An Earnest Invitation
Notes
Transcript
Do you believe it?
Do you believe it?
We are 3 weeks into a journey seeking to understand what it means to experience God, to know and follow His will.
So far we have looked at the first 2 realities:
God is always working.
God lovingly pursues us.
Today we are looking at reality 3: God invites us to join Him in His work.
I was struck this week by the importance of Andy’s sermon last week and us really believe that God loves us and pursues us.
We really can’t go any further in understand the realities of experiencing God if we don’t understand that God loves us
And that the motivating factor for him to call you to follow him and pursue his will is His love for you.
God’s invitation is a loving invitation to join His mission for the world and by joining Him we experience who He is and enjoy Him more and more.
God desires us to know Him, to love Him, to be loved by Him, to join Him, and to experience Him in a personal and transformation way.
So as we look at God invitation today, don’t lose sight of His loving pursuit of you.
Jesus invites us:
Jesus invites us:
As he was walking along the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter), and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen.
“Follow me,” he told them, “and I will make you fish for people.”
Immediately they left their nets and followed him.
Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. They were in a boat with Zebedee their father, preparing their nets, and he called them.
Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.
Jesus is around 30 years old at this point in the story.
He has just began His ministry in the region of Capernaum around the Sea of Galilee.
He had been baptized by His cousin John the Baptist, had been tempted in the wilderness by Satan, and now He is has begun sharing His message and healing people.
When He comes to the shore of the Sea and see 2 men fishing.
Peter and Andrew were professional fisherman, it was their livelihood and likely all that they knew.
They had worked hard at it, likely had plans and goals for their business, and wanted to be successful for the sake of their families and futures.
But from the shore this man they had likely heard about from others and probably even met for themselves from what we can see from other Gospel accounts, calls out to them a simple 2 words (and a few to follow) “Follow me.”
Probably the most striking thing about this passage is verse 20
Immediately they left their nets and followed him.
Immediately, without delay, without a second thought, these two longtime, professional fisherman dropped their nets, tied up their boat and started to follow Jesus.
For the next 3 years, Peter and Andrew don’t fish.
Now after Jesus’s death and resurrection they do go back to it for a few days, but otherwise, from what we know of them, fishing was no longer a major part of their lives.
Here’s the point I want to make, when Jesus calls them to follow Him, he called them to join His mission, not add Him to their mission.
1) To join His MISSION, not FIT Him into OURS.
1) To join His MISSION, not FIT Him into OURS.
What Peter and Andrew understood in that moment was that Jesus was inviting them to leave behind what they once thought was most important and to commit themselves to this man on the shore.
Jesus was already working, and He was inviting Peter and Andrew, James and John, to join Him where He was working.
What if they hadn’t though? What if instead they had said to one another “this Jesus guy could really be good for our business. Let’s follow Him and then maybe when we do go fishing we will catch a whole lot more fish.”
Maybe they decided to give Jesus a few days a week and the other days they could keep building their business, making sure the money kept coming in and such.
Maybe that sounds a little goofy, but it is the way many of us function in our relationship with Jesus.
We believe in Him, we come to church, we give, we serve. We pray before our meals, listen to Christian music, and talk about church and God from time to time.
But if we are honest, we are really just fitting Jesus into our mission for our lives, maybe hoping that by doing so He will help us accomplish what we want.
What we see in Peter, Andrew, James, and John was surrender.
They saw in Jesus someone who was worthy of their surrender.
And in that moment, surrender meant they needed to lay down their nets and follow Him.
What does surrender mean for you?
It could mean some drastic changes in your life.
It could mean some shifts in how you spend you time, money, and energy.
What God desires is a willingness to surrender our missions in life in order to join Him in His.
2) To see our PURPOSE from a NEW PERSPECTIVE.
2) To see our PURPOSE from a NEW PERSPECTIVE.
Jesus’s invitation to Peter and Andrew is to follow Him and to become something new.
He was giving them a new mission for their lives.
Rather than fishing for fish, they were going to be fishing for people.
There life to this point had been focused on catching fish and making money to provide for their families.
That was their purpose in life, but Jesus was giving them a new perspective on their purpose.
One of the most profound and difficult questions many often struggle to answer is: What is the purpose of life?
Why do we exist? What should we be doing with our lives? How do we determine what is important and valuable, as opposed to what is meaningless and worthless?
It might not be a question you often ask consciously, but it is a question you answer every moment of every day as you live.
Even when we wonder around aimlessly, we are still moving in a particular direction.
And, regardless of whether or not we are aware of it, each of our lives are being lived for a purpose.
So what PURPOSE are you living for?
We have been talking in this series about knowing and living in the Will of God.
We don’t really talk about “Wills” outside of setting one up for our kids in case we die, or when we talk about the probability of something happening.
So another way of referring to God’s Will is to talk about God’s Purpose and/or God’s Mission.
What is God’s Purpose for our lives and what is He seeking to accomplish through us, in His world?
That really is the same question as “what is God’s will?”
Remember what Blackaby says:
Once I know God’s will (His Purpose/Mission), then my life gains its proper perspective, and I can adjust my life to Him and to His purposes.
So what is God’s purpose/mission?
We can find it in some of the last words Jesus spoke before He ascended to heaven.
Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
God’s mission then is to make His name known throughout the world and He intends to do that through His people.
I shared Romans 10:13-15 with the students at the high school a on the morning of SYATP a couple weeks ago.
For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
How, then, can they call on him they have not believed in? And how can they believe without hearing about him? And how can they hear without a preacher?
And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.
God’s purpose, God’s Mission, and God’s will is for people who do not know Him to come to know Him.
And He has chosen you and me to be the ones who tell them.
Jesus’s invitation is to see every aspect of our lives as an opportunity to be used by Him to accomplish His mission.
Your purpose isn’t to make more money, to raise successful children, to have a vibrant and passionate marriage, to enjoy the pleasures of life, or live the American Dream.
Your purpose is to make Jesus known.
When we see our purpose from this perspective, then it changes the way we parent, the way we work, the way we coach.
It changes what we spend our money on, what we spend our time doing, what we sign our kids up for.
It change how we act when someone mistreats us, how we respond when things don’t do our way, and what we do with the blessings we are given.
When Jesus invites us to follow Him, He invites us to see our life purpose from His perspective.
3) To SURRENDER the PRIORITIES of our lives.
3) To SURRENDER the PRIORITIES of our lives.
When James and John are invited to follow Jesus there is something slightly different about their story.
Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.
James and John didn’t just leave their nets behind, they left their dad behind.
God’s invitation calls us to surrender the priorities of our lives, often meaning we leave behind some things we find really important.
It is a dangerous mistake to believe nothing in our lives has to change when we begin to follow Jesus.
When Jesus saw a large crowd around him, he gave the order to go to the other side of the sea.
A scribe approached him and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.”
Jesus told him, “Foxes have dens, and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
“Lord,” another of his disciples said, “first let me go bury my father.”
But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”
We say with our mouths “I want to follow you Jesus” but with our hands we hold on to certain things with white knuckles because we don’t believe life could be happy without them.
This is when it is so important for us to remember Andy’s sermon last week…God love you and is lovingly pursuing you.
You can read these words as Jesus is making following Him unnecessarily difficult, but that isn’t what He is doing.
He is inviting us to join him in a life that is immensely more fulfilling, even if it may be hard.
When we get to the end of our lives David Platt powerfully reminds us:
“We will not wish we had made more money, acquired more stuff, lived more comfortably, taken more vacations, watched more television, pursued greater retirement, or been more successful in the eyes of this world. Instead, we will wish we had given more of ourselves to living for the day when every nation, tribe, people, and language will bow around the throne and sing the praises of the Savior who delights in radical obedience and the God who deserves eternal worship.”― David Platt
Do you believe God is at work?
That He has plan and is working in and around us even when we can’t see it?
Do you believe He loves you?
That He is pursuing you and inviting you to know Him personally?
Do you then believe He has you where you are a reason?
That there are people around you that God has chosen you to be a witness for Him
That He desires to use you right where He has you.
Then what is keeping you from following Him? From receiving His invitation to join Him?
Have you trusted Jesus for salvation?
I know I am a sinner and I know I have put other things besides you as first. But I believe you love me, and that you died for my sins and that you rose from the dead. And from this moment forward I want to follow you and live my life for you.