Responding to God’s Voice

Scripture: Matthew 4:12-23

Matthew 4:12–23 NIV

12 When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he withdrew to Galilee. 13 Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali—14 to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah: 15 “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles— 16 the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.” 17 From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” 18 As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 19 “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” 20 At once they left their nets and followed him. 21 Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them, 22 and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him. 23 Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.

1/25/2026

Order of Service:

AnnouncementsOpening WorshipPrayer RequestsPrayer SongPastoral PrayerKid’s TimeMinistry CelebrationOffering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)Scripture ReadingSermonClosing SongBenediction

Special Notes: Ministry Celebration

Madi sharing during service about her Emmaus weekend (After opening worship)

Opening Prayer:

Responding to the Voice of God

Introduction

It's hard to follow God faithfully throughout the year if you can't hear or understand him clearly. So we spent our first month of 2026 focusing on hearing and understanding God's voice.

We've covered a lot of ground. God speaks through what he has already said, especially in Scripture, and his communication transcends every boundary: language, culture, geography, and even time. We hear him more clearly when we obey what we already know. What he has spoken in the past and in this present moment continues to feed and lead us into the future. Whenever we struggle to hear or understand, we have two checkpoints: Scripture and the body of Christ. Together, they help us stay on track.

For three weeks, we focused on God speaking. Today, we turn the spotlight around and ask a different question: How do we respond? We respond to God's voice by repenting from our old life and following Jesus into the new life he is calling us toward.

Light Dawns in an Unexpected Place

Before Jesus ever called anyone to follow him, he went somewhere unexpected.For the last 200 years, the Church in the United States has learned to engineer revivals. It almost comes down to a science. Get as many churches as possible to work together. Bring in the biggest-named speakers and bands you can afford, because their fame will draw people. Find a good location with a good stage, a good sound system, and lots of parking. Spread the word, pray hard, and invite everyone you can. Then hope for the best.

Over time, the people who make their living at these events have learned that certain parts of the country are more open than others. Revivals get more traction in the South, especially in smaller rural areas. Those communities are often the most receptive, even if they don't have the resources to make it big. Around the world, we tend to think of revival as something that happens more easily in developing countries. We hear less often about God moving powerfully in places like New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, or Baghdad. But I've met missionaries who have served in some of these cities, and they can tell stories about people who were desperately hungry for the gospel. Their revivals just don't look like the ones we're used to.

Everyone expected the Messiah to begin his ministry in Jerusalem and Judea. A holy leader like that was expected to teach from the temple. No one expected him to come from Galilee or spend time in that dark place up in the north, right on the border with the Gentiles. It was close enough to smell the pagan sacrifices, near enough to have unclean merchants selling things that good Jews couldn't eat, shouldn't touch, and didn't even want to look at.

But that's exactly where Jesus went. The revival he sparked in northern Israel truly was a light in a dark place, and it caught everyone's attention. He wasn't throwing another log on dying embers. He was calling fire down from heaven on wood that was soaked with the waters of oppression, idolatry, and compromised integrity.

Nazareth and Capernaum weren't the region's major cities. They were fishing villages full of blue-collar workers, everyday nobodies, whose names we only know because of Jesus. If God could bring the wise men from the east to worship a baby in Bethlehem, he could bring his light to Galilee of the Gentiles as well.

Isn't that how God so often works? He moves in places we don't expect, places we think are too hard, far beyond our ability. Sometimes that's exactly where he starts.

Matthew wants us to see that Jesus is the one who was promised. So he points us back to the prophet Isaiah, who wrote these words 700 years before Jesus was born: "Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles—the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned."

Isaiah saw it coming. A light would dawn in the very place everyone had written off. Matthew saw it happen. Jesus, the light of the world, began his public ministry not in the halls of religious power, but among fishermen and farmers in a region most respectable people avoided. God keeps his promises, and he often keeps them in ways that surprise us.

The Invitation to Repent and Follow

The first public words Jesus spoke in Matthew's Gospel were, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." It's a command, and he picks up right where John the Baptist left off, only this time, far to the north in Galilee. John preached to crowds in a more traditional Jewish region, encouraging them to live out their faith even when it was hard because of the Roman occupation. It's easier to make excuses for not being obedient to God than to make the necessary changes or to find ways to be faithful when it's not easy or obvious.

The people in Galilee had Jewish roots, but many of them had made compromises to succeed in business. Half their customers weren't even Jewish. Repentance meant turning around and realigning yourself with God. Sometimes that means doing a complete 180. Other times, we're only two or three degrees off. We've got everybody fooled, even ourselves. But at the end of our journey, even a small misalignment will land us in the wrong place.

The message Jesus gave them was to repent now. Why the urgency? Because the kingdom of heaven was near. It was not far off, not many years away, giving them plenty of time to wander around aimlessly. If they weren't properly aligned, they would miss it.

Matthew shows us the urgency of Jesus's announcement through the response of his first followers. James, John, Peter, and Andrew were out in the fishing boats, doing exactly what they were born and raised to do. Get the fish from the water into the nets, from the nets into the boat, and from the boat to the markets so they could feed the family and live to fish another day. It was a simple life. Like many careers, there were no guarantees of a good day or a good catch. It was always a bit of a gamble, but it was all they knew.

Then Jesus showed up and extended his invitation. "Come and follow me," he said. In their tradition, those were the kind of words a rabbi or teacher of the law would say to students he had chosen. Normally, such students were selected for their work in the local synagogue, their study of the Torah, or their family connections. Men who worked for a living, especially adults with families of their own, were rarely chosen. But there was a hunger in these men, something that had either been there for a long time or had just woken up at the sound of Jesus's voice. Their response was immediate. They dropped everything. They left their fish, their families, their heritage, and history because they sensed something different in Jesus. They may not have been sinning in that moment, as we often use the word, but they turned from their former lives and reoriented themselves to follow him.

Jesus didn't make them do that. We find out later in the Gospels that they had many opportunities to turn away and go back to their former lives. He chose them, but relationships work both ways. For that bond to form, they had to choose him as well. It's the same covenant relationship with God we talked about last week. We have to choose him because God wants willing partners. He won't force us.

These four disciples are an example of the response Jesus is looking for when he speaks to us. They show us the willingness we need: drop everything, turn from whatever is in front of us, and follow him.

But here's what we need to understand: their decision to follow Jesus was not a one-time decision. It was the first of many.

A Million Daily Choices/Conclusion

These disciples said yes to Jesus when they first met him on the shore of Galilee. But the call to be a disciple of Jesus, to be a Christian, means saying yes day after day, through times of confusion, failure, and grief. Many of you know this from the covenant of marriage.

★ KEY STATEMENT: The "yes" that we say at the altar is not a one-time choice; it's the first of a million choices.

Every day, you choose to stay, to forgive, to show up, to try again, and to grow together.

Think about a cold January week in Indiana. Your neighbor's driveway is buried under a foot of snow, and you know they can't shovel it themselves. You could grab your shovel and help them because you're a good person. But a disciple of Jesus does something more. A disciple prays on the way over and asks, "Jesus, what are you doing here, and how can I join you?"

Or think about a difficult family relationship, someone you'll be stuck in the house with during a long, cold winter. It's easy to grit your teeth and get through it. That's what any decent person would do. But following Jesus asks more. It asks you to pray for that person, not just tolerate them. It asks you to consider whether your own pride or unforgiveness is part of the problem. The daily choice isn't just "be patient." It's "Lord, help me see this person the way you see them. Change me if I need to be changed."

From the outside, both situations might look the same, whether you follow Jesus or not. But the difference isn't just what you do. It's whether you're doing it with Jesus, listening for his voice, following his lead, letting him shape you into someone new. That's repentance. And it doesn't happen once. It happens every time you pick up the shovel, every time the tension rises, every time you choose to follow him again.

Those choices, individually, fade over time and blend into a life that shows either faithfulness or unfaithfulness. The call Jesus extended that day on the Sea of Galilee culminates in the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. That parable, about the end of everything, shows Jesus separating people based on how they lived. The remarkable thing is that neither the sheep nor the goats fully realized what they had been doing their entire lives. Their daily choices had blurred in their memory. They had made those choices so often that the choices became who they were.

The sheep didn't keep a tally of their good deeds. They simply became people who saw the hungry and fed them, saw the stranger and welcomed them. Likewise, the goats ignored the people around them so often that they eventually stopped seeing them at all. They didn't even realize they were ignoring them. It became who they were.

We can get set in our ways. We can fool ourselves into thinking we've started following Jesus when we haven't.

★ KEY STATEMENT: God may have started with us, but we may not have started with him.

A response from us is required. We have to be willing to repent of the life we currently have, turn, and fully face Jesus if we're going to follow him into eternal life.

But here is the good news: Jesus is always calling us closer. We can always repent, always turn. We can always take the next step toward him. Transformation takes as long as it takes. We have God's grace to go with us through it all. We just have to be willing to go with him, and we can begin today.

Conclusion

As we follow Jesus through the rest of his ministry in Matthew's Gospel, we see him teaching, preaching, and healing. He was constantly inviting people into God's kingdom. For those who accepted him, he gave them whatever they needed to make that journey, to make them whole. He's still doing this today through the power of his word and the Holy Spirit, working in and through his church. He's still calling. He's still inviting. He will continue until the end because that's his mission.

But we have to respond. The more times we tell him yes, the easier it is to say yes again. The more times we tell him no, the harder our hearts get. We get stuck in our ways. Those deathbed conversions are far too rare. Most of the time, we die the way we live, with Jesus or without him. So don't wait. The kingdom of heaven is near. Will you listen to God's voice? And when you hear it, will you repent and follow him? Not just once, but every day.

★ KEY STATEMENT: Make it your first step, your last step, and a million, million steps in between.

When you find yourself anywhere on that journey, questioning whether it really is his voice you're hearing, remember our two checkpoints. First, Scripture. Is what you're hearing found and grounded in God's word? Scripture clearly shows us who Jesus is. Second, the body of Christ. If you can't find a direct answer in Scripture, God has given you brothers and sisters who are also following him. They can help you discern his voice and hold you accountable to keep following him with every step you take.

Today might be your day to take a first step. Repent from your former way of life. Turn and fully face Jesus. Yet it's also an opportunity for each of us to repent of whatever is before us and to reorient ourselves, whether that's 180 degrees or 2, and to take that next step, one step closer to him. Jesus is calling all of us. He's come near. No matter how deep the darkness around us, the light is here, shining, and calling our names. How will you respond?

Closing Prayer

Lord, we thank you that you continue to call us. As your voice crosses every boundary, we thank you for giving us Scripture and our brothers and sisters in Christ to help us know your voice and to know you. We thank you that the goal is not just knowing about you, but being with you, following you, beginning today, and getting closer with every step we take until we are with you in your kingdom.

We thank you that you don't force us to make that choice because you want us to want to be with you. You want us to choose you as you've chosen us. Lord, help us today to choose you over and above everything else in our lives. Help us to choose you. In Jesus' name. Amen.