"The Gospel Makes You Follow" Matthew 9:9 Sunday Morning Worship Service

One verse this morning, Matthew 9, verse 9.

Matthew 9:9

As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth.

And he said to him, Follow me.

And so he arose and followed him.

This is one of those verses that I have read many times before, and I thought, you know what, you could preach a whole sermon on that one verse.

And so then I remembered that I can preach a whole sermon on this one verse.

And there's no one to stop me.

Last week, in the first part of Matthew chapter 9, we learned that Jesus has the authority to forgive sins.

Matthew 9 · chapter mention

And this is what was so aggravating to the Pharisees, the scribes, the religious leaders, because they did not have the power to heal a man who is lame, nor did they have the power to forgive sins.

Forgiving sins is something only God can do.

And they knew that.

So they had never even offered the possibility of having your sins forgiven.

Instead, over the centuries that the Pharisees had risen up, ever since Ezra had built his temple and Nehemiah his wall and the return to Jerusalem had happened, over these centuries that the Pharisees had risen up in Israel almost like a weed, they had not offered forgiveness of sins.

Instead, they had offered a way to demonstrate righteousness by a strict adherence to the law, a way to demonstrate covenant faithfulness to God.

And you have to understand that in the Old Testament, Israel was in a bit of a free fall.

God had given them their law, but they had not kept it.

They had been exiled.

Now they have returned to the land.

And in their mind, they needed something more, with more power, with more severity than the Old Testament law, even.

And so they had become fanatically devoted to it.

And had taught a sense of righteousness that could be derived.

In a broad sense, you were righteous by being a Jew, they taught.

But in a particular sense, a strict adherence to the law was a manifestation of your righteousness.

And over time this gave way to a very works-righteous kind of system that is not that unlike every other religion in the world.

That basically teaches try hard, do good things, and that will hopefully cancel out your bad things, and by virtue of your relationship with God, the righteousness wins.

Again, every religion in the world has different nuances, but that's generally the gist of every teaching in the world.

And so the Pharisees had never taught that your sins could be forgiven.

Carte blanche, so to speak, that you could start over.

It was a shocking revelation to them.

Do you remember when Jesus told Nicodemus that you must be born again?

Nicodemus didn't even have a category for that.

In fact, his response was, even if I if I wanted to start over, how could I?

I mean, this was an unbelievable concept to them.

Well, now Jesus arrives, and the scribes and the Pharisees have a front row seat, and he demonstrates to them through all, by the way, all of Matthew chapter 8.

Matthew 8 · chapter mention

He's demonstrating to them that he has authority over sickness, he has authority over leprosy, over the demons, even one thing after another.

Jesus is demonstrating supreme authority.

But the Mount Everest of His authority, the top of this mountain peak of his authority, so to speak, was his declaration that we looked at last week that he has the power to forgive sins.

And the Pharisees were stunned.

Through all of Matthew 8, Jesus could have been dismissed as a miracle-working spectacle.

He was just a sideshow, a distraction, but he will come and he will go, and the crowds might follow, and then they'll disperse.

He was like John the Baptist, and he will run his course, and then we can get back to business as usual.

That's how they were dealing with him.

But then Jesus makes his declaration that he can forgive sins, which only God can do.

And that's where we ended last week.

And we all went away last week, and there's not a lot controversial in that statement from a Christian perspective, is there?

That Jesus can forgive sins.

In our mind, that's kind of the point.

Praise God that he forgives sins.

It's such good news.

In our mind, we put that in the good news file.

God is a forgiving God and forgives sins.

He's forgiven mine.

That's great.

Happy days.

And then this verse comes in.

And as Americans, we might lose the controversy in this verse.

We might lose how radically shocking and offensive this verse is to the Jews.

Because Jesus, in the abstract, has said he has the power to forgive sins.

He's forgiven this one particular layman sin who was lowered through the roof, the paralytic sin.

And we don't know anything about the paralytic.

The Jews, of course, would have assumed he had done some kind of sin to deserve his condition in life or his parents had.

And, you know, Jesus forgives that.

And that's in the same category as the blind man in John 8, I mean John 9, who sinned that he would be born blind, him or his parents, and neither, but the works of God can be seen in his life.

We have a comfortable category for that.

But Jesus leaves that house.

He leaves dealing with this idea that he can forgive sins in the abstract, and now it's going to become very personal.

He's going to forgive this person of his sins, and it is not just any random person.

He goes from there, and the phrase from there lets you know that this is the demonstration of what he just said.

He had just said he had the ability to forgive sins, and now he's going to go display that.

And he comes across a man called Matthew.

The other gospels refer to him as Levi.

He's the author of the book of Matthew.

He's one of the twelve disciples.

Levi, of course, being his more common Jewish name, Levi being his ironic name.

Levi is a word that refers to his priestly identity, and it's not that he was a priest, but he's named after the priest in Israel, the whole tribe.

And he's doing a very unpriestly like function.

He's sitting in the tax booth.

Now, we as Americans have lost our appreciation for how offensive this is.

You know, we have stereotypes and tropes about, you know, IRS agents.

Boo, hiss.

Tax is bad on other people.

They're good, I guess, on other people, but bad on me.

This is not that world.

Rome, if you remember, ruled Israel and ruled Egypt.

Those two nations had their own cultures, they had their own language, they had their own customs, they had their own religion.

Rome did not make the mistake of trying to squash their culture and religion and customs.

Rome let them carry on.

Rome let them have their own currency in the temple.

In fact, Rome funded the building of their temple.

Rome let them speak their language.

Rome let them do their thing.

They could even have their own rulers.

They could have their own chief priests with their own police force if they wanted it.

So how did Rome exercise control?

Through taxes.

Rome provided protection.

Rome provided the roads.

Rome provided kings that were allegedly good.

While the Jews provided the taxes.

And the tax system was complex.

This makes you filing your nonprofit 501c3 form look ridiculous.

The Roman tax system was insane.

They, by design, wanted it to affect every single area of your life because this was their stamp of control on your life.

Nothing was outside of the reach of the taxman.

Let me just give you one example.

I have scores of examples that I read about this week, but let me give you one.

The Romans taxed the bathhouses in Israel.

Which doesn't seem like that big of a deal to us, the bathhouses.

I mean, people could bathe in their homes and they could bathe really wherever they wanted to.

You had your own private mikveh in your house.

Certainly there's not a tax on that for the Jews.

But remember, the Jews were fastidious with ceremonial washings and cleanings.

And so bathhouses were an important function of their life.

And so the Romans taxed one-third of the bathhouse profits.

And they did this by taking every fourth day, the fourth day, taking those profits directly to them.

They had their own calendar for this.

And if it was found that a bathhouse didn't pay the taxes, the Roman government would take over the bathhouse, which was bad for a Jew because that meant the house was defiled.

It was no longer good for ritual washings.

And so bathing became a taxable action in Rome, in the Roman Empire.

The people had every element of their life touched by this.

Shepherds had a tax on wool.

There were certain days, nine different days a month, so that shepherds couldn't fall behind.

There was a beer tax.

If you brewed beer and you distributed it, it would be taxed.

There was a bean tax, and we have an expression that still comes from this.

They had a tax figured in fraction form, like we do gas.

You know, gas is 279.99100ths a gallon.

Why not 280?

Well, that's just not the way Americans do it.

We like the 0.99 at the end, so the sign looks one cent smaller.

It's just so easier, I guess.

The Romans had that with beans.

And we have an expression that lives on from this bean counters.

There were people employed to count the beans in transactions to take the tax from it.

It was not designed to be efficient, it was designed to micromanage your life.

There was a cow tax.

If you bought a cow, you had to pay a tax.

You had to pay a tax for grazing a cow.

It was a different tax than you had to pay for grazing sheep.

You had a soil tax.

If you dug, if you turned over the dirt, you had to pay a tax on turning over the dirt in your property.

There was a birth tax.

You had to pay a tax for being born.

Americans have the death tax, they had a birth tax.

Now, this sounds complicated and it was, but at first it might strike you as impossible.

How in the world would the Roman government across the Mediterranean Sea know when you planted tomatoes in your property?

How would they know when you sold the cow?

How would they know when you brewed beer?

How would they know when you had a child?

How would they have any idea?

And here is the ingenuity of the Roman system.

They hired Egyptians in Egypt and Jews in Israel to be the enforcers, the collectors.

They hired people from the neighborhood.

The people who knew what you grew in your property, the people who would notice when you started a garden, the people who would notice if you acquired a new cow, and the people who would certainly notice if you had a child.

And those people were in charge of collecting the tax.

And they did not even have to be armed.

They had to find you and ask for it.

And if you didn't pay, they would have the Roman military behind them.

So you can see why the Jews hated these tax collectors.

They were traitors, they were sellouts.

Beyond that, they were notoriously corrupt.

There is no enforcement mechanism other than murdering the guy.

I mean, if a tax collector got out of control, you could murder him, and then you would pay the penalty, you would go to jail, you'd likely be executed or crucified.

So as long as a tax collector didn't go that far, he could get away with whatever.

But here's what had developed in Israel.

This is kind of the world's first pyramid scheme.

You'd expect that it would have been developed in Egypt, but the Israelites invented it.

They both had the same tax collectors.

A guy would buy the right to be a tax collector from a neighborhood.

So let's say somebody buys the right to be the tax collector for Springfield, Virginia.

And he would then sell it to other people to be the tax collectors in certain neighborhoods.

And they could then sell that to people to be tax collectors on certain streets.

And you could keep dividing it and dividing it.

As long as the person further down the pyramid, so to speak, could convince somebody else to buy in, there's enough money for everybody up top until it finally falls apart.

That was the whole system.

So when you're talking about a tax collector, you're talking about a traitor, somebody who's betraying their country.

You're talking about a snitch, somebody who's ratting you out for having a child or digging a garden or taking a bath.

You're talking about all the negative stereotypes of a pyramid scheme person.

That's what this person is.

Some Jewish sources even call tax collectors Gadoy or Gentiles.

You know, they're they're even though the guy couldn't have a more Jewish name, Levi.

He's practically a Gentile.

It's appalling, these people.

Beyond that, there's a stereotype of them as a mafiosa-style protection.

Pay me to protect you kind of thing.

That's who Jesus goes to.

And again, when Jesus leaves this house, he's going out to demonstrate that he has the power to forgive sins, and he could not have gone to, in our sense, a worse person to make that point.

From the Pharisees' perspective, you couldn't find a worse person to forgive their sins, to demonstrate how ridiculous this idea is.

We have this idea in our heads that the gospel is dangerous because taken to its logical extreme, you know, an axe murderer, a serial killer could be converted on his deathbed, and that's a dangerous extreme for us.

Well, this is that extreme in the Jewish minds.

And that's where Jesus begins.

He leaves the house to put on display his now authenticated authority that he can forgive sins and he goes to the worst of the worst, the lowest of the low, the most hated of those who are hated.

Matthew, a tax collector, not just any tax collector, look what it says in the middle of verse 9.

Sitting in his booth.

In other words, this is not a part-time hobby for him.

He's working, he's identified with the tax booth.

This is who he is.

And that's to whom Jesus goes.

And Jesus goes to him, and he leads with what is perhaps Jesus' most common refrain in the New Testament.

He tells Matthew, follow me.

Follow me.

As I mentioned, Mark and Luke use Levi as his name, but here Matthew just goes straight.

Matthew doesn't separate himself from this.

He uses the name he's known as as a believer right here to let you know this is his testimony.

This is how he met Christ.

Jesus came to him and Jesus said, Follow me.

As I said, this is one of Jesus' most common refrains.

It's what he told Peter and Andrew.

Matthew 4, verse 19, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

Matthew 4:19

Well, here Jesus is out fishing for men.

Peter and Andrew did follow Jesus, and now they see him fishing.

He goes to someone and says, Follow me.

In a real sense, this is what the four friends of the paralytic did.

They brought the person to Jesus.

Now Jesus is out on patrol.

He's actively hunting for people to follow him.

When Jesus found James and John, those two brothers, Matthew says they left their nets to follow Jesus.

This is how he called James, John, Peter, Andrew.

In fact, it's likely the phrase he used to call all of his disciples, because there's limiting phrases in Matthew and Mark where it says he only let those disciples follow him.

The crowds tried to follow him, and Jesus wintered them down so only his disciples could truly follow him.

That is the invitation to be a Christian, to follow Jesus.

We have all kinds of other words, synonyms for becoming a Christian, being born again, being saved, deciding, even as we sang earlier, I've decided to follow Jesus.

That phrase, follow Jesus, hits the nail right on the head.

I want to break this phrase down a little bit.

I want to go through the grammar of it.

First of all, the phrase follow, it's a verb.

And you guys know what a verb is.

A verb is an action.

It is something that you do, you follow.

This is how it is played out in your life.

If you are a follower of Christ, it is the action that you are living out.

That phrase to follow Jesus is interchangeable with the phrase to be a disciple, it is interchangeable with the phrase to be saved, to be born again.

When someone is born again, they become a follower of Jesus Christ.

Follow is the verb.

And if you're doing it, you're marked as a follower.

It's your life action.

A person is saved in a moment, they're born again in an instant, but that birth, that encounter with saving grace, produces lasting effects.

Salvation is not over in a moment.

It happens in a moment, but it doesn't end in a moment.

When a person is converted, that happens instantaneously.

They go from going away from Christ, they now turn and they're following Christ, but it never stops happening to them.

They will always be a follower.

Because God's grace changes your life.

The grace that can forgive sins energizes you, empowers you, and actually changes your life.

There you are.

This should be your testimony if you're a Christian.

There you are, sitting in your own booth, minding your own business, doing nothing good spiritually speaking.

That's what Matthew's doing.

I love the image.

Just like last week we saw the paralytic lowered down who could do nothing for his salvation.

Here you have Matthew.

It's not that he's he's paralyzed, it's that he's actively rebelling against God.

He's sitting in his booth, not doing anything righteous, instead, extorting his people.

And that's to whom Jesus goes, and it all changes in an instant.

When he becomes a follower.

What a great description of the Christian life.

You're doing nothing good spiritually speaking, and then in an instant, in a moment, you become a follower of Christ.

And we've seen this phrase before.

We looked at it a few weeks ago.

Jesus says, unless you pick up your cross and follow me, you are not worthy of me.

This is what I mean by the Christian life is an action.

You have your cross on your back and you are following Jesus Christ.

Now the Christian life isn't entered by action.

You don't earn your salvation by working.

Of course not.

You're saved by grace, but it is grace that energizes you and grace that propels you into works.

When a person has an encounter with Jesus Christ, his grace changes their life.

They turn around, they stand up, and they walk and they follow Jesus.

It is a verb.

There's movement involved, there is action involved.

It's the command.

It's the only way to be a Christian, is to follow Christ.

But alas, not everybody does.

Remember what Jesus told the rich young ruler?

Sell what you have, give to the poor, and follow me.

And he went away sad because he had many possessions.

And Jesus said, Oh, it's so hard for rich people to go to heaven.

They're unwilling to follow.

And do you remember Peter in his boldness?

He pipes up and says, Lord, we've sold all we have in order to follow you.

That's the phrase Peter uses.

What about us, Jesus?

We're following you.

And Jesus tells Peter, Whoever has followed me will sit on thrones and reign with me in my kingdom.

That's the verb.

You follow.

What kind of verb is it?

It's an active verb.

It's an active verb.

It's a verb that involves your response.

You are following.

It's not a passive verb.

This isn't something that you sit back and let happen to you.

This is active.

It is aggressive.

It is, and elsewhere in the New Testament, it compared to being a marathon runner, to marching, to fighting, to buffeting your own body.

Matthew had to do this here.

Matthew had to stand up on his own two little feet and walk.

He had to actually leave his life and follow Jesus.

He had to respond.

This is the pattern in Christ's life.

Jesus can only do what the Father has him to do, but his life is a life of works.

Jesus is dependent upon his Father for his will, but his life is a life of work.

This is what it means to be a Christian.

Jesus calls us to follow him.

This is our response.

We follow him.

Jesus does not tell Matthew, if you want to be a Christian, join a church.

If you want to be a Christian, get baptized.

You want to be a Christian, be a spectator.

No, all of the language Jesus uses here is action about himself.

Follow Christ.

This hits on the lordship of Christ.

Are you serving Christ?

Is your life wrapped up in Christ?

Is your life subsumed by Christ?

That's what it means to follow Christ.

It's what you do.

You are actively in pursuit of him.

That's the call of Jesus.

I hope this is sitting in in your head here.

That Jesus' call for you is for you to be engaged in following him.

There's no passive Christianity.

Jesus' call to people is not to watch the Christian life.

It's not to Study the Christian life.

Jesus' call to people and his call to you this morning is that you would be a follower of Christ.

That's what you do.

You follow.

This verb is in the present tense.

Active voice, present tense.

Because this is going to be the pattern of your life.

The Greek verb tenses are even better than the English verb tenses.

In the Greek verb tense, there's this present tense means it's the ongoing pattern of your life.

It's not something that just happens in a moment.

Sometimes the present tense in the English could be, you know, a one-time action is just there at a moment.

That's not true in the Greek.

In the Greek, the present tense means this is going to be what you're doing.

This will be your life.

The call to follow Jesus is not a call for a one-time decision, a one-time response, a one-time action.

The call to follow Jesus is a call that will echo through the rest of your life.

It will be the pattern of your life.

Some grammar books refer to it as habitual.

It'll be the habitual action of your life.

The idea is that if someone is looking for you, they know where to find you.

They find Jesus.

If someone wants to know what you're doing, you're following Christ at any point in your life.

Where so-and-so?

Oh, they're a Christian.

They must be following Christ.

That's who they are.

That's where they'll be, that's what they'll do.

Following Christ is not an off and on switch.

You don't follow him on Sundays and off on Monday through Saturday.

It's not a tap you turn on and off.

It's just who you are.

It's always on.

It's not a trail you blaze on your own throughout the week and then you follow Jesus on Sundays.

You will be following him the rest of your life.

Jesus doesn't just teach you a little while how to be a Christian and then send you out of the nest on your own.

The rest of your life you will be following him.

He doesn't give you training wheels the first few years of Christianity and then let you branch out on your own.

No, the rest of your life you are dependent upon him.

The rest of your life you are following him.

You never outgrow being a follower of Christ.

Ever.

You never mature through this.

You never graduate from this school.

You never are promoted above the rank of a follower.

No matter how mature you are in the Lord, no matter how long you've been walking with Jesus Christ, you are still a follower of Christ.

It's an imperative.

It's present, active, an imperative.

In other words, it is urgent.

It's a command in the Greek.

And it comes across in English too.

Follow me.

It's a command.

In other words, immediately start following.

Right now, get out of your booth and follow.

The fact that it is a command means it's something that's not happening at this moment.

Of course, as he's talking to Matthew, he's sitting in the tax booth.

Matthew is doing anything but following.

Jesus commands him, right now, you must start your journey.

Right now, you must start following.

There's a start to this.

Nobody is born into following Christ.

You know, I pray with my three girls, I pray that they, as they look back in their testimonies, that they will never know a time that they weren't following Jesus.

They'll never be able to remember.

I'm not a big proponent of them having like a day that they were saved.

I think when you're born in a Christian family and you're raised in a Christian family, it's okay to look back on your life and not remember a start of your Christian journey.

That being said, let me very quickly say they're not born following Christ.

If you know my girls, you can say amen to that.

They're not born following Christ.

They have to be taught it, they have to start it, they have to learn it.

If you weren't raised in a Christian family, your testimony is likely much more instantaneous, where it happened at a moment.

You were going your own way, and then you found Jesus, and or more likely he found you, as the scene is here, and you begin to follow him.

That's the response of somebody who comes to encounter with Jesus Christ is they start following.

They weren't before, and now they are, and they will forever be.

As I mentioned, Jesus, being a follower of Christ, is not an off and on thing.

It's not something you can start and stop.

You just sign up and you go for it.

You join his army of disciples, and you will follow him the rest of your life.

And this is, of course, a change.

This is a change that is called conversion.

That you go from living for yourself to living for him.

Matthew is going to leave all of his life behind.

And you see this, he rose and followed him.

I mean, do you understand that if you walk away from a tax business, it's not there next week.

The Romans aren't going to say, oh, he took a two-month sabbatical from his tax collecting to go find himself.

No.

They'll find somebody else to take over your street.

Or the guy above you will sell it to somebody else, more likely.

You walk away from your tax business, you are done.

This is the Cortez equivalent of burning his boats.

I mean, there is no turning back from this.

He is committed.

It starts today when he responds to Jesus Christ.

Moreover, this verb is active, present, imperative.

You didn't know you were getting an English lesson this morning, but you are.

Second person singular.

Second person singular.

It is a command to you.

And in the Greek, this is all wrapped up in the word follow me, where you can tell it's second person singular.

It's not a generic command.

It's not second person plural.

It's, you know, the text and phrase, all y'all.

It's not that command to the world.

It's not the general call of the gospel that goes to the world.

This is the personal call to Levi, to Matthew.

You stand up and follow me.

It is the call that goes right to his heart.

You, Jesus says, you must do this.

You cannot respond to this corporately.

You cannot follow Jesus corporately.

There is no such thing as following Jesus in a corporate sense.

It is an individual relationship with him.

Friends cannot follow Jesus in your behalf.

Parents cannot follow Jesus on their children's behalf.

Grandparents cannot follow Jesus on their grandchildren's behalf.

Individually, human hearts have to respond to this call as individuals where Jesus calls you.

And you have to be hit by this call.

If you hear the call of Christ to follow him, you have to respond.

You can't say, oh, my parents are Christian, so I'm good.

Oh, my brother or my sister, they're following Christ, so that is sufficient for me.

Somebody asked, Are you a Christian?

Yeah, my whole family is a Christian.

That's not the answer.

There's no family identity in this.

It is you as a person following Christ.

That's the call to Matthew.

Jesus doesn't command all the tax collectors, he doesn't command the hillside, the highways, and the byways.

Here he commands this person.

Follow me.

And finally, there's an object to the verb.

Jesus says, follow me.

He is the one with authority.

It's all about him.

It's personal.

Jesus doesn't say, follow this church.

He says, follow me.

He is the one with grace.

He's the one with the power to save.

He's the one who commands us.

That's why it's so noteworthy here that Matthew was not looking for Jesus.

Matthew is not on the hunt for promotion in life.

Matthew was sitting there minding his own business and Jesus found him.

That's the way this always works.

Jesus, his grace, finds us.

He is the one who is on the hunt.

It's a reminder to us that we love him because he first loved us.

This is the testimony of the irresistible grace and authority of God.

That he speaks and the mountains quake.

He speaks and the lightning flees.

He speaks and our hearts melt.

He speaks and what he says comes to pass.

And here what he says is to Matthew, follow me.

He calls and we answer.

And that's the nature of being a follower.

You can check your autonomy at the door.

You leave it with your sin and your previous life.

Because when you are the object of the call, when Christ calls you, you answer and you become his follower.

He is the Lord of the universe, the God of creation.

And he is certainly the Lord of the church.

That's why Christianity is all about Christ.

I love the phrase Christianity even.

Because he is the center of it.

He is the sum and the substance of what it means to be a Christian, to know and to follow Jesus Christ.

This is what it means when a person says they're in a personal relationship with Jesus.

It's not a personal relationship of equals.

Jesus is the leader, we all are the follower, and we follow him based upon his lordship, based upon his call, based upon his love towards us through Jesus Christ.

How do we follow?

What does it mean to follow Jesus?

How practically do we follow?

The New Testament spells this out over and over again.

2 Timothy 1, verse 13, where Paul says, follow the pattern of sound words that you have heard from me, in faith, in love that are in Christ Jesus.

2 Timothy 1:13

In other words, the New Testament says, you follow Jesus by reading the Bible and doing what it says.

It is the pattern of sound words.

John 8, verse 12, Jesus spoke to them saying, I am the light of the world.

John 8:12

Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.

How can you tell if you're following Christ?

Are you walking in the light or are you walking in the darkness?

That's John 8, verse 12.

John 8:12

Do you let the words of Scripture resonate in your heart?

That's 2 Timothy 1, verse 13.

2 Timothy 1:13

Is Jesus the love of your life?

Is he the goal of your life?

Is he the aim of your life?

Is he the pattern of your life?

That's what it means to be a follower of Christ.

It's not a position you can earn, it's not a position you can buy like a tax franchise in Israel.

It is just something that happens to you.

You have an encounter with Christ and you see the beauty of the one who died for your sins.

You recognize that you are Levi in the tax hut.

You are the sinner who can't earn his salvation, and Christ comes to you and he looks at you despite your sin.

And he says, I'll take your sin.

I'll take your life.

You follow me.

If you're not following Christ, you're not a Christian.

If you're not following Christ, you are not a disciple.

If you're not following Christ, you're not in a relationship with him.

And if that's you this morning, I would plead with you, today follow Christ.

Today make him the object of your life.

Today recognize that your sin separates you from God, but his love for you is shown through the death of Jesus Christ, his resurrection from the grave, and his invitation to you personally to follow him.

Lord, we're thankful that we don't follow Paul, we don't follow Cephas, but we follow Christ.

He is the Lord of this church.

We're thankful that you have given us other people who have set this pattern for us.

We don't respond to this verse with a cavalier attitude that it is our Christianity is in a vacuum.

No, you have given us elders and you've given us pastors who have gone before us who have been a pattern of what it means to follow you, and so we follow the pattern that they have set.

This is the church followed Paul because Paul was following you.

We too follow you.

We're thankful for the pattern of sound words in the New Testament that show us how we live our Christian life.

Lord, I pray if there's anyone here this morning that has not become a follower of you, I pray that they would respond in faith this morning.

Lord, we know that your heart is wide, your love is real, and it stands open for us to receive.

I pray for anyone here this morning who has never become a follower of you.

I pray that today they would wave goodbye to their old life.

Wave goodbye to their old name, and they would take on a new identity that from this day forward there would be disciples of Jesus Christ.

We ask this in his name.

Amen.

Thank you for being with us today.

And now a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, emmanuelbible.church.

If you're not a member of the local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.