LIFE: According to Jesus
06/19/2011 - Life's a Process
This week in my study I came across a letter from a management consulting firm that was actually written to Jesus who at the time was managing his father's carpenter shop in the town of Nazareth in the region of Galilee. But Jesus was about to resign that position and start a new venture on his own.
So he contacted this consulting company and submitted the resumes of his twelve disciples for them to review hoping for their affirmation. And in response this is what they wrote.
Dear Jesus,
Thank you for choosing Jerusalem Management Consulting Firm to help you launch your new venture. We appreciate your business.
Recently, we received the resumes of the twelve men that you have picked for management positions in your new organization. All of them have now completed our extensive battery of tests.
We have not only run the results through our computer, but have also arranged personal interviews for each of them with our staff psychologist and vocational aptitude consultant.
The profiles of all the tests are included and you will want to review each of them carefully.
As part of our service and for your guidance, we have also made some general comments, much as an auditor will include general statements in a financial review. These are given as a result of staff consultation and come without any additional fee.
It is the staff opinion that most of your nominees are lacking in background, education, and vocational aptitude for the type of enterprise you are undertaking. They do not work well as a team. We would recommend that you continue your search for persons of experience in managerial ability and proven capability.
Simon Peter is emotionally unstable and given to fits of rage. We strongly recommend that he take an anger management course. Andrew has absolutely no qualities of leadership and could be a detriment to the team. The two brothers, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, place personal interest above company loyalty. It might be best for them to remain in the fishing industry. Thomas demonstrates an unhealthy skepticism that could easily undermine team morale.
We feel that it is our duty to tell you that Matthew has been blacklisted by the Greater Jerusalem Better Business Bureau. He has been accused of extortion and tax evasion. Simon the Zealot definitely has radical and subversive political views and should be considered dangerous. And most of the others scored poorly in all the major areas of our evaluation. We're sorry if this comes as bad news.
However, one of the candidates does show great potential. He is a man of great ability and resourcefulness, meets people well, has a keen business mind, and connections in high places. He is highly motivated, ambitious, responsible, and well networked. We recommend Judas Iscariot as your controller and right-hand man. All of the other profiles are self-explanatory.
We wish you every success in your new venture.
Sincerely Yours,
John Caiaphas, Director
Jerusalem Management Consultants
Wow, aren't you glad that Jesus didn't take the advice of the Jerusalem Management Consulting Firm. Their observations may have been correct, but in the end they got it all wrong didn't they?
Why? Because they didn't account for change, the change that would occur in the lives of these men because they had met Jesus. Peter and Andrew, James and John, and the rest of the Twelve, except for Judas, weren't the same men at the end of their lives as they were when they were first introduced to Jesus.
And that should give us all hope because Jesus doesn't want you and me to be the same person at the end of our lives as we were when we first met him either. Like the Twelve, he wants to give us life and life to the full. And when he gives us his life our lives change. Our lives are being transformed.
This morning we continue the series that we introduced last Sunday calledLIFE: According to Jesus. Life begins with yoking ourselves to the one who called himself the way, the truth, and the life.
We started last week with Jesus' words in Matthew 11:28-30, Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
I was talking to someone this week from the Valley View community and they were saying how much that passage meant to them. In fact, it meant so much to them that they pulled a stone out of their pocket on which they had written Matthew 11:28.
And they said, "Bruce, that's a great verse to give someone even before John 3:16 which is also a great verse that says,For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
In John 3:16 Jesus is asking people to believe in him, but someone may not be ready to do that. Instead, inMatthew 11:28 Jesus is simply asking people to come to him, especially those who are weary and burdened and beat up by life. If they do then he will give them rest for their souls. And who wouldn't want that, right?"
I thought that was great. The kind of life that Jesus is offering begins when we come to him. So let's keep coming to Jesus ourselves and encouraging others to come to him as well.
TAKE MY YOKE UPON YOU, Jesus says. Last week we said that the yoke Jesus was referring to was a wooden beam that was used to connect two oxen together, an older, more mature, experienced ox with a younger, wild, less experienced one. And over time, with the help of a yoke, the older ox would train the younger ox how to be more productive and more effective and more useful to the master.
Take my yoke upon you and LEARN FROM ME. The yoke in Jesus' day was also a metaphor for a rabbi's teaching. When you followed a rabbi's interpretation of the Torah you were putting on that rabbi's yoke. So Jesus is saying, "Follow this rabbi's teaching. Put on my yoke and learn from me."
That word "learn" is the Greek word for disciple. "Be discipled by me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."
Jesus is inviting us, all of us, any of us, every one of us, to be discipled by him. That's when real life begins according to Jesus. And what's the goal of this discipling relationship?
Jesus states it in Matthew 10:24-25 when he says, "Students, literally disciples, are not above their teacher, nor servants above their master. It is enough for disciples to be like their teacher, and servants like their master."
Did you hear that? The goal is to be like Jesus. That's where he's taking us. That's the agenda. There's nothing hidden about it. He wants us all to know it up front. If we yoke ourselves to Jesus he's out to make us like him.
And what's he like? Well, for starters, he's gentle and humble in heart and had a soul that was completely at rest in the midst of a very tumultuous life.
Do you want that? If you do, then yoke up to Jesus. That's what he wants to give you. He wants to completely satisfy your soul and give you peace and rest and a deep sense of relief from the stress and struggles of life. That's life according to Jesus.
But we don't become like Jesus overnight. It's a process. Life is a process. Transformation takes time and comes incrementally. Three steps forward and two steps back. There are peaks and valleys in the journey. If you graph it, it's not always a straight line up and to the right. But if we stay in the yoke we're going to get there one day, that's his guarantee.
The apostle John, who spent his whole life yoked up to Jesus, wrote this in1 John 3:2-3, Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
That's the hope that keeps us in the yoke. One day we will be like him for we shall see him as he is. And that amazing encounter will finish the discipling process. But it is a process.
You can't study this subject very long and not run into the name of A. B. Bruce. Alexander Bruce was a Scottish pastor and professor back in the late 1800's who wrote a classic book on discipleship called The Training of the Twelve which was all about how Jesus trained his disciples. And in his book he identified four stages of the process, each one involving a deeper and deeper commitment to Jesus and his teachings.
And I want to share those four stages with you and as I do I want you to think about the stage you're in right now and what it would take for you to go the next level in yoking up with Jesus.
The first stage is for the curious and is best summed up by the phrase "come and see." That's what Jesus says in John 1:39 when two men ask him where he's staying. Jesus says,Come and see.
During the "come and see" stage Jesus doesn't demand to be followed. Instead, he simply gives invitations. And so in the first four chapters of John's gospel he invites John and Andrew and Peter and Philip and Nathaniel to check him out. So they listen to his teaching and they watch him interact with people and perform some miracles, but they don't drop everything and follow him.
The purpose of this first stage of discipling is to create an interest and a curiosity in who Jesus really is. It's meant to whet the appetite of the curious so they want to know more. In his book, Bruce says "the come and see" stage lasted about four months out of Jesus' three-year ministry. Becoming a disciple always begins with "come and see."
In our last series called Balancing the Burbs we talked about being a missional church, a church that's on a mission to be blessing to this world. And that's what we want to be because we believe that's what God wants all churches to be.
But we also need to be a community where we can always invite others "to come and see." From day one we've wanted Valley View to be a safe place to come and check out Jesus whether it's through a Sunday worship gathering, a Wednesday night meal, a Hub group, a Joy event, Zumba, a serving opportunity like Beautiful Day, a Blood Drive, anAlpha course, dinner and movie, or whatever.
Becoming a disciple of Jesus doesn't begin with conversion. It begins with curiosity. That's how it began for the Twelve that Jesus discipled and that's how it begins for most people today. It took years for his disciples to believe in him. Coming to faith was part of the process, but it was not the beginning of the process.
I love what Alan and Deb Hirsch say about this in their book Untamed, "Discipling is not just for Christians. We believe it is a great mistake to restrict discipling to just Christians and keep it within the confines of the Christian community. We as believers are called to disciple everyone who comes into our orbit of influence - it's that simple ... It's not our role to convert them, but to disciple them. Conversion is God's business ... It's about bringing people closer to Jesus and teaching them his ways. It's about loving people and exposing them to the grace and wonder of God's heart, helping them see and experience the values of the kingdom and calling forth those values that may lie dormant in their own hearts and lives. It's about letting the beauty of Jesus and his kingdom come through."
Jesus was disicpling the Twelve long before they believed in him. And so we disciple others in the way of Jesus by inviting them into our lives and into the community with the hope that one day they will move from the curious to the convinced.
And that's the second stage in the process. "Come and see" moves to "come and follow me." Those were the words Jesus used on the beach in Mark 1:17 when he called out to Peter and his brother Andrew as they were casting their nets into the sea. Come, follow me, and I will send you out to fish for people.
According to Bruce this stage lasted for ten months as Jesus was teaching the disciples some of the basics about who he was and what he came to do. This is the stage of the process that does lead to faith, when we move from being curious about Jesus to being convinced that he is who he claimed to be. This is where baptism fits in.
Jesus said in Matthew 28:19, Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
So next week and again in July we'll baptize those who have moved into at least this phase of being a disciple. They will come into the pool and I will ask them two questions, "Do you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God?" and "Do you believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sin, was buried, rose again and you're ready to follow him and the ways of his kingdom?"
Baptism isn't for the curious. Baptism is for the convinced and it's a very important step in the process of being a disciple. Could that be your next step? Maybe it is.
So we move from the curious, to the convinced, and then to thecommitted. "Come and follow me" gives way to "come and be with me."
This is the stage when we begin to implement the spiritual disciplines in our lives and create space to be with Jesus. This is when we start to arrange our schedules and our finances and our priorities around Christ and his kingdom work.
A little over a year into his ministry we read in Mark 3:14 that Jesus appointed the Twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach.
This is the phase when Jesus started sending out the Twelve, first two by two and then they led the seventy as they went out and proclaimed the good news of the kingdom. This is the phase when we roll up our sleeves and get involved in the kingdom work as it's expressed here at Valley View and in other ways as well. This is the phase when we get off the bench and get into the game using our gifts and our talents, our time and our money to serve Christ and his kingdom.
Maybe this is the next step for you? There are always opportunities to serve around here. And if you don't see it in the events and opportunities let us know how you'd like to help. Commitment to Christ is expressed when we commit ourselves and our resources to serving him.
So the curious become the convinced and the convinced become the committed and the committed become continuers who follow Christ their whole lives if they stay in the yoke. In one of the last recorded conversations that Jesus had with his disciples before he was crucified he said in John 15:4-5,Remain in me, as I also remain in you ... if you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit.
Continuers are those who have walked with Jesus for decades. They have stayed in the yoke despite the hardship and the trials of life. They've stayed in the yoke despite their questions and their doubts. They've stayed in the yoke despite opposition and struggle. They've stayed in the yoke because in the midst of it all they have found rest for their souls.
That's what I want to be. I want to be a continuer. I want to stay in the yoke no matter what life brings because that's where life is found according to Jesus. Life is a yoke. And life is a process. What will it take to get you to the next level?
In his foreword to the book Untamed, Rick Warren writes these words, "Surveys and polls reveal that in many countries, the lifestyles of believers in Jesus are not very different from those who have little or no faith in Jesus. Too many Christ followers have settled for living a nice, comfortable, moral, and decent life instead of following the radical and wild adventure of trusting God's promises and obeying his commands.
"As you get serious about following an untamed God, you will begin to enjoy the untamed lifestyle of being radically committed to Christ's mission in the world. Your Father in heaven created your for this, Jesus saves you for this, and the Holy Spirit empowers you for this! This is your destiny."