Journey With Jesus – Steps of Discipleship – 10/21/07
Date: 10/21/07
Sermon Series: Journey with Jesus
Title: Steps of Discipleship
Text: Mark 3:13-19
Theme: As we look at how Jesus taught His disciples and prepared them for the task of kingdom building we can learn some important lessons about what it means to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, and some principles about bringing others to Him.
Introduction: The scene from Hook where Rufio draws the line in the sand.
Transition: What it means to be a disciple. A disciple in the ancient world entails much more then being a student. A disciple is someone who learns from someone by attaching themselves to that person. It was believed that knowledge does not simply occur with the passing of information but the sharing of life. And so it was that the most of the great philosophers of the ancient Greece had disciples, people who invested their lives in taking on, not only the information that the teacher had, but the character of the person to whom they were attached.
Set the scene: This scene occurs about a year or a little more into Jesus’ public ministry: Most of that time He has spent circulating around the northern part of Israel, around Galilee, although He has already visited Judea a couple of times. Huge crowds have begun to follow Him around as He has healed many people and had several confrontations with the Pharisees. We know from the account of this event in Luke that Jesus, just prior to this choosing, has spent the night alone up on the mountain in prayer. (not a willy nilly choice). He looks out on the huge crowd and asks some to separate themselves and come with Him and then He chooses 12 out of that smaller crowd to have authoritative roles.
- Jesus Summoned (called)
o Our Call is personal. In the Greek the verb that is used here is in the middle voice and the personal pronoun is attached to the phrase, a more literal translation would be that Jesus, He Himself called them up to Him.
This part of the disciple ship process is always personally made by Christ. It is to Him and Him alone that people are called into relationship. Our job is not to introduce people to the Church, or even into the community of Christ, Those relationships are simply added fringe benefits. We are in the business of introducing people to Christ, as a personal, living Lord.
- Jesus Appointed (literally made)
o Jesus then chose twelve out of the crowd that were going to be commissioned for a special service. This is the second
step in the discipling process. Jesus desires to make each of us useful for His kingdom purposes we can find this
commissioning taking place all over pour New Testament. Jesus desires people who are willing to be committed to the
kingdom building task.
- Jesus Named Them
o A name of purpose
Apostles – their office name reflects their commission to be sent out, to accomplish something. This is not a static
name it is an active calling.
o And personal names
Names are incredibly important things. Even more so in this ancient culture then in ours. People didn’t have last names.
According to Ben Witherington III they are recognized by geography, gender and genealogy. Jesus is turning that
ancient system on its ear. He is saying that any identity that you thought that you had because of who you were
connected to or where you came from doesn’t matter in the least. All that matter is what I think of you.
- Jesus Prepared Them
o To preach
o And to have authority not power (dunamis) but delegated authority.
- The Disciples came
o They come up the mountain the question comes. Have you ever noticed that coming to Jesus always requires movement?
And it is usually movement that is not comfortable. For these early disciples coming to Christ meant separating themselves
from the crowd and coming up the mountain.
o For the modern Christian the journey is much the same, somewhere down the road of our faith walk we have to decide to
separate ourselves from the crowd and go up on the mountain with the Lord.
- The Disciple were with Him
o This is a subjunctive present action verb. The main thing that we have to be as Kingdom servants is people who are with
Jesus. I think that sometimes in the mix of trying to accomplish kingdom work we forget that primarily we have to be people
who are sold out about our relationship with Jesus. Jesus is going to ask a lot of these men before their experience is over,
probably a lot more then they ever expected but actually what he is asking them is: if they are willing to be with Him, are
they willing to be sold out for their King?.
