Matthew 4:18-22 - April 21, 2024

Alright, I had a lot of people ask me, are we back in Matthew today?

And the answer is yes, we're back in Matthew today. I know that we did a couple of different things the couple times that I came back, but now we are going to just keep proceeding forward through the

Gospel of Matthew. And since it's been a little while,

I don't want to go too in -depth on a review, but I did want to highlight a few points just to sort of get us back to where we were when we were talking through the

Gospel of Matthew before, just to give us a little bit of the context of what we're hearing. Now first and foremost,

I wanted to remind you all that the reason that we're doing this, the reason that we're going verse by verse through a

Gospel like Matthew, is because the most important thing that we do here is that we understand who

Jesus is. So we're looking at this because we want to learn more about Jesus.

We want to learn more about what he taught, how he lived, you know, why he came. And if you recall back probably six months ago,

I told you that it's not enough for a church to just say that they believe in Jesus.

It's not enough for for people to say that they're followers of Christ, because a lot of groups claim to be followers of Christ.

But it's not good enough to just simply accept that statement at face value, because to say you believe in Jesus or to say that you follow

Jesus is something, but what you actually believe about Jesus and who he was is probably more important than simply to say that you believe in Jesus.

What you believe about Jesus is extremely important. And to that end, there's only one single definitive source of information about the life and the ministry of Jesus, and that's

Scripture. Because remember, one of the things that we teach here is that the 66 books that make up what we call the canon of Scripture are inspired in an errant, which means that the writers produced this work under the inspiration of the

Holy Spirit, and because that inspiration came from God, it is without error.

And while I know this is a review for all of you that have been here for a while,

I just wanted to mention it again, because if another religious group gets information about Jesus or about God from sources that aren't part of these 66 books that make up the historical canon of the

Bible, and again these didn't just randomly come to us. I know that we haven't gone into this a great deal, but over the past couple thousand years, this is something that the church determined through historical records, through looking at where the writings came from and who did the writings, to determine that they were legitimate.

There's a lot of stuff that's not in here, and some groups pull information from those writings.

So if information about who Jesus is or Jesus' ministry is not coming from Scripture, those individuals are misinformed.

Those groups are misinformed. They're not learning the true Christ. And finally, just for the brief review, we'll mention that the reason

Matthew is writing his gospel primarily to a Jewish audience is for the purpose of demonstrating a couple things.

First, Matthew is endeavoring to show or to prove that Jesus is the Messiah that was promised in Scripture, and that he's the fulfillment of the

Old Testament prophecies. Now, we call it the Old Testament, but Matthew's readers, this is all they would have had at the time, right?

So this is their entirety of Scripture, and that Jesus is fulfilling the prophecies that they're so familiar with, that they grew up reading, and that they are constantly studying.

Now for our purposes, we have the opportunity to observe the things that Matthew is teaching his readers, and we also get the benefit of hearing more about the life of Jesus so that we can put it back in the context of the

Old Testament. So we can see the prophecy, and then we can look and see how it's fulfilled. We also get to see how

Jesus lived his life, and that's one of the most beneficial things to us.

We also get to see what he taught. We get to see how he approached different situations that he came across in his life, in his earthly ministry.

And the reason this is important is because as Christians, our goal is to shape ourselves in our lives ever more closely to the image of Jesus and who he is, as close as we can come anyway, right?

Because we're never going to reach that point. We're never going to reach that kind of perfection, but we are trying to be more like Christ as we go.

So there should literally be nothing that is more important to us, nothing that we place above Scripture, absolutely nothing.

And Charles Spurgeon said this, he said, if Christ is not all to you, he is nothing to you.

He will never go into partnership as a part Savior of men. If he be something, he must be everything, and if he be not everything, he is nothing to you.

And as we look at our passage for today, this concept is going to apply directly.

So we will look at that in just a second, but that's the reason why we study Jesus and why we study who he is.

So today, we're back in the book of Matthew. We're in chapter 4, and we're going to be looking at verses 18 through 22.

And there's, even though this is five verses, there's a significant amount of content here.

There's a significant amount of implications for our lives. And I have been accused of taking two good sermons and making them one really long sermon, so I'm not gonna do that this time.

So we will be in Matthew 18 through 22 this week and next week as well.

So here's what those verses say. Now as Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers,

Simon, who was called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen.

And he said to them, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

And immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on from there, he saw two other brothers,

James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them.

And immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him. So these are our verses for today.

And as we read through these, what we see here on the surface, it seems pretty simple, seems pretty self -explanatory.

We see Jesus coming out saying, follow me, and the fishermen follow him. So we'll take a look first at Peter and Andrew.

So we have two sets of disciples that he's calling, Peter and Andrew and James and John. So Peter and Andrew, there's distinctions in each group, things that are significant about what happens and the way they're called and the way they're spawned.

So we'll look at those for just a minute. But based on the telling of this story in Luke, Peter and Andrew, excuse me, based on the telling of the story in Luke, Peter and Andrew were working with James and John.

So they probably knew each other, they had some kind of partnership, they had a couple of boats, they had hired hands, so this was a pretty significant business.

And they were fishing, right? And this kind of fishing involved taking a big circular net.

Circular net had weights on it and strings tied to it, and they throw it over the edge of the boat and then they take the strings and pull it along so that any fish that were swimming by got scooped up into the net and they caught it.

Now fishing was a very significant form of business here. So it was second only to agriculture, agriculture on the land there, as one of the most common means of earning a living in this region.

So some people assume that the disciples were poor, uneducated guys.

This is not necessarily the case. Being fishermen, given the situation that they had, they probably fell somewhere in the lower middle class part of the economic spectrum.

So all four of these guys are roughly in the same situation. But the means of the call and the situation and their response to the call serves to highlight a larger point here.

So where Peter and Andrew are concerned, there's a focus on the fact, if you were to look at the

Greek, that they were in the middle of the act of fishing.

So they were actually doing this thing right then when Jesus calls them to follow

Him. So that's significant. They were doing their job. They were earning a living. They were doing what it is that they did on a daily basis to support themselves and potentially their families.

But what is more important is what happens after that. Because we see in verse 20 that they immediately left the nets and followed after the call of Jesus.

In verse 19, he says, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. And immediately they stop what they're doing to follow

Jesus, to answer His call. And we'll go back to the specific calls to be fishers of men in a little bit.

But first, now we'll move on to what happened with James and John. So they're also fishermen and they're with their father

Zebedee. Now this verse says that they were mending their nets. So I guess they had already come back in.

They were getting things ready to go back out, getting things ready for the next time they head out to fish. And Jesus makes what we can only assume is the same call to them.

We don't have the words. We don't have the actual, you know, follow me I will make you fishers of men. But we're left to assume that it's the same call made to Peter and Andrew.

But what's interesting about the situation with James and John is that they're with their father and part of a family business.

So now they're not only leaving their business like Peter and Andrew, they're also leaving family behind in response to this call to Jesus.

So here we see Jesus calling disciples who immediately drop what they're doing for their work, who leave their family to answer this call.

And before we get into a little bit of application for ourselves, there's a few things about this, or at least a couple, about this particular method that Jesus used to call his disciples that are unique and that would have been odd to the readers of this time.

So the first thing that's unique about this is the way that Jesus took the initiative to call his disciples.

He chose them. Now for us we don't find that odd, right?

Because we've emphasized over and over the fact that you can't choose to follow

Jesus. This is a call from God. This is a prompting of the Holy Spirit that is given in your heart.

So it's not odd for us that Jesus would call them, but in those days it was actually a significant departure from what a regular religious teacher of that time would do.

The one commentator I read said this, he said, Jesus seeking out disciples may thus represent a serious breach of custom.

He also said some of Jesus's methods mark him out as a radical teacher on the periphery of the more usual social institution.

And the reason he said this is because the more common practice at the time was for students or disciples to seek out a specific rabbi.

So the rabbi wouldn't go out and choose who was going to follow him or who he was going to teach or who he was going to mentor.

Those people were expected to come to the rabbi. They were expected to make that choice for themselves and then they would follow that person.

Now a lot of times rabbis were the religious and the academic elite of their society and they probably only wanted to educate people that were in kind of a similar state to them.

And this leads us to the next way that Jesus's call to follow him was unique.

So the first is that he did the calling. Now the second way that this call was unique is that it was to a bunch of lower -middle -class, probably rough -around -the -edges fishermen.

These weren't the the promising religious scholars of the future or you know the future leaders of the synagogue in society.

Osborne says this, Jesus did not choose on the basis of status in society, religious hierarchy, or personality and charisma.

He chose those on the marginal edges and not particularly outstanding. Jesus saw that they were not only believers but open to his life -changing power.

And this should be encouraging to us. Unless of course we like to sit around and think about how pious and religious and how great we are on our own right and how we just can't wait for Jesus to call us because we're amazing at what we do.

Jesus is not, he's not looking for the guy at the top of his seminary class.

He's not necessarily necessarily looking for, you know, the guy who knows all the doctrine, who's been planning to be a pastor or be an elder or a church leader since he was a kid.

In the case of the passage that we're looking at today, Jesus is calling the equivalent of any kind of blue -collar worker.

Somebody who knows the Bible, somebody who's a believer, but somebody who the church would probably never tap to be a pastor and elder, all things being considered.

And in fact as great as these disciples turned out to be, they still had a lot of flaws.

They were nicknamed the Sons of Thunder, right? They were nicknamed the

Sons of Thunder because of their tempers. And we have a really good example of this in Luke 9 54.

So what happened here is this is during Jesus's ministry and he was looking to stay at the

Samaritan village and they decided they didn't want to receive Jesus in the village.

So they had to move on to look for another place to stay. But what's interesting is what it says in Luke 9 54.

And when his disciples John and James saw this, that the village wasn't welcoming him, they said,

Lord do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them? They said, we got you

Jesus. This village doesn't want you. We'll send them to eternity.

So I guess these are people that you don't want to cross, right? Because despite walking with Jesus and being a part of his earthly ministry, they still didn't get it right away.

And in fact, the very next thing that happens is Jesus reminds him, Jesus reminds them that he didn't come to destroy people's lives.

He came to save them, right? So this knee -jerk response of destruction and judgment is not what

Jesus was going for. And again, this should be encouraging to us.

This should be encouraging to people who are doing their best to follow Jesus, who don't always have the right reaction to a situation, or who don't always have the right response to other people.

Because none of us are perfect and no other people are perfect. But Jesus is not looking for perfect.

He doesn't give anybody a call because of anything that they did.

So the second unique thing about the disciples Jesus called is that he chose people that society wouldn't have expected him to choose.

And one last interesting thing about this is the fact that all of the initial disciples were fishermen.

So we already touched on the fact that the fishing industry was a significant source of making a living for a lot of people in the region.

And the idea of what a fisherman was and what they would do would have been familiar to the readers.

So they would have understood the concept. They would have understood fishermen, even if it didn't make sense to them from a religious standpoint.

But then they take this metaphor and turn it into becoming fishers of men.

And it sort of flips the idea of fishing entirely on its head because it really takes the idea of fishing from a negative situation, at least a negative situation for the fish, right?

And it turns it into something positive. Because while the fish are drawn out of the water into a net to their doom, to be eaten, these fishermen now are using the gospel as the net.

They're using the words of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus as the net. And they're drawing people out of darkness, but they're drawing them into the saving light of God's grace.

And another reason we have to be really careful about making these connections, because we can't be a hundred percent sure that this is exactly what was intended.

But in Jeremiah, and I am going to turn back to Jeremiah real quick,

Jeremiah 16, 16, this same imagery is used.

Jeremiah 16, 16 says, Behold, I am going to send for many fishermen, declares

Yahweh, and they will fish for them. And afterwards I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt for them from every mountain and every hill and from the crevices of the rocks.

So this idea of fishing for people to bring them back to God is not necessarily all that out there.

And then Jesus says this in John 5, 22, not related to fishermen, but related to his mission. Truly, truly,

I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death and into life.

So this net of the gospel is pulling its hearers out of death and into life in accordance with the mission of Jesus.

So that's just some information about the passage. Maybe some information about why the readers would have thought this was a little bit, a little bit out there, a little bit unique.

But now what I want to do is turn to the practical implications of this passage for our lives.

Because like I said, for five verses there's a significant amount of application here.

There's a significant amount of repercussions for our lives. You know, because we're not the hero of this story obviously, but we do have a responsibility to take the lessons that Scripture gives us and to integrate them into our lives as we pursue sanctification and holiness.

Sanctification is the process of us becoming more like Christ. So the first thing

I want to look at as we consider how these verses apply to our lives is the response of these four men to the call of Jesus.

And if you recall, just a few minutes ago, the response of Peter, Andrew, James, and John, there's two words, two words that I want you to sort of stick away in your mind as you consider the proper response to God's call on your life.

And these two words are immediate and complete. So let's start with the word immediate.

Because when we look at what happened in verses 20 and 22, this is the word that is used to describe how quickly these disciples answered the call.

And granted, they did have the luxury of Jesus speaking directly to them, right?

So there could be no question that this was Jesus making this call to them. So that undoubtedly made it a lot more persuasive.

But all the same, they still immediately left their primary source of income, they left their primary source of making a living, and they left their family behind to heed this call.

They didn't look at Jesus and say, you know, this seems like a really good opportunity.

Let me pray about it for a couple of days and I'll get back to you. No, they dropped what they were doing and they answered the call.

I don't know what this looks like in your life, but for a lot of us, it's obviously not the person of Jesus standing in front of us making a call.

It's more like that little tingling feeling in our gut that Jesus is calling us to do something that's outside of our comfort zone.

That maybe Jesus is calling us to make some kind of change that's even a little risky.

And when we get that feeling, that uncomfortable feeling, our first response is to just ignore it.

It's like, we look at our phone and the caller

ID says Jesus, and we're like, don't answer it! He could be asking us to do something that we don't know if we want to do.

But the fact is that the biblical model, again, we're always, always, always looking to the biblical model for a response to Jesus is to follow.

And it's to follow him no matter what that cost is. And I know that that probably sounds harsh, but let's look at some of the things that Jesus himself says.

So in Matthew 8, 21 to 22, we see this, 61 through 62.

Another also said, Commenting on Matthew 4, verse 20,

Charles Spurgeon said this, he said, Now I want to make sure that you're not hearing something that I'm not saying.

We do see, and we'll look at this in just a minute, we see that they left their fishing business, but at this point, they didn't leave it permanently.

And as we get to the word, complete, we'll look at some of this stuff as well. But this is not, this is not an excuse to say that you're hearing a call of Jesus so that you can leave a situation that you don't like, that maybe

God has put you in. Yes, they immediately, James and John immediately left their father.

Be clear that I'm not telling you that you hear a call from Jesus and you're like, well

I'm leaving my family, I'm leaving my marriage, I'm leaving my children. That's not what

I'm saying, okay? And we'll talk about this in just a little bit. There's a big difference between answering

Jesus's call and kind of using what we think might be a call of Jesus just to to move us out of something that's uncomfortable.

Because even though family was left behind,

Jesus placed a great emphasis on the family. However, sometimes we use family as an excuse to not follow

Jesus. So again, it's gonna sound, it's gonna sound like I'm saying things that are contradicting other things that I just said.

Hopefully I can explain it clearly enough so that that's not the case. But as we consider, as we consider how they immediately followed the call of Jesus, I would ask you these questions.

Are you willing and prepared to follow a call from Jesus in this way? Are you going to answer

Jesus's call to discipleship without hesitation, despite how that looks for you?

So that brings us to the second of our two words, and that word is complete. Their response to Jesus's call was complete.

So we already noted that the four initial disciples, like their response to the call was to leave everything behind, to drop what they were doing at that moment and to go.

But like I just said, we got it, we got to put out there that they didn't leave their boats behind forever, because if you go a little bit later in these

Gospels, you see that they were fishing again, and they had families.

However, what we are seeing is that even though it may not have been permanent, is that at a great cost to themselves, at a great personal cost and a great professional cost, they left their business behind at the moment they were called, because Jesus was telling them to go right now.

And he wasn't waiting. But the word complete is probably even scarier to consider than the word immediate.

And it's also scarier when we have a situation in our life that's comfortable, or we have a situation in our life that's enjoyable, because so much of what we learn in our society and so much of what we learn in our culture is that the end goal of everything that we do is to be comfortable, and it's to be secure.

You got to save up money so that, you know, you don't run out of money. You can buy all the things that you need.

You have to be able to take vacations. You have to have a big house, a big car. We're all focused on comfort.

And then, all of a sudden, Jesus's call comes, and it's to something that's far less comfortable, and it's something that's far less enjoyable.

I had a friend at another church. This just sort of came to my head.

I'll try not to give too many identifying details, but he had a fairly high -level job, a nice house, and his family.

He felt called to be a missionary. And, you know, not just a couple weeks somewhere, right, but to actually pack up his family and move them to a different country to share the gospel of Jesus with these people.

And he did. Everyone thought that he was crazy, but he sold his house, he quit his job, and packed up his family, and they served as missionaries overseas for several years.

That's a huge example of answering the call completely.

But let me sort of... I know that we all have questions, and we're hearing this stuff, and we're like, oh my gosh,

I hope that I never hear this call. Let me allay your fears just a little bit, because the chances are that the kind of sacrificial call that we're looking at here is not just going to come out of the blue.

It's not going to be one of those things where, you know, you've just become a Christian, or you're barely involved in church, and then all of a sudden you're going overseas with your whole family.

Because even Scripture demonstrates that these kind of calls, they're something of a process.

And we're only looking at Matthew right now, but if you were to take this story and compare it across the four different Gospels, you'll see a lot of different details.

But one thing that might stick out is that there are different phases of this call that the disciples go through.

So first of all, when Jesus came to these fishermen and said, follow me, this wasn't the first time that they had ever seen or heard

Jesus. They were familiar with his teaching. They had heard him before. And they didn't go on day one from fishing to casting out demons from people, right?

It was a process. So because they didn't do that, it's unlikely to be any of our stories either.

John MacArthur put it this way. He said, God calls all believers in a similar way. This is in phases.

First, he calls us to salvation, apart from which no other call could be effective.

He then calls us progressively to more specific and ever -expanding service.

So as you can see, the idea here is that you have to be saved first, right?

And even the process of moving into some kind of leadership position in church or something like that, it doesn't happen overnight.

That's why First Timothy tells us that an elder is not to be a new convert, because we're not throwing people into these things.

We're not putting people into odd positions. Now, you know, don't make this mistake either.

That more specific and ever -expanding service part is real. I promise you that it is.

You may have things happen to you that you never expected, but God is not going to instantly call you into a situation that you're not at least somewhat prepared for.

Now, sometimes people do get into those situations, but the reason they get into those situations is because they're out running ahead of God's call.

They're out running ahead in some kind of misguided, immature enthusiasm, and that happens a lot.

And it kind of makes sense on one hand, because when somebody is a brand -new

Christian, what has happened in their life is so amazing that they really do want everybody to know about it, and that's a great thing.

But then sometimes they think that the way to make everybody know about it is to start up a church or to start up a ministry, even though they've been a

Christian for 48 hours. They're not ready for that. God's not called them to that.

And in fact, this idea is actually very explicitly stated in our passage.

It's stated in verse 19. So let's take a look at that verse again real quick. Verse 19.

See if you can pick this out. And he said to them, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. What did he say?

He said, I will make. I will make you fishers of men. Because think about what we said earlier.

He doesn't go for the kinds of people, necessarily, that we think will make the most sense.

Jesus is looking for those that he knows can be molded.

He's looking for those that he knows will be faithful to the call. And I tell you that for this reason.

When it comes to serving God, when it comes to being called by Jesus, you can't let what you've been in the past stand in your way of answering this call.

You can't let your history or the things that you've done, no matter how bad you think they are, you can't let those things make you think that God can't use you to advance his kingdom because he can't.

Now, if you have sin in your past, yes, you have to repent of that sin.

You have to let that go. You have to turn away from it in order to follow

Jesus. But none of that is keeping you from God.

Again, repentance, non -negotiable, part of salvation, part of following Jesus.

But your background does not prevent you from that. Because for those that he calls, he promises to make them into his disciples.

God will equip you. Because if it were up to us, and we just got this call, and we decided to go out and answer it in our own way, based on our own holiness and our own brilliance, we would just mess it all up.

And sometimes, some of us do mess it up going about it that way. But we don't have to worry about that.

Jesus tells us that he is the way, the truth, and the life. And he says that no one comes to the

Father except through him. No one comes to the Father through me. No one comes to the

Father through you. We all come to the Father through Jesus. And Jesus gives us what we need.

Jesus gives us the tools, gives us the plan, gives us the way. So we have to trust his way, and we have to trust his plan.

Like I say over and over and over and over, read your Bible so that you know what his will is.

Pray. If you're not used to praying, I know it can be hard. You have to keep at it.

You have to keep talking to God. Pick verses of Scripture out that work for praying. Something that I haven't talked a whole lot about, but because we're in this topic, is that you have to allow spiritually mature individuals also to pour into your life.

When someone feels called to do something for God, one of the first things that should happen, again, unless we're dropping everything and running, is that you get that call affirmed by other people.

There's been a lot of people out there who think they're called to do one thing, but the people around them say, no, no, we looked at your life, we looked at how you do this, and that's probably not what you're called to.

So allow spiritually mature people into your life.

Allow yourself to be discipled. Back to this idea of complete, a complete response.

Part of trusting God's plan is giving your life and yourself over to that plan completely.

See, it's not that people aren't willing to follow God's plan, but often we're not willing to give the entirety of our life to God.

Often we think we can hold back part of our life from God. We say, I'll give you this part, but I'm gonna manage this part.

And when we do that, that's a pretty clear indication that we've made an idol out of something.

And we've made an idol out of that thing, and we're worshiping it more than we worship God. And we trust ourselves more than we trust

God with this area. In fact, we are making ourselves God of this area. And for most people, you already know this, it's family.

It's work. It's money. Right? I'll trust God in certain areas, but not with money.

Or I'll trust God in certain areas, but, you know, I can't bring that into work.

So my question here is, are you truly willing to trust God's providence in all areas of your life?

And do you truly believe his plan always works for the good of those who love

God and are called according to his purpose? And if that's you, do you trust that? Because we see in Scripture, Jesus told us that we can't serve two masters, because we'll love one and we'll hate the other.

And if we love money, I keep saying money, we'll hate

God. Because you can't, you can't reconcile those two things.

He also said this, he said, Jesus said, Once again, this is not

Jesus telling anyone to abandon their family. But this is Jesus trying to tell us how to prioritize our lives properly.

And only God can save.

None of these other things will provide you salvation. They might provide you comfort, they might provide you joy and love in this life, but they will not get you to the next life.

And all these things will go away. This is storing up treasures on earth where moth and rust destroys, opposed to storing up treasures in heaven.

So another commentator I put it, or I read put it this way, which I thought this was extremely well said.

He said the problem today is that so many want to give virtually a tithe of their life.

That is one -tenth to him and 90 % for themselves. Jesus makes it clear that such will not do.

The call of God through Jesus Christ is sovereign and absolute in its authority.

The response of those who are called is to be both immediate and absolute, involving a complete break with old loyalties.

He also said this, this will look different for each of us, but the truth is the same.

Everything we hold back from God will hamper the quality of our life and keep us from realizing our true potential for him.

So more questions. What are you holding back from God? Are you giving

God a tithe of your life? Are you giving them 10 % instead of 100? Even if it's more than 10%, remember that anything less than complete and total surrender to the will of God, complete and total surrender to Jesus as the sovereign

Lord of your life is insufficient and it's unacceptable. So let's let

Scripture be our guide and encouragement as we wrap up today. A few verses. Psalm 37 5 says, commit your way to Yahweh, trust him and he will do it.

Psalm 25 verses 1 through 3, to you oh Yahweh I lift up my soul, oh my

God and you I trust, do not let me be ashamed, do not let my enemies exalt over me.

Indeed let none who hope in you be ashamed, let those who deal treacherously without cause be ashamed.

And 1st Peter 4 19, therefore those also who suffer according to the will of God must entrust their souls to a faithful Creator who is doing good.

And James 4 7, the first half of this verse says, submit yourself to the Lord. And it's easy to talk about this and it's easy to stand up here and and say that you need to submit yourself a hundred percent to God and that you need to trust in his plan and that you need to answer his call because so many of us have done exactly that in ways that we thought were following God and it didn't turn out well, right?

And we're suffering for it. I'll just speak for me right now,

I'll let you think about this however it applies to you, but in a lot of those situations there was something, something that I did, some sinful area of my heart that was truly not allowing me to fully answer the call a hundred percent and I was answering it in the way that I thought was best and just handing over a part of that.

And that's often what results in that suffering. It's our sin nature. It's our sin, it's the little voice in the back of our head that says you can't really trust

God with that and that's not God, obviously.

But a big part of what we've been talking about today, and I probably should have put this up front and defined it a little better, but the first huge topic of this verse is the topic of discipleship.

Jesus was calling disciples. This is interesting because Jesus could spread the gospel by himself.

Jesus doesn't need any one of us, yet he chose to call disciples to multiply his efforts.

And I would tell you that the reason he did this was to set an example for the church. So discipleship is a process of sharing and guiding others along the path of following Christ.

Because we all need somebody to do this for us, right? There's always someone farther along on this path and this is a significant task of the church.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.

And John MacArthur said, discipleship entails a life of total self -denial, a humble disposition toward others, a wholehearted devotion to the

Lord alone, a willingness to obey his commands in everything, an eagerness to sense him even in his absence, and a motivation that comes from knowing he is well -pleased.

Part of the reason that we gather here as a church is to encourage one another. It's to be taught, it's to hear the

Word of God, but it's because we all bring something different to the table and we all have a responsibility for discipling one another.

And I know some of you feel like you don't know enough to possibly disciple somebody else.

It doesn't mean you have to give a sermon every week, it doesn't even mean you have to teach a class.

But you can teach your kids about who Jesus is. You can even talk to a friend who might not know about Jesus.

But that's actually the topic for next week as we talk about evangelism. But consider who in your life you're discipling.

Are you helping somebody along on their journey? And who's helping you? Because again, we all need somebody.

And if you don't know how this looks, we look at Christ. We look at Christ as a model for discipleship.

And it all starts with an immediate and complete submission to his call. So I want to close with this brief passage from 1st

John, verses 5 and 6. It says this, but whoever keeps his word, truly in him the love of God has been perfected.

By this we know we are in him. The one who abides in him, who abides in Christ, ought to walk in the same manner as he walked.

Just complete and obedient. Jesus was complete and obedient to God in every way. We're to be complete and obedient to his call.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity to follow you.

We know that this didn't come from us. We know that the call came from you. God, we're grateful for our salvation and the way that we show that is in how we live it out.

And specifically, how we answer you and how we disciple others. God, I thank you for a church of people who are so willing to care for one another, who are so willing to pray for one another, and so willing to be there for one another.

I thank you for everyone who's stepping up to lead something, to teach somebody, or just to be a part of this church.

God, I pray that the Holy Spirit continues to move in the hearts of the people here. I pray that the

Holy Spirit continues to do his work in us so that we can do your work here in Madison County.

We can do your work here in this area and spread it out as far as it can go. Because we know that this community, this state, this country, this world needs you.

It needs you more than it ever did before, probably. So, God, help us be the followers, be the disciples that you have called us to be.

Again, we know that looks different for each and every one of us. Help us pray.

Help us read Scripture so that we can recognize the way that you're calling us. God, we thank you for your word and we thank you for everything that it's shown us and we thank you for today.