Follow Jesus

Scripture: Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Matthew 9:9–13 NIV

9 As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. 10 While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Matthew 9:18–26 NIV

18 While he was saying this, a synagogue leader came and knelt before him and said, “My daughter has just died. But come and put your hand on her, and she will live.” 19 Jesus got up and went with him, and so did his disciples. 20 Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. 21 She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” 22 Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed at that moment. 23 When Jesus entered the synagogue leader’s house and saw the noisy crowd and people playing pipes, 24 he said, “Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him. 25 After the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took the girl by the hand, and she got up. 26 News of this spread through all that region.

6/7/2026

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Communion

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 1: Communion

Opening Prayer:

Merciful God, we confess that we often go our own way, trusting our plans more than Your promises. Like the people in Hosea’s day, we offer words without heart and sacrifice without love. We forget that You desire mercy and faithfulness more than performance. Forgive us, we pray. Restore us with Your healing touch, raise us by Your grace, and renew our faith so we may follow You like Abraham, and love as Jesus loves. We pray this in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Call to Worship

Leader: Come, people of faith, trusting not in your own righteousness,

People: But in the mercy and grace of God.

Leader: God has called us, like Abraham, to journey by faith.

People: God desires steadfast love, not empty ritual.

Leader: Come and worship the one who brings healing, hope, and life.

People: We lift our voices and our hearts to the Lord!

Follow Jesus

Movement 1: The Call

Last week, we read and committed to our mission of making disciples with Jesus. Today, we’re going to begin with the basics of how to do that. The very first step is being a disciple of Jesus yourself. We build our entire life with Jesus on that foundation.

We’re picking up here in Matthew’s Gospel at the moment Matthew receives his call. Jesus has already been preaching, teaching, and doing miracles. He’s begun to call disciples to follow him, and today is Matthew’s turn. Matthew didn’t get a miracle. Instead, Jesus came to this tax collector, this outsider. Most people considered him part of what was wrong with the world, not part of what could make it better. With a simple phrase, “Follow me,” Jesus changed his life forever.

You’re going to realize fairly quickly, as we read through Matthew’s Gospel, that Matthew didn’t do very much. From the moment of his call through his commissioning and on for the rest of his life, just about the only thing Matthew did was follow Jesus.

The word “follow” is a commonly used word that you know well, but Jesus used it in an uncommon way. Rabbis and teachers who had openings for student apprentices—those disciples—would walk up to them in public and say the phrase, “Follow me.” But the expectations, even that first command to follow, meant more than just, “Go to the same place I’m going,” or, “Keep an eye on me.” Although the text says “follow”, another way to think about it is to focus on and study someone. And in the presence of Jesus, the presence of God Himself in the flesh, I want to give you another word that captures it a little bit more: behold Jesus.

(pause)

To follow Jesus, we first have to behold him.

Behold is not a word that we use anymore, unless we’re reading it in scripture or very old texts. When you look at the word itself, to behold something or someone means to be with them. There is a sense where we are holding them also, although most of the time it’s not with our hands, it’s with our eyes.

Those of you who have ever worked with photography know that for every picture, you need a focus point. That focus point has to be the right size, and it has to be clear. You can make many different pictures out of the same scene by focusing on something different.

When we behold Jesus, we focus on him. We make sure that we are close enough to Him, that He is the right size in our eyes, and that we can see Him clearly. Our eyes naturally focus on things, but whenever there is movement, and especially whenever the thing we are focusing on moves, we choose where to direct our attention and what to fill our frame with. We move that focus to keep beholding Jesus, even as he moves. That is what Jesus asked Matthew to do when he called him to be a disciple, and that is what Matthew did first and foremost, and all through his time with Jesus.

So, where did Jesus take Matthew first? He took him to Matthew’s own home.

Movement 2: The Dinner Party

The Bible doesn’t say whether Matthew had any family, but that evening, Jesus created one right there in his own home. It was an uncomfortable mix of Jewish teachers, tax collectors, other troublemakers, and the disciples Jesus had gathered. This was not the kind of dinner party where everyone sits around a table together, says grace, and then has polite conversation. It was probably more of a dinner party where Jesus was the only one who stayed seated at the table for very long.

Notice where the Pharisees are. They’re outside the house. The ones Jesus came for are inside. The Pharisees were outside, peeking into the dinner party and complaining about Jesus sitting down and eating with “tax collectors and sinners”. They were close enough to see Jesus, but not close enough to behold him. The disciples probably kept standing up, sitting down, and milling about the house like lost bees, trying to find their hive, unsure where to land safely or what to do.

Matthew and the other disciples probably had to work to stay focused on Jesus and not be distracted by all the movement in the room that evening. It wasn’t long before political and religious debates broke out, and the tension got worse. Rather than getting caught up in the debate, I imagine Matthew shifts his focus to behold Jesus, who says the sick need the doctor, not the healthy. He says he hasn’t come for the righteous, but for sinners. And then he tells them to go look up a verse from Hosea — “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Matthew never forgot this verse. He wrote it twice in his gospel, because mercy, not sacrifice, is what brought Jesus to his door. Rather than alleviating the tension in the room, that may have offended and unsettled everyone there who came at Jesus’ invitation, and more debate broke out among them.

Then suddenly, someone burst through the door.

Seeing that it was one of the Jewish leaders, Matthew may have held his breath, waiting to see whether this was the spark that would set the dinner party ablaze or an answer to prayer that would redirect the tension between the tax collectors and the Pharisees.

That Jewish ruler, Jairus, with a look of weariness and exasperation on his face, came and knelt down before Jesus.

“My daughter has just died, but come and put your hand on her, and she will live.”

Even though it cost him face, abandoning his Pharisee brothers and entering the unclean home of a tax collector, Jairus went. Jairus knelt. Jairus begged. He came to Jesus and said, “Here I am.”

Jesus got up without hesitation and went with him, leaving the dinner party and Matthew’s house in a mess. Matthew and the other disciples did the one thing that Jesus had asked them to: they followed him.

Movement 3: The Unclean

Did Matthew see the strange woman sneaking up behind Jesus? Or was he trying to keep his focus on Jesus as he followed him down the road from his house to Jairus’s house to see his daughter?

In Jesus’ day, touching anything dead, anything bleeding, anything unclean — made YOU unclean. And uncleanness spread like a cold. For a holy man like Jesus to touch the dead body of someone who was not a close family member was unthinkable. But there had been a lot of unclean, unthinkable things that had happened already that day.

Jesus had come to Matthew’s house and thrown a dinner party, which they left in a hurry, leaving his house in disarray with half the neighborhood standing around outside commenting on it, and all that had been said and done inside just moments before.

Then our scripture says,

“On the way to Jairus’ house, a woman reached out and touched him. She had been subject to bleeding for 12 years.”

Anything she touched was made unclean because her circumstances made her perpetually unclean. She did not come to Jesus like that father did, kneeling down in front of him and begging. Instead, it says, “She came up behind Jesus and touched the edge of his cloak,” believing that even if all she got to touch was his cloak, she would be healed.

This whole evening had been chaotic, and depending on what you focused on in the scene—going from the marketplace to Matthew’s house, now out in the streets in the evening, going to Jairus’ house, to a room filled with grief over the loss of a child and death—it almost looked like things went from messy to bad to worse wherever Jesus went. There was never enough time to clean things up and get things in order. But here, in a short interruption of the bigger interruption of the dinner party, this woman, who was perpetually a mess, who not only could not be clean herself but made everything around her unclean, reaches out to touch Jesus without even asking.

She was an invisible person in the community, and she tried her best to stay invisible. Because if people saw her and knew what she was experiencing, they would be affected by her, and not in a good way—not in a way they would choose. The chaos and the tension of that evening, the storm swirling around all of them, matched the storm that had been raging inside her for 12 years. It gave her the space to come to Jesus and say, “Here I am,” and reach out and touch Him.

When she reached out and touched his cloak, Jesus stopped and turned to her. He said,

“Take heart, daughter. Your faith has healed you.”

From that moment, she was clean. She was healed. Her life was changed forever.

Jesus saw her, the invisible one, the unclean one. He named her something more beautiful than her given name.

He called her daughter.

He claimed her as his own. He gave her more than healing. He gave her assurance.

And Matthew… he is still beholding Jesus, waiting to see what will happen next.

Movement 4: Awake

Then Jesus led them all into a funeral. We know the initial impact of grief is not measured in hours but in days. Those who would come out to publicly mourn the loss of this leader’s daughter had gathered around his household for days. They had probably started playing their music and weeping, beginning the funeral as soon as the news came out that the girl had died. This would mean the father left to go find Jesus right as the funeral for his daughter was underway. Jesus was the only hope he had left, and it was a far-fetched hope.

It was a mess of grief and loss, of doubt and sorrow. I’m sure there were people there who were questioning why this young girl was taken so soon. We don’t know if the family was wondering where the father had gone or if they had sent him and were hoping he would bring Jesus back with him. Because death was one of the ultimate forms of uncleanness, most of the people would have been gathered right outside the home or in the entrance. The room where his daughter lay might have been much quieter and empty, apart from a grieving mother.

That’s often how this works, isn’t it? When we face the chaos and the mess, uncleanness and death, there are always those on the outside, busy and making noise, each dealing with their grief in their own way. And then there’s a quiet place inside, and a feeling that once you’ve been in that inner room, in the presence of death, it changes you, and it takes a while before you can go back out with everyone else again.

Jesus walked into that place, that storm of emotions and chaos of people trying to grapple with things that were bigger than them, and he said something ridiculous. He said:

“Go away. The girl is not dead, but asleep.”

The crowd laughed at him. They may all have been laughing as the family moved him out of the house. And Jesus went into that quiet room where the young girl lay, the one who couldn’t even say, “Here I am,” who couldn’t come to Jesus. So Jesus came to her, took her by the hand, and she got up.

The storms of the night were over. A woman, plagued with an incurable illness for as long as that young girl had been alive, was healed. She was claimed by the one who called holiness out of everything he touched, and the funeral was canceled because Jesus sent death away.

Matthew’s life was changing. Every moment, he was following Jesus. There were so many distractions that could have pulled his focus away that first day he met Jesus, but he kept following Jesus and let Jesus push those distractions out of the frame. Jesus showed him there was more going on than he realized.

Our first call in being disciples is to follow Jesus, to behold him. Last week, I shared that we do this together, not just on our own. Before we gather together at His table today, I want to give you a picture, a moment, of how we behold Jesus together.

There’s a part of our communion liturgy that we say together, and we’ve done it often enough that you might know it by heart. Let’s take a moment and see if we can remember it before we put the words up on the screen.

I say, “The Lord be with you,”

and you say, “And also with you.”

I say, “Lift up your hearts,”

and you say, “We lift them up to the Lord.”

I say, “Let us give thanks to the Lord, our God,”

and you say, “It is right to give our thanks and praise.”

Sometimes we struggle a little bit with that very last one, but when we are saying these words, “The Lord be with you and also with you,” we are waking up and beholding Jesus here with us. When we lift up our hearts, when we lift them up to the Lord, we are saying, “Here I am, Lord. All of me. All of my gifts, all of my pain, all of my joy, all of my sorrow. I’m lifting it all up to you.” Then we give him thanks because he is our Lord and our God, and it is right to give him our thanks and praise.

Brothers and sisters, that is what worship is. We recognize Jesus is with us. We behold him. We lift up our hearts, saying Here I am — and here is all we have and all we are— offering ourselves to him, and we give him thanks because he is our Lord and our God. We give him our thanks and praise.

Would you pray with me?

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus, open our eyes, our ears, and our hearts to see and behold you.

Wake us up from the grip of sin and death so that we can rise with you, rise, and follow you.

Free us from the things that keep us away, and help us know that there is nothing that can hide us from you and your love for us.

Show us that before we ever come to you, you have already come to us.

We hear your call to follow you. Lord, help us to behold you, to keep our eyes on you, and follow where you lead us.

In Jesus' name, amen.