Towel Vs. Sword

If you have your Bibles, I’d like you to turn to the book of John. We’ve

been in a series entitled, "the Twelve." This is a series about twelve

common men that had an uncommon calling that Jesus chose to do life with. You know, if there’s anybody at all that could have done a solo

project, it was Jesus. Jesus could have done everything He did on earth and on the cross with the power of the resurrection. He could have done all of that by Himself. But it’s interesting to me that Jesus made the decision to have some people join the journey. And He selected a real diverse group. We’ve been studying each of them and looking at them individually, been looking at them together.

One of the things we looked at is how Jesus selected some that were siblings. How many know that it’s hard sometimes to get brother and sister to get along when they’re eating cereal, much less to go somewhere for three years together. And so Jesus put two sibling brothers together on His team. He put some that were unknown. He put some that were known, like Thomas who we learned, when we hear the word "Doubting Thomas" in our culture. We even hear a lot about Judas. And we didn’t cover Judas in this setting, but I did a special message on Judas online. So it will be available tonight on the website. You can go to our website and check out a message that I did about the disciple, Judas. I did that in my home and just talked about a few things for a few minutes about what I learned from studying the life of Judas. It’s interesting to me even though we see Judas, he’s got horns growing out of his head and he walks around with a pitchfork, guess what? He was not like that. He was one that was chosen just like the rest of them. Something went bad. And we want to find those things out.

But Jesus chose all kinds. He chose ordinary. They were ordinary men. They were common men. They were not men that had their bath water drawn by a butler. They were not men that every morning when they got up there was freshly squeezed orange juice, like many of you who have maids and you have people pull your car around in the morning. They Benedict your eggs and all of that kind of thing. If that even makes any sense. That wasn’t planned, I promise you. But you know, they were common people just like us. Common finances, common family, common work, things like that. But obviously there was something about the twelve. And we’ve studied that for six weeks. There was something about the twelve that got Heaven’s attention that got the attention of the King of Kings. And I believe there are many things, I believe there were gifts, I believe there were talents, I believe there were traits about them, there were skills about them that could be used for the Kingdom.

But I believe there were two things that really interest me about when Jesus selected them. One of them is, it tells us that Jesus embraces diversity, that everybody doesn’t have to be the same. Aren’t you glad that church doesn’t have to be the gathering of the cookie cutters? Can I have an amen? It doesn’t have to be all the cookie cutters. Sometimes there’s spiritual environments where everybody’s got to raise their hand just the same way. "You’re not raising your hand right. You do it this way, not that way." Or you’ve just got to worship one way. We embrace a diverse expression of worship here, a diverse expression of how you connect with God. I’m kind of out there, a little ADD at times. I mean, I’m moving at a funeral, come on somebody. That’s just my flow. But other people are kind of stoic and if the Holy Ghost moves on them, they just kind of do this right here. And it’s a moment and it’s cool and it’s great, whatever God does. Now let me tell you this. God always wants to move you outside of your comfort zone. Come on somebody. So

wherever your comfort zone is, He’s always wanting you to step outside of that. And so He always wants us to do that. He doesn’t want us to be tripping on ego and tripping on identity and so caught up in self-awareness. So Jesus was looking for a diverse group.

And the other thing I think that was real cool is that Jesus saw potential in these disciples that they didn’t even see themselves. Have you ever had a coach or a teacher in a positive light see something about you that you didn’t even see yourself? They say, "You know what, I believe you could be good at this." Or sometimes there’s been a mentor in our life that says, "Man, you’ve got it going on here." "You think I can do that?" "Yeah, I think you can do it." "Well, my goodness, let me try it." You feel good about yourself. Now in some cases we have people that do the opposite. We have coaches that run us down. Sometimes, even in our parent zone, we’ve come from a home maybe that there was the tragedy of always being put down. "You ain’t good for nothing. You ain’t ever... I’ll tell you what," all this kind of stuff. But Jesus saw people and saw potential. Not only does God want us to be a people of faith, I’ll tell you some good news. God is a God of faith. He wants us to give Him faith. But you know what, He has a lot of faith in looking at our life, believing that we can be the man, believing that we can be the woman that He’s intended us to be.