Follow Me

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab them. I’m super excited to dive into our section of Scripture tonight and we are making a little more progress than we have the last few weeks as we will be looking at a whole whopping 5 verses. Mark 1:16-20 is where we will be heading and something that I want to stress before we look at these verses is the radical nature of what Christ says and the radical response that takes place in the lives of the 4 men that we are about to read about. When it comes to Christianity, many have the tendency to think of it as more of a recommendation where you take what you want and leave the rest. They think of discipleship as like a subscription service where you are free to cancel at any time if you feel like you aren’t getting what you really wanted. Many fail to recognize that when Christ calls, He calls the whole person. When Christ calls, He calls for you heart, mind, body, and soul. He doesn’t call for part of you, He commands all of you and that is important for us to remember as we look at Christ’s important words to his first disciples: Follow Me. One of the most influential books that I read as a young pastor was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship and that is a book that I really think every Christian needs to read. Bonhoeffer was a German pastor during World War 2 and he was arrested and eventually executed due to a connection that he had to a plot to assassinate Hitler but despite that, Bonhoeffer had a great mind and a good heart and he understood the lengths by which man is to go in order to follow Jesus. In the Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer says, “The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow Him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time—death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.” When Christ calls us, it is a call to abandon that which is comfortable, it is a call to abandon that which may appear to be the most suitable or pleasing in the eyes of the world. It is a call that one must take seriously if they want to be a faithful follower of Christ. Believe it or not, if you want to be a follower of Christ, you are actually going to have to follow Him. Christ does not save us so that we will stay who we are and where we are and we will see this pretty clearly in what we will read tonight. Let’s open up in prayer and then we will read Mark 1:16-20

Mark 1:16–20 NASB95

As He was going along by the Sea of Galilee, He saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed Him. Going on a little farther, He saw James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, who were also in the boat mending the nets. Immediately He called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and went away to follow Him.

There’s three C’s that I want us to focus on tonight and that is: The Caller, The Called, and the Community. Let’s look at the caller first.

The Caller

So who is the caller in these verses? Well, it is the only one that Mark notes as speaking any words at all, it’s Jesus Himself. Mark moves our narrative to the Sea of Galilee where Jesus sees Simon, who we will come to know as Peter, and his brother Andrew. After that Jesus goes a little further and calls James and his brother John. Now this is not the first time that Jesus met Peter and Andrew, in John 1:35-42 we see that Peter and Andrew knew Jesus from the ministry of John the Baptist. What’s also important for us to know about our caller is that Christ did not just pick random fisherman in this call but deliberately and intentionally sought out these 4 men. The Sea of Galilee was a fishermen’s dream and there was surely no shortage of fishermen as Jesus walked along the coastline. Jesus likely had a plethora of fishermen that He could have called if the only qualification was that the follower must be into fish. So Jesus is intentional in His calling and this is amplified in what Jesus says to His disciples later on in John 15:16. Jesus says to them: “You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you.” Just as this is true of the early disciples, this is also true of every born again Christian. We are not believers because we sought out Jesus first, we are believers because Christ sought us first. In fact, we would have never looked for Him if He did not first look for us. If you look at Paul’s chain of salvation in Romans 8:29–30 “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.” Those that Jesus knew, those that He predestined ahead of time, are those that are called to be His followers. We see this in this exchange between Jesus and the four fishermen. Notice what Jesus says to them, He says, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” Now in that one statement, I want to quickly bring your attention to 3 things that are crucial to understanding this passage.

The command of Follow Me

The first thing is what we have already spent some time talking about and that’s Jesus’ words: Follow me. These words are not a suggestion. Jesus is not requesting Andrew and Peter to come with Him. This is a command. Jesus doesn’t come to these men saying, “Hey if you aren’t too busy and if it is not too much trouble, would you like to follow me around for a bit? If not, that’s ok, just get back to me and let me know.” No, this is a divine command to these men. Those that the Spirit of God calls must come. Discipleship happens because Christ has issued you a command to follow Him. Tim Keller said, “The Gospel is not about choosing to follow advice, it’s about being called to follow a King.”

The Task

The second thing that is important to understanding this passage is what Jesus is tasking these men with. Jesus says that they will become fishers of men. Now obviously this doesn’t mean that Andrew and Peter were going to go running around Jerusalem with fishing rods and nets in order to try and collect a whole bunch of people together but instead it is the work that all true followers of Christ are to take part in. To be a fisher of men means that these men were to be fishers of souls. Their task was to cast a wide net over the souls of man and warn them of judgement. In the Old Testament, we see the Lord use the fishers of men analogy always in reference to a coming judgement. We see this in passages like Amos 4:2 “The Lord God has sworn by His holiness, “Behold, the days are coming upon you When they will take you away with meat hooks, And the last of you with fish hooks.” We also see it in Jeremiah 16:16 ““Behold, I am going to send for many fishermen,” declares the Lord, “and they will fish for them; and afterwards I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them from every mountain and every hill and from the clefts of the rocks.” And we see it also in the book of Habakkuk and also Ezekiel. The task of these fishers of men was to teach the Gospel with the purpose of bringing lost sinners into the fold of God. They were to be heralds for the King of Kings and testify to the Kings words. The task is to make the lost aware of their need of forgiveness, repentance, and salvation.

The Empowering

The third thing that is worth emphasizing is that there is an outside empowerment for these men to become fishers of men. Notice what Jesus said, “I will make you” become fishers of men. You won’t make yourself one, other people won’t make you one, I Myself will make you fishers of men. Jesus understands that the task before these men is an impossible task outside of Holy Spirit power. Jesus would tell them later on in John 15:5 “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.” Far too often we think that by our own strengths, by our own abilities, by our own knowledge that we can confidently carry out the work of the Gospel and the Christian life on our own. Christ says, “No you absolutely can’t! If you are looking anywhere else outside of me to be able to empower you for the work, you won’t find it!” I know from personal experience that there are times where I write a sermon and I can tell that I’m doing it on my own because I’m relying on my own education, my own theological knowledge, and I unintentionally reject the Spirit. I always know when it happens because usually the sermons that I think will have the greatest impact on people almost never do. It always seems like the sermons that I dread preaching that are usually noted as my better ones and that has to be something from the Spirit because there is a total lack of reliance on myself! If you want to be faithful and I think that some of you do, the sooner you recognize your utter hopelessness outside of Christ to sustain you, the sooner you will start to recognize the grace of God that is active in your life. Just as the disciples needed Jesus to make them what they were, we need Christ to make us what He wants us to become. To quickly summarize, we know that the caller is Jesus Himself. We have seen that His call is a command and we see the task that He is to empower us with. Let’s now turn and look at those that were called in these verses.

The Called

There are quite a few elements that I want you to notice when it comes to the four men that were called in these verses. One of the most basic things is that these men were fishermen. I think that is one of the most radical elements of this entire section. You see Jesus did not come and start a movement with the strong and the powerful. He didn’t come and create this new way of life with kings and rulers or rabbis or even the most distinct professionals of His day. Instead Christianity starts with a handful of fishermen. Just think of it in this way, if you were trying to start a movement, where would you start? You would likely want to start with those that had the most resources to offer or who had a great reputation with the community that you were looking to get started in but instead, Christ begins the most important work in the world with fishermen. This is one of the many reasons why I believe that the Gospels that we have are true because if you were going to try and convince the world that you were someone truly significant, why would you start off by recruiting fishermen? Why would Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all point out that the great leaders of the early church were nothing more than flawed and ordinary fishermen unless that is what really happened? You see this is great news for us because this reminds us that God is not in the business of taking the strong and mighty and making them stronger and mightier. Instead God uses the weak and the powerless to shame the strong. This doesn’t mean that God never uses those that are strong and powerful but it shows us that that is not necessarily the norm of how God often operates. Adrian Rogers said, “It is God’s plan to take ordinary people and to do extraordinary things through them.” Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 4:7 “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves.” God uses ordinary people to show His glory and His power and there are a lot of ordinary people in this room so this is great news for us. The next thing I want you to notice is that these men immediately respond to the call. They don’t stand around and ask Jesus what’s in it for them and they don’t ask to see the benefit package before they sign up. We see Peter and Andrew immediately leave their nets to follow Jesus and James and John take it a step further and it says that they just got up and left their father in the boat to follow Jesus. This is a radical commitment! Far too many of us are waiting for Jesus to give us more of a reason to follow Him when we don’t need a reason! We must follow simply because of who He is! When God says to go, who are we to ask Him for the terms and conditions? Do you understand the urgency of following Jesus? This is not a command that we should take our time with. Jesus stresses the immediacy of this command in Luke 9:57-62

Luke 9:57–62 (NASB95)

As they were going along the road, someone said to Him, “I will follow You wherever You go.”

And Jesus said to him, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”

And He said to another, “Follow Me.” But he said, “Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.”

But He said to him, “Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God.”

Another also said, “I will follow You, Lord; but first permit me to say good-bye to those at home.”

But Jesus said to him, “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Now we may read this and think that it sounds almost cruel of Jesus to say this but is that what Jesus intended? I don’t believe that Jesus meant for it to be cruel per say but I believe that He absolutely meant to stress the seriousness and the urgency of what it means to follow Him. I think that when we look at those verses we think that Jesus is standing at the guys funeral and saying, “Nope there is no time for you to go to that. If you want to go to your father’s funeral, you have no right to be my disciple!” But really what the man is saying, “Lord I will follow you but let me wait until my parents are gone and then once that happens, then I’ll come.” Jesus is also saying that if all you do is keep looking back and going back to where you once were, you will never move forward to where I am calling you to be. It is not uncaring it is simply re-prioritizing what it means to be a disciple. Choosing to follow Jesus means that there are things that you are going to have to leave behind. We talked about this when we were talking about Bonhoeffer. Notice that all four of these men left something. They left their jobs, they left their livelihoods, James and John left their family and it seems that they left a fairly wealthy background considering Zebedee had hired servants working with them. In the eyes of the world this is crazy! To leave behind family, to leave behind monetary gain, to leave behind that which we know and are comfortable with and yet if we want to be followers of Christ, we must all be willing to count all these things as lost! Jesus says in Luke 14:26 “If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.” Now does this verse mean that we are to truly hate these people in our lives? Jesus talks a whole lot about loving others so it seems odd that He would say that we must hate those that are closest to us so what does He mean then? What Jesus means is that our love and devotion for Him should be so vast and so far above the love for these people that it looks like hate in comparison. These four men literally left everything to follow Jesus. They left all sense of comfort, all sense of security, all that was familiar because they saw something in this man and heard something in this call that they could not stay away from. Do you feel a call this strong in your life to follow Jesus? Do you feel that God has called you to be a fisher of men? Do you feel that God has called you from darkness to His marvelous light? If the Lord has called you to something, we know that He will equip you to do that something and He will equip you for that task in such a way where it should be obvious to you and those around you that this must be from the Lord! With the few minutes that we have left, let’s talk about the last C that we see in this passage: the community.

The Community

What do I mean about community in this passage? There are two layers of community that we will talk about and the first community that we are called to in this passage is the community with Christ. Christ calls us to communion with Him. As we follow Him, we become part of the community that has Christ as its head and cornerstone. Jesus calls us to Himself so that we can be the community of God. Something that shows just how different of a community Jesus was making is that He seeks out His followers. He seeks out His students. Back in Christ’s day, the rabbi’s would never go out in search of students but those that wanted to learn from the rabbi’s would instead go to him and ask if they could follow him. People would basically apply for a particular rabbi to train them but Jesus doesn’t do this. He is the one that seeks, He is the one that desires to teach, He is the one that comes to save. In the very picture of Christ calling these first disciples we see a picture of how Christ calls ourselves. He seeks us and He teaches us, not because we sought Him but because He sought us first. As He seeks us out, He seeks us out with a purpose. He seeks us to not just allow us to remain who we are but to make us like Himself. Charles Spurgeon said, “When Christ calls us by His grace we ought not only to remember what we are, but we ought also to think of what He can make us.” As we follow Christ, we look back in a sense but we must also look ahead. We must look to see the type of community that Christ wants us to be. The second community that we come to is the church. Jesus does not call these men to be individual entities. He calls these men to bring them together into a covenant people. We are not meant to live this life alone. If you want to be a follower of Christ, you are going to need the church. You were saved to be in a community. Imagine how these disciples would feel if they were called to the task that they were called to if they knew that they were going to do it alone? Christ loves us far too much to have us do this impossible task alone. He gives us Himself, He gives us the power for the work, and He makes us a community where we can serve together all with the purpose of following Him. This day you have all been called to Christ, you have been called to service, and you have been called to a community. You need to follow Him. You need to understand that Christ, who is sovereign over all, has a task for all His people and we as His people must understand the absolute urgency of the task that is before us. Far too many souls are walking into hell because the fishers of men have taken too much time unraveling their line and making excuses. We need to follow and we need to work. Christ does not leave us with the option but has commanded us to follow Him wherever He may lead. As we have talked about this caller, who we are as the called, and the community that we as Christians have been brought into, I could not think of a better night for us as followers of Christ to celebrate the Lord’s Supper together. At this time our youth leaders will start to hand out the bread and the cup and I want to remind you that if you are not a Christian, this moment is not for you. When the bread and the juice comes by, just let it pass. Maybe take this moment to reflect on what it is we are doing as the Body of Christ. At the last supper, the Lord Jesus gave to His followers bread and wine as a symbol of what He was about to accomplish on their behalf. He also gave this ordinance as a lasting reminder for the Church that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. As we celebrate communion, we look back on what Christ has done. We look back on His sinless life and we look back on His all-sufficient, sin clearing death on the cross, and we look back to His resurrection and His ascension to the right hand of God. We look back on all that the Gospel and the Bible proclaims. But we don’t solely look back on this reality. Instead we also look ahead to what is to come. We look ahead to the day when Christ returns, we look ahead to the assurance of our own resurrection, and we look ahead to the New Heavens and the New Earth and as we take part in this moment, our minds are totally held captive by Christ. Before we eat this bread and we drink this cup, is your heart right with the Lord? Is their sin in your life that you are attempting to hide from Him? Is there hate in your heart against your brother or sister in the faith that is holding you captive? Have you truly been born again and have you come to a new life in Jesus Christ? Take a moment and reflect, and I want to give you a moment to go to the Lord in prayer before we take part in this sacred moment. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11, “The Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” Paul continues, “In the same way He took the cup also after supper saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.” Let’s pray.