Looking Across The Table Series

OPEN: How many of you receive our Church Newsletter?

Now, here is a test question… what is it called? (“The Logansport Link”)

Right underneath that title is this phrase:

“Linking Man to God through Jesus Christ”

That is our goal as a church.

And that is our objective as Christians: Linking the people around us to God through Jesus Christ.

Our sermon series this month is focused on that theme:

Linking/connecting people to God and each week we’re going to focus on a different aspect of that objective.

Next week: We’re going to “Walk across the Street” – connect to our neighbors, the people we work with, and the people we meet down at the grocery store, or CVS or WalMart.

And the week after that we’re going to “Reach Around The World”. We’ll talk about Missions and we’ll focus on the missions we support and why.

BUT, this week we’re going to “Look across the Table”.

We’re going to discuss how we can talk to our family and close friends about our faith, and how we can “connect them to God?

In our text today, we’re introduced to a man named Andrew. Andrew is a man’s man. In fact his name has the connotation of being “manly”.

He’s a fisherman. An outdoorsman. A common laborer.

And Andrew is kind of a quiet guy.

We don’t read much about him in Scripture.

He’s only mentioned 12 times in the Bible, and 4 of those are when his name is listed with the names of the other 11 apostles. Even in the traditions of the early church, he’s one of the few disciples about whom there are few legends.

But that’s not to say that Andrew is unimportant.

The times he IS mentioned in the Gospels he’s usually doing something very important… he’s bring people to Jesus.

For example in John 12:20-26, there are some Greeks who want to meet Jesus. They talk to Philip, who then turns to Andrew for advice, and together, both of them bring these people to Jesus.

In John 6, when Jesus is asking His disciples where they could buy food for the hungry crowd, it’s Andrew that brings the boy with his lunch of 5 small barley loaves and 2 small fish. Jesus then uses that small meal to feed about 5000 men. And when they’re all fed, there are 12 baskets of bread left over.

Now, in our text in John 1 we find Andrew’s at it again, but this time he’s bringing his brother Peter to Jesus.

How does he do this?

How is it that this relatively quiet man bring so many to Jesus, when many Christians have trouble bringing even ONE person to Jesus?

ILLUS: Back in May 2002 the Lilly Endowment sponsored a survey that involved interviews with 300,000 worshippers in 2,200 churches, representing 8 denominations. And they found that that ¾’s of churchgoers reported they came to church the 1st time because someone invited them.

Yet 54 percent of those surveyed said they had not invited anyone to church in the past year.

(Pentecostal Evangel, June 23, 2002, pg 11)

Apparently, a lot of Christians just don’t invite people to come to Jesus.

So, why would Andrew do this while many Christians don’t?

Well… part of the reason was that Andrew believed that Jesus was worth knowing.

John chapter 1 tells us that Andrew was one of the followers of John the Baptist, and one day John saw Jesus pointed Him out to Andrew and another man “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

And Andrew took John seriously.

He left John and began to follow Jesus.

And the very first thing Andrew did after meeting with Jesus was – he went and brought his brother Peter. Why?

• Well, Jesus was the Lamb of God everybody had been waiting for.

• He was the Messiah that had been promised.

• He was the one sent by God to change the lives of His people.

And Andrew loved his brother too much to have him miss out on that.

The problem with many church goers is they see church as a religious exercise.

They go to church because it’s what Christian people do, but too often they see it as a chore, a responsibility, a duty to be fulfilled.

It’s not necessarily that they don’t love Jesus, it’s just that they don’t realize the eternal significance of what they’re in to.

They know the Scriptures where Jesus says

"I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty” John 6:35 (talking about the spiritual hunger and thirst people have in their lives).

And "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies” (teaching us that Christians don’t need to fear death… resurrection) John 11:25