The Calling of the First Disciples | Luke 5:1-11 | Week 12

Well, good morning, Broward Church. Hope you guys are doing awesome. I wanted to just start off and tell you I’m excited to be here. And I know probably every speaker starts that way, but I really am excited to be here. I want to tell you that you guys in this particular Church was like a north star for our fellowship ship during the pandemic.

You guys were a model of inspiration and innovation. And I know a lot of that has to do with the great leadership. But people were tuning in online to see you guys worship your worship team. What you guys had done, you kind of coalesced and scrambled to make sure that the disciples were still engaged in fellowship and in Church, but online during this pandemic. So thank you so much for that.

I also want to tell you guys that the Broward Church has a wonderful reputation, a great reputation for an incredibly supportive eldership and a dynamic young staff. So I just want you to know, you may not even know that you’re impacting people and churches outside of the fellowship here, but God is using you guys in an incredible way. So I just wanted to give you just that encouragement. But also, Greetings from the Church in Detroit. Amen.

I wanted to say also I appreciate Tony’s introduction. He said it like my mom wrote it for him and super appreciate his heart there. I’m really looking forward to we’ve become fast friends, we’re kindred spirits. We both have a deep love for our fellowship and for seeing the gospel just spread across our cities and across the world. And I’m just looking forward to God puts these relationships in your life that become part of your life story.

And I’m looking forward to just kind of our journey of faith together so I’m really excited about that. I wanted to show you a picture of my family, so I’ve got three teenage boys. Now let me just explain this picture for a second.

I don’t have a recent picture of all of us together. Okay. I tried to get my boys to take a couple of times, like, hey, guys, let’s take a picture downstairs. But they gave me that teen boy annoyed look like dad I’m playing Valorant right now, and I apologized immediately.

I didn’t know what I was thinking. But this is taken last year. Okay? Both these pictures were taken last year. And so that picture with my boys.

So the one in the middle on his knees, that’s my 19 year old, Ethan. And the one on your left, far left there, that is my 17 year old. He’s a senior in high school. His name is Jaden. He actually got baptized last month, which was real exciting.

Yes. Thank you. And it was just an incredible story how God had really moved in his heart. And just in six months, he had really done an incredible 180, really unprompted by my wife and I really talked about, like, what did you do? We really did nothing.

It was totally God. We always say that. But this situation absolutely requires no exaggeration. It was the Lord. And then our son that you see on the right there of the three boys, that’s our youngest, Bryce. Actually, he turns 15 today.

Yeah. Today is the 15 year old birthday. We sent him a text this morning just telling him how proud we are. He was baptized during the Pandemic last year. And so we were like, we’ve got three boys.

He’s the most talented of the three. Straight A student, good athlete. He’s kind of an old soul. The joke was, when he turned ten, he was the most mature male in the house. You know what I’m saying?

The beauty, of course, you see there before your eyes. That’s my wife. She’s sitting over there. That’s Ruth. Yeah.

This picture was taken last year at a wedding that we were at. And we have been married for 22 years. 22 years. That’s right. And yes, thank you.

Yes, I married her when she was seven obviously. Her father was not happy. Lucky for me, I was only eight at that time. So it all worked out.

We are studying the Ministry of Jesus. All right, here we go. We got this right here. And you guys have this little map fun thing that you got here. Okay, let’s look right here.

Where are we at in Luke, chapter five? We are at Capernaum. Okay. So Capernaum is Jesus hometown. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, lived in Capernaum.

Right? If you’re someone that’s moved a lot, you understand that there’s probably a lot of places associated with your life. So I was born in Canada. I kind of grew up in Vancouver area. We moved to Toronto, and I currently live in Detroit.

So if you say, oh, it’s Mark from Detroit, you’d be right. If you said, oh, it’s Mark from Vancouver, you’d be right. In the same way, if you say, oh, it’s Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus of Bethlehem, Jesus from Capernaum, you’d be right. All these places are associated. The text that we’re looking at takes place near the Sea of Galilee, which is also known as the Lake of Genesaret, and it’s in Jesus’hometown.

Now, before I get into the text, and this is a well known text about the calling of the first disciples, I wanted to start off and I wanted to ask a question, and it’s relevant to the text. Here’s the question. If you had to radically change the way that you’re living your life, what would it take?

What would it take to radically change the way you’re living your life? Let me rephrase the question. If you had to get open about that thing that you’ve never been open about, if something had to move you to get open and honest, what would it take? What would it take for you to forgive the grudge that you’ve been holding for years and years and always comes back to trigger and haunt you. What would that take?

What would it take for you to look at the addiction that you’re getting? Maybe it’s an addiction to pornography and it’s just something. What would it take for you to go enough is enough. I need to change this.

What would it take for you to stop staying in this state of just negativity and criticalness and worry? What would that take? Now there’s really only two answers to this question. The one thing that it would take is it would take a radical change in your circumstances. When my wife and I used to lead the Church in Milwaukee, there was a sister named Colleen.

I knew Colleen to be delightful, involved, committed. We’d have prayer mornings. Sometimes you get 20 people, sometimes you get three people. But Colleen was always there. She was serving, and she had a great heart.

And yet what people would tell me was that the Coleen that I knew was not the Coleen that they knew a few years ago. And I said what had happened, and she would talk openly at a young age, in her late 30s, she got cancer. And she told me it completely changed her heart and her attitude. She saw so much of the things that she used to do is useless and meaningless. And she might know it here, but of course, your life circumstances have a way of taking what you have here that never quite making it down here and getting there.

Of course, if you look at our disciples that are in the Ukraine, their life situation has changed, and it’s forced them to radically change the way that they live their life. My wife and I have been connected with the churches in Europe for quite some time. We have a long standing relationship, particularly with the churches in the Baltic and Nordic region where we used to give our special missions. And so we know those churches. And right now those churches are being flooded with disciples from Ukraine.

Disciples are driving hours and packing their vans and just taking brothers and sisters in. And mostly it’s women and children because men from the age of 18 and up aren’t allowed to leave the country. They need to stay and fight. And yet what you have with the brothers in Ukraine is what we’re hearing is that they’re engaged in the middle of a war in Bible studies and that these guys are being active. They’re spreading the word.

There are brothers that are at these bus stations where people are packing, and they’re inviting people out there. They’re offering Bible studies. What would it take for you to radically change your life? Well, the first answer is that your circumstances radically change. Now most of us, we don’t want to wait for our situation to radically change.

We don’t want to wait until we get cancer. We don’t want to wait for a war to happen. So what’s the other answer? Well, the other answer, of course, is that you radically change the way that you look at yourself, the way that you look at God and the way that you look at the situation around you, that you radically change your perspective. And there was nobody in the entire world that has ever existed that was better at getting you to see your world in a different lens than Jesus Christ.

And so, therefore, there was nobody better at getting people to radically change their life than Jesus Christ. So let’s read. Here in Luke chapter five ni verse one, two. It says, one day as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Genesaret, also known as the Sea of Galilee, the people were crowding around him and listening to the word of God. He saw at the water’s edge two boats left there by the fishermen who were washing their nets.

He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon. He asked him to put out a little from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat. Great image. You have this group of people crowding around Jesus. And he looks and he sees right by the water’s edge there’s two boats.

He goes into one of the boats. Which one? The one that Peter and Andrew were in. So he goes into Andrew’s boat. It’s like the first century setup crew, right?

He gets into the boat and puts out and he begins to speak to the people.

In the Old Testament, one of the themes that you see constantly repeated is this idea of the distinction between God’s people and all the surrounding nations. The Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke talk about this as well. In Matthew, he constantly talks about two groups of people. Matthew talks about the crowds and the disciples. There were the crowds, and then there are disciples.

In the book of Luke, he does the same thing, but he uses the word people. The people listen to the word of God. However, the disciples were engaged. The people were amazed at what Jesus said. The disciples were amazed at what Jesus did with their lives.

The people were fickle. You read later in Luke 18 and Luke 19, at the end of Luke 18 and Luke 19 says in Luke 18, Jesus heals the blind, Bartimaeus. And it says, the people rejoiced. They were so amazed. Jesus healed this marginalized man and paid attention to him.

And then in Luke 19, it goes right into his interaction with this tax collector, Zacchaeus. And then it says, and the people muttered at Jesus. The people, the crowds were fickle. The disciples were called to a life of sacrifice. Jesus loved the people, but he called the disciples higher.

And you have this image that would have resonated with the first century crowd. You see, Jesus was in a boat with the disciples to be Andrew and Peter. And the crowd was standing over there and they were separated by what? Water.

And throughout the Gospels, you see both Matthew and Luke making this distinction and even asking you, Are you part of the people or are you a disciple? Are you engaged? You see, at the very beginning, even before he called them, Jesus was training Peter and Andrew to be engaged in the message. You could just see Jesus on that boat sitting down, speaking. He’s probably like, hey, can we turn down that mast?

It’s making a knocking sound. Andrew, can I get a glass of water? And he’s just getting ready right before he speaks. But he’s teaching his disciples to be engaged. In Detroit, we just finished a theme called Team.

And we just ask the disciples in the Church, we just ask them, hey, what team are you on? What team are you on? What side are you on? Because you’re on a side. I don’t know if there’s football fans here, but I heard Tony, I was talking to Tony about the Miami Dolphins.

He was saying, These guys are always 500. In Detroit, we wish we could be 500. We long to be 500. We want to be where you guys are at. We had a quarterback for twelve years named Matt Stafford.

Last year, he switched teams. Do you know what happened to him? He won the Super Bowl. He switched teams. Many people are going to live their lives believing they’re a disciple, believing they’re a Christian, but only realizing they’re just part of the crowd, only realizing they’re just people.

And if you’re on the wrong team, be like Matt Stafford, switch teams, be a disciple. Let’s read on. It says in Luke, chapter five and verse four to five, it says, when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, Put out into deep water and let down the nets for a catch. Simon answered, Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.

So what’s happening here? Well, Church is over. It says, when he’d finished speaking and he has something in mind, and I think Jesus, well, he obviously knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to give Peter and Andrew a blessing. And so he said, hey, let’s go out, let’s get some fish.

And you hear Peter’s response, right? I mean, Jesus wants to give him a blessing. He says, let’s go get it. He says, oh, master, we’ve worked all night and we haven’t caught a thing. Have you ever wanted to give somebody something good and they’re reluctant? If you’re a parent of teenagers, this is your life. This is your life. Hey, son, I have an idea. Let’s go camping.

Let’s create a memory that you will love that years later you’ll look back and say, My father loved me because he took me camping. Let’s do something that I have no desire to do? Let me spend $1,000 on you. Let’s do it. Of course, I don’t know.

Sounds terrible to me. I took my son camping a couple of years ago. He loved it. It’s one of his favorite memories. In fact, I took one of my it’s my middle son camping. My other two are like, hey, are you going to take me camping? When I first brought up the idea, you thought I was asking to donate their liver or something like that.

Trying my boys to try new food. One of my favorite foods is carrot cake. I remember I had to bargain with my son. I said, hey, just try it. No, I’m good.

That’s the thing. I’m good. No, you’re not good. Try this cake. No, I’m full.

Don’t lie to me. You’re not full. You think I was born yesterday? Look, I’ll tell you what. If you try this cake, I’ll let you have a half hour of video games. Now you’re talking. Tries the cake. Loves it. Now he wants carrot cake all the time.

This reluctance, right? I’ve got three teenage, I’m sorry, I’m purging. I got teenage boys. You know what I’m saying?

But when I look at this, this is his answer. Master, we’re working all night and haven’t caught a thing. But because now I appreciate Peter because he still did it. But why does he got to get this little.

All right, this is what it sounds like. This is like an argument between my wife and I. There’s rules in a marriage, right? Like Christian marriage. I can’t roll my eyes, I can’t raise my voice.

So what I’ll do when she gives me a ridiculous suggestion is I’ll make sure she knows that I know I was right. I’ll be like, okay, that sounds like an idea, honey. Here’s what I think, and I’m going to do what you suggest. And when it goes sideways, I just want to remember that we had this conversation. We own a 2009 Kia van.

It’s got over a quarter million miles on it. And about a couple of years ago, the electricity in the driver’s side door just went dead. Which is things start to happen to your car, you don’t care anymore. You don’t even notice it, right? It’s crumpled and dented and I’m just driving it.

It doesn’t matter. Electricity goes out. I don’t know how to fix things, and we just kind of deal with it. You have all the buttons there the window and the lock. None of it works. The electricity just in that door went out. I stopped to fill up the gas, and then I realized a problem. The switch or the button to open the gas door is in the driver’s side door. So I’m pressing and it doesn’t work.

I got to open this. And so Luckily, I have some tools in the car. I’ve got a hammer and I’ve got a screwdriver. So I’m at this gas station, and of course I’m like, okay, well, I’m going to have to bust this open. And my wife calls me, and she said, I said, hey, honey, just so you know, I’m going to bust this gas thing open. And there’s nothing else we can do. I asked some people for help. They said, no, I don’t know what to do. I can’t help you, buddy.

So I’m like, all right. And she goes, Why don’t you call the manufacturer and they can give you some advice? Who calls the manufacturer? Put on hold.

Some guy in the Philippines is going to talk. I’m not calling the manufacturer.

And I said, Honey, I’m not calling the manufacturer. Okay? Look, our car is old. I’m going to break open the gas gauge, and we can have our van back. And she texts me the phone number to the manufacturer.

So I know she’s going to ask when I get home, did you call the manufacturer? So, like, Peter, I’m like, all right, this is not good. So I called the manufacturer, and I said, I get somebody. And I say, hey, my electricity went out. What can I do?

And he said, okay, if you go to the back, there’s a latch behind in the back. I opened it and goes, yeah, you should see a lever, a safety lever that opens the gas gauge. I pull it and it opens up.

She was right.

I almost destroyed my van for lack of understanding.

But when we don’t understand God’s plan, we destroy our lives at times. We destroy our marriage because we don’t understand. And we take a hammer to our marriage, to our spouse. We hurt our children because we don’t know how to communicate. We don’t know how to listen for lack of understanding.

We just decide, say, I can’t do this. And so we take a hammer. And Jesus says, I have something for you. And we respond with, hey, we become Masters at making excuses. Luke talks about this later in Chapter 14.

He said, you know, Jesus invited people to his banquet, and all alike, everyone had an excuse. One person said, I bought a field. One person said, I just got married. And one person said, I just got five Yoke of oxen. And you know what was common about all three of those things is that all three of those things are blessings.

It’s your relationship that God has blessed you with. It’s a job, it’s a field. And that blessing becomes a burden. And that blessing that God gives you becomes the reason why you can’t do what God wants you to do. It becomes the reason why you do what God you can’t do what God wants you to do.

He says, Go out there and now to Peter’s credit he says he gives an excuse, but he still does it. Let’s read on. It says, when they had done so important point because they actually had done it, they cut such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them and they came and filled both boats so full they began to sink. An amazing story. And it’s hard to we’re kind of displaced from what this might have meant. It wasn’t just a catch of fis. For these guys it was their livelihood.

For these guys, it was money, it was income. It was the ability to rest for a bit. Their tomorrow had just changed. What they could do tomorrow and the next week had just changed. It wasn’t just for this instant. And there are these seasons where you feel so blessed by God.

But Jesus isn’t just blessing. He’s teaching. With every blessing, there’s a lesson. But often in life, the lesson of the blessing gets lost in the celebration. Let me say that again.

The lesson of the blessing gets lost in the celebration. And the lesson was this. It was never your fishing skill that got this for you. It was your obedience to God. And so often we plan out our course.

We plan out a course and all of you plan something out so that your fish can overflow. You got your 401, you got your investments, you got your children. And I love my kids, man. You’ve got your plan to make sure that your nets overflow. And yet God takes a step back and says everything you have, you can trace back to obedience a blessing from me, because the lesson gets lost in the blessing.

And you have your plan. You have your plan to overflow your nets, but it’s not God’s plan to overflow your nets. And that’s not how nets overflow. At the beginning of last year, my wife and I kind of we had our plan. We had our vision.

We started looking for a house to buy. We had grown up and then most of our marriage kind of just essentially been in student loan debt. About five years ago, we got out of debt. My wife does our finances. She got her degree in math.

She’s good with numbers and so she does a great job and she’s frugal and she’s smart with the money. And she had not only got us out of debt, but we had saved up enough to put a down payment on for a home. And so we were pretty excited because the entire time in Detroit, we had been renting. And there’s a homebuyer’s program in Detroit that where you can put like 3% down. So it allowed us.

And so we started last year, January and February, kind of looking at homes. We told our parents and they were pretty excited about it. Now Ruth’s family gave us a couple thousand dollars, which was real encouraging, kind of to get the house prepared. My father gave me a really amazing phone call. My mother had passed away in 2019.

And he called me and said, Son, I’ve been thinking about you looking for a home, and I want to give you the inheritance that your mother and I had planned when I passed, and I want to give it to you so you can buy a nicer home. It was amazing. And he lives in Canada, and he wired me all the money along with the documentation, and it came into our account. And this was more money than I’d ever had in my entire life. And I was looking at it in my account going, this is what some people must live like.

It was amazing. Just stared at the amount. I was like, I’ve never seen this much money in my account. But let me tell you, this amount of money was a game changer for Ruth and I because we qualified now for a cheaper mortgage, which allowed us to get a nicer house, but plus, the money allowed us to get a nicer house. And so we got a way nicer house that we could.

So we started looking at homes that were dream homes, honestly, homes that I’d never imagined that I would live in. And it’s just amazing. My dad specifically said, I want this to go to get your dream home. And we find our dream home. We find this home.

It’s only like two and a half years old. It’s got this brand new wood floor. We’re just falling in love. To make matters even better, a disciple named Joe, who is a friend of ours, just doing our mortgage gets us the best rate that I’ve ever heard anyone have. You ask around and you’re like, man, this brother’s getting us an amazing rate.

So we close on Monday, March 22, and on Friday, we just got an email from Joe reminding me to wire the down payment and the closing costs. So we wire it. And then Monday morning, we come to show up to pick up, get the keys to the home. We got disciples coming to help us move the whole campus ministries. A bunch of them are mobilized to help us.

And the title company said they didn’t receive the money. And I’m like, oh, I hate administrative errors. And we go to the we’re there for a couple of hours, a little bit of a kerfuffle. And they said, you should go check it with your bank. So we check it with the bank.

And after a few minutes, the banker, someone who’s a friend. We reached out to him, and we realized we were victims of a scam. We had wired all of the money, the closing costs, the money we had saved, the money her mother gave us and my father’s inheritance. We had wired it to some criminal. The account was empty, and we were crushed.

I had to go back, and I had to look at my wife in the eye and say, honey, I’m sorry, we’re not getting the house. We went home, my boys. I had to cancel the moving truck. Disciples were calling me. I just said, It’s not happening, guys, I’m sorry. I didn’t really explain it too much.

My kids came home and they said, what? Where’s the truck? I said, Boys, I’m sorry, we’ve been robbed. We called the FBI. We called the local police.

We called the fraud Department. I mean, there was nothing they could do in that moment. Local police said, Call the FBI. The FBI gave us a number. They said, this happens.

We get hundreds of these every day. And the fraud Department, he said, Mark, honestly, very few of these cases get their money back.

So we went home and we were stunned. We prayed. We sang together. We sang the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. And we told our staff and we asked them to pray for us.

That next morning, we had staff meeting just they were somber, and there was kind of a somber mood, but we still sang together as we do every staff meeting. And one of the brothers there, he’s actually formerly from Florida. His name’s Kyle Eastman. He’s one of our sector leaders. And he led us in a song, God is so good.

And I just want to tell you something, that there is nothing in life as exhilarating as to take a gut shot from Satan and to still sing that God is so good. There’s nothing so exhilarating.

I got a phone call from Joe, the mortgage lender, and he said to me, Marc, I just want you to know I got you a very special rate. It expires next Monday. And of course, the sellers of the house, they were upset and they wanted their money. And we had applied for loans. We couldn’t get anything, not at this short notice.

So we had the lonely and difficult task of unpacking our home that we had just spent weeks packing. On that Wednesday, we got something really encouraging that happened. About four or five young people, four or five young couples. And by young couples, I mean, couples in their 20s and 30s had dropped by and just said we had heard what happened. And we just want to give you something. And we’d got a check for 300 and a check for 1000 and a check for $1,500.

And it was just these young people that just wanted to give to encourage. And they all kind of said the same thing. One gave us a long letter says, Please accept this just for us. We believe God wants you to have it. And that gesture by these young people was kind of like the widow’s two copper coins.

It gave us courage. And my wife and I, on that Wednesday, we made three decisions. One, the first thing we said was we prayed every day, specifically prior to this move, that God would give us a smooth transition. And God said no. And he has every right to say no because he’s God and we’re not. The second thing we said is, this is not the worst thing that can happen to somebody. We have to get perspective. It’s not our health, it’s not our marriage, it’s not our reputation, it’s not our Salvation, and it’s not our children. And so we said, we’ve got to get perspective on this. And the third thing we said is, look, my job is to talk about faith.

Now God’s will ask me to walk it. And we came to these three resolves. And then when my wife and I finished talking, my wife said to me and she said the words that every husband loves when their wife says, she looked at me and she said, honey, I’m going to be okay. I’m going to be okay. And she got up and she made a phone and she phoned the company that we rent from and says, hey, I know we said we’re moving, but we would like to renew our rental and so forth.

Now that’s where we were at. And we praised God for that. On Thursday and Friday, something amazing happened. Disciples from Chicago and we live in Detroit and disciples from Milwaukee, which is the Church that we used to lead, and disciples from Grand Rapids, which is the Church in Michigan 2 hours away, and disciples from Lansing, which is the Church an hour away on their own, not contacting each other, called us, dropped by our house. Some made a Trek for a couple of hours and just dropped by and says, hey, I had heard what had happened.

Here’s a check and it was 1,000 and here’s a check and it was 2,000. And it was this great encouraging gift. And we just thought, oh, man, the Kingdom is just so amazing. And then on the Friday, we get another call and wealthy brother says he goes, I believe in what we are doing. I believe in you.

And he wrote me a check for $10,000. Another one wrote me one for $9,000. And by Friday night, I looked at my account and my wife was sitting there. I said, honey, we have enough to get this house on Monday. And then one week later, we got the house.

You only think you know how to make your nets overflow.

God does. God really knows. You see, obedience is the seed of the blessing. It was never your effort. It was never your genius.

It was never how smart you were. What can you do but praise God, that is the house that the Kingdom built. That house was a metaphor for my life. Through the sin of the world and my own folly, I lost everything, I lost my father’s inheritance.

But God, through his Kingdom, gave it all back and honestly and a little bit more. And a little bit more. The lesson of the blessing gets lost in the celebration. But it is our obedience that is the seed. Let’s finish off this passage. It says here in Luke chapter five and verse eight to ten, it says, When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’knees and said, Go away from me, Lord.

I’m a sinful man. For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken. And so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, Simon’s partners.

Once he sees the fish, Peter realizes his own inadequacy, and he has a statement. He says, Go away from me. I’m a sinful man. You might think that’s an odd response, but it’s actually a very common response, right? See, people that got close to God became very self aware of who they were.

Paul said, I’m the worst of sinners. Isaiah in chapter six, when he sees the Lord, says, I am an unclean man. David in Psalm 51 says, Surely I am sinful. Wash me and I will be whiter than snow. You see, one of the qualities about people that get close to God is they see their need for God.

And Peter says, I am a sinful man.

You can’t be happy until you realize that you can’t be happy without God. It’s one of the messages of the Sermon on the Mount, that you need to be needing. And you know, I’m willing to venture that for most of you, if not all of us, that we could trace the root of your problems back to your unwillingness to see your need for God, your unwillingness to go to God with your marriage, with your parenting, the unwillingness to surrender that pride before God, the unwillingness to surrender the selfishness, the addiction, the impurity that criticalness, the lying. And you can see your relationships suffer. And it all comes back to your unwillingness to do this.

I’m a sinful man. I need God every single second of my life that we can trace our problems back to our unwillingness to see how much we need God. Let’s close it off here. Then Jesus said to Simon, don’t be afraid. From now on, you will fish for people.

So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything, and followed him.

I love what Jesus said. He said, don’t be afraid, right? Sure. You’ve heard this is the most common repeated command in the Bible. The most common repeated command is don’t be afraid.

And the reason why is because being a disciple is going to take some courage. You got to be strong if you’re going to be good. You’ve got to be strong if you’re going to be good. He says, don’t be afraid. But you know what the most repeated promise is? I will be with you. See, when Jesus sends out the disciples in Matthew he says and I will be with you. Of course, the Matthew and the Mark account of this, Jesus says, Come, follow me. In other words, Jesus wants you to be with them. He wants to be together.

I often go to Chicago because we have Church leaders meetings there in the Midwest, and I have several mentors down there that I go to see pretty regularly. About a month ago, there was a meeting in Chicago for the Church leaders, and it’s a four hour drive, and that’s a pretty you know, I’m used to it, so it goes by pretty quickly for me. But I get a call from A. T. Arnison, who is the leader of the Chicago Church, and he said to me, hey, Mark, why don’t you fly down to Chicago?

I’ve got some appointments in Detroit. If you fly down, we can drive back together. I say, hey, great idea. So I flew down to Chicago. It’s like a 45 minutes plane ride.

And then we drove back. And so the meeting ended at 03:00, and that’s a four hour drive, but we hit Chicago traffic. And if you guys have been to Chicago, Chicago traffic is no joke. But to make matters worse, we hit a snowstorm. I got home at midnight.

And if you’ve ever been like a nine hour drive is one thing, but a four hour drive that turns into a nine hour drive, that’s exhausting, that can steal the joy out of anybody.

But you know what? I was in the car with A. T. Arnison and another brother named Ed Dawson, who he’s an elder in the Chicago Church, but he also used to disciple me. And let me tell you that 9 hours was awesome because of who I was with.

You see, in a journey, what makes all the difference between, oh, it was so tough is who you’re with. We were joking. We were laughing. We were driving at sometimes 25 miles an hour in the snow, shaking, trucks would come by, but we were laughing. We’re going to die.

We were talking through our lives. We were talking through our marriages, talking about our children, talking about the Church, talking about everything. And by the end of it, I was like, oh, man, is it already done? It was so fun because of who I was with. And Jesus says, don’t be afraid because I’ll be with you, because you’re going to be with Jesus.

And that’s what it means to be disciple. And it said that they left everything left everything, not just their homes, but their bad attitudes, their enslavement to sin, the critical heart, the lack of forgiveness. They left everything and followed him. And I want to close with this. Same question I started with, if you had to radically change the way that you’re living, what would it take? What would it take?

It would take an ability to separate yourself and see Jesus higher calling, as Jesus is calling you out of just being people, and he wants you to be a disciple. It would take an understanding of how God brings about the blessing. It’s not through your hard work, it’s not through your effort, it’s not through your intelligence. It is through the blessing that comes through the obedience from God. It’s for you to see you who you really are in desperate need of Jesus Christ.

What would it take for us to radically change the way that we’re living right now? To see Jesus Christ and the call that he has for each and every one of us to follow Him. Let’s pray, Lord in heaven we lift our hearts to you just grateful that the Gospel of Jesus Christ speaks to us so relevantly and so powerfully that I believe Father, you right now are calling each and every person in this auditorium in our own separate way. Whether it’s calling us out of sin or calling us to recommitment or calling us to repent of the indifference and apathy sometimes that gets in our hearts and to follow you. Help us, God, as we take Communion to remember your sacrifice, to remember that you are the author of blessing. You are the author of all good things.

We love you and we pray all this in Jesus’s name. Amen.