FOLLOWING JESUS – My Sheep Hear My Voice & Follow Me

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Following Jesus, that is our focus for LIFE: The 5th element a disciple learns on the path of discipleship is to FOLLOW JESUS. Remember what Jesus said in John 10:27 “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. The New King James Version
What does someone look like who follows Jesus? May I introduce one from history? The shadow of a sixty-year-old man was silhouetted against the canvas of the tent. The flickering candle cast a golden aura inside as he knelt beside a small wood and canvas cot. Rhythmic tropical rain lightly pelted the tent as he prayed beside his bed. The prayer was one he had written out many years before. If you were able to hear that night what God heard it would have sounded much like this:

O Lord since Thou hast died, To give Thyself for me,
No sacrifice would seem to great, For me to make for Thee.

Lord send me anywhere, Only go with me;
Lay any burden on me, Only sustain me.
Sever any tie, Save the tie that binds me to Thy heart.
Lord Jesus my King, I consecrate my life Lord to Thee!

I only have one life, and that will soon be past;
I want my life to count for Christ, What’s done for Him will last.

I follow Thee my Lord, And glory in Thy Cross;
I gladly leave the world behind, And count all gain as loss.

Lord send me anywhere, Only go with me;
Lay any burden on me, Only sustain me.
Sever any tie, Save the tie that binds me to Thy heart.
Lord Jesus my King, I consecrate my life Lord to Thee!

Outside the native porters, guides and cooks who had followed this man for nearly 20 years through the jungle heard the low sound of his voice communing with God as he always had done before bed. Then the candle flickered out and they also retired to sleep through the rainy night.

The next morning the cold and stiff body of David Livingstone was still kneeling beside the cot when his beloved native brothers found him. He was so thin from the countless bouts with malaria, his skin darkened by the years of Equatorial African sun was loosely draped over the bones of his earthly tent now vacant. His spirit had soared immortal, making its flight from the darkness of a disease-ridden, weak and failing body to the realm of light and life in the presence of Jesus his King to whom he had consecrated his life.

When Livingstone’s wife died in 1861, he threw himself fiercely into his work. He disappeared from sight. When Sir Henry Stanley found Livingstone the year before he died, the great missionary who spent thirty years in darkest Africa, he wanted him to come back to England with him, but Livingstone refused to go. Two days later he wrote in his diary: “March 19, my birthday. My Jesus, my King, my Life, my all, I again dedicate my whole self to Thee. Accept me, and grant, O gracious Father, that ere the year is gone I may finish my work. In Jesus’ name, I ask it. Amen.” A year later his servants found him on his knees dead.

Such was their love for him that native assistants bore his body fifteen hundred miles to the coast. One of them was among the huge crowd at the funeral in Westminster Abbey. Some words on Livingstone’s tombstone there summarize his achievements: “For thirty years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelize the native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, to abolish the desolating slave trade of Central Africa.”

Sir Henry Stanley gave David Livingstone after discovering and spending time with him in Central Africa: “If I had been with him any longer, I would have been compelled to be a Christian, and he never spoke to me about it at all .” Livingstone’s witness went far beyond mere words