[0:00] God's Word this morning from Luke chapter 7. Turn in your Bibles with me. I believe God is sovereign, and this morning, He has this particular text for us this morning.
[0:18] So may we pay attention to reading God's Word. Soon afterwards, starting in verse 11, Luke chapter 7, starting in verse 11. And soon afterward, He went to a town called Nain, and His disciples and a great crowd went with Him.
[0:36] And He drew near to the gate of the town. Behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.
[0:47] And a considerable crowd from the town was with her. And when the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her and said to her, Do not weep. Then He came up, and He touched the bar, and the bearers stood still.
[1:04] And He said, Young man, I say to you, arise. And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized them all.
[1:16] And they glorified God, saying, A great prophet has risen among us, and God has visited His people. And this report about Him spread throughout the whole of Judea and all the surrounding country.
[1:31] This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen. Amen. Well, this morning, Pat, thanks for that nice introduction.
[1:51] I'm so thankful to be here this morning with you guys and with New City Fellowship. And I want to give you a little bit of opening invitation, if you will, that I really enjoy preaching interactively.
[2:08] And so I'm going to ask some questions. And most of those are not rhetorical questions, and I'll let you know.
[2:19] And so I feel like New City is good at this already. So I'm excited to do this. So I'll ask a question and wait on an answer.
[2:31] So let's just practice for a moment. Okay, just a little warm-up. Who said, follow me? All right, see, you got this.
[2:43] Who said, learn from me? Very good, you got this. All right, who said, walk as Jesus walked?
[2:54] Oh, I threw you a curveball, didn't I? Peter said it. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we're going to just have this kind of dialogue.
[3:05] And one reason I love to preach interactively is, honestly, I believe it's the Jesus way. Jesus, if you go through and just count the number of questions that Jesus asks in the Gospel of Matthew, he asked 103 questions in the Gospel of Matthew.
[3:23] According to my count. We call it a sermon on the mount. It's interesting. Guess how many questions Jesus asks at the sermon on the mount?
[3:35] 19 questions. So he's doing what I believe, some of those are rhetorical, but he's doing this kind of dialogue, this back and forth. And the reason that I believe Jesus loved teaching kind of in this Socratic method is because he loved to watch people's faith emerge.
[3:55] Isn't it? Don't things stick better for us when we discover truth instead of being told truth? So this morning, I want us to discover the beauty of Jesus together and kind of this open dialogue as we go through this passage together.
[4:11] So I want us to enjoy that time. I want us to think through what it means to discover the beauty of Jesus. Just to give you a quick illustration of my own life.
[4:26] I've been an ordained pastor in the PCA for, gosh, 15, 20 years or so now. And when I was at First Prez, I was on staff at First Prez downtown before I joined See Jesus.
[4:41] And about eight years ago, I had something happen in my life that I believe might be applicable to you. I was what a theologian named Dallas Willer would call a Christian, but I wasn't a disciple.
[4:59] And I just want that to sit with you for a minute. Dallas Willer says, how is it in the church of Jesus Christ that someone could live their entire life as a Christian, but never become a disciple of Jesus?
[5:17] Really interesting. So part of what happened in my life, I was, you know, grew up in a Christian home, kind of grew up in this Christian culture, and I wanted to repeat the Christian culture for my children around me.
[5:31] And so I felt like I was just kind of playing this game a little bit. I was an ordained pastor. Somebody invited me to a conference, discipleship conference, and honestly, probably in my spiritual eyes, just rolled my eyes like, oh boy, here we go again.
[5:47] Another discipleship conference so I can learn how I've failed at discipleship as a pastor. But I went in there and this gentleman who was speaking started talking about Jesus in ways that I'd never heard before.
[6:01] In 40 years of following Jesus, of being a Christian, I'd never heard anybody talk about Jesus who studied the scriptures. The Jesus who spent time in prayer.
[6:13] The Jesus who is dependent on the Holy Spirit to do everything in his life. The Jesus who loved to go to worship week after week and be with his father.
[6:25] I walked out of that seminar that day as an ordained pastor in the PCA, and I thought, I don't know Jesus. Here's what I did know.
[6:37] I knew what I call the 72-hour Jesus, which is the cross and the resurrection. It had just been hammered in me over and over and over again to preach the gospel to myself every day.
[6:50] And that's not a bad thing to do. But for me, it became just this ritualistic formula. This is what a Christian does. He reminds himself of his justification over and over, and somehow that mystically creates sanctification, and we become more like Jesus over time.
[7:07] I thought to myself, a follower knows the one he's following. And I knew a lot about and around Jesus, but I didn't know him as a person.
[7:24] And so I began to just dive into the scriptures and really became convicted that I didn't know the cadences of Jesus' life. I didn't know what he was like, how he loved, why he did the things he did.
[7:37] I mean, we just talked about Jesus asking questions. He's the second person of the Trinity. Why on earth is Jesus asking questions? So I just began to examine things like that and study the gospels and kind of quietly, in my own presbytery, didn't want to tell anybody that I don't think I knew Jesus.
[7:59] And I started looking around for things written on the person of Jesus, and there wasn't a lot out there. There's mountains of books written on the work of Christ, which is very important.
[8:18] But a pure and balanced Christology is the person and work of Jesus Christ, and the church has been weak on the person. So this morning, that's part of why Paul Miller started See Jesus, and that's why I'm passionate about what I'm doing, because I believe the next generation, who is the next generation of the church, can really, what would it look like if they were a generation that was deeply in love with this person who they followed?
[8:46] And they began to imitate him and look like him. So I got really excited about that mission. And so my life eight years ago just really felt like I caught a wave, and I study the gospels every day, and I caught a wave, and it's just not broken, because discovering Jesus is a lifetime.
[9:10] Can I say this? Jesus, the person of Jesus, is not just for children's Sunday school. It's for all of us on a continual basis.
[9:25] And I believe eternity is an unearthing of Jesus and the triune God for all eternity and never reaching the end. The beauty just continues to grow and continues to grow all throughout.
[9:39] I think that's what eternity is going to be. All right, see, I'm talking too long. We're going to do some questions. So let's jump into our passage this morning.
[9:54] And my purpose in this is twofold. One, that you will see Jesus and fall deeper in love with him. And two, that you will long to imitate him as a follower of him.
[10:08] That you'll shift from being a Christian to becoming a disciple. The two are one, but there's an important distinction.
[10:20] I want to help us move there. So when you think about the opening of this passage, it says, As soon afterwards, he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a great crowd went with him.
[10:33] And as he drew near to the gate of the town, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of a mother, and she was a widow. And a considerable crowd from the town was with her.
[10:47] So what's going on here in this passage? Just in what I just read. Open question. A funeral. Yeah, great. A funeral procession.
[10:58] What do we generally find in a typical funeral? Let's do this for New City. What's a typical funeral look like at New City? Just one word descriptors.
[11:12] A celebration. Mourning. Remembering. Prayer. Is that what I heard?
[11:24] Yeah, what else? Say that again. Yeah, yeah, good.
[11:37] What else? What are some physical things you see? A casket. Surrounded by family and friends. Yeah, usually flowers.
[11:50] Flowers didn't actually start at funerals until after the resurrection. Yeah, so let me describe for you a first century funeral that's going on here.
[12:05] So in the first century in this town called Nain, this little town, and hold on to that Nain. We're going to come back to that. And actually, the literal meaning of the word Nain means green pastures.
[12:18] Which is quite interesting, isn't it? Jesus, the good shepherd, going to Nain. So they go to Nain, and here's this procession of this funeral happening.
[12:29] And in the first century of funeral, women would lead the funeral out of this town in this procession. They'd be at the head of the funeral. Because it was believed by first century that women brought death into the world, so the women take death out of the world.
[12:47] So, sorry, ladies. It's part of the first century belief. So the widow was probably likely in the front of this group leading this procession of this funeral.
[13:01] But after that, they would carry kind of the casket in a wicker basket, and they would rotate pallbearers as they took him outside the town to bury him. And then after that, they would have professional mourners, people who would weep and wail loudly.
[13:18] And then a group following them would be some professional flute players or instrument players who would be playing instruments. And then following them would be the entire city of Nain, especially a small town like Nain.
[13:33] In those days, the whole town came out for it. And historians believe that there is a population of about 500 people in the city of Nain at this time. So look at your text, and what does it say about the crowd that's with Jesus?
[13:49] What's the description of it? It's large. Same word that's used to describe a group that's with Jesus when he's feeding the 5,000.
[14:02] Okay, so I want you to get this. Imagine the scene in your mind. You have 500 people in a procession of a funeral moving outside the town of Nain.
[14:14] You have Jesus coming into the town of Nain. And let's do a low estimate of 2,500 people. So we have about 3,000 people colliding just outside the city gate.
[14:27] I want you to keep that in your mind as you think about that. 3,000 people who are entering into this funeral in this moment.
[14:43] And then I want you to look back at your text in verse 13 and watch what Jesus does. And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, do not weep.
[14:56] Then he came up and touched the beer, and the bearers stood still. And he said, young man, I say to you, arise. A dead man sat up and began to speak.
[15:06] And Jesus gave unto his mother, fear seized them all. And they glorified God, saying, a great prophet has risen among us. How do you see Jesus loving this woman?
[15:20] Just look at the text, things straight from the text. How does Jesus love? He has compassion. Great. He sees her. Yeah, awesome.
[15:35] We'll go back to that. Great. Yeah, he acknowledges her. Yeah, he enters into a problem and fixes it.
[15:48] He helps. Say again. Yeah, he understands her. Very good. He incarnates with her. Isn't it cool to think the incarnate God is the greatest incarnator who's ever been?
[16:06] Makes sense. I mean, it's kind of logical. Anything else? Say again. Speaks kindly to her.
[16:21] Yeah, there's one more in there at the very end of this. Had compassion. What's he do with the son? Raises the son and then does what?
[16:34] Yeah, gives him back to the mom. So let's, we're going to work through these slowly but surely. But what we see from Jesus, the first thing that Jesus does is that he sees her.
[16:47] Now you might be thinking, okay, well, yeah, that's kind of obvious. But as you start reading through the Gospels, it's all over the Gospels. That Jesus sees. And his eyes are on his people.
[16:59] When you think about the way, when we think about love and what love looks like, one of the things that hit me in that seminar that day was, if I want to know what it means to be human.
[17:10] You ready for this? This is like somebody took a two by four and hit me upside the head. And his name was the Holy Spirit. And he said, you want to know what it means to be fully human?
[17:22] You want to know the purpose of life? You want to know how to do life? This is so logical. Then I should probably watch the one who did it perfect. I should probably watch the one who the Apostle Paul calls the second Adam.
[17:42] The perfection of humanity who is also fully God and fully man. If I want to learn who God is, I watch Jesus. I want to know about God, I watch Jesus.
[17:53] If I want to know what it means to be a human, I watch Jesus. No wonder the writer of Hebrews just says simply fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of your faith.
[18:06] He's the center. And right here, one of my friends who's a youth pastor in Nashville now, after being exposed to just studying Jesus as a person, he says, we have complicated this thing called Christianity for far too long.
[18:22] So we can learn, we tend to think of Jesus so complex that we can't imitate him. And our denomination in particular, our circles are very weak at calling people to imitation.
[18:39] It's a weakness of ours. Man, Holy Spirit, will you please help me if I should talk about this or not? I was with Paul Miller this week.
[18:56] It was just really interesting. He developed the Sonship curriculum, which is very, which is really beautiful and grace-centered and really beautiful.
[19:08] But one of the reasons he created, see, Jesus is because he found there was a miss in the Sonship. And that the overemphasis of grace missed a call to obedience.
[19:23] Someone who, Kevin DeYoung, I think, said he calls it a hole in our holiness. So, what do we learn from Jesus?
[19:36] Just this very simple thing. What love looks like. Where does love begin? It begins by seeing. By seeing people.
[19:53] By seeing people. By seeing people. By looking them in the eye. I'll give you a couple of illustrations from my own family.
[20:04] I asked my girls if I could do this this morning. Mary Catherine was about six or seven years old. She has this gymnastics mat in the front of our, in our living room at that time.
[20:18] And she was tumbling on it. She said, Daddy, watch me. And I've got my phone sitting on the couch. Daddy, watch me.
[20:32] Daddy, watch me. And then she kind of, can I use you as an illustration, sir? Come on up here just a second. You can stay down there. I'll come down there.
[20:44] She comes over to the couch. Mary Catherine, I don't know if you remember this or not. She comes over to the couch and she grabs my face. And she goes, Daddy, watch me.
[20:58] And it was this, I mean, it was just my heart just sunk. I wasn't seeing my children right in front of me.
[21:10] The other night, my oldest daughter, Laura, needed to be seen. Just going through some hard stuff and just needed my wife and I to see her.
[21:25] It's amazing the pace of life and the culture that we live in and the culture that we get wrapped up in. The current just, we just forget to stop and see people.
[21:35] See how easy it is to imitate and learn from Jesus? It's not complex. I'm on a little bit of dangerous ground here, perhaps.
[21:55] But how often in our circles do we say, you can imitate Jesus and see, loving begins by seeing. But you can't really do that.
[22:09] You just need to remember that Jesus did it perfectly for you and his righteousness is imputed to you and you're forgiven and you have his grace. What did I just do? It's truth.
[22:23] But I just cut the legs out from under an exhortation to imitate Jesus. So grace leads to responsibility. One seminary professor of mine said, here's scripture for you.
[22:39] He puts grace on a table and he puts responsibility on the table. And Jesus says to you, have a feast and enjoy it.
[22:50] Because they're both there. So as loving begins by seeing, what does Jesus do next? Or actually, let's go back into the story before I jump there.
[23:04] How do we know that Jesus saw her? Easy question. Yeah, the Bible tells me so. Very good. Yes, excellent.
[23:15] Excellent. Yeah, we'll come back to that in just a minute. But think about Jesus. Why was he fixing his eyes on her?
[23:29] Of all the people there, I would have probably been watching the professional mourners, like waiting on them to mess up or something. I had my cynical heart. But here Jesus is laser focused.
[23:43] And there's no other indication that Jesus went to Nain except for this one person. What do you think that look was like?
[23:55] As he sees her. There's somebody, we'll go back to this in just a second. What's the second thing Jesus does? He sees, he does something else.
[24:07] Has compassion on her. Yeah, he has compassion on her. How do we know that he has compassion on her? It tells us, right? This is pretty simple. So, who's writing this text?
[24:24] Luke is. Was Luke present at this story? No. Do you remember who, who do we get, who does Luke get his information from? Eyewitnesses.
[24:36] Eyewitnesses. In Luke 1, 1 through 3, you can read it later. Luke gets his information from eyewitnesses of events. So, he's collecting information from stories from people.
[24:47] So, somebody in that crowd that was there that day comes to Luke and tells Luke that Jesus had compassion on this woman.
[24:57] Could you imagine what it looked like for someone who's interpreting Jesus' actions and watching his demeanor what compassion looks like?
[25:08] Because Jesus did not do this. I promise you, Jesus didn't do this. Hey, Peter. Hey, my heart. It's filling compassion right now for the widow.
[25:21] So, so, later on, when you tell Luke about this, would you please tell him to write in, I feel compassion? No.
[25:34] You know, I got, another point of this, I, I went to seminary, I, my seminary experience was, was amazing. I really loved it. And one thing they teach you in, in seminary, and one thing we teach in the PCA is that we believe in organic inspiration.
[25:48] Right? People's personalities, their backgrounds, their, their gifts, their, all this kind of stuff. I've heard a list of all those things my whole life, but no one's ever said that the, their encounter with the living incarnate Jesus, the person of Jesus, was the greatest source of organic inspiration for all the writers.
[26:08] Especially of the New Testament. They all have him just running in their head all the time, in their mind, in their heart. They've encountered the most extraordinary person ever.
[26:19] And somebody there saw compassion in Jesus. What does compassion look like in a person? How do you know when you see it? A hug?
[26:31] Is that what you say? Yeah. Perhaps there was a hug. We don't know for sure. In their eyes? Yeah. Focused. Focused. Great.
[26:45] Yeah. Felt needs. They're crying. Maybe Jesus was, maybe there were tears in his eyes. Have you ever thought about Jesus in these ways?
[26:57] Isn't it cool to think, like here in the middle of the desert, with approximately 3,000 people, Jesus is focused on one person, this widow.
[27:08] He's feeling compassion for her. He can feel it enter his bones. Perhaps even his heartbeat increases. And he feels sweat. And he starts, this emotion just hits him, is this woman who has lost everything.
[27:22] Yeah. She's lost not only her husband, she's now lost her son, which means she's lost all source of income, which means she's lost any hope of the future.
[27:35] She's probably lost her property, and she's probably without a home. And Jesus knows all that about her.
[27:46] And he enters right into her story. And his heart is moved to compassion. You're going through something hard.
[28:00] You know the story of Hagar, who had tremendous injustice done to her by Father Abraham and his wife, Rebecca.
[28:15] Sarah, sorry. Rebecca was another one. No. Tremendous injustice done to Hagar, and she's kind of cast out. And she's crying out.
[28:30] And she doesn't know God's name, but all she can say is El Roy, which means the God who sees me. She knew that one truth.
[28:40] The God who sees me. The God who's moved to compassion at the center of the universe right now stands a God who sees you and a God who has compassion on you.
[28:56] It's a beautiful picture of what Jesus is showing us in this text. And notice how he stops the procession.
[29:12] He just simply does what? Yeah, he simply walks up and touches the casket. I mean, how does the average American male get 3,000 people to stop?
[29:31] A loud whistle, a bullhorn, a siren, something. A yell. And Jesus, in the beauty of his power and who he is, just simply walks up and touches something unclean to bring life to another.
[29:48] All these little stories have these micro snapshots of the good news of the gospel. That Jesus would become unclean to bring another one life. But he stops the whole procession.
[30:03] And they stood still. Isn't it amazing? What's the one thing Jesus does not do here? You ever thought about it?
[30:18] How many words are in this passage that Jesus actually speaks? Ten words in the English language.
[30:35] Jesus doesn't preach a sermon. He is the sermon. He doesn't have to preach a sermon. His actions of healing and compassion.
[30:48] The movement of his heart and the visual things they see in him. He just says ten simple words. Woman, do not cry. Son, arise.
[31:01] And get up. These simple words that Jesus speaks. What do we learn from that? How do we begin to imitate that? Sometimes in a moment of crisis with people we don't need to say a lot of words.
[31:17] Hey, surprise. We're just learning to imitate Jesus. Pretty beautiful, right? It's pretty simple, right? But the only way it becomes simple is when we study him as a person as he's given to us in the scriptures and we begin to learn and glean those things in our own life.
[31:34] And we go, man, I can follow him. I can imitate him. And people oftentimes say, you know, I can't do that on my own. Of course you can't do that on your own.
[31:45] The day you were redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ is the day that the spirit of Jesus entered into you. You've never been alone since that day. We don't need to invite the Holy Spirit into this room.
[31:59] He's already here. He's living inside of each one of you that claim to know Jesus Christ, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for you.
[32:10] He's here. Working in and among you and us to encourage one another, to see one another, to have compassion on one another.
[32:22] And then the last thing that he does is that he helps her. Look how he helps her. He goes to the son and he says, young man, I say to you, arise.
[32:35] And the dead man sat up and began to speak and Jesus gave him back to his mother. Notice who's the center of this whole story.
[32:46] It begins with Jesus going to who first. He goes to the widow and then from the widow, he goes to the son and then he takes the son and gives her back to the widow.
[33:01] This whole story for Jesus revolves around that widow. He restores everything for her. He restores everything.
[33:15] He gives resurrection back to her. It's resurrection in the present and the here and the now and the question is, do we have an eye out for resurrections?
[33:29] I know we all believe in the future resurrection if you're here this morning and you don't believe that, then come to Jesus Christ who really did conquer death and crushed the evil one for you that you might have the hope of eternal life and the resurrection is real.
[33:46] If the resurrection is not real, this is all in vain. We can all pack up and go home. But because the resurrection is real, he brings present day resurrections into our lives every day.
[34:02] Keep an eye out for him. Have an eye out for resurrection. Could you imagine the emotional swing in that desert that day?
[34:13] 500 people in mourning coming out the desert, 25 people following Jesus and they meet in the middle and Jesus brings resurrection.
[34:25] Could you imagine the party that happened in that desert? Oh man. One last thing I want to point out to you that I think is just really fascinating.
[34:37] You ready for this? All right. You got your seatbelt on? Okay. This just blows you away. Look at the very end of this passage.
[34:52] Verse 16. Fear seized them all and they glorified God saying, A great prophet has risen among us and God has visited his people.
[35:04] And this report about him spread throughout the whole of Judea and all the surrounding country. any thoughts as to why they would say a great prophet has risen among us?
[35:18] God has visited his people. I wish I had like a $10 bill I'd give you if you get this one. This is great or a candy bar or something.
[35:33] He is a prophet. Amen. Amen. The greatest of prophets. Yeah, candy bar.
[35:43] Here you go. Yeah. There is a prophet, another prophet. Actually, two of them, Elijah and Elisha, who both raised dead widow's sons. I want you to think about this for a moment.
[36:01] This is another challenge for you. Actually, I'm not going there. So, I love to, I just try to pray while I'm preaching because sometimes he says, put the brakes on.
[36:17] And he said, put the brakes on. So I put the brakes on. Isn't it amazing that a prophet, think about this, let's go back to the city of Nain.
[36:31] Does anybody remember the name of the woman's, the widow's son that Elisha raised?
[36:44] She was a Shunammite woman. And she was from, I don't think I'm probably not pronouncing this correctly, but she was from Shunamm.
[36:55] Well, if you look on a, a biblical map, there's this city called Nain that's here. There's a hill and on the other side of the hill is this little city called Shuman.
[37:15] And you know how far it is from Nain to this little city? It's about two and a half miles. Jesus, the incarnate son of God, the greater prophet, goes almost to the exact location of a previous prophet to say the greater prophet has come and I am here to bring resurrection life into this world.
[37:45] Almost the exact geographical location here's what's even more fascinating about this is in Nazareth, Jesus had preached this sermon.
[37:56] He opens up the scroll of Isaiah 61. He says, the spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind, to set the prisoner free, to bring about the year of the Lord's favor.
[38:09] And then he kind of does a mic drop and he says, and today, this is fulfilled in your hearing. And he sits down and says, all the eyes of the people in the synagogue were fixed on him and they're like, what has just happened?
[38:24] This is the Jesus that grew up among us. We're his friends and his family and he's proclaiming something astounding. And then Jesus begins to tell them of this good news that happened in these old days when a prophet went and raised a widow's son and he did it to a Gentile and they hated Jesus for it.
[38:52] And they took Jesus and they tried to throw him off a cliff in his own hometown. who in the world knows what and he passed in between their midst and just love it.
[39:06] Like, eh, not your time. And Jesus then leaves Nazareth and in a sense wipes the dust off his feet and he says, a prophet's not welcome in his own hometown.
[39:19] He makes Capernaum kind of his ministry headquarters. verse. And then he goes back very soon. I don't know what the time period is but he goes back down to the city of Nain.
[39:34] Does this miracle and look what the last verse of this text we've been looking at. And this report about him spread through the whole of Judea and all the surrounding country.
[39:48] Could you imagine when word gets back to Nazareth which is really only about seven miles from this site from Nain and they hear of a story of this one who said the spirit is on me.
[40:06] He's anointed me to preach good news to the poor. To set the prisoner free. To give sight to the blind. To declare the year of the Lord's favor.
[40:18] The kingdom God has come. And Jesus says in those moments could you imagine what it was like for a Nazarene to hear the story of that prophecy in that temple that day coming true just a few miles away.
[40:40] So what is it like to encounter Jesus in these moments? So these three steps of love is what we've been looking at. That love begins by seeing.
[40:53] And then the next step of that love is that your heart will be moved to compassion. Not empathy but compassion. A popular word in our culture today is empathy.
[41:06] It's an okay word but it just means you can understand someone and but that's about as far as it goes and that's an okay step to do.
[41:19] You try to enter their world a little bit. But compassion sees moves to compassion and then it moves to help.
[41:29] That's what true compassion is. The church is called to true compassion and as much in many spheres as you can. That we're called to see people and man the Lord Lord knows that begins in our own homes.
[41:51] We need to see each other better. It begins in our own church. It begins in our own communities. Our neighbors. The people we work with and live with in our spheres. Our heart is moved to compassion and we're moved to help in the best ways possible that we can.
[42:12] What would it be like for you to move from a Christian to a disciple? Is Jesus someone that you want to follow?
[42:28] Now I really, really let me see what time I lost track. Okay, I'm good. I got a couple more minutes. I just, I just think for many times we're not real clear on what it means to follow him.
[42:56] So I want to give you just some clear ideas. I didn't bring it this morning but I can use this. One idea is that you pick up the gospels, I use a harmony of the gospels as I read through the gospels.
[43:15] I am really not that smart and it's really hard for me to figure out like, huh, like, okay, this Luke story actually is not repeated in any other gospel. gospel. And I can see that in parallel columns as I use a harmony of the gospels.
[43:30] I'm like, oh man, Mark enters this detail but why does Matthew not do that? And he's just become, you know what a follower is like an apprentice who's studying someone so closely that they want to follow in his footsteps.
[43:44] An apprentice in those days sometimes has been described as they're following so close behind Jesus that their nose is in his shoulder blade.
[43:58] An apprentice of Jesus is someone who's walking so closely behind him as Peter says that they walk as he walked that the very dust of Jesus just is splashing up on you all the time.
[44:11] What does it look like for you to know Jesus so intimately that you learn the cadences of his life, the cadences of what it means to love, the cadences of what it means to ask good questions, the cadences of the way he leaves space for people, that sometimes he just asks questions and just lets it sit.
[44:33] The cadences of like, man, what would it be like to be a really good storyteller because Jesus is a great storyteller. The cadences of his brother James who says be slow to speak and quick to listen.
[44:46] The cadences of what it looks like to fulfill the wisdom literature as you watch Jesus, the man of wisdom, live them out, principle by principle.
[44:59] As you watch the way he uses this dynamic between compassion and honesty and he fires straight at people some really hard truths. things. What does it look like to know that Jesus also is just this dependent human in the fullness of his humanity that he does nothing on his own?
[45:24] is what he says in John 5 19. It's one of my favorite verses. What do you mean Jesus? You don't do anything on your own? You're God.
[45:38] How does that work? Then you just start reading and in John's gospel in particular and you just see this utter affection for his father over and over again.
[45:50] And you see it as baptism. He hears these words from his father from heaven that say, you are my son with you I am well pleased. We think, oh, that was for the crowd.
[46:05] But it was for Jesus. Jesus needed to hear the affirming words of his father and the fullness of his humanity because right then after that he goes straight into the desert and 40 days the onslaught of the evil one.
[46:20] What does it look like for you to just hear the voice of your heavenly father? You are my son or my daughter whom I love. With you I am well pleased.
[46:34] Yes, because of who Christ is in you, but also because of you. As Kelly Capic would say, Jesus loves you.
[46:50] And he likes you. You are the only unique, you are the most unique individual that he has ever made.
[47:03] Everyone in this room is uniquely crafted by him for purposes and he loves you and he likes you. He did not try to change Peter's personality. He let Peter be Peter.
[47:15] He called him to things but he let Peter be Peter. He let John be John. He let Thomas be Thomas and ask questions.
[47:31] God's not trying to change you and your personality. He's trying to change and conform you to the image of his son. That you might love better in your personality.
[47:43] You might become more like him in the beautiful gifting that he's created you with. Let me pray for us.
[47:59] Jesus, thank you that you not only came to redeem us but you also came to live and to show us what it's like to live a life that's pleasing to the Lord.
[48:22] And that you said, I'm not going to leave you alone. I'm going to send you a comforter. I'm going to send you a teacher to show you the way. And his name is Holy Spirit.
[48:35] And he's been given to us to call us to holiness, to call us to imitate him, to call us that we might be salt and light in a dark world, that we might show people what love looks like by just seeing them.
[48:54] Having compassion on them and moving to help. Thank you, Holy Spirit. Pray first and foremost that the spotlight has been shined upon the sun and we've seen him in all his beauty.
[49:08] so much so that we want to become like him. Call us to that. Call your church to that, I pray. Bless New City Fellowship and call her to be a people who redeems everyone around them and brings resurrection life because they showed him what love looks like and they see Jesus in the people here.
[49:32] Thank you, Holy Spirit, Father, and Son, in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's stand and sing and respond.