The Three Goals - Be With The Rabbi

Hello, welcome to NCF. If you are visiting today would you, please fill out the connection card in your bulletin and at the end of the service take it back to the connection table and you will be greeted by my wife Callie and receive a gift from us. If you have any questions that is a great place to ask them as well.

All right! Let’s get into this.

Last week we discussed the call of Jesus to become an apprentice of Him.

We discussed how this call to apprentice our lives after him is no small issue that can simply be solved or fulfilled through an alter call experience.

We learned that Jesus calls us to lay aside all our allegiances – Family, socially, political, and even our allegiance to ourselves and to make Him the sole allegiance of our lives.

His words should remind us of

Jesus is saying I want you to remove all things that fight for your allegiance and follow me.

We started this series by looking at Jesus as not only our savior, healer and redeemer but also as our Rabbi who teaches us the way of Life.

As I mentioned last week we looked at His call for us to follow Him as His apprentices and the cost of following Him.

This week we are going to discuss the three goals every Apprentice to Jesus should have.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Every person is an apprentice. It is our natural means of learning. You may not realize you are or were an apprentice to someone, but you were and are.

The question is to whom and to what affect.

How did I learn what it was to be a man? Who taught me what it means to be masculine?

I did not pop out of my mother with that instant knowledge, someone had to teach me.

My teacher was my dad. I learned how to be a man, what masculinity is from my dad.

Now, you have to understand my dad was imperfect and in some ways he was very far from the Jesus of Jesus when it came to being a man.

None the less He was my first mentor in life.

I wanted to be with Him.

I wanted to be like him.

And I wanted to do what he did.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As a child I would beg to go to work with him, to play catch with him, to fish with him, I would even beg to sleep by him.

I wanted to be with my mentor, my dad.

I wanted to be just like him.

At the age of three I would put His boots on and run around the house in my little white undies and his boots.

During the summer he would often take me to work. I would dress in a suit just like him, carry a small coffee thermos just like him.

I would mimic his walk, his talk, his facial expressions.

And then I became just like Him.

To this day I catch myself talking like him.

I picked up all his mannerisms in speech, facial expressions and even his emotions.

Even my radical stance on following Jesus is my dad’s fault.

Much of what a person sees about me is a direct result of my relationship with my dad as mentor.

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We all have that mentor in our lives that shaped us.

Maybe it is your mothers, or your dad like me, maybe it was your neighbor or family member, foster parent or maybe you are the result of the crazy uncle.

We all naturally found ourselves in a mentor or Rabbi relationship with someone. And we all to this day express them in this world even if they are gone today.

Good or bad you are the result of a mentor/apprentice relationship.

And we all shared the same goals in that relationship that produced who we are today.

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Jesus has called each of us into that same mentor/apprentice relationship with Himself.

And just like His original apprentices and the millions who followed throughout history we should have those same goals.

To be with Him

To be like Him

And to do what He did.

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But How Can We Be with Jesus Today When He is Not Physically Here?

I want to show you two ways as modern apprentices of Jesus that God has given us to be with Jesus in a very tangible way.

I want to show you two ways as modern apprentices of Jesus that God has given us to be with Jesus in a very tangible way.

It is true that Jesus is not Physically with us today. According to Scripture the resurrected Jesus is at the right hand of the Father right now.

This may seem like it disables us from sharing in Jesus and being with Him like the 12 apprentices were.

But Jesus did not leave us empty handed, and honestly, we have a greater advantage of being with Jesus than Peter, John and the rest of his original apprentices.

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The first and most important way: The Holy Spirit

“No, we don’t know, Lord,” Thomas said. “We have no idea where you are going, so how can we know the way?” Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you had really known me, you would know who my Father is. From now on, you do know him and have seen him!”

Thomas is not asking here, what is the way to Heaven.

He is asking a very Jewish question.

If you leave, what is the Way to which we are to follow?

Jesus tells him, in short – Thomas I am the way.

Now you can imagine Thomas and what He is thinking.

If you are the way and you are leaving us, how will we be able to be with you and follow Your way?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Let’s continue reading; turn with me to –

NLT

“If you love me, obey my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, who will never leave you. He is the Holy Spirit, who leads into all truth. The world cannot receive him, because it isn’t looking for him and doesn’t recognize him. But you know him, because he lives with you now and later will be in you. No, I will not abandon you as orphans—I will come to you. Soon the world will no longer see me, but you will see me. Since I live, you also will live. When I am raised to life again, you will know that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Those who accept my commandments and obey them are the ones who love me. And because they love me, my Father will love them. And I will love them and reveal myself to each of them.”

God will give you another –

This word another is another interesting Greek word.

It literally means “Another of the same kind.”

Jesus is saying my Father will give you a helper, comforter who is another me.

The Holy Spirit is another, just like Jesus.

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The Spirit is called the Spirit of Christ and he is the marker of who belong to Jesus and who does not.

NLT

But you are not controlled by your sinful nature. You are controlled by the Spirit if you have the Spirit of God living in you. (And remember that those who do not have the Spirit of Christ living in them do not belong to him at all.)

NLT

And because we are his children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, prompting us to call out, “Abba, Father.”

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Spirit continues to lead us in the Way of Jesus

NLT

“There is so much more I want to tell you, but you can’t bear it now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own but will tell you what he has heard. He will tell you about the future. He will bring me glory by telling you whatever he receives from me.

The Spirit guides us into truth Just as Jesus did when he was physically here.

The Spirit will only tell us what He has received from Jesus.

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Jesus through the Holy Spirit is with you every second of every day.

Through the Holy Spirit you never have to be away from Jesus as your Rabbi and mentor.

Through the Holy Spirit in us, we are always connected to our rabbi Jesus.

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The Holy Spirit is a supernatural gift that God gives to His chosen people.

But there is also a gift that we can use in being with Jesus that God has given to all humans.

The Second Gift God has given us to be connected to Jesus as Rabbi is -

Our imagination.

Your imagination is a gift from God. He built into to who we are as humans and He intended for us to use it.

I use my imagination when I think of what God wants for us as a church family.

I imagine the new carpet, the new chairs, I imagine hundreds of people with raised hands worshipping God.

We all use our imagination-

We imagine what it would be like winning a Billion dollars

We imagine an argument with our spouse or boss and what we will say.

We imagine a tough conversation with a child or parent before we go into the real thing.

In sports we are taught to imagine the pitch, or match, or at bat over and over before we enter the game. If you see it you can do it.

If you are a writer or artist you use your imagination to create the invisible into something others can see.

A musician uses their imagination to hear notes that do not exist yet to write music.

And most children first learn how to take on a complicated world by creating an imaginary friend.

My imaginary friend was named stinky face. (No idea why).

I created him in my mind because I did not know how to deal with conflict with my parents when I would do something wrong.

So, if I broke something – Stinky face did it.

If I wanted something I could not have – I would ask why and then say but Stinky face has one.

Of course, this freaked my parents out and they made me flush stinky face down the toilet at age 5.

Here is the point – If we all have an imagination and we all use it, why not use it in our faithfulness towards following Jesus?

The Practice of Imagination is the second gift God has given us to be with rabbi Jesus.

Here is how I use my imagination in being with Jesus.

Each day I wake up, brew up an espresso and foam a bit of milk for a latte.

I then grab my phone and open the read scripture app.

Before I start reading the two chapters of the Gospel I am in I set on the floor and pray.

I thank the Holy Spirit for being there, ask for his guidance, and then I imagine Jesus setting in front of me.

As I read, I allow my mind to imagine Jesus speaking these words to me.

I imagine his voice, his face, the dirt around us. I try to allow my imagination to take me back to the time of Jesus.

I then will ask him questions or tell Him how hard this sounds.

By using my imagination it allows me to be fully open to the Biblical idea that He is with me through the Holy Spirit.

On my trip to Osage I imagine Jesus in the seat next to me. I will talk out loud to Him as I am pondering the passages I had just read.

It is in this space that the Holy Spirit almost always begins to talk back to me.

Through the presence of the Holy Spirit and the gift of imagination I daily set at the feet of the Master.

I engage Jesus as my Rabbi, and this allows the Holy Spirit to rebuke me, encourage me, and lead me in the same manner that Jesus did with the first 12.

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Are you setting at the master’s feet and allowing Him to mentor you in His Way?

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Application –

When you read through the Gospel each day, ask the Holy Spirit to use them to teach you how to live.

When you are doing your daily routine, constantly keep an open ear to the voice of the Spirit.

Practice talking to the Holy Spirit about your day and ask Him to reveal to you how you should speak, act, etc..

Recognize that through the Holy Spirit rabbi Jesus is with you and His desire is to mentor you in His Way.