People of Grace: What is a Disciple? - June 1, 2025

It is my privilege to invite you to today's sermon podcast.

I have made the Apostle Paul's prayer request my own.

When he states in Ephesians 6, 19, pray also for me, that whenever I open my

mouth, the words may be given to me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel.

May today's sermon come alive to you and aid you in your understanding of God's plan for your life.

Does anyone here this morning think that they're a believer in Christ because

they had a praying grandma or grandpa or praying mom and dad,

would you just raise your hand?

Pretty much almost unanimous, right?

The power of your prayers, and this isn't a sermon on prayer this morning.

We're still talking about God's grace, but I think we have an optimism when it comes to grace.

And when we pray for our kids, when we pray for our grandkids,

when we pray for our neighbor, our loved ones, even when we pray for our enemies,

God moves and God moves in a major way.

And I think about the mission of Jesus that we've talked about so much here,

and that's really what we're all about.

Jesus came to earth to reveal the loving heart of God.

He came to earth to invite people to live in this personal relationship with Him.

Now, once again, there was nothing going to stand in the way of us and our Creator God.

Jesus came to make that personal to us. Jesus came and he died on a cross for

each and every one of us, taking the punishment that was meted out for sin.

That's a powerful act of grace. Even more so is when Jesus rose on that resurrection day.

He rose from the grave three days later after he was crucified,

after he was dead and put in the tomb.

And that resurrection from the grave validated everything he did in his life. Every single thing.

But even after the resurrection, he did not take on the divine mission,

the grand mission of seeking and saving those which was lost all by himself.

No, he invited men and women to follow him.

He invited them to be discipled, and he invited them to share Jesus himself

with others, with whoever they came into contact with.

This is the kind of God that we served. And then when he returned to the Father,

he let humanity loose, Let the disciples loose to go and to continue the mission that was started.

We think about this calling, this calling of men and women to follow him.

And I kind of think back to the gospel of Matthew chapter 4,

Matthew 4 · chapter mention

which we're going to read from just a few verses today, to examine and to really

consider what is God calling me to?

What is God calling you to? And what is God collectively calling us to?

And this morning, as we look to the word again, in Matthew 4, verses 18-22.

Matthew 4:18–22

I hope that you see in this the personal call for your own life,

the personal call for you to follow Jesus.

So this morning, I invite you to stand if you're willing and able,

and let's hear the word of the Lord together this morning as it's read.

As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers,

Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew.

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

Come follow me, Jesus said, and I will send you out to fish for people.

At once they left their nets and followed him. Going on from there,

he saw two other brothers, James, a son of Zebedee, and his brother John.

They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets.

Jesus called to them, and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed Jesus.

Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word. May it impact our hearts and life.

And Lord, we just want to get personal this morning.

And so, Lord, may your spirit speak to each one of us personally with the amazing

grace that you've given us today, that you've shown to us.

Lord, may we hear your calling today in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thank you. You can be seated. You know, the text today that we just read,

it invites us to examine three critical questions, which we'll do in the course

of this sermon this morning.

But before we do that, we've got to answer two very crucial questions and make

really, I guess, one question and two crucial definitions.

And so, in this book here, A People of Grace, written by Sam Barber.

If you'd like to borrow this, you can. It's a great book. If you'd like to order

one from Nazarene Publishing, or it's called The Foundry Publishing now, I invite you to do so.

But in this book, Sam gives this definition of disciple and discipleship.

And so, let me read the quote from the book. A disciple responds to God's prevenient

or seeking grace by accepting the offer of saving grace.

A disciple becomes aware of and then accepts God's offer of sanctifying grace

and grows in Christlikeness because of God's sustaining grace.

Then a disciple takes up the mission and.

Of God, to join with God in helping someone else along his journey of grace.

A disciple is a person of grace.

We call the process of growing in our relationship with God and inviting others

along with us, the journey of grace, we call that discipleship.

So as you see on the screen there, disciple, in summary, is a person who responds

to God's prevenient grace.

Again, that's a seeking grace by accepting the offer of saving grace,

growing in Christ-likeness, becoming like Jesus through sanctifying and his

sustaining grace, and then joining God on that mission by helping others in their journey of grace.

That's a mouthful for someone that we could just say is a follower of Jesus

because it really lays it out.

It says you're just not a fan of Jesus. Yay, Jesus! Yes, but you're a follower,

which means you're truly following.

If you look through the New Testament, you see many times people followed Jesus,

until the going got tough, and then they tapped out. I'm out of here.

But it's those disciples who really were impacted by God's grace in such a way

that it was all in, that it was deep down, that it made a difference.

And we think about discipleship. It's just the process of growing in our relationship

with God and inviting others to join us on this journey of grace.

I think it's important just to define these so we know what we're talking about.

The word disciple and the word discipleship in the church realm,

yeah, we know what it's all about, but in the world, sometimes that doesn't

make sense to them. We hear a lot about mentoring.

If you like Star Wars, you hear a lot about the Jedi and the Padawan, right?

The same kind of biblical things, just made up in a different way.

When we think about those two critical, those two crucial definitions,

I want to talk to you this morning about three important questions.

And it's a question I hope that each of you can answer this morning.

And the first one is just simply this.

Who does Jesus invite into discipleship with him?

I think you'll be surprised maybe when you hear some of these answers to this.

First and foremost, he invites everyone. That means you too.

He's invited you along to come and be his disciple.

You don't have to have professional religious training. You don't have to go

to Bible college or go become a seminary student or go to NNU in the religion

department. You don't have to have any of that.

None of that is required to come and follow Jesus. You don't need that professional education.

I'm not saying it's not helpful along the way, but you don't need it to start following Jesus.

Any one of you can, whether you did well in school or you didn't do well,

whether you graduated or didn't graduate, Come and follow Jesus.

All the requirement is that you be willing.

Think about these few questions. Were Jesus' disciples trained in this religious

stuff? Not necessarily.

Were they educated by experts in religious matters?

No. You know, it's been assumed that these guys that Jesus asked to follow him, they were rejects.

That even from a young age, they didn't make the cut to be part of a rabbi school.

And so they had to find other ways to go out and to

make a living and we see some of them going out

and and they were fishermen others kind of

being traders and they were tax collectors we see

all along with these first disciples that were called jesus

didn't go to the rabbinical schools and call the brightest of the best students

out of each one just went for a stroll along the lake and found some fishermen

and said hey come and follow me and they did that willingness to come and to

seek out this rabbi who now has chosen them, this great teacher.

We think about the fact that Jesus was a carpenter.

Some say, well, that's not a good translation. Maybe he was a stonemason because

you look around Israel, there ain't very many trees.

And some scholars will say that was kind of a synonymous thing,

a carpenter making furniture out of rock or, you know, that kind of thing.

Sipels, I said, were fishermen. Even the apostle Paul, even with his rabbinical

training, even though he was the Hebrew of the Hebrews, he still knew how to

make tents and use that to help fund God's mission and fund himself as he went

out to proclaim the gospel.

Folks, followers of Jesus, disciples of Jesus come from every corner of the

earth, come from every socioeconomic level, and most of all,

they just come from common people that are doing the common labor just to help make ends meet.

So put that excuse to rest. Now, you don't have enough smarts or enough training.

You don't know enough about the Bible to follow Jesus in discipleship.

No, all you have to do is do like the disciples did.

You see, Jesus' first disciples learned what it meant to follow God,

to follow him, just from the everyday experience of hard work and discipline.

They learned from success, and they learned from failure.

They learned from interacting in the family relationships that they had,

and also in the family that became the 12 disciples there as they followed Jesus.

They learned all of this.

Sometimes the best teacher in life is the hard knocks of life.

Anytime my kids start complaining about how bad they have it,

I just start singing a little song from little orphan Annie.

It's a hard knock life for us. It's a hard knock life for us.

And I know that's not the tune.

That's just my tune. Sorry, Emma, you could sing it better. She's heard it enough.

Not that she's a complainer. She probably heard it from me talking to her brother.

I'll let you guess which one.

We think about what kind of training the disciples had.

It was on-the-job training. They just jumped in and wanted to follow Jesus.

And they experienced everything Jesus did.

From the great times, the on-top, mountaintop experience, when a person was

healed, when a blind man received his sight, When a layman took up his mat and

walked, they were there with Jesus during those times.

The other times when the Pharisees were questioning Jesus, really testing who

he was and were really just being nasty toward him.

The disciples were there too and seeing how Jesus responded to them.

And that's the kind of discipleship we're talking about. Just living life with Jesus.

So any of us, every one of us, Jesus invites to become his disciple.

You don't have to be a Nazarene of Nazarenes.

All Jesus is asking that you would follow him. And so what is that call?

When we look back or we look over the book of John, we see that it wasn't just

kind of like it's portrayed sometimes in movies or maybe in our own minds during

Sunday school that here's these guys out fishing,

they're casting their nets or they're mending their nets to go out and fish again.

And then all of a sudden, some guy just says, hey, follow me. And they're like, okay.

And then they just start following him. We kind of think about it in that way.

And I don't think that's totally wrong.

But I think, and when you look at what John says, there is already an established relationship.

They already kind of knew who this Jesus guy was. And so when he came along,

God, I think, had already been convicting and talking to their hearts.

And so look at what John says in John 1, verses 40 through 42.

John 1:40–42

Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, was one of the two who heard what John had said

and who had followed Jesus.

The first thing Andrew did was go find his brother Simon and tell him,

we have found the Messiah, that is the Christ, and he brought us to Jesus.

And it just goes on, especially in this John, this parallel passage,

how Jesus had a relationship.

God was already working in someone's heart. It doesn't mean that miraculously

someone just can't say, I just want to follow Jesus. That happens all the time.

But here, there was an established relationship when Jesus called them to come and follow him.

We think about the call to Christian discipleship. It comes directly from Christ.

It's nothing a pastor calls you to, although I plead with you often,

well, get into your word, join a class, go and just live out who Jesus wants you to be.

Discover your spiritual gifts, put them to use in ministry and all these things.

But really, it comes from God.

God, not only does he invite us to follow him in discipleship,

but he invites us to follow him in this journey with him in his mission to the world.

He wants us to be partners with Jesus.

Doesn't that sound good? I don't know if any of you ever been in business with

someone that was kind of shady.

That's not fun to be in. I've heard stories. I've got some close friends that

were just burned in business with their own friends.

It kind of destroys that relationship. But I got to tell you,

when you partner up with Jesus, it's the best thing you can do.

I'm just not talking about heaven or eternal life. Well, I'm talking about all

the blessings and benefits that come with being an instrument that goes out

and just shares the good news of the gospel of Jesus with others.

How beautiful and how bright that is. You know, it's not a generic call. It's a personal call.

It's a personal call that each and every one of you, I hope, can hear today.

Jesus wants you to be a disciple. Not just a fan that sits in the pews,

like I said earlier, but a disciple that follows him into wherever you go and to whatever you do.

It's this personal call that Jesus invites you to. And there's two levels of

commitment here, and it comes right from the Scripture.

Scripture, if you look back at verse 19, there's two things that Jesus said when he called them.

The first one was, follow me. Hey, come and follow me.

Follow him in that personal relationship. but follow Jesus in that consecrated

commitment where it's just like, I'm all in with you.

Leave your nets behind and come on.

Come and follow me into this great journey, this great adventure that awaits.

Went on to say the last part of verse 19, come and follow me and I will make

you fishers of men or fishers of people.

Children, teens, women, men. Come on, follow me, and I'll make you fishers of

those same kind of people.

That's the two levels of commitment. The disciples were sent out to do just that.

And I think the call requires us to do that same thing as well today.

You know, the call requires this laser focus attention on the assignment that

God has given us to share God and His mission to our entire world.

Wasn't it great having Jubilee here a few weeks back. Actually,

it was nice to have him twice in our worship service. I thought that was a special blessing.

And even talking to Jubilee, and maybe you experienced this too,

just the temptation he felt in his soul just to stay here, stay here where it's comfortable.

I mean, after all, he said, this is like heaven here. I'm glad it was earlier

in the month before it got too hot, but he's used to that heat there.

But he said, the temptation to stay here and just be comfortable rather than

go about my calling, which many times is uncomfortable when his life is threatened,

when there's persecution actively going on.

His laser focus on the mission said, no, I've got to go. Hey,

I've got reason to have asylum here.

I've got reason to stay if there ever was reason. And he could do a work here, a good work here.

But the call of God on his life to follow Jesus in discipleship was to go back

home and continue in the work that he is doing there.

That laser focus, he forsook everything.

And for us to forsake everything and to follow him, it demands our time.

It demands our focus to live exclusively for the kingdom of God.

Sometimes we miss that exclusively word when we think about what it means to follow Jesus.

It means Jesus becomes our priority. It means his mission becomes our priority.

Hey, you could still be a plumber if you want. You got to make ends meet.

You could still be a builder.

You could still be a contractor, a farmer, electrician. I mean, fill in the blank.

Fisherman, if you want. But the primary focus of everything else that you do

has to be on following Jesus.

That's just not a preacher thing. I think it comes from the scripture.

Live exclusively for Jesus.

And so I just want to, the time I've got left, a few minutes is,

how should we respond to Jesus' call?

Well, let's look at how the disciples responded. Back in verse 20,

the disciples responded at once, at once.

In verse 22, it says, immediately, without hesitation, without lingering contemplation,

without procrastination, without second guessing or turning back,

they started to follow Jesus.

It wasn't like what happens with us sometimes when your wonderful pastor gives

you a great opportunity to serve others, and you say, I got to pray about it.

Some of you have been praying about it since Pastor Chuck was pastor,

and I'm not talking in this building. I'm talking about the other building in Holmdale.

Well, you ain't heard an answer yet.

An opportunity after Adam was, well, he's about three or four to come to Rupert

and to go out there and to be a pastor of a little church.

And I said, okay, pastor, I'll pray about it.

And he called me two weeks later. You still praying about it?

I said, yeah. He said, well, if the Lord ain't told you now,

the answer is probably no. I said, yeah, you're probably right.

It was bad timing anyway, because then we found out Adam was sick with cancer

shortly after that. But we don't have to keep putting the Lord off when he says,

hey, now, I know there's a lot of things we've got to figure out.

When we answer God's call, especially these first disciples, they left everything.

Well, James and John, they left old Zebedee back in the boat.

Can you imagine that, dads? Here you are fishing with your son.

You're really showing him the family business, showing him the trade.

And all of a sudden, some guy shows up and says, hey, come on and follow me.

And okay, they hop out of the boat, leave their nets there.

And dad's just left in the boat saying, what in the world? Get back here. Come on.

I mean, it just blows my mind. But they followed immediately.

They left everything that they knew, everything that they have.

They knew fish and they left it.

So they left their employment. They left their livelihood. They left their family. They left familiarity.

They left their obligations to follow Jesus into the unknown,

to follow Jesus where they didn't know what was going to happen in the next day.

I think sometimes they didn't even know where they were going to eat,

where they were going to sleep.

What I appreciate about the new series that's out, The Chosen,

and I know there's different opinions, but one of the perspectives I like about

that show is it kind of highlights that, that they didn't always have like a central location.

Sometimes they're just wandering out in the wilderness following Jesus,

coming across people that needed him.

And sometimes they're just set up out and they'd be like out in the Hawaii wilderness here.

You know, here they go. There's a need. Jesus starts leading that way and they just all follow.

We think about everything they left as the fact that they left and followed

Jesus unconditionally.

There weren't any loopholes in their level of commitment.

They just said, we're going to follow Jesus.

Disciples, when they followed Jesus, it wasn't just more than a mental ascent.

It wasn't just, okay, Jesus, I agree with you on these principles.

No, they not only agreed in their mind and their heart, but with their actions too, and they went.

And so we just can't make it cerebral all the time just in what we think and how we follow Jesus.

It's got to hit our heart and that source of motivation and really push us toward actions.

I think the Apostle Paul said in the New Testament The love of Christ constraineth

us. It compels us. It pushes us forward.

And it's that same love that they had for Jesus that compelled them to keep following.

And I think today it's that same love that we have for Jesus and his grace that

he has shown us that pushes us forward to follow him.

And to not only that calling to salvation, but that calling to take the next

step after that and to continue to grow in God's grace.

Jesus calls each and every one of us just like he called the disciples.

And that doesn't change today.

Just because we're living in 21st century America, we've got all the bells and

whistles of everything we could ever want or need.

Sometimes Jesus calls us just to go follow him. And he requires of his disciples

that same desire just wherever.

You know, I want to tell you that God may not be asking you to quit your job.

Some of you are like, yeah, I'm following Jesus Take this job and shove it, right?

I'm out of here I'm ready to go follow Jesus Sometimes the call is just to stay.

Stay in that job that's providing for your family That's providing an opportunity

to share Jesus with others that don't know who he is Sometimes that might be to change jobs.

What I'm saying is God might not ask you or call you to go to Africa,

to go to Myanmar. He might, but the call of discipleship is one step at a time.

It's taking that one step. This morning, when you got out of bed after that

hot day yesterday, you could have just been exhausted and said,

I'm not going to church, man.

It's nice and cool today. I missed

yesterday. I couldn't do any yard work because it's too stinking hot.

But man, it's great weather for doing yard work.

So yeah, I watch church online later. I can check it out. I'm going to go and

mow the yard. I'm going to go and do whatever.

But no, you made a choice this morning, a step of discipleship,

a step of following Jesus in this journey of grace, because you chose to come

and to gather with God's people here, to not forsake the assembling of yourself

together with other believers.

That's a step of commitment. That's a step of discipleship.

When you gave this morning in the offering, whether you did it in the offering

plate or online, that's a step of commitment, of discipleship.

This morning when you attended Sunday school and you studied the Word with other believers.

This morning when you opened your Bible before you even got going and you had

your daily devotions with God. You read Scripture. You prayed.

That's a step of commitment to say, I want to follow Jesus.

In all these things, you didn't have to leave very much to do that.

But you did it. You took that step.

The more positive and forward progress we have in following Jesus when He gives

us the opportunities to follow Him, the easier it is in those small things once

we get to a major decision that we have to make to say, yes, Lord,

yes to your will and to your way.

You see how important these little decisions are of saying yes to Jesus and

taking that step along the journey that he's given us?

Vitally important because someday he might call you, hey, I want you to leave

everything and I want you to take your family and I'm calling you to go and serve elsewhere.

I know maybe for pastors and missionaries, we've heard that call before.

We've left good friends and good churches and good families to pursue what God has for us.

But it's just not on a clergy scale. It's for each and every one of you.

When God gives you an open door and says, hey, there's people in this place

that have never heard Jesus, and I want you to go there and I want you to share.

What a powerful moment that is. But it's these little steps that we take that

get us to that point to where we say, okay, God, I'm going to follow you wherever,

whenever you want me to go.

Sometimes it's not as easy as we think.

Sometimes we can idealize it, but if we break it down to saying,

okay, in this choice, how am I going to follow Jesus?

And this decision I make, how am I going to follow Jesus? You know,

there's a verse in the scripture, Matthew 6, a little bit over from where we

just were this morning in our passage, Matthew 6.

We think about Matthew 6, verse 33.

Matthew 6:33

Scripture says this, Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,

and all these things will be added unto you.

Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.

Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Next week, I'm going to talk a little bit about discipleship again,

but why is it so hard sometimes to be a disciple?

I pray you'll come back and be encouraged with that. But this morning,

right now, are you following Jesus?

First and foremost, have you responded to a seeking grace? You know,

there's a God that loves you. There's a God that's taking care of your sin.

Have you accepted what he did on the cross?

Have you accepted his payment of the penalty of those things that you did that

you thought that were against the will of God?

It might be minor things, but it could be major too. God, through Jesus,

that debt's been paid. It's history.

This morning, have you responded to that saving grace and you've accepted Christ,

but you're like, now what?

Do I just sit around in a pew with fire insurance knowing I'm not going to go

to hell because I've accepted Jesus? Or is there more?

There's more. There's so much more.

Walk of discipleship. I pray that you'll explore that with me.

Hey, we've got a process, or I have a process. We're unrolling it here at Mountain View Church.

We've got a process by which you can grow in Jesus.

We've got a systematic process that,

boy, if you like that, it's just not sitting in a class all the time.

We've got a way to help you grow in your faith.

All you've got to be is willing. All I got to be is willing to do it and invest the time.

Had a great time, and we've talked about it before with Kristen and Harrison,

just meeting in our office, in my office, going through.

Boy, what does it mean to follow Jesus?

But you take a step of discipleship. Think about it.

Don't let this be a summer slump where attendance just doesn't drop,

but in your own spiritual life, it grows. You grow spiritually.

Remember, we don't take a vacation from God.

This is a great time to grow, a great time to meet new people and meet other people.

I want to thank you for joining today's sermon podcast. You can find a copy

of today's sermon, as well as other sermons, and the sermon outline from today

on our church's website,

www.mvcnaz.org It is my prayer also that you will seek out a church home that

recognizes the authority of the Bible.