I. The Transformation of a Disciple
A. The call to follow Jesus Christ
B. The call to evangelism
II. The Attitude of a Disciple
We want to look at the attitude of a disciple. What attitudes should a follower of Jesus Christ have? What are those portrayed by Peter and Andrew, James and John? There are three characteristic attitudes for a follower of Jesus Christ found in this passage.
A. Immediacy
The first vital attitude of a disciple is immediacy, that is, immediate obedience. In verse 19, Jesus calls the first disciples: “Peter and Andrew, come follow Me.” What is their response? Verse 20 says, “Immediately they left their nets and followed Him.” In verse 21 Jesus calls the second set of brothers: “James and John, follow Me.” What is their response? Verse 22 says, “Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed Him.”
In Matthew 25:14-16 we see an example of this type of obedience. Jesus said, “For it is just like a man about to go on a journey, who called his own slaves and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave five talents, to another, two, and to another, one, each according to his own ability; and he went on his journey. Immediately the one who had received the five talents went and traded with them…”
The first servant in this parable heard what his master told him and sought to carry it out zealously. Immediately he went out and did what he was told to do. He didn’t delay. He didn’t make excuses. He instantly sought to accomplish what he had been given. There was an urgency in his manner. He wanted to please his master. He was not given any indication of when his master would return and so went out immediately to carry out what he was given to do. Many people procrastinate and accomplish something at the very last minute before it is due. But if you don’t know when your master will arrive, how can you wait to follow?
Did you ever have one of those dreams of being in school, going through the semester missing your class and the assignments and you want to try to get to class and finish the work but you keep missing everything? I’ve had those dreams often and I’m glad I’ve always woken up before the end of the semester. Perhaps that’s not a dream but a reality for some of you. But regardless, in those dreams I am filled with angst over missing these assignments, knowing that the deadline is looming. Our Master has given us a task to accomplish. He is returning. We do not know when. He may take you or me home to be with Him today. There should be a desire in our hearts to carry out His work today because our Lord has given us work to do. We should be finding out about the work of bringing others to Christ. We should be seeking our part in this work. Paul says in Ephesians 5:15-17, “Be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most of your time, because the days are evil. So then do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.” Don’t waste your time. If God has saved you, He has saved you for a purpose. You need to find out how to serve the Lord. This church is a body. We all need to see our part in this body and function. You are not an ancillary part (spare) of this body. When parts of the body refuse to function, the rest of the body eventually shuts down. Our Master has called us to work and He has called us to work TODAY because He is returning quickly, even if He doesn’t return in our lifetime. How short is the time we have to accomplish His work. If you are not serving, you need to get on board and be committed to the work of the gospel in this church. You should be praying to see this work accomplished. Prayer for the will of God and according to the will of God is a spiritual wrestling match. Paul calls it a labor in Colossians 4:12. Prayer is the beginning of the work. Not only should we be praying about the progress of the work, but we should be participating in that work. If you are not serving in this body, you need to find out how the Lord wants you to serve in it.
If Jesus Christ is your Master, doesn’t it follow that your commitment to Him and to His church should be one of immediacy? “I must serve today because I do not know what I will be able to do tomorrow. And not serving today may affect how I will be able to serve tomorrow.” In Matthew 20, Jesus tells the parable of a man who went out into the marketplace to hire workers for his field. Throughout the day he returned to gather more workers. At the eleventh hour “he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here idle all day long?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one hired us.’” Well, let me say that you have been hired. If the Lord Jesus Christ is your Master, then you have work to do.
Jesus said, “We must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming when no one can work.” Today is a day for seeking to accomplish God’s work. It is a day to reach others with the gospel of Jesus Christ. There is a sense of urgency in Jesus’ words. We don’t have eternity to reach others. We have a short window, and it’s even shorter for some than others. Satan will seek to stop us in it. I think of the silly excuses he gives to us that prevent us from speaking to others about Jesus. “I don’t know this person well enough to talk to them about Jesus.” “I know this person too well to talk to them about Jesus.” And we fall for his silly excuses because we do not yield to the Holy Spirit to lead us through the day. We fail to develop an immediacy in our thinking. We allow days to be wasted over and over again.
Many don’t serve in the church to make the gospel accessible to others because they can’t commit to it. So many other things take precedence over God’s work and some have no sense of the urgency of a precious soul for whom Christ died, an urgency borne on the fact that our life is as a vapor.
Shouldn’t we have an urgent desire to follow what He says? To do His work? When you read God’s Word and it says that you should do something, how do you respond? Do you make excuses why you can’t follow Him? “Lord, I can’t tithe. I don’t make enough.” “Lord, you don’t expect me to stop this immoral relationship because I’ve been involved with it so long.” Or do you delay in doing what He tells you? “I’ll start that next week. I’ll start memorizing Scripture next month. I’ll start my mornings out with prayer when things aren’t so hectic. I’ll be faithful to come to church regularly when basketball season is over (Oh, I forgot, after that it’s baseball season.).”
Who are you really following? Do you have the attitude of a disciple? Or do your plans come first, so when Christ’s plans for you don’t conflict with your own you add them in? Don’t say that you are a disciple when you don’t have the attitude of a disciple. Don’t deceive yourself. Since Christ calls every Christian to be a disciple, if you don’t seek to develop an attitude of immediacy, if you are not concerned to follow Him and do what He calls you WHEN He calls you, then you are not an obedient disciple. Can you call yourself a faithful follower of Jesus Christ if you will not immediately obey, if you will not do what He asks you to do, if His Word does not compel you to follow Him? If you can neglect His Word, reject what His Spirit is telling you, and minimize His directions, what kind of follower are you?
In Luke 12:36, Jesus tells us that we should “be like men who are waiting for their master when he returns from the wedding feast, so that they may immediately open the door to him when he comes and knocks.” Do you go to the Word in the morning, asking the Lord to teach you what He wants for you this day? Do you call upon Him early so that you might hear from Him?
As a disciple, how early should you call upon Him? How early should you be waiting for His direction? Isaiah 50:4-5 instructs us in this: “The Lord God has given Me the tongue of disciples, that I may know how to sustain the weary one with a word. He awakens Me morning by morning, He awakens My ear to listen as a disciple. The Lord God has opened My ear; and I was not disobedient nor did I turn back.”
Following Jesus Christ requires that we follow Him from the start of our day. Whether you greet the morning with both eyes open or with only half a lid, we need to speak to the Lord from the beginning of our day. “Lord, open my ears to listen to you, fill me with your Holy Spirit. Direct me and set my feet upon your path. Lord, show me what do you want me to do today. Let my day be neither idle nor offensive to you but let me follow you first. Guide me to those with whom you are dealing. Give me the ears and tongue of a disciple. Ears to hear you, Lord, and a tongue to speak for you.”
I think our first fight of the day with the devil is over getting up when we should get up and getting up with the right attitude. For right at the beginning of our day we determine where we are headed.
If you don’t start the very first of your day in the Spirit and following the Lord, then you start off in the flesh, following your own desires. For the Christian, there are only these two alternatives. If you are not filled with and walking in the Spirit, then you are walking in the flesh. You and I need to see this. We need to recognize it. I often fail to see that my very waking moments need to be given over to the Lord for Him to direct my path. This is what I believe the Scripture means by “He awakens me morning by morning.” We are to be listening to Him from the start of each day. And when we realize that we are not, we are to go back and reboot. That’s the computer age way to say confess your sin of relying upon yourself and return to seek to be filled by God’s Spirit.
The beginning of our day is so important. This is why you shouldn’t set your course for the day during the time of temptation (when you are thinking about getting up). Instead determine by the Spirit, after you have yielded yourself to the Spirit, when you need to get up the night before, not the day of. Because you and I make very poor decisions operating in the flesh, and when operating in the flesh is coupled with our first waking thoughts there is an extra incentive for us to have things determined beforehand. If you go by the way you feel instead of by the way the Spirit has determined for you, then you’re going to continue through your day making decisions based on the flesh. Don’t say, “After I shower, after I eat, after I… I will commit my way to the Lord.” While you are stretching and fighting to put your feet on the floor, while the alarm is obnoxiously banging upon your head, you need to commit your day to be led by the Lord. You must yield yourself to the Holy Spirit’s influence.
I determine when I need to get up before I go to bed. I don’t start rationalizing in the morning when my clock goes off (or I try not to). And since I am often my wife’s alarm clock, I don’t ask her (any longer) in the morning what time she needs to get up. I ask her the night before. Because when I wake her in the morning at the time I think she needs to get up she says, “Give me another 15 minutes.” And the truth is, when I try to make that decision in the morning, I say the very same thing.
The Word and the Spirit must be the driving influences in our lives throughout the day if we are to have an attitude of immediacy in following Jesus Christ. If you don’t listen to Him when you first get up, when are you going to start listening to Him? When He says, “Follow Me,” and you say, “It’s too early to follow you right now,” when are you going to catch up with Him later in the day? If you see your day as inconsequential (I’m not working today, so it doesn’t matter when I get up.) then you will live it inconsequentially. But if you see it filled with the purpose of following Jesus Christ then you will see every day in that same light of having eternal purpose and eternal consequences. If I am following Jesus Christ and walking by His Spirit, He will use me to eternally impact the life of others. Unfortunately, if I am not following Jesus Christ and walking by His Spirit, then I will still impact others eternally, though maybe not in a very beneficial way.
We don’t have the decision, as an obedient follower of Jesus Christ, to tell Him when we will follow or how we will follow or under what circumstances we will follow. He says to follow and we are to go. We do have the decision to put off following Him for part of the day or some period of time, but not as an obedient follower and faithful servant of Jesus Christ.
If we start out thinking that we can pick and choose what is on our agenda without consulting the Lord, without acknowledging, “Lord, I’m committing my way to You, now You direct my paths,” then we’ve not at all chosen the path of a disciple. For if this is the way we operate when things get difficult or the path is hazardous, then we are following our own way and not the way of Christ.
The problem with this way of thinking is that, though the way WE choose may seem safer, it leads to a fruitless life as a Christian. It is not filled with the love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, kindness, faith and self-control of the Spirit. Choosing our own “safer” path does not result in bringing others to Jesus Christ. It does not result in reward from our Savior, a calling of “well done, good and faithful servant.”
There ought to be an urgency in our desire to follow Jesus Christ. And if it is a Spirit-driven urgency, it will not be frantic, but one that is characterized by the peace of the Holy Spirit and a service that reflects His joy in our hearts.
Though we need to live with this sense of urgency in our lives perhaps there are times when you actually see the consequences of acting (or not) on that sense of urgency. There were Christians who were in the WTC on 9/11 who saw firsthand the necessity of being Christ’s disciple with an urgency to speak of Him. One survivor, an Indian man named Sujo John, was working on the 81st floor of one of the buildings. He made it down to the ground floor. As he was standing in the building, the other building collapsed. He thought that he was about to die. He said that it was as if the Lord was speaking to his heart about those standing around him: “Sujo, where are these people going to spend eternity?” He called out to the 15 or 20 people around him to call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to save them. He said that not one person argued with him. Every one of them called upon the Lord. Fifteen minutes later he was the only survivor. All the rest had been struck by debris and killed. He said that prior to that time he had been a closet Christian. Just that morning, prior to the event, the Lord had been dealing with him about living seriously for Him. At 8:05 AM, he sent an email to a friend from church asking his friend to pray for him because while he was enjoying financial and material success, he said, spiritually, there was a “deep vacuum.” He called himself a closet Christian. Today he lives with an urgency of bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ out to others. He sees the need to follow Jesus Christ closely and obey Him immediately.
You and I ought to live as disciples of Jesus Christ with an urgency of following Him as if every day was 9/11 and we were working in the World Trade Center.