Follow Thou Me

The fire had burned low on the shore. The fish were eaten. And the Lord had just walked Peter through the hardest conversation of his life.

Three times Peter had denied his Lord beside another fire, in another courtyard, on the night everything fell apart. Now, three times the risen Christ asks him, lovest thou me? Three denials answered by three affirmations. The wound is being healed, stitch by stitch. And then the Lord tells Peter how his story will end. He speaks of stretched out hands and a road Peter would not choose for himself, the road of the martyr. He tells Peter, in so many words, that one day Peter will glorify God by dying for Him.

Imagine carrying that. You have just been forgiven, restored, recommissioned, and then handed the knowledge of your own cross. The weight of it must have pressed down hard.

And what does Peter do? He turns his head.

He sees John following close behind, the same John who had leaned on the Lord’s breast at the supper, and Peter asks, Lord, and what shall this man do? In other words, what about him? If I am to suffer like this, what is his road going to look like?

John, telling the story years later, does not let that question pass without reminding us of something. He takes us back to the upper room, back to the table, back to the night he reclined nearest the Lord and asked, for Peter, which is he that betrayeth thee? Why drag that detail up here? Because it is the very same pattern. At the supper Peter wanted to know another man’s destiny and could not ask it himself. Here on the shore he is doing it again. The head turns. The eyes wander. The heart asks about somebody else’s portion.

And both times, the answer of the Lord is the same in spirit. He will not feed the curiosity. He will not lay John’s future out for inspection. He simply says, if I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me.

There is a tenderness in that rebuke, and there is steel in it too. The Lord is saying, Peter, John’s road is mine to write, not yours to read. Your business is not his calling. Your business is to follow.

How well we know that turning of the head. We are forgiven, we are called, we are given a work to do, and still we crane our necks to study the path of the believer next to us. We wonder why their burden looks lighter than ours. We wonder why their gift seems brighter, their door more open, their season more kind. And while we are measuring our lot against theirs, the Saviour stands in front of us with one quiet, piercing word, follow thou me.

He does not promise that your road will match anyone else’s. He does not owe you an explanation of what He is doing in another man’s life. He has marked out a path that is yours alone, and He asks one thing of you upon it: faithfulness, step after step, with your eyes fixed on Him and not on the man beside you.