Matthew 4:17-22 KJV From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. [18] And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. [19] And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. [20] And they straightway left their nets, and followed him. [21] And going on from thence, he saw other two brethren, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in a ship with Zebedee their father, mending their nets; and he called them. [22] And they immediately left the ship and their father, and followed him.
I. INTRODUCTION—THE CALL
-Os Guiness writes about it in his book, The Call, that something, that feeling within that presses on all of us to give in to what some may call the greatest good, the ultimate end, the meaning of life, or whatever you may choose to call it.
-Any person who is given much to thinking at all has given that idea a thought about their own lives. To find and fulfill the purpose of life comes to us at all seasons of life and will manifest itself in a varying, sometimes dizzying set of choices.
• Teenagers feel it as the world of freedom beyond home and school tends them with the choices.
• Graduate students confront it with an excitement that the world is my oyster sort of mentality only to find that as they open one choice, it closes the door on others.
• Those in their early thirties know it when their daily work assumes its own brute reality beyond their earlier considerations of the wishes of their parents, the fashions of their peers, and the allure of salary and career prospects.
• Those in mid-life face it when a mismatch between their gifts and their work reminds them that they are square pegs that have been forced into round holes.
• Those in their forties and fifties with enormous success suddenly come up against it when their accomplishments raise questions concerning the social responsibility of their success and deeper still, the purpose of their lives.
• Those in later years are suddenly faced with the questions; have I wasted my life or have I invested my life?
-All of us are provoked, I believe by God, to make sure that there is some call that gets our attention. If we are to be submitted to the will of God, it is a call that has a spiritual flare to it. All of us, every single one of us, have a call that God wants to put into our lives. It is a call that shapes the whole direction of what we do and who we become.
• It is a demanding call that will overpower all other desires.
• It is a relentless call that pleads for action and attention.
• It is a burdening call that will put concern in your heart.
• It is a restless call that will pull sleep from your eyes.
• It is a stretching call that will pull its best from your life.
There was a diary of a nurse that was saved from World War I. In this diary, this nurse who worked in one of the frontline hospitals wrote of every nerve and fiber being tested by the steady stream of suffering that she saw in those young soldiers. Little sleep and poor meals were afforded to the medical staff but this nurse wrote in her diary, “Actually for the first time in my life I begin to feel as a normal being should, in spite of the blood and anguish in which I move. I really am useful, that is all, and I am too busy to remember myself, past, present and future.
-I pray that every single one of us in this house determine that we will not waste our lives on the frivolous and insignificant!
There is a blog that I read usually every day. I am somewhat in awe of this fellow, Tim Challies, on www.challies.com. He has written a blog every day for the last 6 ½ years. For 2010, he has undertaken a different challenge at the 10 Million Words blog. His task is to read the Top Ten books on the New York Best Seller List for 2010 in the non-fiction section.
He recently wrote a book after having read a biography about George Carlin, who was listed as one of America’s top comedians. Honestly I had no idea who this man was but apparently he was a godless heathen who did everything he could to mock God.
The following is what Tim Challies wrote about this book:
I love to read a biography in which an old man, in the waning days of his life, reflects on the lessons he has learned in the seven or eight decades given to him. There is something inspiring about hearing a man reminisce about the past and pass along the wisdom of the years. I hate to read a biography in which an old man, in the waning days of his life, describes a life given over only to his own pleasure. Unfortunately, Last Words, George Carlin’s posthumously-published autobiography, falls squarely into the latter category.
Carlin was, of course, a stand-up comedian, for decades one of the most famous comics and one who is regarded as among the America’s greatest. He filled concert halls, was a regular guest on the most popular television shows, recorded bestselling albums and taped live performances that continue to air today. His name was known around the world and he made himself a wealthy man. By some standards this made him a singularly successful individual.
Yet this is a story of an utterly wasted life. Carlin shows himself to be utterly self-focused, self-centered, self-obsessed. Shaped by his Irish Roman Catholic heritage, he turned quickly against the faith of his childhood and gave himself up to whatever pleasures the world could offer. The decades, the years of his greatest successes, were full of hard living that included a crushing drug addiction, alcoholism and the inevitable physical effects of both. Even when he fell in love he lived life for no higher power or purpose than himself and his own success. He was away from home so much that his wife filled the emptiness with alcohol, and still he did not lessen his workload; he and his wife did drugs and fought viciously in front of their young daughter who soon got into drugs as well, even sharing with her parents; even when his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he stayed on the road, ending up far away when she slipped into unconsciousness and died.
Not surprisingly, by the end of his life Carlin had succumbed to despair. “I no longer identify with my species. I haven’t for a long time. I identify more with carbon atoms. I don’t feel comfortable or safe on this planet. From the standpoint of my work and peace of mind, the safest thing, the thing that gives me most comfort, is to identify with the atoms and the stars and simply contemplate the folly of my fellow species members. I can divorce myself from the pain of it all. Once, if I identified with individuals I felt pain; if I identified with groups I saw people who repelled me. So now I identify with no one. I have no passion anymore for any of them, victims or perpetrators, Right or Left, women or men.”
In the end, Carlin did not live long enough to finish his memoirs. Someone had to piece together his notes, fill in the relevant details, and send them out to the publisher. He died in 2008 at the age of 71. He went to stand before the God he denied, the God he despised (funny, isn’t it, how you can so despise someone you insist does not exist), the God he made a career out of mocking and belittling.
Some memoirs are written for fans only while others transcend only the most loyal audience. Last Words is definitely for fans only. Profane, loud, over-the-top, this book is an apt reflection of the man himself. A man who was driven by the desire to shock others, this book gives him the last laugh, one last chance to make his audience gasp at his own profanity, his own baseness. But somehow, when read in the context of his life, the jokes no longer seem so funny.
Verdict: Buy it if you’d like to learn how to waste a life.
-What a waste of a life! We cannot afford to do that with our own lives!
II. THE CALLING OF THE DISCIPLES
-It should be more than just a passing interest to us that Jesus called men who were of the common fabric of life to do His will. Perhaps nothing was more important than those twelve whom He chose to follow Him throughout that brief 3 ½ year ministry.
-Their lives were filled with double functions to the Lord.
• They were to be His friends but also His messengers.
• They were to share His closest company but they also had to carry on His work.
• They were to know His revelation but also His sorrow.
• They were given the message but it also had a mission with it.
-Whether His great mission was to be fulfilled depended entirely on how seriously and how much importance they were willing to be responsible to the call.
-These men were plain, bordering on illiterate, being called to the highest kind of work for God. No doubt they were colored by some of their prejudices and probably had some superstitions that were ingrained into them from Jewish society.
-The Lord was calling them away from an independence of their work and their life that boasted of material success. Imagine for a moment, these men walking home telling their parents, their wives, children, and friends that were leaving their nets to follow an itinerant preacher who was considered by some to be mad. Can you even begin to think of the scoffing, the ridicule, and even the reasoning these men had to endure for the sake of the call.
-The call of the Lord is a strange one at best. Every call from the Lord has its share of challenges.
A. The Challenge of Separation
Romans 1:1 KJV Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God,
-The challenge of separation to a call at the first thought is one that is unnerving and alarming. The call pulls us from the familiar and the friendly into a place of the unknown. We are suddenly unsure of ourselves in this great service for the Lord. Self-confidence disappears and we are brought into a place of treading waters of the deep.
-The call separates us. . .
• From our sin.
• From all of the temporary aims and purposes of life.
• From the cares and whims of our own flesh.
• From the worldly affairs that captivated us in early days.
-But of necessity this calling separates us to. . .
• Being living banks of spiritual reserves to carry others.
• Being an example of the power of the Gospel over sin.
• Being storehouse of doctrine to encourage others.
• Being a chosen vessel that is filled with hope to speak to others.
B. The Challenge of Self-Denial
-Another of the challenges of this calling is that one of self-denial. To really follow the Lord in His full purpose means that there will be an aspect of self-denial that comes to play in your life.
Anonymous—The secret of all success is to know how to deny yourself. Prove that you can control yourself, and you are an educated man; and without this all other education is good for nothing.
Tyron Edwards—He is one of the most noblest conquerors who carries on a successful warfare against his own appetites and passions, and has them under wise and full control.
O. P. Gifford—One never knows himself till he has denied himself. The altar of sacrifice is the touchstone of character.
-Whatever appetites that we have, when they are filled they will overpower our soul and force themselves into our actions. If those appetites are fleshly and worldly, if they are not restrained by the work of the Spirit, they will exhaust and consume us.
-But if a man will give himself to the hungers of revival, of prayer, of spiritual desire, so much can be accomplished for God.
-The call to drop their nets and leave them behind brought Peter and his brothers to fill their lives with a higher and greater purpose. To that point in life their chief business had been fishing but all changed when the Lord asked them to serve Him.
-That calling of life will come to all of us. Jesus came to a world that was absorbed in a struggle for physical existence and perhaps even more to pile up that wealth to show that someone had passed this way.
-But life is more than just the accumulation of things. The call challenges us to turn our attention from the problem of making a living to making a life.
III. CONCLUSION—J. T. PUGH
I heard another story recently about J. T. Pugh that probably fits well with this message. J. T. Pugh was raised by his two older sisters in an old clapboard sharecropper’s cabin in Noble, Louisiana. His father died when Brother Pugh was just. A tornado came through the town and he died in the tragedy of that storm. His mother died when he was just in his early teens and he was left with his two sisters to make the best of things as they could. He said that there never was a day in his life when he felt that he would just skip school and quit because he say it as a way out of the deep poverty that he was so accustomed to growing up with.
It just so happened that when he was in high school that a teacher noticed that Brother Pugh had a talent for public speaking and the more she noticed him the more convinced she became that he could perhaps do something with it. She would go home at night and tell her husband about Brother Pugh’s thirst to learn and better himself.
Her husband owned a general story in Noble but this man had some attachment to the VFW. One day, Brother Pugh was walking home and passed by this story when the man was out front sweeping off the porch. He called out and said, “Are you J. T. Pugh?” to which Brother Pugh answered, “Yes sir, I am.” He told Brother Pugh that his wife, the schoolteacher, had been telling him about how he had applied himself to the books and lessons and also that he had a knack for public speaking. The conversation went on and he mentioned that the VFW every year would sponsor a student to give a patriotic speech and that there were prizes that were awarded to the winners. If Brother Pugh was interested, the store owner told him he would work with him and it could be that he might win. He told Brother Pugh that every year that they gave out some very nice prizes to those who won and some were scholarships to various colleges around the country.
Time passed and Brother Pugh, the storeowner, and the schoolteacher, worked long hours after school with Brother Pugh crafting and working through his speech. Somewhere deep in his mind, Brother Pugh saw this as an opportunity for education to get him out of his deep seated poverty. So the work, the self-denial, was not a task but almost a relief.
The day arrived when he was to give his speech for the state competition. He did it flawlessly and won the competition at the state. The next step was the regional which took place in Memphis. On the night that they gathered in Memphis, all of the contestants were taken behind the stage and placed in individual rooms so that they could not hear the presentation of the other speakers. Brother Pugh was in his room pacing back and forth giving his speech to the air when there was a knock on his door. One of the assistants stepped in and said, “Jesse Truman Pugh, it’s your time!” Brother Pugh said in his mind, “Mister, you’re mighty right, it is my time!”
One of the finer details had been revealed to all of the contestants just before the competition had begun. The winner of the regional event would go on to New York City and compete nationally for a scholarship to Yale University. Brother Pugh felt like this was his ticket to get out of all of poverty and downtrodden life he had lived. “Mister, you’re mighty right, this is my time!”
He went out on that stage in Memphis and delivered his patriotic speech and he won the southeastern regional division. Now it was on to New York to deliver his speech and to get the scholarship from Yale. Opportunity had finally swung in his direction!
There was a space of time between the regional competition and the national competition and Brother Pugh had two sisters who were praying for him. The praying sisters lived in Tupelo, Mississippi where a very primitive Pentecostal Bible college had been set up. It so just happened the Brother Pugh went over to see them during the Christmas break. He said that when you get around praying people it has an effect on you and the Lord started pulling at him in Tupelo. His sisters were praying because they knew the end effect that would happen if he were to win this scholarship to Yale.
So late one night after going to church and getting in, his sisters went on to bed and Brother Pugh was sitting in front of a pot-bellied wood stove in that cold December winter. The Lord was dealing with him about a call to preach and he was having all of his excuses torn down by God. After a while, he reached into his pocket and pulled out that speech and began to pace back and forth while he read his speech on that tattered notebook paper. Finally at last, he walked over to that stove and opened up the door and tossed his speech into the roaring fire. However it happened, it did. . . Brother Pugh said that in that moment the Lord showed him his whole entire life. He won the speech contest, he went on to Yale and finished. The Lord showed him the woman he would have married. The Lord showed him the job he would have had and then it all turned and the Lord showed him a miserable life. One in which his material dreams would have been realized but his marriage would have been a prison trying to love a women who despised him, children out of control with no spiritual aspirations, and largely a very miserable life.
Fast forward in time to Deleon, Texas where he knelt down in a clapboard house by a threadbare, worn couch and asked, “Bessie, will you marry me? I can only promise you a life of wearing worn-out shoes, faded out dresses, without a car for several years, and you won’t have much. I can only promise you a life of doing the will of God but if you will have me, I will love you with all of my heart.” He said that with tears dripping off of her face, she said yes. That was well over sixty years ago. Now, Sister Pugh is stricken with Parkinson’s and Brother Pugh is confined to the house and takes care of her night and day. He feeds and dresses her. He takes care of every need. Someone asked, “Brother Pugh, how do you feel about it now?” He told them, “It is my happy privilege to do it because for years she has sacrificed for the call. . . and her reward will be great!”
-That is the power of the call!
Philip Harrelson
January 17, 2010
