Let me tell you a bit of a story!
When I was a young bloke I decided I needed a way to make a living so I did what was the usual back in the day and looked in the paper and applied for a few jobs, well quite a few. I finally got this job as an apprentice electrician.
The truth of the whole thing was I’d left school with the ability to read and write and a couple of bits of paper that said I could, I was not much of a scholar, in fact my opinion was that the best part of school was lunch and knock off time, both things that I excelled in.
So I started in the electrical trade and I started to learn, I learnt all sorts of useful things, things like wearing overalls, steel cap boots and safety glasses, driving the van, painting substation buildings, getting morning tea, getting pies and cream buns for lunch, picking up the fish and chips for Friday lunch, drilling holes, carrying stuff from the van to the boss and back to the van, I learnt various parts of the English language that I’d never heard before, I learnt about banking my money and once I’d started polytechnic I started to learn some theory and regulatory stuff that related to the electrical trade.
I learned how to apologise to customers for drilling up the outside of the wall chewing up the carpet and wall paper with my drill bit and not the inside of the wall, I learnt how to weld copper, I learnt how to drill holes in copper 1500 of them at a time, I learnt how to sweep the floor, wash the van, dig holes and play euka ( card game). I found out all sorts of stuff about life in general, old blokes war records, other guys views on politics, cars, women, marriage, religion, the Thatcher intervention in the Falkland Islands, how not to blow yourself up while draining LPG from a vehicle or earthing a power line or working on live electrical equipment or working with solvents…I learnt all sorts of useful stuff.
I guess that I had to be willing though to learn and someone or in my case a whole lot of someone’s had to be willing to teach me.
There was blokes like Pete the Painter who taught me how to paint substations, Kimo who taught me how to play cards when we should have been maintaining substations, Stan who gave me one of the best bit’s of advice, “get a home ownership account”, Graham and Neville the polytechnic tutors who taught me how to sit exams and pass as well as some fairly useful trade stuff and Eric Brown who taught me about accountability when he made me apologise to the lady whose wall I drilled up the outside of when I thought I could pass that buck to him.
All these people in some way assisted me in my life journey and my journey towards being an electrician and after four years from when I had started out knowing nothing about being an electrician, I was one and I could even spell it.
I’ve found in life that some people once they have left school give up on taking note of what others tell them, maybe because they found the whole experience of schooling a bit of a drag and lacking in freedom, I noticed some even gave up learning at school.
But I discovered that even once I got my electrical ticket I still had to learn other things as new stuff became available or when I worked in areas I hadn’t worked in before, it probably took around ten years to get to the point where anything could be thrown at me and I could handle it without stretching my brain to far. But occasionally I needed to seek out a bit of advice or hit the books.
I’ve told you this because over the next weeks I’m preaching on a series called, “From here to there?” This is not a series on how to become an electrician but it’s about growing in the Christian faith.
This series is about a word that you won’t even find in the Bible, ‘mentoring’.
You may be wondering why I want to talk about mentoring if it doesn’t get a mention in the bible. Well the thing is that Jesus is the best example of a mentor the world has known. “Jesus’ life exemplified all the great qualities found in the best leaders, the best friends, and the most loving people”.
( http://biblestudies.stores.yahoo.net/jeasyome.html : sited 11/02/2012)
As modern followers of Jesus we are here as a result of his earliest disciples doing what Jesus commanded them to do, we are here today in this building as a direct result of Jesus mentoring of his disciples. Jesus commanded them to teach or make learners of others.
The word disciple translates to learner. So Jesus said this to his disciples: Read Matthew 28:18-20 “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
There are reasons that I want to talk about this whole command, not just because it is referred to by some as the great commission. What I want to do is talk about this function of the disciples who were to make disciples of all nations:
Firstly because we are tied to that command and we know that the Good News of the gospel of Jesus Christ is light to a world that is lost in the dark.
Secondly because the bringing of this news to the people of this dark world allows people to encounter life change as they accept the Good News, confessing Jesus as their risen Lord and Saviour, they are set free then to live abundant lives.
Then what is heavenly comes to earth as the Father sends the Holy Spirit into lives to effect change. The will of the Father is done, His kingdom comes and what is done in heaven is done on earth.
Lastly is that this teaching we embrace is eternal, as we knowing it we will encounter eternal life.
This occurs through teaching and through learning because without knowledge there is no change, but as any student knows, knowledge without action is as much use as a gardening book on a shelf that has never been read.
The knowledge it contains will not help flowers to bloom or fruit and vegetables to be enjoyed and fill waiting stomachs. The pest control measures the gardening book promotes are nothing to slugs and caterpillars the if measures in the books pages are not put into action. White Cabbage Butterflies will continue to drift from plant to plant, garden to garden producing destroying grubs if the gardening book remains crisp and tight paged on a shelf. It’s only when it’s dog eared, a little dirt stained, smelling of derris dust and old seed packets are acting as book marks that the knowledge it contains is making a difference and is retained for action season after season in the gardeners brain.
So back to Jesus and his teaching!
1) We are all commanded by Jesus to be learners, we are all commanded to be teachers…you might say it doesn’t say that in the bible, the truth is though is that to be a teacher you have to be a learner…knowledge just like vision leaks, unless and I’d better qualify this if you have a photographic memory; and I know some of you have them, but if like me and you have a mind that does not retain everything you need to keep learning to retain knowledge. Even if you do have a flash memory that does not mean that there is not plenty still to learn.
The apostles were with Jesus for a period of three years, a period where he taught by word and example, we don’t have a full record of that time, the gospels give us Jesus teaching, his commands, his descriptions of the kingdom of heaven and the way he mentored and the way in which others interacted with him. We also see in the record that we have in Acts and the letters to the churches the ongoing teaching and learning that the disciples engaged in, to live as Jesus commanded them.
Why live as Jesus commanded?
2) Looking at Matthew 28 again we see in verse 18 that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus. This statement points to Jesus becoming The One through who all of God’s authority is given; his kingdom has dawned all powerful. Jesus would have said this about his authority so that his disciples could go in confidence; that what he was sending them out to do was what God his Father required. That his message was for all people not just Jewish people but for all nations, Jews and gentiles alike. Remember up until this time the Hebrew people believed they had a monopoly on the One True God.
3) The part of the sentence “baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit points the disciples to the Trinity nature of God, not that baptism is a way of making disciples any more than putting someone in a Salvation Army Uniform makes a person a disciple. To qualify this if we just brought someone in off the street and put them in a uniform would they be a Salvationist or a person in a Salvation Army uniform?
In the Salvation Army we don’t baptise as we a non-sacramental church, this does not mean we are anti-sacramental; just that we don’t see the sacraments as necessary to salvation; they are an outward symbolism of what should be occurring as an inward change. As we learn of the nature of God we should embrace Him as Father, Son and Holy Spirit especially as we encounter ‘the baptism’ of His Spirit, as we are born again.
Water baptism for the Jew was symbolism of crossing the Jordan River and entering into the promised land of Israel, for the Christian it is an outward symbolism of the new life that we enter into in Christ as The Holy Spirit engages with our spirit.
Some will say well if the Holy Spirit helps us to grow to be like Jesus what else do I need, why learn any more?
4) There are a good number of reasons, but today as I’m talking about mentoring I’m only going to focus on one reason our humanness. As we encounter the teaching of Jesus we have choices to make and in our humanness it’s easier to stay where we are. But, Jesus makes it clear to his disciples he is in authority, therefore everyone needs to know it! The disciples were to teach each everyone to obey everything that he had commanded, Jesus commands aren’t for some select group of people his commands were for all people, Jews, Arabs, Maoris, Samoans, English, French, Scots, Indians and for blokes like me who are made up of a fairly scattered ancestory.
Because in our humanness we are broken, we ignore God, we treat one another badly, we treat ourselves badly but we have a way out of the ties that bind us to our pasts, our behaviours, our lack of respect for one another and for God , away from actions that harm and into a life that is within God’s will.
How do we do this? We teach and we learn, we mentor and are mentored not restricting this to just here and just one another but living this outside these walls.
The thing that separates us from other living things is not just our opposable thumbs, not just our huge brains, but that while we are human, we are spiritual creatures, made in the likeness of God. As such God even came in the likeness of a man, truly and properly God and truly and properly man to teach His way of living.
So where to, we are to learn and we are to teach, we are to mentor one another as community, as the body of Christ who are called the Church. This does not just apply to us as Salvationists but to all the church.
Over the next weeks it is my aim to talk about how we do this how we embrace the teaching of Jesus, how we learn from the scriptures of both testaments, how we journey, mentoring and being mentored in our Christian walk and how we encounter and learn to listen to God as He walks with us on that journey.
All of us are in a place that is now, our here, what is it that God would have you learn to take you to there, that place where he wants you to be?
Today you may have come along expecting something a little different from this sermon; you may have been challenged to start a journey of learning about walking with God. We have a place here of prayer, if you want to be one who learns of Jesus, who encounters life change through a relationship with him this place of prayer is open.
