Amen. Mark 1, beginning 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. ‘ 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 make you become fishers of men. And immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on a little farther, he saw James, the son of Zebedi, and John, his brother, who were in the boat, mending the nets. And immediately he called them. They left their father Zebedi in the boat. In the Book of Acts, early Christians were part of the way, what it was referred to. From there, the word Christians became the word in use, the Acts 11: 1, at Antioch was the first time that that word was used. Followers of the way, the way, the truth, and the life. Followers of Christ. Today, some people use the expression Christ’s followers as a way of saying that’s big in some circles.
I guess the point they’re trying to say is, No, I’m really a Christian. And that’s the emphasis. I am a Christian. I belong to Jesus. And whatever the word the idea is that you are a disciple of Jesus Christ. You believe in his teaching and in his work, and you try to live according to that belief. It also includes the idea of spreading the knowledge of him to others. Now, so familiar are these ideas that it can become easy for that reality to miss us at times, to feel the importance of that in our lives. We’ve all heard that expression, familiarity breeds It’s contempt. I think it’s more accurate just simply to say familiarity breeds familiarity. We get so used to something that it no longer registers so much. Well, let’s reacquaint ourselves with some common themes of discipleship. Relationship. We do so because the Lord is the one who calls us to follow him, and we are to put him at the very center of our lives. What exactly then is a disciple? I’ll put this in your bulletin. I like how Pastor Stephen Smallman defines this. I’m using this as somewhat of a template today.
He said simply this, One who has heard the call of Jesus has responded by repenting, believing the gospel and following Jesus. Just a great compact summary there. But to see this played out, we are looking then at the call of the first disciples. Jesus enters on the scene and begins to preach about the kingdom And along with that, he begins to call people to follow him. We see to begin then, the Kingdom has come. And like John the Baptist, who went before him, Jesus went proclaiming the Kingdom of God. Verse 14. Now, after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God. John the Baptist was arrested by King Herod for preaching against his marrying his sister-in-law after she divorced his brother. Father. And John was what we think of as the last of the Old Testament prophets. He was the last of the Old Testament era. And Jesus now steps onto the scene as the beginning of the New Testament. Of course, there was overlap between them. But there’s this transition that takes place. John the Baptist comes, proclaiming the Kingdom has come, and Jesus comes, proclaiming the Kingdom has come.
And Jesus is announcing the good news, the good news of God, the good report. That Greek word is it’s euangelion. The reason I say that is because that’s exactly where we get our word evangelist from. It’s almost a direct transliteration. Euangelion, evangelist. Just proclaim the good news. The word is used to report a military victory, something on the battlefield happened, and they would send people with good tidings of what took place. Or maybe there was a great event that happened in the empire, the birth of an Emperor, and the gospel of that would go forth and be claimed to people. Good tidings, good news. Well, what is the good news that Jesus is proclaiming? He’s proclaiming that the Lord has come to his people to deliver them. The great hope and expectation of Israel was finally happening. They had been languishing under foreign rule and captivity for a very long time. Now, when Jesus spoke of the good news, what they were looking for and what Jesus was speaking of wasn’t the same thing. We see that develop in the Gospels. Jesus is the good news that they were to be looking for. But initially, they weren’t thinking this.
And Mark now is just giving us a condensed summary of the content of what Jesus was teaching. He was preaching and proclaiming in the region. He clearly spoke more than these 15 words or so to the people. This is just a summary. He said to them, The time is fulfilled. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel. Well, what time is fulfilled? The time that the prophets had been predicting. The long-expected Messiah had come. Israel’s deliverance was now at hand. The Kingdom of God has come. Matthew uses the term Kingdom of Heaven, which is more of a Jewish way of saying the Kingdom of God. They really tried to avoid using the word God itself. And so the Kingdom of Heaven, the way of expressing that. But we see that this theme of the Kingdom occurs over 188 times in the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Synoptic just means they are similar in sequence and wording. It’s seeing together. You recognize how similar those three Gospels are. But the theme of the Kingdom is throughout them. And then what does it mean to say the Kingdom of God is at hand?
It certainly speaks of God’s triumph over his enemies. It’s the establishment of his rule and his reign. For Jesus, the language of the kingdom, it’s not about human politics. He’s speaking about God’s authority coming in a new and visible way. And the rule and pain of God has come in Jesus. We see this in the authority that Jesus teaches with. He says things like, Truly, truly, I say to you, or, You have heard that it was said to those of But I say, he has an authority that everyone recognized was different than the scribes and the pharisees. And we see this authority in his casting out demons and in healing the sick. No historical figure has had this reputation in any way the same degree as Jesus. This total combination of teaching authority and supernatural action all in one person. Now, we often speak about the kingdom being here in part, but not in full. Its completeness awaits a future moment when Jesus will return, but it’s truly here now, and it’s expanding. The long-awaited kingdom, the promised hope for all the way back in Genesis 3: 15 has now come. And what we see then as Jesus came not only as a preacher of this good news, he also called disciples to follow him.
Here we see the nature of discipleship. The two commands that are given by Jesus, verse 15, are repent and believe. We’ll look at that in a moment. But we then get to the calling of the first disciples. Verse 16, passing along the Sea of Galilee. If you’re not familiar with geography, the Sea of Galilee is a lake. It’s about a third the size, a flathead lake, 8 miles by about 13. It’s called the Sea of Tiberius, the Lake of Getsenterit in Luke. This is the area where Jesus started his ministry. It’s near where he lived. This is where his first location, his primary ministry begins. There he saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting in that in the sea, for they were fishermen. Andrew and Simon, Simon as we know him by Peter, the more common name, are first in the list of the Apostles. All four lists mentioned in the New Testament, these who are always at the top. And Jesus said to them, Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men. Now, it was the custom of rabbis to have disciples initiate becoming a follower. That was what the biblical schools did.
You came to the rabbi to say, I want to become your disciple. Here, Jesus takes the lead. He does not wait to be chosen by them. He’s the one who does the choosing. This is not a call to partnership. They’re called to what? To follow after him. They’re following after this rabbi, and they’re being called out to do so. Jesus is going about things in a very new way. And Jesus is not calling them to a particular school, a particular teaching, a set of beliefs. He’s calling them to follow him. He is the object of their faith. Now, we’re used to hearing that. God. Think about that for a moment. An individual is saying, I am to be the object of your belief in your faith. That’s strange. And this is what Jesus is doing. And unlike the prophets who call on people to return to God, to follow after God afresh and anew, Jesus is designating himself. Something new. And verse 18, Immediately, they left their nets and they followed him. That word immediately is a favor to Mark. It really brings that whole gospel story into quick succession immediately, immediately. Here it’s emphasizing the importance of a radical obedience to come after Jesus.
Mark leaves out all the filler and gets right to the point. Now, in the other Gospels, and certainly in John, we see a fuller story that developed. Jesus would have been known by these men to a certain degree. He had been preaching in this area for some time. This new rabbi would have had a reputation that would have gone ahead of him. We see in the other accounts, he ran into them on a couple of occasions. So Jesus was a known quantity. It wasn’t simply a person unknown to them at all, telling them to follow him. But what we see here was one writer has put it, The disciple’s commitment to follow is an act of faith, but it’s an informed faith, not a blind faith. And going a little farther, he saw the James, the son of Zebedi, and John, his brother, They were in preparing their nets, and he called them and says they left their father, Zebedee, in the boat with the hired servants and followed Jesus. And what we see that Mark is telling us is not even the most important relationships could stand in the way of following after Jesus.
We hear him say some very radical things to his disciples. To follow me, you must hate your father and your mother. He’s saying, Compared with following after me, that is the level of relationship that I am to have with you. I precede everything. That’s also very strange. Not the most important relationships that we have can stand in the way of following after Jesus. So we come back to that question, what’s a disciple? Again, from Smallman. One who has heard the call of Jesus has responded by repenting, believing the gospel and following Jesus. Well, how does Jesus call people to him today? There’s an internal sense of this call and an external one. What’s the difference? Hearing about Jesus is not the same as believing in Jesus. We know that. There are many who have heard or read things about Jesus who do not follow him. It is the Holy spirit who takes this external call illuminates our hearts internally so that we are, and here’s the language we often use, we are transformed, we are converted, we are regenerated, we are born again. Lots of ways to describe that. But there is a new of soul that takes place that the call that we hear is given faith by God to where we believe that this is true.
Now, for all of us, that looks a little different. There are some of you who can just name the time and the place, the moment when you follow Jesus. It’s like the light switch. Click. I was dark and then it was light. September 14th, 1995, whatever that day was, you can just pick it for sure. There are others where I call it more like the dimmer switch. It’s dark and then you start moving the switch and it gets lighter to where it goes to light. You’re like, Well, when did I get saved? I don’t know. I was dark here, and now it’s light here, and somewhere in the middle. The hard part is that we usually We often want to use our experience and overlay it on everybody else. If you’re the on/off switch, you don’t believe the dimmers. If you’re the dimmer, sometimes you think these people are making something up. But the reality is that we come to faith in Christ in different ways. But we are there because we have been called. Now, once you become a follower of Jesus, you are called in a sense to gospel ministry, but that’s not the same as being called to be a minister of the gospel.
There are lots of ways to say this. The point is that you are called to minister your faith in Christ. Gospel ministry means it’s a priority that your life is centered on the person and work of Jesus. You live, you work, you raise your family with Jesus at the center, like a wheel, the hub and the spokes that go out of it. Jesus is at the heart, and everything else in our lives radiates away from him. Not everyone, though, is called to leave everything and go into full-time work as an evangelist, as a pastor in a capacity like that. But all are called to live with the rule and reign of Christ propelling them. And in that we see we’re called to repent. And the basic meaning of repent just simply means to to turn around, to go the other way. Repentance of sin simply means you stop sinning and go the other direction. Repentance of sin speaks that you now have a new orientation. You’ve given up one orientation for another. You’re headed this way, now you’re going towards Jesus. If you are living for yourself with you at the center Repentance means that you are now living with Jesus at the center.
Your care and your concerns must change from loving yourself to loving God and to loving neighbor. All of that is included in repentance. Well, what does it mean to believe in Jesus? The simple definition is that you put your trust in him. In the Communities class, I give the example of a chair. I’m sure it was used. I know it’s been used by other people in different ministries, but it’s a simple way to talk about this to children. It’s one thing to know that a chair will support you. It’s another to sit in the chair. I believe or I trust that it will support me by sitting in it, by putting my weight in the chair. Simple trust, simple belief in Jesus. In the New Testament, the word faith and belief are the same in Greek. To have faith in Jesus is the same as believing in Jesus. In English, we use the verb to believe and the noun faith or belief. We don’t say, I am faithing in Jesus. You can say that in Greek, but you can’t in English. We changed the words. I am believing in Jesus. I’m putting my trust in him.
The full weight of what he’s saying, I am putting myself there, believing his promises. And as we do this, we see that our whole identity changes. The New Testament way of describing this is to say that you are in Christ. Now, initially, the first disciples had a very limited understanding of what it meant to follow Jesus. What is their relationship then between following Jesus becoming fishers of men? When we follow after Jesus, we put his agenda first and foremost. We now We long to see others follow after Jesus. We tell people about the good news. We also care for people, both physically and spiritually. These are connected in the life of Jesus, and these are to be connected for us. We care for people in the wholeness of who they are. Now, make no mistake, humans are evangelists of one kind or another. And often the stranger to the idea, the more of an evangelist people can become. How do you know if someone believes in flat earth? They tell you very quickly. You have a conversation and it comes up. Yeah, my car was doing this thing. Yeah, speaking of your car, did you know the earth’s flat?
What? That’s what people do. They tell you about things. And that goes for eating certain foods to cure something, to cure a new health regimen, a newfound passion or a conspiracy theory. People tell you those things. We’re evangelists at heart. I’m sure you’ve heard the joke. How can you tell if someone does CrossFit, is an attorney or is on a special diet? They’ll tell you in the first 30 seconds. We know that. We tell people about the things that we’re interested in, especially if it has caught our passion. Sharing good news is a part of being human. But the good news of Jesus transcends all other good news. Now, how we share this good news can vary, and it certainly requires wisdom to be used. Being so obnoxious about your faith that it repels others is not good, nor does it mean that we take every opportunity to be filled with telling sinners to repent. We see in the New Testament, Jesus actually had ordinary conversations with people. We can do that. And because the gospel affects all of human living, there’s a variety of ways to speak about it because every area of human understanding falls under God’s rule and reign, his kingdom.
From math to biology, political science, medicine, literature to carpentry, history. These are all areas that the gospel affects. Now, bringing the gospel into these areas of life can take skill and forethought to be sure. But it’s also true that we have our own story that we can share with others, too. That word testimony. We’re just telling people about how the good news of Jesus has captured our hearts. And everybody can say that. You don’t have to be an expert in all these different arenas to be able to simply to tell people, this is how Jesus got a hold of me. This is who Jesus is and my gratitude towards him. As a disciple, we also recognize that we live with one foot in the kingdom and one foot here in this life. And we live in this state of tension, a state of longing. We understand what Paul says to the Philippians when he says, I am torn between the two. I desire to depart, to die in order to be with Christ, which is far better, but it is more necessary for you that I remain. He sees his own heart and purpose that he would much rather now long to be with Jesus, but God had put him here for a purpose that is better for those around him.
And because Jesus is the center of his life, it’s not about him and his desires. It is, I am here for your purposes, Father. Send me where you will send me. Use me as long as you will use me for the good news of Jesus. A disciple wants to be with Jesus. A disciple wants to be like Jesus. The familiar hem, I have decided to follow Jesus. It emphasizes the human response to God’s call on our life. Now, It could be problematic by itself, but in a well-rounded theology, it captures a picture of what it means to be a disciple. Some of the lyrics, I have decided to follow Jesus. No turning back, no turning back. Though none go with me, I still will follow. No turning back, no turning back. My cross I’ll carry till I see Jesus. No turning back. The world behind me, the cross before me. No turning back, no turning back. That’s a picture of discipleship for us. God has initiated, he has called. He has brought you from darkness into light, and this now is what it looks like to have him ruling and reigning in your life. Where he leads, you go.
If you’re by yourself, you’re by yourself. If you’re with other people, praise God. But either way, we’re going in the direction that Jesus called us. There’s a single-mindedness to his call. And so immediately, as we circle all this back, the familiarity of this, we know this. If you’ve been in the church any length of time, this is all really simple, but it’s profoundly difficult. It is so easy just to let the layers of day-by-day living, the problems of life, the circumstances that we face, cover this, mute this, blunt the edges. We’re coming this morning, as we do each week, to covenant renewal, asking that the Lord would take out his wet stone and put the edge back on us again. That where we have failed to follow in this way, where we have lessened and slackened in our zeal, we repent of that. We repent and ask again that the Holy spirit would show us the grandness and the greatness of who Jesus is. That our lives and our focus would now become come that razor sharp edge once more. If there are any here who are not sure of what I’m talking about, the call then is to believe.
Today is the day. Today is the day to put your faith and your trust in the person and work of Jesus. It is in him alone that you will have life. This external call that you are now hearing, that the Holy spirit would come and bring that internal witness to bring those two things together, that you would become a follower of Jesus. That is the greatest and the highest calling that we have. It takes precedent over every relationship. And that’s a hard one to fathom because we love our families, we love our friends. And those are good and wonderful gifts of God. And Jesus says, in comparison to me, those must pale. Because I am your greatest and highest delight, and you will have the fullness of life when your life is found in mine. The response of a disciple, that your life is placed in his. That whatever you’re doing has meaning and significance because Jesus is the one directing your steps. There’s no inferior Christians. There’s no like, oh, they have this amazing ministry. They’re telling all these people about Jesus around the world. They’re doing all these great things. No, whatever God has called you to is amazing because he’s called you to it.
And that is what you’re to step out into. To be faithful with what’s right in front of you. That every person and opportunity and circumstance that you have can bring glory and Majesty to Jesus. And you don’t have to be talking about Jesus to do that. You can But living for what you’ve been created for is glorifying God who has made you and has made you in a particular way with a particular focus, particular gifts. There’s freedom in that. And as you pray and ask the Lord to use you for the purposes of his kingdom, he will do that because his spirit dwells in you. And that is the very heart of what it is to be a disciple. You are being used by God for far greater things so that even the ordinary parts of life are now transformed and transfused with the light and the Majesty of God. Every place you trod now becomes sacred space because of the sacredness of Christ in you. That, brothers and sisters, is why we call it good news. And this is the good news that people need to hear, and we need to hear ourselves afresh and a new, to be able to live our lives with the fullness and the purpose to which God has created us.
I have decided to follow Jesus. No turning back, no turning back. Pray with me. Father Almighty, as we come before you this day and in your we thank you. We thank you that you have opened blind eyes, that you have unstoped deaf ears. And Father, we also come and would ask that you would use us powerfully, Father, to live out this good news of Jesus here in the Flathead Valley beyond. Lord, that you would be pleased to bring the fullness of Christ to bear. Father, in every place where we trod because you have gone before us. And Lord, we would pray and ask, too, that Lord, if there are any here who do not know you, Father, that you would grant them saving faith, that you would open their eyes to see, Father, that you would call them to follow Jesus. We pray and ask this all in his mighty name. Amen. Please stand. My.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.