Your Following

Have you ever considered the people following you? You can call them followers on the internet or you can call them friends in real life. But believe it or not, you have followers. I want to share five things regarding the people who follow you and why God has brought them into your life.

David departed from there and escaped to the cave of Adullam. And when his brothers and all his father’s house heard it, they went down there to him. And everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was bitter in soul, gathered to him. And he became commander over them. And there were with him about four hundred men.

(1 Samuel 22:1‭-‬2 ESV)

Two characteristics about the people following you:

• They are brothers – brothers, not literally, but brothers as in they are in covenant with you. That is to say that they are with you in the good times and bad, the thick and thin, and they have shared your experience. The prophet Samuel is talking about those men who have went to war with David and know him as a person. They are his brothers. The brothers (or sisters) we have in our lives are the people who live with us in shared experiences that unite hearts. Whether that is work colleagues under the same tyranny of a horrible boss, or perhaps a those men and women who you grew up with on your block.
• They are family – your literal family. In the case of David, Samuel says his literal family came out to follow him. If you wanted to apply this, then think people who share some commonality with you. All of us have commonalities with people in our own family. But there are those individuals who we do not share blood with that we call family because there are other commonalities that tie us together.

Based on these two characteristics of people following you, there then must be a reason for your relationship with them by the grand design of God. After all, we are all called for glorious good work that was prepared for us beforehand — this is in the Bible. Read Ephesians 2. So three areas in which you are called to minister to your followers:

Minister to your followers in their distress

People are always distressed. You are called to apply your giftings of empathy to listen to the anxiety that fills the lives of people who are following you. I know we are taught to avoid people who have drama in their lives, but the Bible says that it is these types of people that are following you and me.

So you need to tackle this head on in the people in your life and be empathetic in love for your followers. That means we need to go out on a limb and make time for people and their drama in our lives so we can minister to their stressors.

Minister to your followers in their debt

The people who are following you are undoubtedly in some type of financial pressure. I mean, almost everybody has financial pressure (e.g. student loan debt, car debt, underemployment, unemployment, credit card debt, bills, etc). Use your resources to help your followers in their debt. Let’s be honest, most of us have financial pressure or debt that we are dealing with and that’s enough of a money problem for us.

Why should we help others when we need the help ourselves? When we give of ourselves and our resources generously to others, God rewards that generosity. In ministering out of love, and in giving out of love, we are sowing seeds for the kingdom of heaven in people’s lives.

Minister to your followers in their bitterness

People become bitter because they have been treated unfairly or because there is unresolved resentment in their lives. We minister to these people by doing what you can to make those sources of bitterness a thing of the past and bring sweetness to their lives. You minister by using your influence in their lives to change the narrative of their thought processes and their speaking.

Most of don’t want to deal with bitter people, but influencing the thought processes of bitter people does more to change the world for good than any other charity in the world. The reason for that being that the disposition of people around these bitter individuals gets better. You don’t just impact the one person, but the circle of influence around these bitter individuals.

Conclusion

I don’t know what’s going on in your life. You may be in full retreat like David was. You know you are anointed for something, but you haven’t realized it yet. But do not doubt for one second that people aren’t following you and that your lack is a reason for not ministering or leading. David immediately became the leader of 400. When you put that plainly, he had 400 people following his lead, and being influenced by his actions (read: ministry). So how are you ministering to your following?