Matthew 4:12-25

Let's read together Matthew 4, verses 12 through 25.

Matthew 4:12–25

Matthew 4, 12 through 25.

It says this.

When he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee.

He left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum by the sea, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali.

This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah, land of Zebulun and land of Napali, along the road by the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles.

The people who live in darkness have seen a great light, and for those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.

From then on, Jesus began to preach, Repent, because the kingdom of heaven has come near.

As he was walking along the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who's called Peter, and his brother Andrew.

They were casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen.

Follow me, he told them, and I will make you fishers for or I will make you fish for people.

Immediately they left their nets and followed him.

Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John.

They were in a boat with Zebedee their father, preparing their nets, and he called them.

Immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him.

Now Jesus began to go all over Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.

Then the news about him spread throughout Syria.

So they brought to him all those who were afflicted, and those suffering from various diseases and intense pains, the demon-possessed, the epileptics, the paralytics, and he healed them.

Large crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan.

Let's pray together.

Father, we give you our time this morning and we ask that you would speak to us through this text.

God, we're so grateful that we get to bring our life before you.

And God, you know the pieces, the puzzle pieces and the dots that we wish so desperately would connect.

And Lord, we just would ask that you would speak to us by your spirit, that you give us a sense of direction, correct us where we're off, Lord.

Comfort us with your word.

Give us instruction on how to do life in a way that is righteous.

Lord, we're so grateful that we get to have the Bible in our own language, to get to read it together with a church family.

We are a wealthy, we're spiritually wealthy, and we pray that you would find in us just a responsiveness and an obedience this morning.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

Well, here we are, Matthew chapter four.

If you're new with us, we go through the Bible verse by verse.

So we're right now studying the book of Matthew, and this is uh one of the books of the Bible that talks about the life of Jesus.

There are actually four books in the New Testament uh that talk about Jesus' life.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Those are called the synoptic gospels.

And then John also writes a gospel, but it is very different.

Its source material is different.

It doesn't conflict with Matthew, Mark, or Luke, but just the perspective is very much John.

So Matthew, as we've seen, is written very much to a global Jewish audience.

And last week we looked at the beginning of chapter 4, which was the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.

You remember, Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, which in itself was kind of shocking.

And as soon as he came up out of the water, the Holy Spirit came down on Jesus' head in the shape of a dove, and there was a voice that came from heaven, God the Father, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I'm well pleased.

And then right on the heels of Jesus' baptism, the Holy Spirit guided and directed Jesus out to the wilderness.

And Jesus fasted for 40 days, and at the end of 40 days he was hungry, and Satan came to tempt him in the wilderness.

Three different temptations.

And Jesus resists that temptation based off Scripture from Deuteronomy 6 through 8.

And we looked at that last week, and now we get to this story, this account, and we see right away that Jesus is beginning his ministry, and we've got a little bit of geography that we're going to get to.

The outline for the text this morning is this.

Verses 12 through 17 is Jesus' move to the Galilee and what was going on there.

Verses 18 through 22 is the formation of the apostles or the call of four apostles.

And then verses 23 through 25 is this preaching and healing ministry that Jesus is involved in.

Let's look at those first, that first section, verses 12 through 17.

It says that he moved to Galilee.

When he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee.

Now, this would be, if you have what's called a parallel, gospel parallel, you would be able to see inserted into here is some text from John that gives us a little bit more detail about John's ministry after Jesus' baptism and before he is arrested.

But in Matthew's account, he skipped over that material and he jumps right into this account of John being arrested and Jesus withdrawing and heading to Galilee.

Now the next verse is going to say that he moves from Nazareth to Galilee.

This is zoomed in on the nation of Israel, this map.

This is the northern body of water for Israel as a nation.

It's called the Sea of Galilee.

And there's a number of significant coastal towns around Galilee.

You see here it's called Tanshia, and then there's Capernaum, there's Beth Seda.

On the what we would say would be the eastern shore is more of a Gentile region.

Capernaum is a major shipping or fishing village, and this becomes Jesus' new hometown.

So he moves from Nazareth where he grew up over to this region of Galilee.

And a lot of Jesus' ministry takes place in this region.

In fact, if you look through Matthew from chapter 4 all the way up through chapter 18, all of that material, all of the accounts that are going on there are predominantly happening in this region.

Now, if you have a map of Israel, you zoom out, what you'll see is that there's another southern body of water called the Dead Sea, and close to the Dead Sea is the capital of Israel, Jerusalem.

And so Jesus makes appearances in Jerusalem, which is where all the religious leaders are gathered.

Jesus goes there, but he's predominantly doing his teaching in this region, this northern region, which is significantly north of Jerusalem.

There's a big geographic difference.

North of this area, we see alluded to at the end of chapter 4, the area of Syria, by and large, called Syria, Damascus.

And that's a Gentile space at Jesus' time.

And so this account says that Jesus moves from Nazareth and he went to live in Capernaum by the sea in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali.

And then Matthew, always faithful to help his reader understand how Jesus is just fulfilling what the Old Testament said.

The Jewish scriptures are fulfilled in Jesus.

He says, Hey, let me quote to you Isaiah chapter 9.

Isaiah 9 · chapter mention

And this is it.

This is what this was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah, land of Zebulun, and land of Naphtali, along the road by the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles.

The people who live in darkness have seen a great light, and for those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.

So again, this is Isaiah chapter 9, verses 1 and 2.

Isaiah 9:1

Here it is in Isaiah, nevertheless, the gloom and the distress, distressed land will not be like that of the former times when he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtalese.

So take it in your mind, think back 750 years.

750 years.

Like how long has the United States been around for?

Right?

270 years?

Is that where we're at?

Something like that?

Is that close to right?

I think so.

So double that, and more than double that.

And that's when Isaiah the prophet, this Jewish prophet, is overseeing, has this spiritual work over the nation, prophesying to Israel and Judea, then the their now two different kingdoms, uh, and you have the northern nation of Israel, the southern uh nation of Judah, and Judah, uh Isaiah prophesies in the midst of Israel being taken by Assyria, right?

So God allows a nation called Assyria to come and carry off the northern nation, um, carry uh Israel off to Assyria.

And so they're displaced from the promised land.

Imagine being the people of God and having this Jewish heritage where Abraham is your forefather, and you've had the stories of David as this glorious king that brings about victories, and and Moses leading people out of Egypt and into the promised land, and Solomon, and all this rich heritage, and but your experience as a Jew is that you're a minority under threat of Assyria, and then you're captive, taken off to a foreign land, never to return again.

So Isaiah has a spiritual ministry to those people, and God's allowing that to happen because of their disobedience, because of the idolatry of Israel, following pagan gods and not being faithful, loyal to Yahweh.

God allows Assyria to take them, and they have these kind of messages spoken.

The gloom and the distress of the land will not be like that of the former times when he humbled the land of Zebulun.

That's this is that humbling, the land of Naphtali.

But in the future he will bring honor to the way of the sea, to the land east of the Jordan, to the Galilee.

Here it's the Galilee of the nations, right?

This water region is not just the Jewish place, but it's Galilee of the nations, the Gentiles, is how it's found in Matthew.

Galilee of the nations, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light.

A light has dawned on those living in the land of darkness.

So Isaiah, 750 years before Jesus, has this beautiful poetic language about this geographic region, them being in darkness, and it not being like this former times of humbling.

But there's the light dawns.

People walking in darkness have seen a great light.

The light is dawned, and those living in the land of darkness.

So it takes 750 years for God to allow this to play out.

It's just so interesting how God works, right?

That He's He's, and if you're the contemporary of Isaiah, what you're hearing from this is that God's not done working.

Your experience may be one where it seems as if God's abandoned you.

It may seem as if God's far away from you because of the point at which you're living in history.

But God is not done, and he's going to bring about the so we have this ability to look backwards, but just imagine how much time God allows to span between this prophetic word and Jesus.

And how does it take place?

Well, John gets thrown into prison.

Jesus, who's been a carpenter for 30 years, who is the Messiah, but's living a very normal life, like he puts his pants on just the same way you put your pants on, or, well, he probably had a tunic, but you know, it's kind of that idea, very normal life, right?

He doesn't have a halo when he's walking from Nazareth to the Galilee, right?

And he so he goes to Capernaum, and Matthew says, Listen, I'm gonna give you the spiritual interpretation of this very normal move.

This is what's so fun about being a follower of Jesus, is that something significant is playing out in our very mundane, normal lives.

Our culture, we live at a time that is just so disenchanted and heartbroken and upset by the changes in society.

We live in what's called postmodernity, where people have uh there is a there is a large part of humanity that's kind of given up on putting the pieces together or finding unity.

Postmodernity is marked by this just life is broken, the pieces don't fit together, it's difficult to find unity, and it's even reflected in some of like um entertainment, where um more most recently I when I watched the the latest Spider-Man that came out, the creators of that Spider-Man, the artists felt completely free to use discontiguous art to portray the story, right?

We can use what looks like comic art, we can use, you know, but we're gonna jump over and we're gonna throw like a collage in here, and then we're gonna show, hey Marco, we're gonna show this over here, we're gonna show this piece over there.

So just a fascinating um time that we live in, and it would be easy to kind of like say, I don't, I don't know.

I don't know how to make sense out of, but yet if you are a follower of Jesus, we have this hope that we're living in this grand narrative and that our life is woven into God's grand story.

So your experience, your human experience, may be one of suffering, and it's just like, I don't understand why, why am I Israel being carried off?

You know, well, it might be because you're like worshiping idols.

But like, I don't know.

Like, but there is this sense of that timing that came to Israel of suffering and being carried off.

And even if if those who had um followed idols, they had been like, okay, I repent, I'm sorry, it wouldn't have changed the history at that point.

God had determined, listen, you as a nation have been rebellious, and now is time.

You're gonna go through 70 years.

Well, for it, for the northern tribe, it was longer than 70 years, but you're gonna go through this season of suffering.

Anyway, um, that is how the Old Testament is interacting with our text.

Jesus moves to this new region.

And um I say all that because we're gonna keep going through Matthew, and what we're gonna see is that Matthew doesn't say, listen, Jesus is on the scene, so forget everything in Israel's history.

Instead, Matthew is bending over backwards to help you and I understand that Jesus is the Messiah that the Old Testament talked about.

I used to see the Old Testament as this kind of foggy depiction of God's plan.

Every once in a while, the fog would part and there would be like a passage like this where it's like, oh yeah, it's talking about Jesus, and then the clouds would kind of come and cover up God's plan again.

But the more I've studied the Old Testament, the more that I've seen that it is this beautiful, intricate explanation of God's value system and his kingdom.

And Jesus is so appropriate and beautiful and on the spot when he comes in, and it's not that Jesus is like the thing that is, Jesus uses this um parable about uh new wineskins and old wineskins.

And it would be easy to look at the Old Testament and say that that's the old wineskins, it's not.

Jesus is talking about the old form of Judaism and legalism and saying, no, I'm here, I'm here with the new wine.

It's time to let go of your traditionalism, all the traditions that have been, the edifices that have been built up, and it's time to take Jesus in.

Remember that, don't forget that.

So if your experience with the Old Testament is one where you feel like it's foggy, difficult to understand, I just I have two recommendations for you.

One, there's an awesome YouTube channel called the Bible Project.

There's also an app by the Bible Project that does just explainer, 10-minute explainer videos on every book of the Old Testament.

It'll explain to you Exodus.

And you're like, wait, I don't know how to make sense out of Exodus, go and watch the Explainer video on their YouTube channel.

Also, Blue Letter Bible website, that is a free Bible commentary uh website.

It's gonna give you sermons and just an easy to understand explanations of every book of the Bible.

So don't give up on the Old Testament.

Know that it's beautiful.

Matthew's gonna keep pointing us back to it, and it's worth the time of studying it.

Okay, at the end of this section, we're still in this first section of our outline.

Jesus is now in Capernaum, and he began to preach.

Repent, because the kingdom of heaven has come.

At the beginning of chapter three, it says, In those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, Repent, because the kingdom of heaven has come near.

Isn't that interesting?

The same exact message as John.

Who is John?

John's the final Old Testament prophet on the scene before Jesus.

Now we have John in the New Testament, but he's really significantly representing the Old Testament in his ministry.

He's prophesying and saying, Repent, the kingdom of heaven is coming.

Now, hold on to this.

Because in the last, there's three sections, right?

First section, second section, third section.

Third section, we are going to see Jesus preaching again.

Okay?

So here's the first little blurb summary of Jesus' sermons: Repent, the kingdom of heaven has come near.

We'll see Jesus preaching again.

But let's move forward just a little bit to the second part where we have the calling of the four apostles.

The calling of the four apostles.

It says this as he was walking along the Sea of Galilee.

Remember our map, we've got that sea there.

Fishing is what's going on there in the sea.

He saw two brothers.

Simon, who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew.

They were casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen.

And Jesus says to them, Follow me, he told them, and I will make you fish for people.

So she sees these two brothers, and he just calls them, hey, follow me, I will make you fishers of men.

Now, if we could harmonize this account with John and with Mark and Luke, we would see that both Peter and Andrew have already been exposed to this preaching that we just read about.

But this is an interaction, a very personal interaction that Jesus has with these two brothers saying, Follow me.

And he takes and he borrows the metaphor of their job, and he says, I'm going to.

Turn you into what you're doing, but I'm going to make you a spiritual version of it.

My grandpa, who was a pastor for 49 years, one of his favorite ways to share the gospel with people was he would ask people, hey, what do you do?

What's your vocation?

And they would say, Oh, you know, I'm a doctor.

And he would say, Oh, really?

I am too.

And they go, Really?

He goes, Yeah, but but it's I'm I work with people spiritually to help them heal.

And he would always use, he would always kind of bridge this gap.

People say, I'm a plumber.

You go, oh, that's what I do too.

I help, I help people with their spiritual plumbing, you know, get it all figured out and cleaned out and unplugged.

I would always, he would have like the most bizarre like things that he would connect his calling to.

It's kind of, he was a goofball.

And he's in heaven now, so I can say that.

But Jesus says to Peter and and his brother Andrew, I will make you fish for people.

And then they, it says, immediately they left their nets and followed him.

So they obey, like they listen to this call, and they're responsive.

And then we have two more brothers.

Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John.

And they were in a boat with Zebedee their father, preparing their nets, and he called them.

So these guys are not casting their nets, they're sitting in their nets, fixing or mending.

That's what prepare means, or in Greek is that's the idea of making their nets functional, putting their nets back together.

And he calls them, and immediately they left the boat and their father, and they followed him.

So we see this response of uh these first four apostles.

What I want to do for just a second is I want to not assume that we are you that we understand the words that are being used.

I don't want to take for granted some of the Christian lingo that comes up.

And I know some of you are are um just new to the Bible and understanding the Bible for the first time, and and so you'll hear words like apostle, or you'll hear the word disciple.

Um and so I just want to give you a definition for that.

Those words don't come up here yet, but I've used them.

A disciple is the word Methetes in the Greek, and it's found 261 times in the New Testament.

Sometimes John the Baptist has disciples, sometimes the Pharisees have disciples, and then other times Jesus has disciples.

So this is not just the 12.

These are people, it's one who engages in learning through instruction from another.

We could call them a pupil or an apprentice.

So kind of like a student, but the word apprentice is probably the best word that we have.

Like if someone's an apprentice, I had some guys a couple years ago put in a wire in my basement, an electrical wire.

And what showed up at my door was the electrician and the apprentice who did all the work, right?

And the apprentice, he's learning about like the gauge of wire that's supposed to be used.

And uh he's a young guy, a grunt, and he's following around the licensed electrician in the process.

And that's what a disciple is.

It's it's somebody that's learning specific, not just the subject, but but somebody who's following after the teacher.

Then we have another word that's apostle, that's apostolos in the Greek, and that word is found 75 times in the New Testament, and it's the word a delegate, uh, an envoy, or a messenger.

It's the idea of going out and being um a messenger on behalf of somebody else, kind of like an ambassador or um uh we would, yeah, there's a bunch of different ways to look at the idea of an apostle, but really think in your mind of like going, uh going out.

In fact, I have uh a visual of this, right?

So a disciple is somebody that follows Jesus and is learning from Jesus.

An apostle is somebody commissioned to go and do a mission, right?

So now in our, we have a bunch of different church cultures that are represented here.

And you'll get these titles, right?

That, you know, this is a bishop, apostle, so-and-so, or um, and it seems like a term of significance, but in its original sense, apostle is a commissioned person, somebody who is commissioned to go and do God's work.

Um, that's how it's used with Jesus.

Before Jesus uses that term, it's used just kind of in a political sense, or somebody's sent to go and carry a political message on behalf of someone else.

So you have Jesus' apostles.

Now, there are 12 apostles, but there are more than 12 disciples.

Did you hear that?

There's more than 12 disciples.

When Jesus is done with his ministry and goes back up to heaven, and people begin to hear about Jesus and they want to follow him, the title that they're most often given is disciple.

So all the way through the first 10 verses of Acts, 10 chapters of Acts, the followers of Jesus, the new converts, they're not called Christians.

They're called disciples or people of the way, those of the way, followers of Jesus, are called disciples.

So if you're a person where you've made that decision, where you identify yourself as a follower of Jesus, you could say of yourself, I'm a disciple, right?

But then you want to, you should ask yourself, do I actually, am I an apprentice?

Am I following him around?

Am I really an adherent, or am I just kind of hanging around on the periphery and not a great representation of Jesus?

That's a fair question to ask, right?

So we have disciples and we have apostles.

Is that clear?

Does that make sense?

Because I think I think we have the lingo that we use in America for different like church leadership.

This guy's an apostle, and that maybe means like he has multiple churches that he leads, or he functions in a particular way in a church.

And that's fine, but just know, like, don't necessarily import that into the Bible, instead, let the Bible speak for itself.

So we have disciples and apostles.

Um let's see, why do why am I pulling this up?

Let me look back into my notes.

It isn't until Matthew 10.

It isn't this is this is why.

In Matthew 10, we have the names of the 12 apostles, right?

So this is where, now imagine, we're in chapter 4.

We got to get all the way over to chapter 10 until we see the formation of these 12.

So at this point in Jesus' ministry, he's teaching.

There's tons of people that are gathering around in crowds.

He's beginning to gather people to him and saying, Hey, I want you to follow me.

But then we finally get to the formation of the 12.

Once we get to Matthew chapter 10.

Matthew 10 · chapter mention

In Luke, it's in a different, it's like in a different chronological place.

But for us, we're looking at Matthew, and he says, the names of the 12, do you see it there?

Apostles.

The names of the 12 apostles is Simon, called Peter, Andrew, his brother, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew the tax collector, who wrote this book that we're studying right now, James the son of Alpheus, Thaddeus, Simon the zealot, Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

So that's your twelve.

Some of them get mentioned more often than others.

Some of them, this is all you see, right?

We just get their names on a list and we have no idea, like Thaddeus.

What did Thaddeus do?

I don't know.

I have no idea.

But he was there amongst the twelve apostles.

Uh Jesus picked him out.

Remember, there's in, I think it's in John, where Jesus goes, he prays, and these are the ones that God says, these are to be the twelve.

So um in, let's talk though about one uh word here that comes up.

It's this word follow.

In um our text that we looked at, we see that Jesus says to Peter, Andrew, James, and John, he says, Hey, follow me.

This word, um Theo, and another Greek word, dotae, it are found at least, well, at uh Akalitheo is 90 times found in the New Testament.

And there are five five meanings for this word.

And the reason why I want to emphasize this is because we again, if you've been around the church, if you've lived kind of in Western Christianity, the term disciple or discipleship comes up a lot, evangelism, and what what I'm hoping for us is that we're able to kind of strip away what we've heard and just kind of engage the text.

And what does it say about what does it say?

Um, what does it say about Jesus and the response to Jesus?

Does that make sense?

So here in our text it says Jesus calls them, hey, I want you to follow me.

And then it says, of both of these sets of brothers, they immediately followed him.

So this literally moves uh means move behind someone in the same direction, come after him, to follow or accompany someone who takes the lead, accompany, go along with.

The crowd was following Jesus.

Um in a figurative way, it means to follow someone as a disciple or to be a disciple, to comply with, to follow, obey, to come after someone, uh, something else in a sequence.

This term is used over and over again as we look at Jesus.

And I just want to put this up in front of you because this is our mission statement as a church.

We use this word, right?

We're together because of the gospel, following Jesus in his mission to redeem Baltimore City.

There is this mark in our lives where we want to be those that follow Jesus.

If you've grown up in Christianity, maybe you've seen like altar calls or like a Billy Graham crusade, and it's like, you know, come forward and pray this prayer and receive Christ, and there's this moment of conversion.

That comes from John chapter 3 when Jesus works with Nicodemus and talks about being born again.

John 3 · chapter mention

And there's very much a moment at which conversion, when you're translated from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, and it's contingent upon a particular response to Jesus.

But again, could you just, in your mind, just use your imagination to think about Jesus.

Think about Jesus and the fact that he's traveling around these regions of Capernaum saying, repent, the kingdom of heaven is near.

And he's just talking about the kingdom of heaven.

When we go and we we look starting next week at the Sermon on the Mount, we're gonna just see that Jesus is um taking and riffing on Old Testament themes.

He's giving it qualitative depth, he's expanding on um concepts, and what we assume from the Sermon on the Mount is that this is just a compilation of the material Jesus was sharing across the Galilee region.

When it says that he said, Repent for the kingdom of heaven is near, and he's delivering the message about the kingdom.

What he's doing is he's he's talking about everything we've got in the Sermon on the Mount, which is going to be awesome and we're gonna look at next week.

The call, the response, right?

The response of people who are engaging Jesus, it's not to fill out a contact card, right?

Or go to a small group.

Like Jesus is traveling around these different villages, he's just teaching about the kingdom, and he's picking up, like a snowball, he's picking up followers who are interested, but people have lives, right?

And people are doing their lives, and they're engaging Jesus' message, but they're doing life.

There are a handful of people, there are 12 that we know of, who do this that this thing that we're talking about, where they abandon their vocation and they become the apostles of Jesus.

But there are many disciples who even as they're hearing Jesus, they are engaged in normal living.

I did this search.

Um here we have again, is here's the following that happened by uh James and John.

They followed, they followed, and then in verse 25, which we're coming to, large crowds followed him.

What I did was a search of terms that um are action words, verbs related to Jesus, where uh just the most common verbs in the Gospels.

I did this in Chat GBT.

I asked it then what were the verbs in which Jesus was the object of the sentence?

So you have on the far right hand side the general occurrences in the gospels of verbs.

These are the most common ones: to follow, to believe, to inherit, to repent, to come, to seek, and to receive.

This is what it meant to engage the ministry of Jesus.

Then a second to the to the right is the column of where the verb is associated with Jesus as the object.

Obviously, repent is more associated with kingdom and heaven, um, and not necessarily, you know, Jesus, it's not this repentance to Jesus, but it's repentance to receive the kingdom.

It's just an interesting study.

Yeah, take a picture if you want of the screen.

You can go back and look it up.

But again, what I want to do is I kind of want to break your assumptions about Christianity a little bit.

And I want you to see what was the activity of Christians who were engaging Jesus.

It's following, believing, inheriting, repenting, coming to him, seeking and receiving.

Those are the most common verbs, the actions of the people engaging Jesus.

Now, if I had time, I would go, you and we could go deep down this rabbit hole, but it was just a fascinating thing.

I well, let's look here for just a second at um this next section, 23 through 25.

23 through 25.

It says, now Jesus began to go all over Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness amongst the people.

Then the news about him spread throughout Syria.

So do you see here again, he's preaching the good news about the kingdom.

It was not an altar call.

Do you see that?

Not that an altar call is bad, but the sub if you're going to summarize the teaching of Jesus, he's talking about a kingdom.

And these people are familiar with a kingdom because they're living under the Roman Empire.

So, kingdom concept, you know, we use the term government and politics.

He's using terminology that relates to their framework of thinking about government, but he's proclaiming a king a good news of the kingdom, and then he's healing every disease, sickness amongst the people, and the news about him spread throughout Syria.

Um so they bring all these different people afflicted, like crazy.

Crazy, the people that are brought to Jesus.

Do you see that it's like the news about him spread throughout Syria?

Now, fast forward in your head, okay?

Jesus goes up to heaven, he ascends to heaven, and then we have um the uh we have so we have the ascension, then we have the followers of Jesus gathering together, the disciples.

How many are in the upper room?

120, right?

Are in the upper room when the Holy Spirit comes down on the day of Pentecost.

Here's what's fascinating to me.

Jesus does this ministry all throughout a region.

He's healing all these people, they're coming to him, but then on the day of Pentecost, the gathering there is 120 people.

As you interact with like the sovereignty of God and the idea of Jesus healing people, can I can I just ask you, like, what do you think?

What was the what why did Jesus heal people?

For for probably 35 years of my life, I thought that Jesus kind of had like a horse and pony show, is that what, or a dog and pony show?

Is that the kind of the phrase, right?

He had a dog and pony show that would lead and be the hook to get people to listen to the gospel message.

It's kind of like it's how some outreaches go, like we're gonna bring in these awesome dirt bikers that are gonna do like three flips in the air so we get a crowd and then we're gonna share the gospel, right?

That's kind of how I always thought about like the miracles.

But I don't think about it like that anymore.

I think that Jesus is coming on the scene as the king.

Like this is these these humans are the humans that he created from the foundation of the world.

That's what it says in John chapter 1, that the logos was in the beginning, and that the that this is his creation.

John 1 · chapter mention

Like, these are the people he made, and the Father has given him dominion, and Jesus is actually going to give dominion to his disciples later on.

Um and Jesus is just healing because he's good, he's the king, and this world that he's engaging is disordered.

And what did God do in the very beginning?

He gave order to chaos, right?

He puts pieces back together.

And so, yes, I think Jesus wants people to be his followers.

I think he wants people to accept the message of the kingdom and live with him eternally in heaven.

But the God of the Bible, the G that Jesus is here, like he is literally going to heal people of their sicknesses and their paralysis and their demon possession and their epilepsy, and they're not going to follow him, they're not going to become disciples, they will die, they will live eternally separated from God, but their life, eternal, their present life will have been transformed.

Their present earthly experience will have been radically transformed.

Because let me ask you this: do you think that every person here became a Christian?

No.

Was this a wasted effort?

This was not a wasted effort.

Here's why this is important to me.

This is because every Tuesday and Friday we feed people who are hungry, that stand in line.

There's 200 families that are represented.

And the question that people put to me is well, you know, how many of those people come to your church?

And sometimes there is this Christian idea.

There's this Christian idea of like, well, you're just wasting your effort.

But look at when I look at Jesus, Jesus, in not, I don't want to use the indiscriminately healed, but Jesus was not like, I'm gonna heal you if you follow me.

Is that in there?

We read this together.

Is that in there?

No.

No, it just he's preaching, he's not leaving off the gospel, right?

He's not saying like, hey, you know, you have to listen to me, and if you accept me, then I'll heal you.

No.

Jesus is just deciding, like, hey, y'all are gonna, these people here are gonna get healed.

Now, when we get to Acts, we see that the apostles also start healing people.

People that were in Jerusalem, people that had been sick their whole life.

There's people that are around during Jesus' time that don't get healed by him.

What's up with that?

That's not fair.

They must have felt gypped, you know.

But here's the thing is Jesus is healing people that don't necessarily.

Necessarily believe in, don't follow him, don't believe in him.

It doesn't even say anything about faith.

Now, other places it says stuff about faith, but here it's just like Jesus is healing.

Anyway, I think I'm getting a little bit on my soapbox, a little bit up on my soapbox, just because sometimes, not anybody here, nobody in our church, but sometimes there's this like scrutiny from the outside of like, why do you spend so much time like caring about people's physical bodies and feeding people and using church money to like pay for a truck to be able to you know to feed people?

It's like, well, you know, when I look at Jesus, Jesus is doing that kind of thing here.

So the response, let's kind of land the plane because here's it's it's there is this tradition that we've inherited as Christians about Christianity.

I've been I've been hurt by churches in the past where I worked in a church that was all about disciples.

You know, you gotta make disciples, you gotta have the person you're discipling, the person that's discipling you.

And it was like, it was this thing that was kind of kooky, it was it was kind of cultish of like, who are you discipling?

And the more I wrestled in that church with that setting, the more I realized, like, yeah, there's like Jesus has disciples, but but the great disciple maker is Jesus.

Jesus, Jesus has discipled me in a variety of ways.

One through scripture, but like, you know, I can go on the internet and listen to a sermon, I can read a biography about Christians in the past.

Like, if I didn't have somebody like disciple me in this one-on-one way with this particular formula, I'm not a deficient Christian.

Jesus is the great disciple maker.

He wants to disciple you, he wants to teach you about himself through his word.

So, anyway, let's go and land the plane, okay?

We see this beautiful ministry to the Gentiles.

We passed by it really fast, but did you see it?

When Jesus goes to Galilee, he's not just preaching to a Jewish audience, but there's Gentiles that are hearing the message of the kingdom.

But one really important thing for you to understand is that there's these apostles that are called to leave their jobs and to follow Jesus.

They leave their nets and they follow Jesus.

But I want you to see another passage out of 1 Corinthians 7.

This is really important because we're gonna engage Jesus and we're gonna see Jesus calling people to do radical stuff.

And you may be like, well, look, I've got a career, I've got a family, like I can't just leave my kids and like what am I supposed to do?

Like leave my kids and go to Africa?

Like, what's gonna make Jesus happy?

I just I want to balance out some of those misconceptions.

Paul teaches the church, he says, let each one live his life in the situation the Lord assigned when God called him.

This is what I command all the churches.

Were you already circumcised?

In other words, were you Jewish when he called you?

You should not go and undo your circumcision.

Like, I don't even know how you do that, like plastic surgery or something.

Was anyone called well uncircumcised?

He shouldn't get circumcised.

Circumcision doesn't matter.

Uncircumcision does not matter.

Keeping God's commands is what matters.

Jesus comes with a kingdom message, a kingdom, we're gonna study it for a few, a couple months starting next week.

Keeping the commands.

That's the idea.

Jesus calls you to himself, and you need to be ready for a radical reorientation.

But it may be that you stay in the place where you're at.

Let each of you remain in the situation in which he was called.

Were you called while you were a slave?

Don't let it concern you.

But if you can become free, by all means, take the opportunity.

For he who is called by the Lord as a slave is the Lord's freeman.

Likewise, he who is called as a free man is Christ's slave.

You are bought at a price, do not become slaves of people, brothers and sisters.

Each person is to remain with God in the situation in which he was called.

You and I are called to be followers of Jesus, to be obedient to him, but to understand that it is not necessarily a leave your nets to follow me.

It may be for some of you, but for 95, 98% of Jesus' audience, it is internal changes that are going on, right?

That you may not see a vocational change, but it is I'm now an adherent to the king of this kingdom.

I'm ready to adopt the kingdom value system, the rules of the kingdom, and I want Jesus to be my king.

Lord, we thank you for your word, and we pray that you would find in us a devotion.

We want to be apprentices of you.

We want to be those that are just like following close, close behind you, Jesus, learning of you.

Lord, we pray that you would continue to be our teacher this week on how to do life well.

Lord, would there would there be supernatural things that happen in our life, but also just a wisdom where we we align ourselves with you as the king and then you just infect our life with this wisdom on how to do life well?

Lord, be honored and glorified as we do our jobs this week, our vocations.

Lord, just would we be Jesus followers right where we are called?

Lord, we offer ourselves to you afresh.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.