Twelve Ordinary Men Series

Introduction

I want to begin a series of sermons I am calling “The Apostles of Jesus.”

Given the time we will have each Sunday evening, we will only scratch the surface of the lives of the apostles of Jesus.

Nevertheless, I hope it whets your appetite to learn more about these men.

We tend to think of the apostles of Jesus as super-humans.

They were not.

Pastor John MacArthur wrote, “From our human perspective, the propagation of the gospel and the founding of the church hinged entirely on twelve men whose most outstanding characteristic was their ordinariness” (John F. MacArthur Jr., Twelve Ordinary Men: How the Master Shaped His Disciples for Greatness, and What He Wants to Do with You [Nashville, TN: W Pub. Group, 2002], xiii).

They were very ordinary men whom Jesus called, trained, and commissioned for service.

If you think of yourself as ordinary, then this series on the apostles of Jesus is for you.

Dr. S. D. Gordon was an evangelist known for his illustrations. The following illustration is graphic, but the idea expressed is correct.

In his book, Quiet Talks on Service, Dr. Gordon has a most vivid description of Jesus walking down the golden street one day, arm in arm with the Archangel Gabriel, talking intently and earnestly.

Gabriel says, “Master, you died for the whole world down there, did you not?”

“Yes.”

“You must have suffered much,” with an earnest look into that great face with its unremovable marks.

“Yes,” comes the answer again, in a wondrous voice, very quiet but strangely full of most profound feeling.

“And do they all know about it?”

“Oh, no! Only a few in Palestine know about it so far.”

“Well, Master, what’s your plan? What have you done about telling the world that you died for, that you have died for them? What’s your plan?”

“Well,” the Master is supposed to answer, “I asked Peter, and James, and John, and little… Andrew, and some more of them down there, to make it the business of their lives to tell others, and the others others, and yet others, and still others, until the last man in the farthest circle has heard the story and has felt the thrilling and thralling power of it.”

Gordon goes on to say that Gabriel knows us folk down here pretty well.

He has had more than one contact with Earth.

He knows the kind of stuff in us.

And he is supposed to answer, with a hesitating reluctance, as though he could see difficulties in the working of the plan.

“Yes—but suppose Peter fails. Suppose, after a while, John does not tell others. Suppose their descendants, their successors away off in the first edge of the twentieth get so busy about things—some of them proper enough, some may be not quite so proper—that they do not tell others—what then?”

And Gabriel’s eyes are big with the intensity of his thought, for he is thinking of the suffering, and he is thinking too of the difference to the man who hasn’t been told—“what then.”

Back comes that quiet wondrous voice of Jesus—“Gabriel, I haven’t made any other plans—I’m counting on them” (Herbert Lockyer, All the Apostles of the Bible, The All Series [Zondervan, 2013], 31–32).

Let us look very briefly at Jesus’ choice of twelve ordinary men.

Scripture

Let’s read Luke 6:12-16:

12 In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God. 13 And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles: 14 Simon, whom he named Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, 15 and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon who was called the Zealot, 16 and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

Lesson

Luke 6:12-16 shows us that Jesus uses ordinary people to accomplish his purposes.

Let’s use the following outline:

1. The Preparation for Jesus’ Choice (6:12)

2. The Purpose of Jesus’ Choice (6:13)

3. The Persons of Jesus’ Choice (6:14-16)

I. The Preparation for Jesus’ Choice (6:12)

First, let’s look at the preparation for Jesus’ choice.

Luke said in verse 12 that “in these days [Jesus] went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God.”

Luke regularly noted Jesus’ commitment to prayer.

Later, Luke explicitly stated that Jesus went to desolate places to pray (see Luke 5:15–16).

Jesus understood that his mission of seeking and saving the lost required his total dependence upon his heavenly Father for success.

And so he spent significant time in personal prayer, communing with his Father.

Jesus also understood that his mission of seeking and saving the lost required him to select twelve men who were central to God’s plan of salvation.