I have dreamed at times of interrupting some congregational singing of this hymn in this manner:

After all, if there is any idea with which we should not become comfortable or that we should not casually express, it is the idea that we will follow Jesus wherever He leads.

Do not misunderstand me: following Jesus wherever He leads is the very essence of the Christian life. Following Jesus wherever He leads is simply the definition of discipleship. That is what it means to be a disciple. We must follow Jesus wherever He leads!

But what we must not do is casually mouth that idea or make an empty vow of such without considering the life-altering implications of that assertion. To follow Jesus wherever He leads is to do nothing short of laying down your life at His nail-pierced feet and dying to self. It is, in other words, no small thing to follow Jesus.

In this morning’s text, Jesus begins to unpack for His disciples what it will mean to follow Him. This teaching is occasioned by a request from some outsiders to see Jesus. In response to this request, Jesus leads us all into a deeper understanding of the nature of the salvation He offers to all who will come.

As I mentioned, the occasion of Jesus’ amazing teaching is a request for an audience by some who had come to Jerusalem to see Him:

²⁰ Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. ²¹ So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”

This is an intriguing situation. It is intriguing because these who come to find and see Jesus are “Greeks.” This term can mean ethnic Greeks or it can mean, more generally, Gentiles. In other words, the term can be used simply to refer to non-Jews. That is likely the case here.

If you wish to read this text uncharitably, you might see in this request potentially faulty motives. For instance, it could be that these Greeks simply want to see the latest, hottest religious figure on the scene. Or it could be that they simply want wisdom. After all, Paul generalizes to that effect in 1 Corinthians:

²² For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, ²³ but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles

Keep in mind that in our text Jesus never grants the Greeks the audience they seek. So maybe in His reaction to the disciples’ report of this request Jesus is offering a commentary on the faulty motives of those who simply see Him as a teacher of wisdom and is contrasting these people with true followers who will follow Him anywhere as Lord.

That could be, but I do not think we must read the text in this way. The Greeks may have been very sincere in their request. And while our text does not record Jesus granting the Greeks an audience, it does not mean that He did not. It simply means we have no record of it.

Regardless of why they came or what their motives were in wanting to see Jesus, their request was certainly unusual enough to strike Philip as odd. We can tell this by looking at Philip’s reaction to the request:

²² Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.

The Greeks ask Philip for an audience with Jesus and Philip immediately goes to Andrew. Why? Well, we have already seen enough to know that it could be tricky talking to Jesus. Perhaps Philip is uncomfortable going alone. And, of course, this is a very busy time for Jesus and the crowds at the Passover were pressing in on Him. Perhaps Philip and Andrew were uncertain as to whether or not Jesus should be disturbed at such a busy time.

More than anything, though, is the fact that these were Greeks. Whether they were merely curious onlookers or genuine Gentile God-seekers, the disciples likely struggled with whether or not Jesus’ arrival at the Jewish Passover should be interrupted with a request from some Greeks, from outsiders, as it were, from Gentiles.

I believe the fact that these men were Greeks is a crucial fact. Jesus’ response to the Philip and Andrew must have stopped them in their tracks:

²³ And Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

How very odd! How very fascinating!

Consider this: (1) Greeks approach the disciples. (2) The disciples approach Jesus on the Greeks’ behalf. (3) Jesus announces enigmatically that “The hour has come…”

This was undoubtedly a bit confusing to the disciples. It had to be as thrilling to them as well. After all, they likely remembered Jesus’ response to His mother in John 2:4 at the wedding of Cana when she asked Him to help replenish the wine: “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”

So in Cana Jesus had said, “My hour has not yet come.” Here Jesus says, “The hour has come…”

“My hour has not yet come…”

“The hour has come…”

I ask you: what has happened between these two pronouncements? What about this episode led Jesus to announce, “The hour has come”?

Specifically, what has happened is the Greeks, the Gentiles, the outsiders have come looking for Jesus. Here at this most Jewish of events, the world begins to come seeking Christ.

It is an intriguing thought, is it not? The Greeks come and Jesus says, “Now is the time. The hour is here. Now it begins.”

What is it that begins now? In a moment we will see that “the hour” to which Jesus refers is the process that will lead to His great salvific work on the cross and to His death-shattering resurrection. “The hour” means Christ’s work on the cross and His defeat of sin, death and hell in the resurrection.

For our purposes now, however, let us note the significance of Jesus’ proclamation of the hour that has come being occasioned by the approach of the Greeks. If you think about it, this is extremely telling, extremely important and extremely significant.

By announcing that the hour had now come, Jesus is revealing that He came not just for the Jews. He came for the whole world. He came for those Greeks as much as He came for these Jews. His person and His work, in other words, cannot be limited to a people, even to God’s own people. He has come to reveal that His arms are wide enough to reach the whole world, that His cross and resurrection will have cosmic implications that transcend the Jews.

With the coming of the Gentiles, Jesus announces: “The hour has come…” But then He goes further in defining “the hour”:  “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

Well! The excitement generated by this last phrase no doubt eclipsed the confusion generated by Jesus’ odd response to the Greeks’ request to see Him. When Jesus says that it is now time for Him to be glorified, the disciples no doubt instinctively bought into the limited, politically-expectant euphoria of the triumphal entry crowd we considered last week.

This is all very promising to the disciples! Could it be that now Jesus will be glorified by revealing Himself in true political and military strength and power? Will Jesus now be glorified by leading an insurrection against the Roman swine who had contaminated the land of God’s people for too long?

It certainly sounds like it, does it not? After all, we like this talk of glory and we think we know what it means. Great military leaders get glory in their conquests. Heroes get glory in overcoming insurmountable odds. Charismatic revolutionaries get glory as they inspire people to greatness.

Almost certainly this is how the disciples would have interpreted Jesus announcement that now He would be glorified. Perhaps they cut expectant eyes at one another: “Yes! Yes! This is it! This is what we have been waiting for! Now it begins! Jesus is going to lead a movement, start a cause, begin a revolt! Now is the time for Him to get glory!”

This is how it sounds…but this is not what Jesus means. And if the disciples allowed their political imaginations to lead them into the clouds, they soon came crashing to the ground in confusion at what Jesus said next.

In response to their collectively-held breath, Jesus says:

²⁴ Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

This may go down as the most anticlimactic sermon in the history of the world. The disciples dream of glory in the terms that they know it. The disciples think of power and strength and might and esteem and the cheers of the people. And what does Jesus do? He talks about burying a grain of wheat.

²⁴ Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

It is humorous to try to imagine the disciples’ reaction to this. I suspect you could hear the crickets chirp, no? What, after all, could Jesus be talking about here? How do you get from glory to burying a seed in the ground so that it will die and eventually bear fruit? What does glory have to do with a seed? What does glory have to do with death, burial and ultimate fruit-bearing resurrection?

Ah! We have the great benefit of hindsight, of living on this side of the cross, do we not? But had we lived on that side of the cross we would have been just as confounded as the disciples no doubt were.

²⁴ Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

The disciples would soon learn the connection between glory and death-and-resurrection. They would soon come to see that Jesus came not to obtain glory in man’s terms. He came to be glorified in His Father’s terms. He came to redefine glory. And how did Jesus redefine glory? He redefined it with His cross and His empty tomb.

Listen very closely: glory in the Kingdom of God comes through dying to self so that we might live for the will of the Father. Glory comes in the giving of all that we are so that we might obtain all that He is.

Glory, Jesus shows us, is obedience to the Father’s will, even to the point of dying on a cross. Glory is becoming a grain of wheat that dies, is buried and then bears fruit. The seed does not bear fruit until it is buried. Jesus does not rise again until He is crucified.

This leads us to the most shocking teaching of all of Scripture: Christ is glorified as He dies on the cross and rises again. The glory is in the cross!

This is a scandalous idea. The cross, to the ancient world, was anything but glorious. It was hideous. It was awful. Timothy George and John Woodbridge have offered some interesting insights into how terrible the idea of the cross was to the ancient mind:

“For two thousand years the cross has been so variously and beautifully represented in Christian iconography and symbolism that it is almost impossible for us to appreciate the sense of horror and shock that must have greeted the apostolic proclamation of a crucified Redeemer. Actually, the Latin word crux was regarded as an expression so crude that no polite Roman would utter it in public. In order to get around this difficulty, the Romans devised a euphemistic circumlocution, ‘Hang him on the unlucky tree’ (arbori infelici suspendito), an expression that comes from Cicero.”[1]

But this crude and impolite idea was nothing less than the Son’s glory. The cross was the glory of Jesus because the cross was the ultimate expression of the Son’s obedience to the Father.

This is what it means to be glorified in the economy of God: to die for the glory of the Father, to lay down one’s life for another.

The Greeks revealed that the focus of Christ’s salvation is the whole world. The buried grain of wheat reveals that the cross and resurrection is the mean’ of Christ’s salvation. Then the Lord Jesus moves to a shocking invitation to salvation.

It is one thing to try to get your head around the fact that the Son was glorified on the cross, on the tree of cursing. It is one thing to have to start grasping the fact that Jesus came to die and rise again for us. But then Jesus goes further and invites us likewise into this glory.

²⁵ Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. ²⁶ If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.

The cross, then, was uniquely for Jesus in the sense that only He could pay for the sins of the world upon it. But the cross is more generally for all of us as it represents what it means to trust in Jesus truly and to give Him our lives fully.

Jesus will lose His life and then be given life in the resurrection. So, too, if we wish to have life, we must be willing to lose our lives as well.

James Montgomery Boice has pointed out a fascinating feature in the Greek words used for “life” in v.25 that helps us really get at what Jesus is saying here:

We read, “The man who loves (or hates) his life,” and he shall keep his “life,” and for us there is no way of telling that the words “life” and “life” are different in the original language. Yet this is the heart of what the verse is saying. The first word is psuche, which refers to the life of the mind. We call it the ego. It means the human personality that thinks, plans for the future, and charts its course. Jesus is saying that this is what must die. In other words, the independent will of man must die, so that the follower of Christ actively submits his will to him. The other word is zoe, which, joined to the adjective “eternal,” means the divine life. Every Christian has this eternal or divine life now, but he has it in its fullness only when his entire personality with all its likes and desires is surrendered to Christ. It is close to the same thing to say that the Christian will experience the fullness of God’s blessing only when he consciously and deliberately walks in God’s way.[2]

This is life-changing in its implications. We receive the divine life only when we are willing to let go of our earthly lives. It is only when our egos, our psyches, our psuche, die that we are finally able to live.

This means that the cross is not merely the means of our salvation, it is also the path for our lives. We must die to self so that we might live. We must take up our cross daily and follow Him (Luke 9:23).

Before one of his classes at Duke Divinity, Stanley Haurwas once prayed this shocking prayer:

“Bloody Lord, you are just too real. Blood is sticky, repulsive, frightening. We do not want to be stuck with a sacrificial God who bleeds. We want a spiritual faith about spiritual things, things bloodless and abstract. We want sacrificial spirits, not sacrificed bodies. But you have bloodied us with your people Israel and your Son, Jesus. We fear that by being Jesus’ people we too might have to bleed. If such is our destiny, we pray that your will, not ours, be done. Amen.”[3]

Indeed, we might have to bleed. Whether we bleed or not, we must die to self.

It is all very unsettling, but, when you seek to step into the reality of this truth, you find that it is all very beautiful and very true and very liberating. It is a glorious freedom to die to self.

What does it look like to follow Jesus to the cross, to die to self for Christ and to bear much fruit in doing so? Perhaps an example might help us. Let us consider one of our great missionary heroes: Adoniram Judson.

Judson was a preacher’s son and was born in 1788. While in college at Brown University, he abandoned his family’s faith and became a Deist under the influence of a friend named Jacob Eames. Under Eames’ influence, Judson came to believe that there was a God, but that God was distant and indifferent to the world. He certainly was not the God of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

After college, something happened that made Judson reevaluate his views on God and return to the Christian faith. He was in an inn one night and he heard through the wall of his room the physical agonies of a man in the room next to him. The man in the other room was obviously very sick and possibly dying. All night long Judson lay there and listened to this poor man groan and struggle in physical misery. All night long he heard the agony of this man.

The next morning Judson enquired about the man in the room next to him. Was he ok? To his absolute shock, the inn clerk responded that the man had died. To his greater shock and horror, the inn clerk told Judson that the man who had died in such agony was named Jacob Eames! Without knowing it, Judson had listened all night to the violent, terrible sounds of his own friend’s death, the very friend that led him away from his Christian faith.

This shook Judson to the core. He reflected on his life and on the God he had abandoned. Finally, he turned back to God and vowed to give the Lord everything he had. It was not long before the Lord laid a burden on Judson’s heart. He called Judson to the mission field. He called him to go to Asia.

Before going to the mission field, Adoniram Judson married. He married a girl named Ann. When he proposed to her, he said: “Give me your hand to go with me to the jungles of Asia, and there die with me in the cause of Christ.”

The Judson’s set sail for Burma, modern day Myanmar. They arrived in 1813. There were no believers in Buddhist Burma. On their first Sunday, they had the Lord’s Supper alone. There was no one else they could invite.

Adoniram and Ann threw themselves into their work, but it was hard work and fruit was slow in coming. Judson had been warned by no less than William Carey, the father of the modern missionary movement, that it was impossible for the gospel to take root in Burma. He was told it would never happen. For a long time, it seemed like that was true.

The language of Burma was seemingly impossible to grasp, but Judson threw himself into it and in three years time, after studying twelve hours a day with a tutor, he was able to speak it.

Their time was marked by personal tragedy. Ann had miscarried on the boat on the way to Burma. She also gave birth to a son in Burma who died at eight months of age. They were rebuffed and largely ignored when they tried to share the gospel. The Buddhists of Burma cared nothing for it and shrugged off their efforts.

In the meantime, Adoniram and Ann worked and labored with no fruit. Adoniram began to write on the Burmese language and in 1817 he published a grammar of the language that is used to this day. He also began translating the Bible into the local language.

Finally, after a lot of prayer and work, Judson baptized his first convert to Christianity in 1819. It took six years for Judson to see any fruit: a single convert to the faith. By 1822, there were 18 converts to Christianity.

During the Anglo-Burmese war, Judson was thrown into a brutal prison, accused of being a British spy. For twenty months he was subjected to great hardships, often being suspended upside down by his feet with just his head and shoulders touching the ground. During this time, his wife pled to anybody who would listen for her husband to be released.

In 1826, Ann died of sickness and disease. Six months later, their third child died. Judson would marry again but lose his second wife to illness in 1845. He would finally marry a third time.

Johns Stott writes that, “Adoniram Judson lived in Burma for 37 years, from 1813 to 1850. When he first went to Burma, he said that he wanted to see a church of 100 members formed in time. However, when he died in 1850, there were seven thousand baptized converts in sixty-three churches. There are now more than three million Christians in Burma.”[4]

This is what it means to die to self and live for Christ. This is what it means to follow Jesus.

Wherever He leads I’ll go.

Let us consider these words before we sing them. Christ has called us to follow Him wherever He leads. But brothers and sisters in Christ, we know where He leads. He leads to a cross. It is a painful cross. It is a cross that tests us and challenges us. It is the cross of Christ’s ultimate obedience.

But that is not all. Christ leads to the cross but the cross leads to the empty tomb. If we die with Him, we will be raised with Him. If we will take the cross, God will give us the empty tomb. If we will embrace the crucifixion, we will live in resurrection.

Will you embrace this Jesus today? Will you embrace this Jesus who died on the cross for you?

I do so hope you will.

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