Follow Me

Here's where we're at.

We're in Mark 1.

If you have your Bible, make sure you're turning there.

Follow along with us.

We're going to be diving into this text this morning.

But I want to start us off with this question.

Who are you following?

Who are you following?

You see, everybody, it doesn't matter if you're here this morning in this church or you're still in bed or wherever you find yourself at this morning, everyone is following somebody or at least something.

You see, whether we're aware of it or not, every single person is a disciple.

You see, the word disciple is Talmud, and it simply just means to be a student of a teacher or philosopher, but not just a learner, but a practitioner of an embodied way of life.

One who is diligently working to be with and become like their master, their rabbi, which is what that word means.

It simply means master.

All of us are learning a way of life.

We're being instructed and taught, and we're embodying that way of life in our everyday habits, practices, and rhythms.

You see, we've all submitted ourselves to a teacher whose way we follow.

We have given up much to be with them.

We have been made to be like them, and we see in our life that we do the things that we've observed them do.

So the question isn't, am I a disciple?

It's who or what am I a disciple of?

You see, this morning in the text, what we see here in the beginning of the Gospel of Mark is that Jesus is actually calling his first disciples.

This Galilean rabbi is coming along the shoreline and he calls out to these common everyday fishermen to follow him.

We enter the story after John the Baptist has been arrested, and the public ministry of Jesus is just beginning, and it says in verse 14, now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God and saying, The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe in the gospel.

So as Jesus is coming into the region of Galilee, it says that he's proclaiming the gospel of God.

You see, Jesus preached the message of the kingdom of God.

The inbreaking of God through the sending of his son into human history to establish his redemptive, kingly reign.

This was the message of the gospel of God.

And the nature of this message, the nature of the gospel is that it actually demands a response.

You see, the gospel is never just information.

It's never just something that we're able to take in and do nothing with.

When Jesus says this is the gospel of God, that God has come into our experience through his son, that his kingly reign is being established on earth.

Listen, you're going in a direction.

Your life is following a path.

Turn away from this to have life in me.

You see, all of us are following a way of life.

We're following a belief system, a worldview that is not only taking us down a certain path, but is making us also into a certain person.

Because our direction in life determines the people we become.

See, we're not aware of that very often.

We don't consider the people we're becoming in this life, and we don't tether it to the direction that our life is taking.

But these two realities are inseparable from one another.

This road that we are following in life is often taking us away from God, away from the beauty of his righteous kingdom, away from the people that he desires his image bears to become.

So the gospel's call to repent is a call to follow a new way of living, submitted under a true and better master, to become a people whose ultimate good is found in conformity to him.

A faithful response to the gospel is not just discovered in this new way of life, but is also in belief that this way of life is truly good and better.

As Peter would say about Jesus, Lord, you have the words of eternal life.

You see, the call of the gospel is to repent and believe.

So Jesus is preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and he's calling for a response to this declaration to be fully persuaded of its message and to turn completely from the way that your life is going and follow a new way.

And it was in this proclamation that Jesus calls out to Simon and Andrew, follow me.

Follow me, verse 16.

Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen.

And Jesus said to them, Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.

Now, Jesus in his message was certainly beginning to create some attraction through curiosity as he was publicly ministering throughout the region.

I think we can consider that Jesus' regard as a rabbi was growing and word about his message and teaching was spreading quickly.

And the scriptures tell us that everywhere Jesus went, the crowds were both astonished and overwhelmed with wonder by the words that he declared.

So while he's preaching and teaching, he stops on the shoreline of the sea and calls out to two common fishermen, Simon, who is Peter, and his brother Andrew, follow me and I will make you fishers of men.

Jesus is essentially calling out to them, saying, This your life is going in this direction.

Turn and follow me in a new way.

Follow me and I will make you like me.

Follow me and I will teach you to do what I do.

When they heard this call from Jesus the rabbi, they dropped all that they were doing.

They dropped their work, their relationships, their way of life, and left it all to turn and follow him.

Jesus then goes a little further down the shore, right?

And he sees two more brothers, James and John, and he calls them also.

And they responded just like Simon and Andrew did, with belief and with repentance, to follow a new way of life with Jesus the rabbi.

You see, Jesus made a call to these common, everyday fishermen that demanded a response.

It demanded a response to turn away from their life, the direction that it was going and embark on a new way where he would be their master and they would follow his path.

Jesus was calling them, follow me.

Follow me.

Was this call to be with him, to be like him, and to do what he did.

And Jesus the rabbi was calling each of these men to be his disciple.

And see that same call is made to you and I today.

Jesus calls us to be his disciple.

Jesus calls us to be his disciple.

So what is a disciple?

I think before we can answer that question, we have to ask the question of what is a rabbi?

Because it's a rabbi, a master, a teacher who makes a disciple.

You see, rabbis were the spiritual masters of Israel.

Not only were they expert teachers of the Torah, the scriptures of their day, but they were also captivating examples of a life lived with God.

You see, Torah means the way.

And every rabbi would have their unique interpretation of the meaning of the scriptures, and they would work to embody how you should apply them to your life.

So, in essence, every single rabbi would take the way, the scriptures, and they would create their way of understanding and living them out.

This was called their yoke.

Their understanding and interpretation of the Torah, the way, the way that they would apply that understanding to their life and live it out, they would call their yoke.

Every rabbi had his yoke.

A Hebrew expression for his set of teachings, his way of understanding scripture, his take on how to flourish as people in God's world.

And every rabbi would have disciples who were called to take on their yoke and follow after them.

Jesus didn't invent this notion of being a disciple.

He would use everyday known language and ways of life to bring these men into himself that they may be with him and be like him and to learn to do what he did.

You see, a disciple was then someone who would change the entire direction of their life so that they could be with their rabbi, to take on their yoke and to follow after them toward a soul-persuaded, better way of life.

You see, this is the call that Jesus the rabbi makes to us.

Hear the words that he teaches.

Be fully persuaded in our souls that this way is truly life and life eternal, and that we would ultimately change every aspect of our lives and turn in a different direction to be able to follow after him, that we would drop everything, our work, our relationships, our previously known way of life, that we might be all in to be with him.

Come, he says, be my disciple.

Come and follow me.

Being a disciple of Jesus, this is following Jesus, is a whole life process of being with Jesus for the purpose of becoming like him in carrying on his work in the world.

It isn't just a call to believe that his teaching is true.

Right?

Belief is only one part of the demand that the gospel makes on our life.

It's a call to change the entire direction of your life to embody that teaching, to embody that doctrine in your very being.

And so, still today, the rabbi calls out to common everyday people to drop all that they have, all that they know, and to follow him to the abundant life that only his way can offer.

You see, the original name for the community of Jesus' disciples was the way, or followers of the way.

In Acts 9 2, we see this that Saul asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the way.

Acts 19, 23.

About that time there arose a great disturbance about the way.

Acts 24, 14.

I worship the God of our ancestors as a follower of the way.

These are just a few examples of its use in Scripture, but the word literally means a road or a path.

And Jesus used this as a metaphor for being a disciple of him.

That our life is going in a new direction, completely different and changed from the one that we were going, because we were going the way of death.

We were going the way that was distant and removed from God.

And now we're turning our entire being to be with him.

To journey on the way was to follow after him with all of life for all of life.

You see, but many of us in today's culture, we've we've lost the essence of the call.

We've divorced the call to believe from the call to repent.

And we've reduced being a whole life disciple of Jesus to just someone who mentally ascribes to the bare bones of his teaching, and we call them Christian.

You see, many of us we fail to answer the call, follow me.

We see this all throughout our culture, right?

You know people who call themselves Christian.

They mentally ascribe to a certain belief system.

Yeah, of course I believe Jesus was God.

Of course I believe he died for a sin.

Of course, I believe he rose from the grave.

And we call them Christian, but we see almost nothing in their life that shows that they've turned away from this direction to follow after him with every aspect of their being.

You see, discipleship is not less than believing, but it is necessary more than believing.

As Saint Maximus said in the seventh century, a person who is simply a man of faith is neither a disciple nor an apostle.

However, through his manner of life and through contemplation, he can be raised to the rank and dignity of a disciple.

You see, it's more than just belief, it's more than just ascribing to certain doctrines and teaching.

It is that those beliefs change your being.

What would benefit us to see is that the word Christian is actually used only three times in the New Testament.

To put that in perspective, the word disciple is used 269 times.

Which comes as no surprise since the New Testament was written by disciples of Jesus for disciples of Jesus.

So to reiterate this, Christian three times disciple 269 times.

We've flipped the use of language in today's modern culture.

That nomenclature has been flipped completely, if not altogether, lost in our current context.

You see, we tend to simply investigate if someone is a Christian by discovering what they confess to believe rather than to determine them as a disciple, because we have seen how their beliefs have caused them to live a new way of life.

I don't think that this is just my half-hearted observation.

I believe it's actually evident in research.

You see, in the American Worldview Inventory of 2023, conducted by Barna, they discovered this shocking state of the evangelical world.

Sixty three percent of Americans self-identified as Christian.

So hear what I said.

In that same study, four percent said that they were actually following after Jesus.

So what have we discovered?

There's a mental ability or desire to simply believe a certain group of teaching, but there is absent that that teaching, that belief, changes the direction of someone's life.

In today's church, we have many Christians and few disciples.

But only 4% say that that belief is changing the way of their life.

If we only believe but fail to repent, to completely change our whole life direction, to follow the way of our master and become like him, then we may very well discover that we aren't disciples after all.

But we belong to some other community of people who ultimately failed to discover the life that they so desperately needed.

You see, throughout the gospel accounts, we see more than just disciples following after Jesus.

We also see two other groups.

We see the unresolved crowd, and we see the religious culture following him as well.

Some of us were a part of that unresolved crowd.

And I know that that's true for even some of us here this morning.

You see, the disciples of Jesus included all of his followers, the 12 apostles, but also many, many others, including women.

The crowds were simply everyone else.

And this sharp divide between the disciples of Jesus and the crowd that followed after him is a rhetorical device that's used by all four gospel writers.

You see, the vagueness of this term crowds is very intentional.

It's a way of saying to us, the reader, which group are you in?

Are you a disciple?

Or are you a part of the crowd?

You see, the crowds followed after Jesus.

But they only did so to a certain point.

You see, they liked what they heard Jesus say.

They enjoyed his teaching.

It provoked them, it sparked their curiosity and intrigue.

It created Excitement for them, but they were ultimately unresolved of its ultimate truth and beauty.

They were willing to believe until it cost them their way of life.

When the road appeared to be too difficult to travel, what did they do?

They turned back.

We're in this age of deconstruction of our faith.

What we're seeing is that throughout the last 25 years of the church, we've made more Christians than we've made disciples.

And they grew up and they discovered the road was too hard to travel down.

You see, the crowd was unresolved in the truth and beauty of Jesus' teaching because they were unpersuaded that the way forward was worth them traveling to obtain the life that he was claiming to offer.

One of the most clear times that we see this in the Gospels is in John 6.

Let's think about the context of this.

Jesus has just miraculously fed more than 5,000 people who were following after him.

And the next morning, he begins teach, teaching them that he is the bread of life who has come down from heaven and gives life to the world.

He calls them to believe.

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.

Right?

He's calling them to believe in the message that he's proclaiming.

But he doesn't just call them to believe.

You see, these two things, belief and repentance, can never be divorced from one another.

Let's look in verse 53 and 54 where he says this.

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.

Look at what he's promising them.

He's promising them the life that they need.

Eternal life is in him, but it's not just in believing what he teaches.

You have to reorient every aspect of your life around him in such a way that it would be as though you were drinking his very blood and feasting on his flesh.

Will you follow him to that life that he promises?

Look at what Jesus is doing.

He's calling them to repent and to believe that if you truly desire life, it's going to come through a fully persuaded soul belief that following after me in all my suffering, through this difficult terrain of my set path that I have from the Father, that's what's going to cause you to obtain it.

And not only does Jesus have the words of life, but he himself is life.

And then John speaks of the crowd in this way.

Then many turned back and no longer walked with him.

What did they discover?

That road wasn't worth the reward.

They weren't persuaded that life was at the end of this journey.

Many of us may simply be a part of the unresolved crowd this morning.

You may believe, right?

You may mentally ascribe to the teaching of Jesus, but one day, one day, it will demand your entire way of life.

A disciple will follow Jesus unto death.

But the crowd, they turn back and never find life.

That's the difference.

Others of us, we may be a part of the religious culture.

We're a part of the religious culture.

Here's what's absolutely wild about the religious culture that followed after Jesus.

The elites of Jesus' day, they shared in this radical cultural prestige that you would have to actually undergo all this rigorous education and training just to be considered one of the best and brightest students of the scriptures.

You see, you'd have to complete a higher level of learning than the vast majority of society that was called the Bet Midrash or the House of Learning.

And listen to me for a minute.

If you engaged in this educational system because you were considered one of the best and brightest, by the age of 17, you would have memorized the Old Testament.

Memorized.

Some of y'all can barely memorize John 3.16.

These 17-year-olds memorized Genesis to Malachi, word for word.

That was the level of prestige that they would have to reach.

Studying and memorizing every story, every law, every prophecy contained within Scripture.

They would have been intimately familiar with the promises of the Messiah who was to come and deliver them.

Yet this is the crazy thing.

Jesus stood face to face with them, and they could not see him.

They failed to see him as the inbreaking of God, as the promise of God made flesh to rescue his people, as the Son who was sent to die to save his people from their sin.

To them, Jesus wasn't the Messiah.

He wasn't even a rabbi.

He was a blasphemer that deserved to die.

He deserved to die for his teaching and way of life.

You see, their root issue was belief.

A predetermined belief about who the Messiah would be, what he would teach, and how he would live.

And Jesus didn't look anything like that.

Jesus didn't agree with their predetermined beliefs and way of life.

So they may have followed him around, but they were very antagonistic toward him.

They never followed him or his way of living.

You see, many of us, we in our camp, we love theology.

We love knowing scripture, and we think that we have this predetermined, fully informed understanding of who Jesus is, what he was like, and how he would function in our world today.

We may very well be a person who has a very informed belief about Jesus, but there's something interesting.

Many of us in this room continually and daily feel distant from him.

Oh, I know him.

But are you with him?

You see, we hear the call to come and die.

We hear the call to take up our cross and follow him.

Yet we hear his claims of love, of justice, of equity, of hospitality and mercy, and it fails often to harmonize with the Jesus we believe that he should be.

Many of us have made this theological soup of political ideology and reform theology, and we've made a Jesus out of that.

And we've said this is how he would look.

And when we really look at the scriptures of who Christ was, he rarely synthesizes with that belief.

You see, we fail to find ourselves actually following after him, and instead we resolve to follow after an idol of our own making.

I'm always very challenged by this quote from the late Tim Keller.

He said, This if your God never disagrees with you, you might just be worshiping an idealized version of yourself.

To follow Jesus is going to contradict a lot of what we believe and assume, a lot of what we have predetermined about Him.

Only the disciple is willing to fully believe and fully follow after Jesus to the way of life that he has promised for them.

And so, church, I want to leave you with this.

Jesus is the rabbi worthy of following.

Jesus is the rabbi worthy of following.

As I said when we started this message, we're all following someone or something.

That's not the right question.

Am I a disciple?

You are a disciple.

Your life is being informed by a certain set of teachings, by a way of life.

You're mimicking and uh modeling that belief system in the decisions that you make every single day.

And everything, everyone that we follow does something very deceptive to us.

All of them offer life on the other side of their way.

That's the dangerous part of discipleship is that at the end of everyone's way, they promise life.

But truly, only one way leads to life and life eternal.

Jesus says, I am the way.

I am the truth.

I am the life.

And Christ alone proves it.

He proves it for all to see in the glory of his death and resurrection.

You see, Jesus is worthy of following, not simply because he has the words of eternal life, but because in him alone is eternal life.

After his death and resurrection, he meets some of his scared and anxious disciples on the shoreline of the same sea of which he first called them in Galilee.

And there, over a simple bread and fish breakfast, he looks Simon Peter in the eyes and calls him, follow me.

Think about that for a moment.

In the same sea, fishing years before, Jesus called out from the shore to Simon Peter, follow me.

He dropped everything, went after him.

He believed, he followed him, he turned his whole way of living.

And then came the trial and crucifixion of Jesus.

And what does Peter do?

He runs scared.

He denies that he even knows him three different times.

Jesus publicly rebukes him in front of the rest of the disciples.

Turn behind me, Satan, or get behind me, Satan.

And what does Peter do?

He goes back to the way of life he knew, fishing in the Sea of Galilee.

Jesus finds him there and he calls him again after his resurrection.

Follow me.

If ever, if ever, it was then and there, in the presence of the resurrected Lord, that Peter knew Jesus was worthy of following even unto death.

Because in him alone was life.

That we would follow after Jesus.

The call of the gospel is this that by a fully persuaded mind and heart, you would reorient your entire being toward the path of life in following Jesus.

That you wouldn't just settle for mental assent to his teaching, but that every part of your way of life would be transformed to embody it.

The way of Jesus, the path of discipleship.

We have to understand something.

It's much less about getting you into heaven, and it's much more about getting heaven into you.

That's the path, the way that Jesus is calling us.

Hear the call of your rabbi.

Take up his yoke and begin the journey of being his disciple.

To be with him, to be like him, and to do what he did.

And may we drop everything to turn and follow Jesus.

Amen.

Let's pray.