The Experience of Being a Disciple | Rev. Malcolm G. Smith

Good morning, welcome to our adult service.

Today we're talking about the experience of being a disciple, and part of that is hearing the Lord's word and being affected by it.

So we'll begin with a reading from Psalm nineteen about that.

The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul.

The testimony of Jehovah is faithful, making wise the simple.

The precepts of Jehovah are upright, making glad the heart.

The commandment of Jehovah is pure, enlightening the eyes.

The fear of Jehovah is clean, standing forever.

The judgments of Jehovah are truth, they are just altogether.

More to be desired are they than gold, and then much fine gold, and sweeter than honey and the dropping of honeycombs.

Also, by them is your servant warned, in keeping them there is much reward.

Amen.

Reading further from the Gospel of Matthew, the Lord working with his disciples, and they get some things right and some things wrong.

And Jesus, coming into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, asked his disciples, saying, Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?

And they said, Some say John the Baptist, and some Elijah, and others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.

He says to them, But who do you say that I am?

And Simon Peter answering said, You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

And Jesus answering said to him, You are blessed, Simon Barjonah, because flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in the heavens.

Then he charged his disciples that they should say to no one that he was Jesus the Christ.

From then on Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up on the third day.

And Peter, taking him aside, began to rebuke him, saying, Mercy, Lord, this shall not happen to you.

But turning he said to Peter, Get behind me, Satan, you are an offence to me, because you are not wise in the things of God, but the things of men.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, If any one wills to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.

For whoever wills to save his soul shall lose it, but whoever shall lose his soul for my sake shall find it.

For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, but be deprived of his soul?

Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

For the Son of Man is about to come in the glory of his Father with his angels, and then he shall render to every one according to his works.

Amen, I say to you, there are some standing here who shall not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.

Amen.

Our final lesson is taken from the teachings for the New Church, the book Arcana Celestia.

The disciples themselves, who spent all their time with the Lord and heard so much about his kingdom, were not yet able to perceive inner truth.

The only view of the Lord they could form was that he would raise the Jewish people to a position of power and glory over all the nations in the entire world.

After listening to all the Lord said about his heavenly kingdom, they could not help thinking that the heavenly kingdom would resemble an earthly one.

So, after the Lord taught them what it was to be greatest in heaven, he still spoke in terms they could grasp, saying that they would sit on twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel.

They were not told that disciples meant not them, but everyone with goodness that comes of love and faith.

They were not told that there are no thrones in the Lord's kingdom, or the kinds of sovereignty and autocratic power found in the world, or that they were incapable of passing even the most limited judgment on a single person.

If they had been told, they would have spurned the news and each gone back to his own business, leaving the Lord behind.

He spoke this way, so that they would accept it and be introduced by it to inner truth.

Hidden within the external truths the Lord spoke lay internal truths, which come out in the open with time, and once they come out, the external truths disappear, serving only as a stimulus or means for thought about internal truths.

Amen.

Here ends our readings from the Lord's Word.

Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.

Amen.

On that window in front of us, we see the Lord and his disciples.

And today we're thinking about what is it like to be the Lord's disciple?

What was it like for them, and what is it like for us today to be someone who's trying to follow and learn from the Lord?

We likely have some accurate ideas, and we likely have some misguided ideas.

To get a better sense of what it's really like, we're going to look at two stories of the Lord working with his disciples, and we'll see what we can learn from them.

And so let's jump right into the first one, the one that we read in our lessons.

In this story, Jesus does something that all good teachers of students or disciples do.

He asks his disciples questions.

He first asks them who other people think that he is.

And then he puts them on the spot and says, But who do you say that I am?

And Peter gets it right.

He says, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Peter and the other disciples had been following Jesus for some time, and they had had unique opportunities to see the Lord do amazing things and hear him teach these mind-blowing new truths.

And actually, a few chapters earlier than the story we're focusing on today, the Lord comments to his disciples about the unique opportunity they were having.

He says, But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears for they hear.

For Amen I say to you that many prophets and just men desired to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it.

And in our story, after Peter gives his good answer, the Lord says to him, You are blessed, Simon Barjonh, because flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in the heavens.

And this is part of what we would hope for from our experience of being the Lord's disciple, that we would be blessed by the experience, that we would see, hear, and understand things that we wouldn't otherwise because we're following the Lord, because we're spending time with him.

And that does happen.

When we come to church sometimes, when we read the word on our own, and especially when we try to live according to what the Lord teaches, we do see and hear and understand things that we would absolutely not see, hear, and understand otherwise.

When we do that, we can understand our God and his world much better than flesh and blood could ever reveal to us.

Our Heavenly Father does reveal stuff to us like he did to Peter when we make the effort to open ourselves to him and to his teaching and leading.

However, being a disciple of the Lord is not just one experience of being blessed and enlightened after another experience of being blessed and enlightened.

There's another side to this, too.

And we see this illustrated perfectly and painfully by Peter moments later in the story.

One of the implications of Jesus being the Christ or the Messiah is that he would suffer.

There are prophecies about the Messiah being victorious, but there are also prophecies that talk about him being wounded and bruised, oppressed and afflicted.

And so the Lord tries to explain this reality to his disciples.

It says, From then on, Jesus began to show to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and be raised up on the third day.

But Peter was not buying it.

In his mind, Jesus was getting it all wrong.

So Peter took Jesus aside and rebuked him and said, This is not going to happen.

Now, when Peter does this, it's easy for us to see how ridiculous it is.

Who did he think he was?

Why did he think that he should tell the Messiah what was going to happen and what he should say and not should not say?

But, ridiculous as it is for Peter to do it, we do the same thing sometimes.

When you read the word, do you ever have thoughts occur to you like this?

Why is the Lord talking this way?

Why did he say it that way?

Why could he not have been more clear about this or that?

Or surely it would have been better if the Lord had done this or just said that.

Those thoughts are like Peter rebuking the Lord and telling him that he got it wrong.

It's just as ridiculous for us to do it as it was for Peter.

In all of our wisdom to presume that we know better than the Lord how he should have done something or said something.

It was wrong of Peter to rebuke the Lord, and so the Lord corrected his disciple.

He said, Get behind me, Satan.

You are an offense to me, because you are not wise in the things of God, but the things of men.

Ouch.

Imagine being called Satan by the Lord.

But the reality was there was something satanic in Peter.

The term Satan means enemy or adversary or opponent.

And the thing in Peter that was telling the Lord that he was wrong was something opposed to what the Lord wanted to do.

And all of us have something in us that is an enemy, an opponent, an adversary to the Lord.

And the Lord said to him, You are not wise in the things of God, but the things of men.

And this is true of us too.

There's part of us that is good at, that is wise in trying to get the earthly things that we want, that is good at uh, that's not so good at being wise in the things of God, and in fact, would like to use the things of God to get the earthly things that we want.

And that part of us wants to tell God what he should say and do so that we can get the earthly things that we want.

And so the Lord, as our teacher, will need to keep calling out that worldly, earthly, satanic part of us, and keep on encouraging us to lift our minds higher.

Here are just a few of the things the Lord said to his disciples along these lines.

O faithless and perverse generation, why are you fearful, O you of little faith?

How is it you do not understand?

O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken.

Now we might picture him saying these things with a stern look on his face, but it's important to remember that all the things the Lord said to his disciples were out of love for them, and an abundance of mercy for them, an understanding of their state.

And we can perhaps hear that a bit more in this statement, where the Lord says, If then God so clothes the grass which today is in the field and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith?

He knows they have little faith in him.

He knows that they could have more faith in him, and it would benefit them if they did.

And so he lovingly points this reality out to them.

And the Lord also knows that his disciples will come to understand more as time passes.

For example, one time he said this to them What I am doing you do not understand now, but you will know after this.

He knew they could understand more in time.

Just like it said in our lesson from the teachings for the new church, the disciples themselves, who spent all their time with the Lord and heard so much about his kingdom, were not yet able to perceive inner truth.

Hidden within the external truths the Lord spoke lay internal truths which come out in the open with time.

This is the miracle of how the Lord teaches and leads us.

He teaches us things that we do understand and things that we do not understand yet.

He speaks to us in ways that we think things work, and he also teaches us the way things actually work, even though we don't get it and don't buy it yet.

And part of what we need to hold on to as his disciples is that we will understand things better with time if we're willing to stick with the Lord.

And this brings us to our second story.

Second story of the Lord teaching his disciples.

In this case, he said something rather challenging.

This is from the Gospel of John.

Then Jesus said to them, Amen, Amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him again at the last day.

For my flesh is truly food, and my blood is truly drink.

He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.

Now not surprisingly his disciples were confused by this.

It says, Therefore many of his disciples, when they heard this, said, This word is hard, who can hear it?

And the Lord knew they were confused, and so he explained some more and said this It is the spirit that makes alive, the flesh profits nothing.

The sayings which I speak to you are spirit and our life.

He was explaining that he was talking in a spiritual way, not a literal way, but still many of his disciples stopped following him.

It says, From this time many of his disciples went away into the things behind and walked no more with him.

These people couldn't raise their minds above earthly things, and so they weren't willing to keep on following the Lord.

And so the Lord turned to his twelve disciples and said, Do you also want to go away?

And it seems very unlikely that they had any better understanding of what the Lord was talking about when he said that people needed to eat his flesh and drink his blood.

Even today, we, with the teachings for the new church to help us, still might feel a little bit uncomfortable with that.

We might even think, did the Lord have to be so confusing?

Did he really need to say it that way?

Yes, he's the Lord.

He gets to decide.

And yet, the Lord's twelve disciples, though they did not fully understand what he was talking about, still chose to keep following him.

We read, Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go?

You have the sayings of eternal life, and we have come to believe and know that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Over time they had come to believe and know who the Lord was.

And because of who they believed he was, they didn't need to fully understand what he was talking about in that moment.

They knew that he was the one teaching them, teaching them the sayings of eternal life.

And maybe they trusted that they would understand more later on.

We need a similar trust and humility to be the Lord's disciples.

Because it's hard to be humbled.

It's hard to be corrected and told that we got something wrong.

And it's hard to trust the Lord.

And all these things get easier with practice.

The Lord tells us, as his disciples, that we should expect to have to practice these things regularly.

In our lesson, the Lord said, If anyone wills to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

And in a parallel place in another gospel, he says, If anyone wills to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

To be the Lord's disciple is to be daily sacrificing our egos, our sense that we know better than the Lord, our feeling that we already know everything we need to know.

Putting that on the cross, saying that needs to die.

And this way of thinking and way of being is something that we can get in the habit of.

Listen to this passage from the Teachings for the New Church talking about how we can develop a habit of useful spiritual ways of thinking.

Leading the life of heaven is simply a matter of recognizing when something attractive comes up that we know is dishonest or unjust, that this is not to be done because it is against the divine commandments.

If we get used to thinking like this and from this familiarity form a habit, then we are gradually united to heaven.

To the extent we are united to heaven, the higher levels of our mind are opened, and to the extent they're opened, we see what is dishonest and unjust, and to the extent that we see this, these qualities can be dispelled.

So let's get into the habit of thinking like this.

Let's get into the habit of being humbled by the Lord.

Let's get good at being corrected by him all the time.

Let's get comfortable and familiar with the daily work of taking up our cross to be the Lord's disciple.

So, what's it like to be the Lord's disciple to be someone who's trying to follow the Lord?

Sometimes you'll be blessed with understanding from heaven.

Sometimes you'll be blessed to realize you're totally wrong.

Sometimes you'll be confused about what the Lord's saying.

Sometimes you'll need to trust that you'll understand better later on, and in the meanwhile, keep following the one who has the sayings of eternal life.

And sometimes what the Lord will require of you is that you do judgment, love mercy, and humble yourself to walk with your God.

Amen.