The Crowd and The Twelve

Good morning.

Today's reading is from Mark chapter three, verse seven to twenty-one.

Says Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the sea, and a great crowd followed from Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem and Idumea and from beyond the Jordan, and from around Tyre and Sidon.

When the great crowd heard all that he was doing, they came to him, and he told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, lest they crush him.

For he had healed many, so that all who had diseases pressed around him to touch him.

And whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, You are the Son of God, and he strictly ordered them not to make him known.

And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him, and he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, so that they might be with him, and he might send them out to preach, and have authority to cast out demons.

He appointed the twelve, Simon, to whom he gave the name Peter, James, the son of Zebedee, and John, the brother of James, to whom he gave the name Bonnergies, that is, Sons of Thunder, best disciple name, Andrew and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James, the son of Alphaeus and Thaddeus, and Simon the zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat.

And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, He is out of his mind.

Sounds like the holidays.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church.

If you are outside in your car, we hope you have the heat turned up.

And thanks again for coming to join us in that way.

We hope that opportunity serves you well.

And for all of you in here, it's great to see you.

This morning I got a couple of announcements to make before we move through our sermon.

First of all, membership is available.

So we aren't having a class or anything formal like that right now.

But if you'd like to become a member uh moving into the next year, then just email info at redemptiondenver.com and we'll be able to connect with you and uh go through just a one-on-one membership uh class with you.

Uh also today is the last day to give to our Centennial Elementary Fundraiser.

So if you just jump in uh wherever you give online on the website or in the app, uh just select Centennial Fundraiser 2020.

Uh and that's going to the elementary school that we're on the corner of.

They've identified just some families that are in need this holiday season at their school.

And so we're buying a bunch of Walmart gift cards.

Uh the principal there said that's the best thing to give.

So uh I think that's something we can all agree on.

Uh because that means you can get anything.

Uh so uh just go there, give what you can, and we'll be delivering those uh this coming week so that folks can have that in time for the holidays.

Also, kind of on the side of random announcement, uh historic Berkeley, who's they're the ones that's kept this building from being demolished so that we can meet here, uh, made it a historic landmark building.

They're hosting in our parking lot around 11 o'clock, so just after church, a Lego truck.

So it that's so Legos, like the company Legos, uh, are I I think there's only one, are uh giving away, they're doing like some fundraiser thing where they give away free Legos.

Um, and it just happens to be happening in our church parking lot right after church.

So I thought you'd want to know.

So now you know.

Uh okay, and finally, this is just on my mind.

As we're moving towards the new year and leaving 2020 behind us forever.

Yeah, applause.

We are uh it's something that you might want to start thinking about is uh how am I gonna be getting into the Bible this next year?

Uh next week we should have available some cards with a Bible reading plan printed on them.

So you can just use it as a bookmark in your Bible.

And we're gonna be going through, as a church, what's called the McShane Bible Reading Plan.

Um we've done it for the past couple of years, and my thoughts behind it are are that you'll be able to kind of pick years and dip in and dip out of this particular Bible reading plan.

But it takes you through the whole Bible in a year, and you're reading it alongside folks in your church so that you're in the same places and you'll have the same questions.

We're even talking about uh I'm gonna be starting a blog.

Because if the world needs something, it's another blog.

I thought.

I felt really convicted about that.

So I'm gonna honor that.

And we're uh we were even thinking a fun thing to do as like a piece in that is here's a weird thing you read this week.

Because if you're reading through the Bible, basically every week you're gonna read something and be like, well, that was just weird.

Okay, I'm the only one.

Uh and uh uh we'll be able to kind of speak into those things.

So if you're looking forward to the next year, consider maybe you want to start setting your heart now.

You know what?

I'm gonna commit to reading through the whole Bible this next year to really participate with God's word personally.

All right, let's pray and get into today's text.

Holy Father, we thank you for bringing us together this Sunday.

We pray that you would unite us in spirit and that your word might uh connect with our hearts in ways that are meaningful and uh personal to us.

Lord, we praise you for your word, and we praise you for your spirit, and we ask that you would attend this morning.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Okay, so uh today what we see Jesus do is break with the old religious system of uh Judaism that he was a part of, and he creates this sort of break with that system, and then crowds begin to rally around and follow him, and out of the crowd, he calls his twelve disciples.

As we're as we've been moving through the book of Mark, we've seen Jesus' ministry start to take shape, and we've seen that crowds are an ever-present part of it.

And we're gonna learn today how Jesus relates to the crowd.

And he relates to them in a really interesting way, a way that's pretty counterintuitive, I think, to most of us.

We have a culture that thinks of crowds as symbols of success.

If there's a crowd, that means things are going right.

And a response to that is to say, well, we just need to ignore or sort of despise the crowd.

But Jesus doesn't do either of those things.

He doesn't say that the crowd means success, but he also doesn't despise the crowd.

He loves the people in the crowd, but he doesn't think of the crowd as a symbol of success.

In fact, he adds a deeper structure to his church, a structure that's based not on gathering crowds or how we can get more and more people to simply come in and uh be exposed to Jesus, but how lives can be changed by being known by Jesus.

We see that Jesus' church is one of names, individuals, people that he knows.

And this is where we get that type of shape.

So uh let's go ahead and uh jump in and we'll see how Jesus breaks with the old system, how the crowd is right on some things and wrong on other things, and then how he calls the twelve to be his disciples out of the crowd.

Mark 3, verses 7 through 8 says, Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the sea.

Mark 3:7–8

And a great crowd followed from Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem and Idumea, and from beyond the Jordan, and from around Tyre and Sidon.

When the great crowd heard all that he was doing, they came to him.

Just before this, just before he withdraws to the sea, and his disciples come with them, and a crowd follows, he was in the synagogue on a Sabbath day.

He was teaching.

We talked about this last week.

And there is a man with a withered hand.

And the Pharisees thought, You are it is unlawful to heal on the Sabbath.

But Jesus demonstrates that not only is it perfectly lawful, it's good to heal on the Sabbath.

And so he heals the man with the withered hand.

But the Pharisees, when they see him do that, make a plot to kill Jesus.

This is the first explicit plot to have Jesus destroyed that we've seen in the Gospel of Mark.

And that becomes a turning point in the Gospel.

So Jesus, this there's actually a lot of weight on this term when Jesus withdraws with his disciples to the sea, he's stepping out of the normal synagogue structure, the normal religious structure, and he's about to make a new movement.

He'd been operating within the Jewish structure of the time.

And now he's about to make a movement that's really new.

It's something new on the scene.

There's a systemic break in his withdrawal, withdrawal.

That's not a word anyway, uh, in his stepping away.

And in that uh systemic break, it harkens back to things that Jesus has already told us about.

He's told us that uh you can't put new wine in old wineskins.

He's told us that you can't sew a new piece of cloth onto an old garment.

He's shown that you need to, in fact, uh have new wineskins for new wine.

You need a whole new container, a whole new movement, a break from the religious structure in order to grasp what Jesus is doing, what his new movement is.

So, first in his stepping away, we see the systemic break.

And part of this systemic break is this incredible diversity of the crowd that gathers around Jesus.

Listen, it says a great crowd followed from Galilee and Judea.

Galilee and Judea, that's just sort of the local region that he has been ministering in so far for his whole ministry.

Uh, that's his his hometowns.

And Jerusalem and Idumea, these are the bigger cities in the area.

So now he's working in this sort of rural area, but being drawn into this rural area are folks from the cities who are hearing what Jesus is doing.

And entire, uh, excuse me, from beyond the Jordan and around Tyre and Sidon, these are outside of the Jewish communities that Jesus was a part of.

This is into Gentile cities, in Gentile places.

So there's this insane diversity that's taking place among the crowd that is following Jesus.

That means he's transcending all of the norms of the culture that normally divided people, and that people were normally stratified by.

In the crowd that gathers around Jesus, we see he's speaking to a deeper need.

He's speaking to something that's more universally human.

He is not some tribal deity.

Okay?

Jesus is not some monocultural answer to this one particularly Jewish problem.

But Jesus came to be the savior of the world.

Jesus came to be one who broke down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile.

Jesus is one who all people from all nations will rally around.

And we start to see that flavor already in this very early spot in his ministry.

The crowd that gathers is unlike any other crowd that would have gathered at this time, breaking all of the normal stratifications.

And we also see in the crowd that this sort of condemnation of the Pharisees.

Now, the Pharisees, as I had said, had plotted to kill Jesus.

And this is the next verse, right after the first plot to kill Jesus, that the crowd, they don't do what the Pharisees do, instead, they follow Jesus.

Now, there's this simple wisdom of the crowd that I think Mark is trying to draw our attention to here.

The crowd is able to look at something that is good and say it's simply good.

Whereas many of us get so trapped in our ideological framework, like the Pharisees were, where they weren't even able to tell good from bad anymore.

They had such a tight hold on what they thought the world was and what right and wrong meant in the world.

And their view of it was so complete and so focused that they weren't even able to see healing someone, taking someone's hand and making it work again.

That's just good.

A guy who's traveling around and anybody who touches, if they if they're possessed by a demon, that he casts it out and now they're liberated and free.

If they're uh if they're sick and they're they're experiencing these diseases, that they just touch him and all of a sudden they're healed.

The crowd is able to look at that outside of the ideological paradigm of the Pharisees and just say, yeah, you know what, that's good.

It doesn't take a genius to see that, yeah, a guy who heals people is nice.

That's a nice thing to have.

That works, that's a good thing.

Uh and so there's there's this sort of simple wisdom of the crowd that makes the Pharisees seem so evidently foolish.

Like you can't even tell that this is good, that people are being healed.

And who is it easiest to tell for?

You know, like who's uh the the sim this is a weird way of getting at it, but you know who it's good news that that a healer is in town for?

For people who know that they're sick.

The Pharisees don't think they're sick.

They don't think they have any problems that Jesus could actually address.

But when you're sick and you know it, and there's a healer in town, you you don't need a PhD to know this is just good news.

I'm just gonna go see this guy.

And so they gather from all over.

From Gentile places, from Jewish places, from small towns, from big cities, they gather.

There's a wisdom in the crowd.

Now in Mark 3, verses 9 through 10, just so we don't think that the crowd is totally wise, ultimately the crowd is ambivalent.

Mark 3:9–10

Okay, sometimes crowds make good decisions, sometimes crowds make bad decisions.

This is a time where the crowd makes a good decision.

But it's also sort of colored with this danger that Jesus perceives in the crowd.

They see his goodness, but that doesn't mean they'll honor him as good.

They're just as likely to turn on him.

So he tells his disciples in Mark 3, verses 9 through 10, and he told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, lest they crush him.

Mark 3:9–10

For he had healed many, so that all who had diseases pressed around him to touch him.

Okay, so we see that there's a goodness in the crowd, and there's a danger in the crowd.

All right, can you think of uh like uh I was gonna say Twitter, that's a crowd, but I can't think of anything good.

But we can see, right?

There's a goodness in a a movement, and there's a there's a that movement can turn and just devour you in an instant.

Uh we see this with celebrities all the time.

Like we're constantly uh the phrase that I heard that I really like is if you idolize, you will demonize.

If you idolize someone, it's just a matter of time before you start to demonize that person.

Like, look, this is a weird example, but look at Ellen de Generous.

Have you guys been following the Ellen story closely?

Like it or not, you have been.

It's not up to us what we consume, it's just given to us every day.

So the uh but like two years ago, she's well, four or six, whatever time.

2020 has been like 17 years.

But there's a uh Ellen de Generis is in the White House receiving the medal of freedom.

Pretty good.

Not a bit not a bad life goal.

And now it's like we we just devoured her.

We just turned on Ellen and we got a we got a stack of the worst pictures that she that have she's ever taken, and we post them with a headline and we say, look at how wicked and vile this person is.

Look, she's just a person.

You know, if you idolize, you will demonize.

Jesus understood this about the crowds, that they're just as likely to turn on him, that the ones that see his goodness because he will heal them are the very same ones who, if he doesn't prepare in advance beforehand to get a boat to speak out of so they don't come into the water, those very same people who love him will crush him.

The crowd is ambivalent.

Uh, it can spot some goodness, but it's just as likely to turn on you.

It's a very fickle thing.

And so Jesus knows this, and that's why he's very different than like an influencer.

Jesus wasn't looking to gain influence, okay?

And the what he was looking to do is he was looking to take responsibility for people.

There's a big difference between influence and leadership.

Influence is uh it's like this sort of uh diet leadership.

It's where you you say a bunch of things and make a bunch of claims, but you don't actually have to take responsibility for anyone.

And if things go well or if things go wrong, you can just distance yourself from it.

That's tempting to in and the success of influence is determined by the crowd.

If there's a crowd, you are successful.

Okay, the the sick the crowd means success to an influencer.

But Jesus doesn't function that way at all.

Jesus doesn't think the crowd equals success.

He's after something much deeper, he's after something much more personal and meaningful.

He's actually looking to take responsibility for people, to be a lord, to be a shepherd.

This is very different from just influence.

And so that's why at this very moment where we see the crowds growing and developing around him, that he shifts his strategy and he introduces this new type of strategy where he says, okay, he steps back from the crowd and he selects his 12 disciples.

And he says, We've got to provide this crowd some structure.

And I'm gonna work closely with people, and I'm gonna know their names, and I'm gonna know their lives, and I'm going to truly make disciples of these people.

We're not gonna call the crowd success.

We're gonna call depth of knowing Christ success.

Oh, there's my communion.

It's okay, you can get it on Amazon.

Or by local communion.

Thanks, Catherine.

Okay, so uh it we see that Jesus' strategy is built around uh it becomes built around building people, not generalities, not percentages in a crowd.

Jesus knows their names.

And Jesus's church is built around knowing his people's names.

So now Jesus steps away from the sea and moves into the mountains, and he calls his twelve.

And Mark 3, verse 13.

Mark 3:13

Oh, excuse me, I skipped over the verse about the when the evil spirits, when the unclean spirits see Jesus, they fell down before him and cried out, You are the Son of God.

And he strictly ordered them not to make him known.

What Mark is doing is he's showing that as this battle is building amongst the people, it's also building in the spiritual realm.

That Jesus is taking spiritual ground as he moves forward in his ministry.

But it's at a time where the crowd can't possibly understand what it means that Jesus is the Son of God.

And so he silences them.

He will show them what the Son of God means on his terms, not on the demons' terms.

We see his authority take place even there over the demonic realm.

Okay, now back to where we were.

Mark 3, 13.

And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him.

Let's look at three things.

Why were they called?

He calls them, and they come to him.

Okay, so why does Jesus pick these twelve disciples?

Any ideas?

Me neither.

He desired them.

In Luke, when the same story is recounted, he spends the whole night in prayer.

And the decision that he comes out is he's gonna pick these twelve.

And the only glimpse that the Bible gives us into why he picked those twelve is simply that he desired them.

That's it.

We are given no condition whatsoever for why Jesus picked those twelve.

It is an unconditional selection of those twelve.

Why do you think the Bible frames it like that?

Well, let's imagine the opposite.

What if picking A disciple was like picking an astronaut.

And you needed to have.

Does everybody know?

Astronaut skills.

Good guess.

I was gonna say the right stuff.

The right stuff, right?

You gotta have the right stuff.

Yeah, okay.

And so you need to be, and so you need to be like uh well astronauts are short.

You have to be short because you've got to fit in at the thing.

You've got to have perfect vision.

Uh a friend of mine, he was like one of the most brilliant people I've ever known, uh, wanted to fly planes for the Air Force, and but his rods and cones were all out of whack.

So he couldn't.

So you've got to have perfect vision, and you've gotta, you know, be a charismatic person and a physicist and all these things.

If the Bible had told us that, that this is what it takes to be a disciple, then we'd create a class of people.

And we'd say, okay, it now you've just gotta make your life fit into this picture of what a disciple is, and then we'll know.

And we'd create an ideology around them, and we'd create an image around them, and we'd say, this is what a disciple is, but the Bible gives us no such ability.

Why does Jesus choose why does Jesus choose whom he chooses?

I think we're gonna reschedule the snow blowing.

Talk to the landlord about that.

Why does Jesus choose whom he chooses?

This is the one day a week that we do something.

Like it won't like it won't be hard.

Pick any other time, is what we'll say.

He chooses whom he chooses because that's whom he desires.

That's it.

If we were to ask Jesus, why do you love me?

You know what his answer would be?

Because I love you.

That's it.

Okay, so we see he's they're chosen unconditionally because of his desire.

And uh he called to those whom he desires.

So Jesus calls them by name.

Jesus calls them and they respond.

What is it like to become a Christian?

Jesus calls you and you respond.

He is the initiator.

He is the one who moves in your heart, who shows you his glory, and then you respond to that, and you always respond when he shows it.

You always respond when he calls you.

Christ has an effectual call.

We've seen this before in the other accounts of Jesus calling his disciples.

Christ's call is effectual.

It actually works.

When he says, Come to me, you go to him.

And that's because this same voice that Jesus has is the very voice of God that when it spoke into the darkness and said, Let there be light, then light shined in the darkness.

The light didn't think, ah, now or maybe later.

No, the light shin when he speaks into our hearts, out of his desire, not because of any prerequisite that we bring.

When he speaks into our hearts, they too begin to shine.

They come to him.

In this simple calling, we see Jesus is effectual.

Mark 3, 14, and he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, so that they might be with him, and he might send them out to preach and have authority to cast out demons.

So these twelve that he calls out of the crowd for reasons that are purely his own are appointed.

They're given positions.

Jesus is crafting something that is organic and deeply relational, but it's also organizational.

There's real structure to it.

So that these twelve are relating to Jesus in a particular and unique way.

They're appointed to positions.

And those positions that they're appointed to are called apostles.

An apostle is actually just kind of a noun form of the verb to mean sent.

They are sent ones.

Jesus called people to him that he particularly wanted to spend time with him and send out.

And those are called sent ones, apostles.

Now, why does he choose twelve?

What we see in this whole section is that Jesus is making a break with the old traditions to start a new thing.

The twelve tribes of Israel were meant to go out and bless the whole world.

That feat wasn't lived up to.

Instead, in disobedience, they lived.

But Jesus here is starting a new Israel, a new 12 tribes, as he calls the 12 disciples, that are meant to move out as a blessing into the whole world.

Look at this picture when he breaks with the old to make the new wineskins.

The old promises are not being neglected or put aside, they're finally being fulfilled as Jesus comes down to inaugurate his people.

The new Israel takes place.

Okay, so what are they called to do?

So that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach and have authority to cast out demons.

Okay, so three things.

What's the first thing an apostle is called to do?

Be with him.

Be with him.

The first thing an apostle is called to do is to be with Jesus.

And that's what they are.

They're with him.

They move in with him.

We're gonna be buddies, we're gonna be pals, we're gonna be amigos.

Here's you, here's me.

The uh I'm just making jokes for my sister, who's the only other Chris Farley fan, apparently.

The uh uh that they move in and they they their life begins to take on the flavor of Jesus' life.

He really knows them.

He really knows his disciples.

A lot of us try and keep Jesus at arm's length.

If he's just ideology, if he's just uh a set of principles, then uh the risk is we don't get to be known by Jesus.

The hard part of knowing Jesus isn't knowing Jesus.

It's being known by Jesus.

It's letting him into all the strange nooks and crannies of our lives and trusting him with those things.

He calls his disciples into that type of space.

And in that being known by him, then it they are sent.

They are sent out back into the crowds.

You see, they're called out of the crowd, but not to despise the crowd.

They're called out, called out of the crowd to be sent back into it.

So that this amorphous crowd, which at one moment could turn on you, at one moment could bless you.

Now Jesus builds a structure so that he might love them in clear ways, the ways that people are loved.

And you know how people are loved by other people who know their names.

There's no other way.

We're we're we're only we're simple types of things.

And the way that humans get loved is by other humans.

And so Jesus builds that structure so that the crowd might be known and that they might be brought in into real relationship with Christ.

And they are given the very authority of Jesus, the authority to cast out demons, the authority to even speak in his name.

This is an outrageous thing that Jesus does in the way that he builds his church.

Now let's look at who they are.

Jesus' church is its names, right?

And so he calls them by names.

And these are the names of the twelve.

There's Simon, who he names Peter, which it means rock.

There's James and John, who he gives the nickname Sons of Thunder because of their WWE career.

Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, who we met earlier.

Remember, he's a tax collector.

Thomas, James, Thaddeus, Simon, he's a zealot, and Judas, Iscariot, who betrays him.

So we see fishermen, a betrayer, some sounds like potentially out of control brothers.

There's a tax collector who works for Rome.

There's a zealot who wants to overthrow Rome.

These people would not have chosen each other.

They would not, this is not a like-minded group.

If you were to look out, it it you would you would be like, what a I mean, the the phrase that I'd like to use for the church is just a pack of strays.

Who called all these people together?

Jesus did.

They're united by something that goes far beyond what their normal dispositions would be.

It transcends what they think about COVID and masks.

It transcends what they think about elections.

It transcends what they what their education level is or income level is or race or ideology or all of these things.

In the 12, we see this bizarre unity because Jesus called them.

We step back and we say, why did he call them?

And the answer that the Bible gives us is because he desired to.

I think he just wanted to make things hard on himself.

All right, we're gonna have it would have been, you know, he could have just chosen to have a zealot who wanted to overthrow Rome and another zealot who also wants to overthrow Rome.

But he didn't.

He chose to have a zealot who wants to overthrow Rome and a tax collector who works for Rome.

Now they've got to learn how to get along.

They've got to see something beyond themselves in Jesus.

When they say, Why are you here?

and why are you here?

And you know what?

They both had they both only have one reason.

Jesus called me.

What was I gonna do?

Stay home?

Yeah, same.

Well, what did he see in you?

I don't know.

What did he see in you?

This is the way that Jesus builds his church.

You know, they're we're trying to do kind of this same thing, just like, you know.

In fact, we're just still in this stream of Jesus' working.

We've got a church, we've got a group of elders, and elders are based off of this apostolic model.

The apostles kind of uh transition into being elders, as we see through the book of Acts.

And the elders are meant to bring a structure to the church so that people are really known.

And that when you uh come here and participate, or if you become a member, that you become someone who's known.

And we get to know each other.

And you know what that does?

It complicates things.

Now we don't get to disappear in the crowd anymore.

We have to actually know each other, and even worse than that, we have to be known by each other.

And you know what we'll say over and over again is what why did he call you?

Somebody else will say, Well, why did he call you?

And we'll say, it was just his grace.

I've been thinking so much about what's the difference between like the ideology of the Pharisees who studied the Bible and they developed such a tight and rigid and complete view of the world.

Now, I study the Bible and I think it gives us a really complete view of the world.

It makes sense of the way things are.

Think of the way the Bible describes humans.

They're made in the image of God, male and female.

He created them.

It's like, yeah, that seems so right.

You know, like humans are the most incredible things.

They can they can do the most amazing things, they accomplish these incredible beauty and make great music and art and poetry and buildings and businesses and all these things.

And it's like, and they are fallen and they're completely, they're they're radically depraved and radically corrupt.

It's like, yeah, that makes sense.

That maps perfectly onto what I see in the world.

You know, the Bible gives us this description of the way things are that really works.

How do we keep that from becoming a rigid ideology that we use to just exclude and try and craft a pharisaical life?

Doesn't it seem like it, like they're like that could happen at any moment?

Like the more we learn and the more complete our view of scripture, and the more complete our view of God becomes, that we're just inches away from becoming Pharisees who have it all figured out and who can't are so blinded by our own ideology that we aren't even able to tell that when a man gets healed, that's just good.

Here's where I think the difference is.

I think the difference is when you've crafted an ideology that says this is how you be good, and I know because I fit that, and I can teach you how to fit it, and if you don't fit it, then I'll turn on you.

Well, that's a religion based on works.

But with Christianity, why does Jesus call us into his church?

It's by his grace alone.

Why are we brought together and why would we be brought into the church as compared to anybody else?

We can't point to anything in ourselves for making that distinction.

We rest on Christ's grace alone.

So what does it mean?

We, yeah, we can develop a view of the world that's really tight and really based on scripture, and we can make claims to things and say, look, this is true and that's not true.

But why doesn't that progress into this tyrannical ideology?

Because it's based purely on grace.

Because it has nothing to do with our goodness, it only has to do with the goodness of Christ.

We don't have the right stuff, which means we can't look down on anybody else for not having it.

See how incredible that is?

I told you everything that I'm reading this book about the Soviet Union in the 30s in the concentration camps, the gulag system that they have.

Pro tip, don't uh get arrested in the Soviet Union in the 30s.

It was very bad.

But we see this tyranny taking place because of this ideology.

And then there's story after story of Christians who resist it.

It just got me thinking, why were they able to resist?

What was it about their ideology that didn't become tyrannical?

It's based on grace.

Why does Jesus call his disciples his desire?

What makes it so what is sufficient reason for those disciples being the apostles?

It was Jesus' desire.

They rest on grace alone.

And because of that, there's nothing else that can pull them apart.

They can't even look down on anybody who's not in it.

What a beautiful picture of a community.

This is a picture of the church.

We're still in that story.

Those twelve that twelve packastrays, well we're we stand directly in their lineage.

What a beautiful thing to see the grace of Christ create such a dynamic community.