Follow Me Series

If you have your Bibles and want to follow along, we will be looking at the gospel of Mark 1:14. If you have been here for a while, you know we are going through a series called The Story. When we talk about the story, we are talking about God’s story as told through the people, places, and events of the Bible. For the last few weeks, we have been in the part of the story called The New Testament Story, and we have been looking at the story of Jesus. Today, we are going to look at the story of Jesus’ calling of the first four disciples. We are going to look at what he may have meant when he used those two words “follow me”. A little bit of context. About three weeks ago, I introduced the story of John the Baptist. You may recall that he was this wild sort of guy who dressed in camel hair and ate honey and bugs and went around shouting about the kingdom of God coming around and people needed to repent. Jesus showed up one day out of the blue and asked John if he would baptize him. After a little bit of hesitation, John the Baptist agreed to do so and he baptized Jesus. If you were here last week, you may have heard my good friend, Nick C, where he talked about how after Jesus was baptized, he was led into the desert by the spirit of God where he would be tempted by Satan for 40 days and 40 nights. This week, we are going to begin to follow the actually ministry of Jesus. We are going to look at how after John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the good news of God.

We don’t have time to look at the passages that explain what was going on with John the Baptist at the time, but some of you may be aware that John the Baptist tended to do a lot of things and say things that were on his mind. He would tend to upset people. In this particular case, he upset King Herod. Apparently he insulted King Herod because King Herod had married his brother’s wife and John didn’t think that was a good idea and basically he started talking about it. Herod got so upset that he wanted to kill John the Baptist, but he knew that the Jewish people saw John the Baptist as a prophet of God, so he was nervous about that. As luck would have it for Herod, a situation came up that allowed him to basically make sure that John the Baptist would die. The story goes that somebody threw a birthday party for King Herod. During that party his daughter decided she was going to do some sort of a dance number. When she was finished, King Herod was so impressed that he asked the daughter what she wanted as a gift. What she said was I would like John the Baptist’s head on a platter. This made Herod a little nervous but with all the guests around, he saw no option but to agree with her request. He had John the Baptist beheaded and the head was brought up to her who turned around and gave the head to her mother.

We know that this passage pretty much introduces the idea that John the Baptist is leaving the picture. We see that Jesus is now coming along and picking up where John the Baptist left off. So much so that he begins to sound like John the Baptist preaching a very similar sounding message. It goes on to say “He is proclaiming the good news of God.” When we think about the good news of God, a lot of us have the idea of what the good news might be. If you are a Christian for a while, you know that the goods news has something to do with Jesus dying on the cross for our sins. If I was to say this week I have an assignment for you, you are supposed to go out when you go to work or on the bus, you are going to explain to somebody on the bus the good news of Jesus Christ. How many of you would be really excited to do that? Not too many. There are a few. It is a little bit hard to do. It is hard to summarize it. If you have been in the church for some time, you know that there is an easy method to do that. It is the idea of talking to somebody and sometime during the conversation you bring up the conversation about death and you say if you were to die tonight, would you go to heaven? The typical answer is I am not sure. I really don’t know. About that time, you would tell them why they probably won’t go to heaven. The fact is they won’t go to heaven because they are sinners. In fact, we are all sinners. Because we are sinners and God is holy, there has been this huge gap created between us and God. God cannot come into the presence of sinful man. We also know, as the story goes, that God in his infinite grace, love, and mercy, sent his son Jesus to die on the cross for our sins. In fact, you may even pull out a diagram that would look something like this. It is very easy to do on a napkin. You have us on the left side, the people full of sin. Romans 3:23 says “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Then you have God on the other side and you have this huge gap between us. The gap represents death and getting what we deserve. Romans 6:23 says “The wages of sin is death.” The good news is that God stepped in and sent his son to die on the cross for our sins. The righteous for the unrighteous. 1 Peter talks about how we are then reconnected and brought back into a relationship with God. That is pretty straight forward. That is the good news as we know it.