Come And See Series

If we’re going to follow Jesus, the question is “Well, why are we doing that? What are we looking for? What do we want?” And he looks at them, and he wants to codify their intention, their motive for following him and allowing him to be their teacher. And they said, “Rabbi”, which means teacher, “where are you staying?” Now, this is curious to me. They say, “Jesus, we want you to be our teacher.” He says, “What do you want?” And they say, “Friendship.” In that culture if you were to say, “Where are you staying?”, what you’re doing is you’re inviting yourself over for dinner. You would only do that with a friend. They looked at Jesus, and they said, “We would like to go to your house for dinner. That’s what we want.” And I love the fact that Jesus doesn’t say, “Well, here. Here’s everything you need to know. Here’s the whole Old Testament. Here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna die on a cross, raise from the dead, I’m gonna work everything out. I’m gonna reconcile – ” he doesn’t tell ‘em anything. He just looks at ‘em and he says very simply “What do you want?” They say, “We want to come over to your house for dinner.” That’s how everything gets started.

Do you see how very little things cause very global change? Just miniscule things have sometimes enormous consequences if the spirit of God is in them. Here are two guys that are following John the Baptizer. Now they decide to go have dinner with Jesus. That changes their whole life. Years later John’s writing this book, reflecting back on it and saying, “Oh, my gosh. How did I get here? How did I get to be the head of the church? How did I get to out live all the other disciples? How did I get to see Paul and Peter murdered? How did I get to write books of the Bible? How did I get there? Yeah. That one night I had dinner with Jesus.” That’s it. That’s how it began. John didn’t even know as much as we know. Didn’t know a fraction of what we now know.

But why did John lead John the Baptizer, why did he go and become a student of Jesus? Because word of mouth, John the Baptizer, his friend and teacher, told him. John and Andrew they didn’t have a full picture of what was happening, but they trusted that the word of mouth information that they were getting from John the Baptizer, their teacher, was true. And so God works through this student-teacher relationship. The reason I had you draw those clusters and communities of relationship, how many of you at some point in your life had a teacher, a Sunday School teacher, an elementary school teacher, some sort of instructor that was in your life that really pressed you toward knowing Jesus? Anybody have a teacher that was really involved that way? I did in high school. I had a gentleman named Mr. Myers. He looked just like the judge from Hard Castle McCormick. And he was the toughest teacher, but he was a very godly man and a good Bible teacher. And he was very open about his faith, and he was very bold about his faith. And I knew he was a Christian. He kept a Bible on his desk.