If you have your Bibles and want to follow along, we will be looking at the gospel of Mark 1:14. If you have been here for a while, you know we are going through a series called The Story. When we talk about the story, we are talking about God’s story as told through the people, places, and events of the Bible. For the last few weeks, we have been in the part of the story called The New Testament Story, and we have been looking at the story of Jesus. Today, we are going to look at the story of Jesus’ calling of the first four disciples. We are going to look at what he may have meant when he used those two words “follow me”. A little bit of context. About three weeks ago, I introduced the story of John the Baptist. You may recall that he was this wild sort of guy who dressed in camel hair and ate honey and bugs and went around shouting about the kingdom of God coming around and people needed to repent. Jesus showed up one day out of the blue and asked John if he would baptize him. After a little bit of hesitation, John the Baptist agreed to do so and he baptized Jesus. If you were here last week, you may have heard my good friend, Nick C, where he talked about how after Jesus was baptized, he was led into the desert by the spirit of God where he would be tempted by Satan for 40 days and 40 nights. This week, we are going to begin to follow the actually ministry of Jesus. We are going to look at how after John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the good news of God.
We don’t have time to look at the passages that explain what was going on with John the Baptist at the time, but some of you may be aware that John the Baptist tended to do a lot of things and say things that were on his mind. He would tend to upset people. In this particular case, he upset King Herod. Apparently he insulted King Herod because King Herod had married his brother’s wife and John didn’t think that was a good idea and basically he started talking about it. Herod got so upset that he wanted to kill John the Baptist, but he knew that the Jewish people saw John the Baptist as a prophet of God, so he was nervous about that. As luck would have it for Herod, a situation came up that allowed him to basically make sure that John the Baptist would die. The story goes that somebody threw a birthday party for King Herod. During that party his daughter decided she was going to do some sort of a dance number. When she was finished, King Herod was so impressed that he asked the daughter what she wanted as a gift. What she said was I would like John the Baptist’s head on a platter. This made Herod a little nervous but with all the guests around, he saw no option but to agree with her request. He had John the Baptist beheaded and the head was brought up to her who turned around and gave the head to her mother.
We know that this passage pretty much introduces the idea that John the Baptist is leaving the picture. We see that Jesus is now coming along and picking up where John the Baptist left off. So much so that he begins to sound like John the Baptist preaching a very similar sounding message. It goes on to say “He is proclaiming the good news of God.” When we think about the good news of God, a lot of us have the idea of what the good news might be. If you are a Christian for a while, you know that the goods news has something to do with Jesus dying on the cross for our sins. If I was to say this week I have an assignment for you, you are supposed to go out when you go to work or on the bus, you are going to explain to somebody on the bus the good news of Jesus Christ. How many of you would be really excited to do that? Not too many. There are a few. It is a little bit hard to do. It is hard to summarize it. If you have been in the church for some time, you know that there is an easy method to do that. It is the idea of talking to somebody and sometime during the conversation you bring up the conversation about death and you say if you were to die tonight, would you go to heaven? The typical answer is I am not sure. I really don’t know. About that time, you would tell them why they probably won’t go to heaven. The fact is they won’t go to heaven because they are sinners. In fact, we are all sinners. Because we are sinners and God is holy, there has been this huge gap created between us and God. God cannot come into the presence of sinful man. We also know, as the story goes, that God in his infinite grace, love, and mercy, sent his son Jesus to die on the cross for our sins. In fact, you may even pull out a diagram that would look something like this. It is very easy to do on a napkin. You have us on the left side, the people full of sin. Romans 3:23 says “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Then you have God on the other side and you have this huge gap between us. The gap represents death and getting what we deserve. Romans 6:23 says “The wages of sin is death.” The good news is that God stepped in and sent his son to die on the cross for our sins. The righteous for the unrighteous. 1 Peter talks about how we are then reconnected and brought back into a relationship with God. That is pretty straight forward. That is the good news as we know it.
But I suspect that when Jesus was talking about the good news, he probably wasn’t thinking in terms of a diagram like this. He probably wasn’t even thinking about a gap or that sort of thing. He was thinking probably a little bit larger than what we normally would consider salvation, even the salvation experience. Jesus begins to connect this idea of salvation, of the good news, to the Kingdom of God. By Jesus coming along and beginning to shout about the kingdom of God coming what he is saying is this kingdom is available right now. Salvation is not just about getting your free pass into heaven. Salvation is experiencing the kingdom of God that has been made available now suddenly by the coming of Jesus Christ. Jesus goes on to say “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near.” As a side note, when we talk about the idea of the word time, the Greeks had generally two types of time. One time was basically kronos which was chronological time as we think of time on a clock or a specific date. But they had another time that they would refer to as kairos time. It is a unique period of time. Jesus is saying that all the preliminary stuff that started way back in the Old Testament, the things we read about Adam and Eve back in the garden, all the way up until the divided kingdom, those things were just a preliminary to this one unique event that is happening now that he has begun his ministry. The Kingdom of God is now pressing back into the human realm, into the human kingdom. Into really the kingdom of Satan. There is an amazing thing going on. This would excite the people. As I said a few weeks ago when I talked about John the Baptist. When he started talking about the kingdom of God, people’s ears began to perk up because the Jewish people longed for another king. A king that would be just like King David that would last forever. They were relying on the promises. When John the Baptist talked about the Kingdom of God, their ears perked up. But Jesus is taking this idea of the kingdom of God and is expanding the notion of it. He is not going to limit the Kingdom of God to some desires of a small group of people. A people who desire to have their own king so they can be protected and have their own military. He was thinking of the kingdom as a spiritual kingdom that would satisfy the desires not just for the Jewish people but for every person who ever walked this earth. He would satisfy the desire for peace, for joy, for love, and also satisfy the desire for forgiveness of sins and the reconciliation with God that would come through it. The good news is that this kingdom is available right now. He talks about the Kingdom of God is so near that you might even begin to witness it. In other words, when you begin to see miracles taking place that is a sign that you have the kingdom of God intersecting with the kingdom of man. That is when miracles happen. When the Kingdom of God begins to cross paths with the kingdom of man, you begin to see miracles.
I am going to talk about kingdom a lot throughout the summer. This kingdom idea shouldn’t be that foreign to you. If you have been raised in the church, whether Catholic or Protestant, you are probably very accustom to saying the Lord’s Prayer. You all know that. I think what happens is we often get so caught up in whether we are going to say “trespasses, deeds, or sins” that we are not even thinking about the most important line at the beginning. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What do you think you are asking for in that prayer? Do you think you are asking for heaven somewhere down the road? You are asking for the Kingdom of God to come into existence right now. To begin to make itself manifest in every nook and cranny of society including your very own life. That is what you are asking for when you pray the Lord’s Prayer. Bring that kingdom on now because I know it is available and I want to see it. I want to begin to experience the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven someday. What Jesus goes on to say basically is that this kingdom reality is available to anyone who chooses to repent and believe the good news. I don’t have time to really discuss this idea of belief that much. We will be talking about it a lot over the next few months. Belief is beyond some sort of a mental acknowledgment or mental assent. It is a belief that results in some sort of an active engagement, an active obedience with the thing that you believe in. We can believe that airplanes fly. It says you really believe it if you are willing to step on the airplane and let it fly you across the United States or across the world. That is the belief we are talking about. The belief that results in some sort of action.
But I want to briefly address this idea of repent. A few weeks ago when I talked about John the Baptist, I used the word repent. I think I used it kind of incorrectly. I said repentance was this idea that you are walking this way and then it is the idea of turning around and going this way. Often, in Christian circles, it is accompanied with some sense of sadness and some sense of remorse. You repent of your sins and that sort of thing. That is not totally wrong, but it is not totally right. The Greek word that we translate repent is based on the word metanoia. It is the idea of rethinking things. In this particular context, it is rethinking the life you are living now and maybe you might realize it is time to change your life. To go into a new direction. Eugene Peterson, who wrote The Message, I like the way that he says it best. He translated it at this “Time is up. God’s kingdom is here. Change your life and believe the good message.” That is what it is about. Repentance is about a change of a way of thinking about things that results in a changed life. A changed life which involves changed behaviors, changed attitudes, changes in ways you think, you do. Really what it is for these particular people at that particular time, it is out-of-the-box thinking. This is brand new stuff. This is newer for them than it is for us. Jesus knows that. He has three years to try and explain it to these guys. He ends up recruiting about a half a dozen men that he can be able to sit with and begin to explain this whole concept of the kingdom and what it means to live in the kingdom. What is the kingdom? What does it mean to live there? How do you act in the kingdom?
As the story goes, “As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. ‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will make you fishers of men.’ At once they left their nets and followed him.” As a side note, we know that Simon is the same Simon who later Jesus calls Peter who is the same Peter who follows Jesus and then is the first person to recognize Jesus as Lord and then later on he says he will never deny him as Lord. He turns around before the crucifixion and denies that he even knows him. Ultimately, after the resurrection, becomes the greatest evangelist that the church has ever known. That is the Simon we are talking about here. Whatever the case, they were doing their job. They were fishing. Jesus walks around and for some reason they just drop their nets and follow him. Then as the story goes “When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.” This is one of those passages that I suspect you may have read quite a bit. You have read it over and over and it doesn’t jump out at you. There is nothing really that exciting about it. It is pretty simple. Jesus is walking along the lake. He sees some fishermen. He says follow me and they follow him. That is pretty much it. I don’t know about you, but I have often wondered why would they follow him so quickly. What is it about Jesus? They didn’t know Jesus as Lord at that time. Nobody knows for certain, but some people speculate that maybe the fishing wasn’t so good and they thought Jesus was going to offer them a better job or something. There is no indication that that is true. The more likely reason is that they knew that Jesus was someone who was gaining a reputation as a Rabbi, which is basically a Jewish teacher. In that day, Rabbis were a hot commodity. People sought out Rabbis because they wanted to learn the things that a Rabbi could teach them. The best Rabbis were really in high demand. So much so that when some of the students would apply to be a student of the Rabbi, they would get rejected because they couldn’t cut the mustard and they would have to turn back to their vocation which some suspect might even have been the case with these four fishermen. Whatever the case, they knew about Jesus. They had heard about Jesus. They knew he was someone worth following. So immediately they dropped their nets and they followed him. They began to sit at his feet and listen to his teachings.
I was trying to think of a modern illustration just so you can understand really what is going on. What came to me is a baseball illustration. Let’s say you are a teenager and you really love baseball and you decide you want to be a professional baseball player. You are practicing baseball down at the batting cage and all of a sudden out of the blue, the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates shows up and he says follow me. What do you think the kid would do? Hopefully he would follow him. He would be a fool not to follow him. That is really what is going on here. That is the caliber. That is what the disciples are thinking. This guy is worth following. So much so that I am going to leave my business behind and I am going to follow this guy. Just as the kid who started baseball and decided to follow the baseball manager wouldn’t really have an understanding how the manger is going to teach him. Really doesn’t even have an idea what he is going to be taught other than it is going to be something about baseball. We find the same thing with the disciples. They don’t know Jesus’ mission at the time. They really don’t know what Jesus is about. They don’t know his teaching method. Just like the kid in the baseball analogy, one thing they knew was that when they dropped their nets and decided to follow Jesus, they were establishing a very special relationship. A relationship that we refer to as disciples. Disciple-teacher. Disciple is a churchy word. We have a hard time grasping that because we don’t talk about disciples out in the working world or the real world so to speak. The bottom line is a disciple is an apprentice. There is an author some of you may have heard of, a guy by the name of Dallas Willard. He says that a disciple is an apprentice, simply someone who has decided to be with another person under appropriate conditions in order to become capable of doing what that person does or to become what that person is. That is what an apprentice is. When these guys decided to follow Jesus, they were signing up for a teacher-apprentice-type relationship. They were basically saying I am willing to spend a devoted time with you. I am willing to be with you in order that I can be like you and do the things that you do. Especially in regards to what it is to be a disciple in this new thing called the Kingdom of God. Because, again, they didn’t have a clue what he was talking about when he was referring to the Kingdom of God. But we know, if we read through the gospels, the Kingdom of God is kind of a wacky type of place. Some refer to it as the upside-down kingdom. It just doesn’t make sense because it is a place where you are expected to do strange things like love your enemy. Enemy smacks you on one side of the face, turn and let him smack the other side of your face. That is weird. What about the idea that the rich in the Kingdom of God often become poor and the poor are the ones that turn around and become rich. The social outcasts seem to get a better status than the social elite. The kingdom of God is a strange place to be. In order to learn how to live within this new thing that is breaking in, they have to spend time with Jesus so he can teach them what the Kingdom of God is about and what it is like to live in that kingdom and most importantly what it means to become like Jesus so you can live in that kingdom.
So these four disciples were picked, and as the story goes, eight other disciples were picked. With the exception of Judas, they all began to be apprentices of Jesus. To sit under his feet. To listen to his teaching. To try to imitate what he did. To try to be like him. When they got done, they basically went on and taught others to do the same. They continued to do that. They continued to carry out the Great Commission: to go and make disciples. That is why all through history we have people that still sit under the feet of Jesus. That still technically could be called apprentices of Jesus. Disciples of Christ. That is really all I have to say about the story of the calling of the first disciples.
I thought I would leave you with a question to ponder. I know some of you like to talk about sermons when you get home. I would just say ask yourself this question; are you an apprentice of Jesus? Before you answer, think about it. If you are a Christian and have been for a number of years, hopefully the response is yes I am an apprentice of Jesus. The question is are you a good apprentice of Jesus? By virtue of being a Christian, you are naturally a disciple. You are naturally an apprentice of Jesus Christ. If you did a word search in the New Testament, you would see that the word disciple is used 260 times where Christian is used 3 times. To be a Christian is to be a disciple which is basically to be an apprentice. The question for some of you is are you a very good apprentice? I suspect there are others who maybe are not sure. Maybe you are a convert to Christianity. In other words, at some point in your life, maybe you were born into it or you did the confirmation thing or you got baptized. What you thought you were buying into was Christianity. I am now a convert of Christ. I am now a Christian. But unfortunately, you never made the link between being a Christian and being a disciple. So you begin to see discipleship as an option. I have an option to become a disciple. I am a Christian and that is all that matters because I am in the door. I am secure in heaven. In fact, if you suggest that I should be a disciple, I think you are implying that I should work towards my salvation, which I am not. You cannot separate Christianity from discipleship. Having said that, some of you aren’t to blame for that type of thinking. It is actually the leaders of the church, this church probably and the church universal, who are at fault. In many cases, I think this is prevalent throughout Christianity, our main purpose is to get people saved. Get them in the door. Whatever it takes. That is good news. But it is not so good news if you begin to see that as the end goal. Becoming saved is just the beginning of a life of discipleship. A life of being an apprentice of Jesus. Which means a life of sitting at the feet of Jesus pretty much every day or as much as you can get there so he can teach you about this weird thing called the Kingdom of God and how to live in it right now. Not when you die down the road.
The good news is that we know he has given us his own spirit, the Spirit of the living Christ, the Holy Spirit to be with us and guide us and teach us how to do this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you are someone who has figured out how to slow down and spend time with Jesus more than five minutes in the morning or night, if you are willing to sit there and be silent and listen, you may find that Jesus may begin to teach you some things about the kingdom. He may begin to show you that everything that is given to us is really a gift. It is a gift for the kingdom. From every breath you take and every heartbeat that beats. To even finding a penny on the ground or an unexpected check in the mail. Those are gifts of God’s grace. Those are manifestations of the Kingdom of God. You begin to see that in a new way. You begin to see creation in a new way. You begin to see creation as not this thing that is disconnected to our world, but you begin to see it as some huge portrait out there. A beautiful portrait and you begin to see every animal and every blue sky and every night sky. You begin to see the very fingerprints of God upon that portrait. You begin to see the character of God as you sit and meditate on the night sky. You begin to see people differently. You begin to understand that in the Kingdom of God, everyone has a divine imprint on them. Everyone. Even the people you don’t like. In fact, that is what makes you able to like them because you begin to look past their faults, the things that bug you, which we all have, and you begin to see the image of Christ in that person and you help them to draw it out. When you sit before Christ, it is like he is pulling back this curtain and giving you this quick glimpse of the kingdom of God in so many ways. When you train your eyes to see it, you can’t not see it. It becomes everywhere. So he shows you what the kingdom of God is but then he also teaches you how to live within it.
To be honest, no one is equipped to live in this new kingdom without taking on the character of Jesus Christ. As you sit with Jesus and you are intent on allowing him to deal with your character flaws, which again we all have, he will work on them. For example, I don’t think anybody here has a problem with the desire for controlling things or maybe power, but I think there are some of us, including myself, that sometimes struggle with the idea that this person may have more control than me. This person may have more power than me. You get upset. Your insides start churning. Before you know it, you are sending off an email because you feel like you have to control the situation. You have to gain the power back that someone is trying to take back from you. When you sit at the feet of Jesus, you learn that in the Kingdom of God, there is no power shortage. We haven’t even begun to tap into the power that is available out there, and we are worried about a little bit of power that somebody else might get. The whole power that has taken place throughout the entire universe is at our fingertips. We are worried about not having control. We are wasting our thoughts. As you sit at the feet of Christ, you begin to see that and you begin to allow God to work on that in you. Maybe you are somebody who has a problem with anger. Maybe you lose your temper for whatever reasons at your work or with your family. You just go before God and say I need your help. I need you to help me identify the source of this anger. I just don’t know where it is coming from. If you sit there long enough, you might get a clue or at least you might be able to understand what are the situations that arise that the anger begins to manifest itself. You say okay God help me with this. He will help you. Probably seven out of ten times you will get it wrong but that means three out of ten times you will get it right. Don’t worry because Jesus will stick with you until you get it right. If you really are intent on changing, you revisit that over and over until you get it. Just when you think you got it, he will come back and give it to you again and see if you still got it. Maybe you are somebody who struggles with depression or anxiety or stress. Maybe you live in a sense of fear. Again, we know that is not a Christian thing. As you begin to expand your view of the kingdom, your vision for the kingdom, you begin to realize I have nothing to be afraid of. I am safe in the Kingdom of God. It is safe here. There is nothing to worry about. There is nothing that man or woman can do to me. I don’t have to feel this sense of anxiety. I don’t have to feel this sense of stress. As you learn these things, as you sit at Jesus’ feet and he is dumping on this information as fast as you can get it, pretty soon you begin to experience a certain amount of transformation. You can actually look back on your life and see that you don’t seem to get as angry as you used to be. I don’t feel the need to control things any more. You actually begin to see you are different. That is what it is all about. It is about transformation. I hate to say it, but I know people, whether it is in this church or my old church in Oregon, that if I went back there after ten years they are exactly the same. Same crabby people. Same fearful people. Whatever it is. It is because they have not availed themselves to Jesus Christ and the kingdom life that he wants to give us.
As we learn these things, we get excited about it because we see that they actually do work. When you sit at the feet of Jesus, he will teach you. You sit there and you begin to change and then you go on to tell somebody else the good news. That is the real good news. The good news is not so much that if I was to die tonight I would go to heaven. That is good news but the better news is that, whether or not I live through the night and through all the days that follow, the Kingdom of God is made open to us right now. A new life is made available. A life that is much better than the life that this world can give you. The only requirement is repent. Repent and believe the good news of Jesus Christ. Change your way of thinking. Think about the way you are acting. Think about the way you are living. Think about whether that is really working for you. Think about just some of the things I have said and you tell me what is the better life. The kingdom of man, the kingdom of self, or the Kingdom of God.
As we go into this time of prayer, as Debbie plays the piano, I just ask you to consider a couple things. One is are you an apprentice of Jesus? I suspect, and speaking for myself, I may be an apprentice, I am just not a very good one at times. I believe that repentance is not just a word that is used for people that need to give up their sins or convert to Christianity; repentance is a word for every one of us every single day. If you are walking through life and feeling the knot in your neck or feeling angry at somebody that is an indication that you are walking outside the kingdom. If you are not feeling the fruit of the spirit that is talked about in Galatians, it is an indication that you have stepped outside the kingdom reality and back into your false reality. What you have to do is decide am I going to change my ways and enter back into the kingdom of God into the safety of the kingdom. We know there are people here who, for whatever reason, never even stepped foot in the Kingdom of God. In fact might not even have heard about it. For those people too, I would ask that you would evaluate your life. Evaluate the life you are living right now in this world in Bellevue today and decide is this something that is really leading to something very good and positive and the fulfilment that I desire, the hope that I desire, the peace that I desire, the love that I want, the sense of significance I want? If you say no to that, I invite you to repent. Rethink the way you are living. Change your life. Begin to take the first step into the kingdom. A step that would begin today and carry on for all eternity. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news.”
