You Can’t Follow Yourself

What Happened to “Follow Me” After the Cross

“I just want to be more like Jesus.”

Almost every believer has said some version of it, and it sounds like the most spiritual sentence a person could offer. It usually comes from a sincere place. But listen to what’s sitting underneath it. The sentence assumes a distance. It puts Him over there and you over here, and it quietly hands you the job of closing the space between.

That assumption didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a phrase the church has built almost its entire vocabulary around.

If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. (Luke 9:23)

Follow Me. Two words that have shaped how millions of people understand what it means to belong to Jesus. And they were spoken by a Man who had not yet gone to the cross, to people who had not yet received the Spirit, in a season when following Him meant something very physical.

The Word Underneath “Follow”

The Greek word is akoloutheó, and it’s an ordinary word. It means to accompany, to come along after, to travel in the same direction as someone else. It’s a word about position. About proximity. It describes where your feet are in relation to where His feet are.

Which is exactly what discipleship looked like before the resurrection. Jesus was a body in a place. He was in Capernaum, or on a road, or in a boat, and if you wanted to be with Him you had to be where He was. Peter couldn’t follow Jesus from home. Matthew had to stand up from the tax booth and physically walk. The crowds followed Him around the lake. When Jesus said “follow Me,” He was not handing out a metaphor. He was describing a geography.

And that word shows up everywhere in the Gospels. Seventy-one times, with Jesus as the One being followed. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are saturated with it.

Then the letters begin, and it stops.

What Happens to the Vocabulary After the Resurrection

Romans. First and Second Corinthians. Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians. Both Thessalonian letters, both to Timothy, Titus, Philemon. Hebrews. James. Peter’s letters, John’s letters, Jude. Not one of them tells a believer to follow Jesus.

That silence carries weight, because of what those letters are. They’re the documents written to explain the Christian life to people who never watched Jesus walk anywhere. Every question the early church had, every correction, every crisis, every clarification about how to live now that He had risen. If following Jesus were the organizing idea of life after the cross, that’s precisely where you’d expect to find it, and it isn’t there.

There are two places people reach for, and both are worth naming honestly. Paul tells the Corinthians, Imitate me, just as I also imitate Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1), using a completely different word that means to model or pattern after. And Peter, writing to household servants being mistreated by cruel masters, says Christ suffered leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps (1 Peter 2:21), a compound word aimed at one narrow situation: enduring unjust suffering without retaliating. Neither one is a call to close a distance. Neither one asks you to keep up.

Every Chase Scene Depends on a Gap

You’ve seen the moment in a hundred movies. Someone jumps into a cab, points through the windshield, and says, “Follow that car.”

What makes the scene work is the possibility of failure. The car ahead might turn. A light might change. The whole tension of the shot lives in the fact that there are two vehicles and a space between them, and the space can grow. Following is only meaningful when losing is possible.

That’s the picture the word carries. And it’s an accurate picture of what it meant to walk behind Jesus in Galilee, when He was ahead of you and the distance between you was real.

But the cross did not make that pursuit easier. It ended the distance the word depends on.

What Actually Happened to You

When Jesus died, He didn’t die as a moral example for you to study. He died as you.

I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. (Galatians 2:20)

Read that as position, not poetry. His cross became your cross. His death counted as your death. And what came out the other side of the resurrection wasn’t a disciple assigned to trail behind Him at a respectful distance. It was a person joined to Him.

But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. (1 Corinthians 6:17)

One spirit. Not nearby. Not adjacent. Not catching up. You cannot follow Someone you have been made one with. The vocabulary of pursuit disappears from the letters because the reality it described no longer exists. Christ is not out ahead of you on the road. He’s in you. Paul says it plainly to the Colossians: Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Your heart doesn’t follow you around. It isn’t keeping pace, and it isn’t at risk of falling behind at the next turn. It’s simply part of who you are. That’s closer to the truth of your union with Jesus than any picture of walking behind Him ever was.

The Two Times the Word Points the Other Way

There’s something quietly beautiful in the exceptions.

Of the Gospel uses of that word, one of them has Jesus doing the following. A synagogue ruler comes to Him about his dying daughter, and Matthew writes that Jesus arose and followed him (Matthew 9:19). The One everyone else was trailing got up and walked behind a desperate father.

And the single time the word surfaces in Paul’s letters, the direction is reversed again. Describing Israel in the wilderness, he says they drank from a spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4).

Both times the pattern breaks, it breaks the same way. He is the one who came after us.

The Better Question

There was a bracelet years ago with four letters on it, and the question behind it was sincere: what would Jesus do? It sent a generation of believers into a lifetime of trying to guess correctly and then measure up to the guess.

The better question is one letter different. What did Jesus do?

He made you righteous. He made you holy. He made you one with Himself. He took a relationship that used to depend on your proximity and made it depend on His finished work instead. You are not chasing Him down the road. You are not in danger of losing sight of Him at the next intersection. There is no gap left to close, because He closed it from His side and then moved in.

You were never going to catch up. That was never the plan.

For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:3)