Luke 6:12-16 - Choosing Of The 12 Apostles

Some Sundays start out a little more hectic than others. Here I am, supposed to preach today, and I left my Bible at home. I was not off to a good start. Fortunately, my dear wife got it to me in time for the first service, but my brain has been a little mushy ever since. So, we're going to get through this as best we can. Hopefully, you've had days like that. Another interesting thing today is that Scott has a preaching calendar in his office, so those of us who are elders know when we're speaking and what we're speaking on. It gives us lots of time to prepare. Mike and I were laughing the other day. I said, 'Well, what did you end up with?' I ended up with four verses, and three of them are names. You can go into the Greek, and Peter is still Peter, and John is still John. There is a lot to bring forward today, but it's kind of fun getting this one together.

In 1980, there was a group of college hockey players put together to represent the United States at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. People whose names nobody knew, and they were going to go up against the best of the best in the world. Nobody thought they had a chance because the Russian hockey team dominated hockey, as did the Northern European hockey clubs. They began to play, they began to win match after match, and before you knew it, they were in the finals against the Soviet Union and they won. We call it the 'Miracle on Ice.' If you're old enough, you watched it live; if you're not, maybe you saw the movie. I see some heads shaking. You have to have been born after 1980 to make that happen, which means, yes, I am older than that.

Moving forward, here's what I want us to understand: this is a group of individuals nobody thought had a chance. When we look at this list of apostles, we're going to ask, 'Why these guys?' It doesn't make sense, and yet we're going to find out God had a much bigger plan in store for them. There are a couple of things that we want to take note of, though, beginning in verse 12.

It says, 'In these days He went out to the mountain to pray, and all night He continued in prayer to God.' So, the first thing we want to consider is what was happening in those days. Why did He take this retreat? If you'll remember what we've looked at in the last few weeks, the persecution was starting to pick up in Jerusalem, so Jesus moves into the region of Galilee. He begins to teach, He begins to perform miracles, and there is a multitude that is following Him. They love to go wherever Jesus goes. But their motivation is they just want to see what's the next cool thing Jesus is going to do. And secondarily, they're looking for, 'What can He do for me today? What's in it for me?' But on top of this, you also have a group of religious leaders, the Pharisees, who are beginning to oppress Jesus and His followers because of His teaching and because of the things that He's doing. We studied last week about the man who was healed on the Sabbath, and the Pharisees are like, 'No, no, no, you can't be doing that,' or the fact that Jesus' followers were eating a little kernel of wheat in the field, 'Oh, you can't be doing that.'

So, the persecution is increasing, Jesus knows His time is short, and He knows that the message that He brings has to go forth, so He retreats to the mountain to pray. One of the things that I want to put in front of you—if you don't make this a practice in your life already—is to find time to take some retreats with God. Get alone, get away, take your Bible, take your pen, take your notebook, and let Him talk. About 20-some-odd years ago, I began making this a practice. Every year, two or three times a year, I will go away somewhere and take a retreat just to listen to what God has to say to me. I've taken retreats in the middle of forests in Pennsylvania, in a cabin; this year was Fredonia, Kansas, places where I'm not going to be interrupted, where I can really listen to what God has to say to me. So many times, we settle for drive-through prayer: 'Hi, God, this morning I need some health, I'd like you to bless my family, give me a great day, please take care of my kids, my wife, my dog, amen. See you at the next window.' It's all about us, it's all surface. What God's looking for from us is that relationship: 'God, I just want to spend time with you. I want to hear what you have to say.' Jesus is getting ready to make the most critical decision about who He's going to entrust this gospel to, and what He does is He gets away and He prays. And here's the other thing: He prays all night. I don't know about you, but I'm very ADD, so sometimes when I want to go to prayer, I start off with, 'Father, I'm here today,' and the next thing you know, I've got '70s song lyrics in my head and then I'm quoting lines from movies from the '80s. Where did that come in? That's not what I was wanting to happen. Part of this is, we've got to retreat away; we've got to get to a place where we can get still, and we've got to wait long enough that we can get still. In the mornings, I do my Bible study and prayer time in my office. One thing I have to do is leave my computer shut down, the screen off, and I have to flip my phone over if I intend to have any kind of quality time with God because the temptation is to look at the distraction.