Profile of a Disciple

God fills and leads his kingdom with every sort of imperfect person he calls to follow him.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.

Ever wondered what Jesus is looking for in a good disciple? I’ve read job descriptions before. I’m sure you have too. When you’re looking for jobs, you read those job descriptions. They usually set the bar pretty high. We’re looking for talented, high capacity creative people for our team. That’s what they’re looking for. There’s always a little bit of a of a contradiction in there. We’re looking for team players and self starters. Which one are you looking for there? The answer is yes. We want both. They’re trying to weed out all the wrong people while capturing all the right people so that they have the right pool to draw their teammate from there. But they’re always phrased in such a way as you would want to be like that person. They’re attractive in that it’s the kind of person you’d want to be. It would never say, Are you fresh out of prison? Are you do you have people issues? Are you a lot to handle? Then we have the job for you, right? Anytime you’re forming a team, you’re looking for outstanding individuals to to make up the different parts of your team. And so you’d think that when God, the God of the universe, the Lord who created all things, forms the team that He would be drawing from the best of the best, that he’d be getting the best leadership. He’d have a high bar for inclusion in the team that would start the worldwide church.

What are some of the characteristics you’d expect from the people on that team? Well, I would guess that things like a deep love for God, a commitment to discipleship, love for people, personal integrity, proven leadership skills, I think that’s what you’d be looking for. I would probably exclude characteristics like desire to overthrow the government and questionable ethics or resumes that are almost entirely fishing. Right. I would leave those out, but I’m not putting together the job description and I’m not choosing the candidates. Jesus is the one who assembles the team that will carry his mission. And as we’ll see today, his decision making process for this team is going to lead to a team that not any of us probably would have expected. We wouldn’t have put it together quite like this, which is good news for you and me, because when it comes to the mission of the of Christ, there is not one of us in this room who qualifies to be on that team. Not one of us would be pre-qualified to join with Jesus. Today we’re going to look at the at Jesus selection of the 12 men that he will name to be his apostles. And I’m going to describe each of these men based on what we know about them from Scripture. So this is going to be a 12 point sermon. Get ready. I’m just kidding. We don’t know a lot about every guy in the list.

Okay? There’s not a ton of information about every one of these guys. But we know enough to get a sense for what Jesus is looking for in a disciple. And so once we look at each one of these apostles, I want to summarize these characteristics into a profile of a disciple of Jesus. And I think you’ll be be surprised and encouraged by what that profile includes. God fills and leads His kingdom with every sort of imperfect person that he calls to follow him. Now, before we begin looking at these men, I want to just say a quick word about men and women in general. Why all men? Right. That’s going to stand out to you in this lesson. Why all men? Why, why no women, apostles? Doesn’t Jesus care about women, too? If Jesus chose the leadership team that we’re going to look at today, if he chose this team today, he’d be on a split screen tomorrow morning on Good Morning America, explaining himself for why he put this together like this. Let me just say three things very quickly here. First, when Jesus chooses apostles, he’s choosing the future. First, elders of the church. God, God’s Word is unmistakably clear that God has made men and women to complement each other, and that the role of elder is to be filled by faithful, qualified men. There are plenty of leadership roles for women in the church.

Male eldership is simply the design God has given to humanity reflected in his church. The second thing I want to say is that that Jesus highly valued the women who were part of his disciple team, and he elevated the role of women in the culture of his day. We’re actually going to get to a passage in the spring that mirrors this one that we’re that we’re looking at this morning, where Luke names some of the prominent women among Jesus disciples. And we’ll spend that morning looking at what it means to be a faithful woman who follows Jesus. And the last thing I want to say is to give you a Bible study skill that you should use every time you study the Bible, any part of Scripture. And that’s this. Every part of the Bible is for every part of the church. Okay? Every part of the Bible is for every part of the church, no matter who happens to be the particular focus of a passage, everyone in the church should learn and grow in our knowledge of the gospel. There may be times when a particular demographic is in focus, and then that particular demographic of people learn something a little bit about their particular role within. They learn something unique to that demographic. You will have that in Scripture. So you’ll have scriptures that that focus on men, women, children, married people, single people, older people, younger people, Jewish, gentile people, tall people, short people, right? Remember, Zacchaeus, you’ll have different focuses.

But, but we we are always all learning about the nature of God. When we read Scripture, no matter what passage we’re in, we’re we’re learning about the character of God, the grace and the justice of God and what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. The lessons of God’s Word are everywhere in Scripture for all of the diverse followers of Jesus. So don’t check out when your group is not in the focus of the passage. Okay? So let’s read this passage in these days. He went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them 12, whom he named Apostles Simon, whom he named Peter and Andrew, his brother. And James and John and Philip. And Bartholomew. And Matthew and Thomas and James, the son of Alphaeus and Simon, who was called the Zealot and Judas, the son of James and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor. Well, the first thing I want you to note is what Jesus is doing here. He is choosing specific leaders out of his group of disciples. He is not choosing disciples here. Okay? He disciple means student. That’s what the word disciple means. It means student. He’s already got a group of men and women around him who are students at this point.

Disciples Out of that group, Jesus chooses 12 leaders after a night of prayer in solitude, talking to his father. 12 men are chosen to correspond to the 12 sons of Jacob that became the representative heads of the nation of Israel. And so there’s symmetry between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant people of God. And these 12 disciples are named apostles. Apostle means sent. So it’s a he’s out of his group of students. He chooses those. He specifically going to send. These particular disciples will be specifically trained by Jesus to be sent out, to continue to do his work, which is exactly what happens with them. All of these guys except for one. And we’ll get to him. They’ll become missionaries who will spread the gospel far and wide through the ancient world. Jesus sends them out before his ascension, so it’s not as if he waited to send them out before he his ascension and the spread of the church worldwide. He actually, during his lifetime, sent them out to Jerusalem, kind of a short term missions project to go to homes in the in the Jewish region. Later, though, during that time, they’re being trained. They’re going to actually go out much farther than that. Being an apostle is an appointed office and it’s an office that’s appointed by Jesus. We do not have apostles today in the same sense of the word, in the way that we’re going to see in the passage today.

We do not have that kind of apostle. We have people that have apostolic gifts, so they have missionary gifts. They can go to other cultures, they can take the gospel there. But we don’t have Big a apostles anymore. We have the 12 original apostles listed here. One of them is a trader and then he’s replaced by Matthias. We read about that in Acts chapter one and one. The Apostle Paul is a special case where Jesus appoints him directly to be an apostle to the Gentiles. These apostles were appointed to equip the Saints for the work of ministry. So God calls these apostles to equip, to turn around and to give skills to the rest of the church who will do the work of ministry. And by the way, that’s true of all time, right? That’s not just true of that day. We still go and learn from the apostles. We do that by reading the New Testament. That was the the written testimony or the recorded testimony of the apostles. That’s why we study them today. They equip us. So if you ever hear of anyone using the word apostle to describe themselves in ministry today, and we do have those. They are within the church, not this church, but we have them in different churches. If they’re using that word to describe their office, just know that they’re mistaken.

It’s not a fatal error. It’s not a oh, no, we have to break fellowship with these folks or anything. It’s not like that. But it it is is an error nonetheless. Let’s have a look at these apostles appointed by Jesus, starting with the top of the list, Peter and Andrew. Now these two, Peter and Andrew, they are brothers. Peter will become the most famous of the original 12 apostles with with a lot of focus of the gospel narratives on him. You probably know a lot about Peter because he comes up consistently. If you’re if you’re a gospel reader, you know a lot about Peter Andrew, his brother. We know almost nothing about him. The most that we know about him is that he is one of that goes to get his brother when Jesus tells him basically he says tells him who he is. And then Andrew runs and goes and gets his brother Peter. Sometimes. Sometimes people will try to spin that into Andrew being the first evangelist or something like that. Okay, that’s fine if that’s how you want to read that. I think that’s a little bit of a stretch, but not a big deal. Peter, though, we know a lot about Simon, who is renamed Peter by Jesus because that name Peter means rock. He’s going to become the main apostle that that Jesus begins to build his church on.

So he’s something of a leader among the apostles. So you’d think that that prominent role would mean that you’d have to have a really spiritually mature person to put into that that office. Right? You need to be really. Ready for that responsibility. But that’s not true at all of Peter. He is not ready at all. Peter spends most of the gospels saying and doing things that are either they either don’t pan out or they are just wrong to begin with. He is constantly putting his foot in his mouth. He’s he’s got a lot of good characteristics. He’s brave. He wants to believe. And so he’ll get out of the boat on the water. He’s the only one that does this. He’ll he’ll attempt to to walk to Jesus on the water. He’ll be the first one to declare that Jesus is the Christ. And so he’s very excited about this theological growth that he’s experiencing, but he’s also impulsive and he fails in some of the biggest moments. He’ll say the wrong things. He’ll get upset at Jesus talking about the cross, Jesus says, I’m going to the cross. He’s like, No, you can’t have that. Can you imagine Christianity without the cross? Peter tried to write, and in his most famous failure will be denying that he even knows Jesus. On the night that Jesus is arrested, He will claim he doesn’t know Jesus at all. Church This is the guy that Jesus chose to be the leader of the Apostles.

All night Jesus prayed and who came to the top of the list to be the captain of the team? The guy who would swear he did not know Jesus in the hour of Jesus greatest need. And he will go on to help the early church spread the gospel to every ethnicity on the planet. He will write two letters in our New Testament that are especially helpful for shepherding the church through very difficult times of persecution. So the guy who gave in to temptation and denied Jesus under persecution will eventually help the whole church not give in to the same temptation to deny Jesus when they’re experiencing persecution. Isn’t that an amazing growth? But it didn’t start there. He didn’t start there. He started as an impulsive, energetic, spiritual failure who, along with his brother and his friends, James and John, had little else on their resume other than fishing. So let’s look at James and John. This is another set of brothers who worked as fishing partners with Peter and Andrew. Jesus gave these guys the nickname The Sons of Thunder, which has got to be the coolest disciple nickname ever, right? That sounds like a great. More on that that nickname, though, in just a second. Here again, one brother is more famous than the other brother. We know very little about James. This is not the James, by the way, who was the leader in Jerusalem who wrote the letter of James that we have in the New Testament, that that was actually the half brother of Jesus.

This James, we don’t know very much about individually, except that we do know that he was the first apostle to die for his faith in Jesus acts. Chapter 12 tells us that Herod laid hands on the church and killed James with a sword. John is known as the disciple that Jesus loved. Now, that’s not to say that Jesus didn’t love all of his disciples, but he had an especially close relationship with John. As you read the Gospels, as you read the read The Gospel of John, you can see his emphasis on the theology of unity with Christ. So John records his gospel to reflect on the deep and tender relationship that Jesus has with his people. The letters of John first, second and third John are all written by the same writer. The Gospel of John and the same who was a disciple of Jesus. These letters talk about a hard attitude of a disciple of Christ. I would say that first. John one. So the first chapter of First John is the passage that I go to the most when I want to walk someone through there and diagnose where they are in their walk with Jesus. And it’s John who records Peter’s restoration after his denial of Jesus.

So when when Peter denies Jesus on the night that he’s been arrested and killed on the cross later, after his resurrection from the dead, Jesus restores Peter and he asks him three times, Simon, do you love me? Three times he asks him. And when Peter answers three times that he does love Jesus, Jesus tells Peter to feed his sheep, to take care of his church. It’s it’s John who tells us about this. John will go on to be imprisoned for his faith. He’ll be put into a prison on the island of Patmos, which is in the Mediterranean Sea, where he will famously write the last book of the New Testament revelation. Sounds like a spiritual giant, doesn’t he? Sounds like the sort of person this John, where. Wow, he’s got to be really, really mature. He must be an incredible leader for the church. But let’s go back to that nickname real quick. Sons of Thunder. Sounds cool. It sounds like they’re a pro wrestling team, doesn’t it? A tag team. Man, that sounds good, but it probably had more to do with their impulsiveness and their immaturity. When Jesus faces some issues with the people in Samaria in Luke chapter nine. James and John come to Jesus and ask if they can call down fire from heaven and kill those people. Thunder, lightning, Right. They’re very, very impulsive. And all it says there when when they get he gets this request is that Jesus turns and rebukes them.

Obviously you turn and rebuke them. These are these are immature and literally fiery men in that they want to command fire. They also come to Jesus at one point and they ask if they can be appointed to sit at Jesus right and left when he gets to the kingdom of heaven. Right. Can we be the right and left hand of you sitting there? So they’ve got they’ve got big, immature goals. Are you seeing a pattern here? Are you seeing a pattern in the selection of this team? Those, by the way, are the top four selections in the discipleship draft. Okay. These are your top your top people to put into the apostle team. Check out these others. Philip. We don’t know much about him. He appears very rarely in scripture, and when he does, Philip is usually just going to go get someone else. That’s his role. So Philip is like, Hey, we need this thing. Philip, can you go get it? And he’s like, I’m on it. So that’s that’s what Philip does. But there’s one big moment, one big moment for Philip, and it comes in John Chapter 14. Jesus tells the disciples that if they they know Him, they know the Father. So he says, If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the father. And now that they do know him, they now know God, the Father.

It’s Jesus revealing a little bit of the Trinity to the apostles. And he’s showing them that that this is what his role is. When we look to Jesus, we see God. In fact, it will always be the case that when we as a church look to Jesus, he will reveal the Father to us. So Jesus gets done teaching this incredible truth to them, and it’s Philip who then responds, Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us. And Jesus response is, Have I been with you so long and you still don’t know me, Philip. And then he goes on to explain, Jesus goes on to explain again that he and the Father are one that you don’t need to physically see the father because you can see Jesus. That’s Philip’s one famous moment in scripture. That was his that was his big moment in the spotlight is this failed question, because it was almost like he fell asleep and wasn’t listening when Jesus was talking about it. It’s like he got to the big leagues, had one at bat and struck out. Well, what about Bartholomew? Well, we know nothing about Bartholomew. Unless Unless this is also the guy named Nathaniel Bartholomew. The word Bartholomew means son of Ptolemy, which is really odd for a name who just named a kid son of Ptolemy. So there’s good reason to think that this is Nathaniel, which is one of the people that Philip went to get.

Actually, it’s kind of strange. So that’s that’s his claim to fame. But since I don’t know if it’s Nathaniel or not, I’m not going to speculate. So on to Matthew. Matthew and Levi from earlier in Chapter five are almost certainly the same person. If you remember from earlier, Levi was a tax collector, so he’s the lowest and most despised Jewish guy in town. He worked for the opposition government. He stole from his own people. He was not a nice guy. And yet Jesus calls him out of that life. He’s. I know who you are. But come, follow me. Come, follow me. And then Levi says, gets up out of that booth and he and. And then he invites Jesus over to his house to have a dinner party so that he can introduce Jesus to all of his other scoundrel friends. Right. And now he’s he’s getting named one of the 12 apostles. He went from that life to being named one of the 12 apostles, which shouldn’t be surprising, if you think about it a little bit, because from the moment this guy meets Jesus, he wants other people to meet Jesus. That’s the passion in in him. We don’t hear anything else in Scripture about Matthew in the storyline of the Gospel, except, of course, to say that Matthew wrote one of the gospel narratives of Jesus life. The book.

Matthew in Your Bible. Let’s look at Thomas. Thomas is known as the twin, which means and I’m speculating here, he probably had a twin. We don’t know who the twin was. That twin never appears. Thomas is known for his willingness to die for Jesus. That’s his big claim to fame. When Jesus goes to bring Lazarus back from the dead, Thomas tells the others, Let us also go that we may die with him. So Thomas sensed that there would be danger on that trip, but he was willing to give his life for Jesus. Thomas is the one who asked the question how they could know the way. When Jesus famously responds, I am the way, the truth and the life. But you probably know Thomas, most famously as the guy who didn’t believe the report about Jesus rising from the dead. Right. That’s where we get our phrase Doubting Thomas. When he heard Jesus was back, he said he had to put his hands into the his fingers into the nail holes of Jesus hand and into his side before he would believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead. And Jesus very graciously went to Thomas and allowed him to rid himself of his doubts. Go ahead. Put your fingers into the holes and into my side. And when Thomas did that, he proclaimed, My Lord and my God. He believed. Then there’s James, the son of Alpheus, tagged with his father’s name to set him apart from the earlier James that we find in the list and from all the other James that were around everywhere at that time.

We know nothing about him other than that he appears in these lists. And now we come to Simon the Zealot. This is a guy who doesn’t appear elsewhere in scripture, but his nickname gives us a lot of information. See, Simon was a zealot, meaning he was adamantly, adamantly opposed to Roman occupation. He despised the fact that that many of his fellow Jews were willing to put up with the Romans. He hated the Romans being around. He didn’t want them to be there. He felt that we needed to go to war against them. Zealots wanted war. He wanted to to knock out the oppressors. They did not want to compromise. And Jesus chose one of these zealots to be his apostle. You said you need to be an apostle. Simon would watch Jesus heal a Roman Centurions child and servant. We see we see this coming up in in chapter seven here in just a few chapters away. Simon would watch Jesus pay his taxes to Rome and then tell other people that they need to pay their taxes to Rome. And that, by the way, when you do this, you are still being obedient to the Lord. You remain faithful to God. A zealot wouldn’t think that. A zealot wouldn’t believe that way.

And perhaps the most daunting task for Simon would be to get along with Matthew, the tax collector, the sellout who is now going to be his teammate. Scripture does not tell us what it was like between these two, but it sure is sure to tell us where both men come from. That’s the note that we’re given, we’re told where their backgrounds are, and that’s for good reason. We need to know that there’s a reason that’s been recorded for us, and that’s because they’re from opposite sides of the political spectrum. It would be as if these two were part of the same church. Can you imagine it? People so divided over how they see the world and how they understand what’s happening in the political spectrum around the political culture around them are part of the same team. They have to get along. They got to do things together and accomplish a task together. How can two people who are so far from away from the Lord, but also so far away from each other coexist in the same ministry, team and church? This has been a big problem for us recently, hasn’t it? Over the last decade, this has been a huge issue where people are getting angry at each other in the Church of God, brothers and sisters in Christ, angry at each other when we’re actually on the same team. How can that be? Well, this is part of the reconciling beauty of the gospel.

See, both men will come to know each other as brothers. They’re not going to just be political enemies. They’re going to be brothers in Christ as they have their minds and their hearts transformed by the grace of Jesus. Jesus will will not leave your political convictions alone, no matter where your political convictions lie. If you are engaged in sin against people, you will be called out for it. If you hold hatred in your heart toward other people because of their views, you will be called to lay it down and to love others who disagree with you. That is what it’s like among God’s people. We lay those things down. Churches. You follow Jesus closely and you lean into grace. You will find these political platforms that we think are so important, are terribly flawed and totally inadequate to guide us into truth. All of them. I talked to a to a friend of mine one time in the theater. I was talking to a friend not not a Christian, but I had this friend of mine told me that he couldn’t become a Christian because he was already committed to a progressive political platform and he knew that those two things would not be compatible. Not to be outdone, I had breakfast with a man in the church not long ago who said that he was completely dedicated to the Republican Party because it was the party of righteousness.

Church. I hope you can see that every manmade platform is inadequate in proclaiming and applying the gospel of Jesus. All of them. And and we as a church are called to stand side by side with those with differing views on secondary matters so that we can grow together to be more like Jesus. These last two in the list are both named Judas. The only thing we know about Judas, the son of James in Scripture, is that he is not Judas Iscariot, and he really wants you to know that. He really wants you to know that he is not Judas Iscariot. Here his dad is listed so that you know that in the two other apostle lists he goes by his other name, Thaddeus, for obvious reasons. And in John 14, it’s pretty great. In John 14, he asks a question and it says, In John 14, it says Judas. Judas. Not as scary. It it actually says that he wants you to know this man really wants you to know that he is not Judas Iscariot. And that’s because Judas Iscariot is the one who betrays Jesus. There will be more to say on this as we go through the Gospel of Luke. This becomes a very big part of the storyline of the Gospel. But suffice it to say that for now, that that Jesus always knew that he was appointing an a a traitor to be an apostle.

He always knew that built into the plan of God was the need for an internal traitor to turn Jesus over to those who would take him to the cross. So let’s go back to our original question What is Jesus looking for in a good disciple? What’s what’s what’s he looking for? What makes a good disciple? I know these are apostles, but they’ve been drawn out of the disciples. They’re sort of disciples, par excellence. And so they serve as examples for all of us. So. Well, what is he looking for? What is. What does he want? What is he looking for? People who are already spiritually strong and competent? Nope. That wouldn’t describe these guys at all. Is he looking for fast learners? Is he looking for for people with the raw material of spiritual leadership who can quickly learn Jesus way and replicate it? Well, these guys spend three years with Jesus and then abandon him at the end of that time, in the moment, in his in his hour of need. From the brief. Look at these men, let me suggest three things to you as we close about what God is looking for in a disciple. First, being a disciple of Jesus has nothing to do with where you were before you met Jesus. Absolutely nothing. God certainly uses everything that has happened in your life up to this point where you meet him.

There’s no there’s no question about that. The fisherman will fish for men. Remember that God will use all of that. But no matter who you are or what you think or what you’ve been through, Jesus calls his disciples from all walks of life. Second thing is, being a disciple of Jesus doesn’t mean you’re qualified. It means you’re called. No one is pre-qualified based on skill or based on character. You know, sometimes I will hear a Christian talking about a non Christian. So I’m talking to a Christian who’s talking about a friend or a family member who is a non-Christian, and they’ll say something like and they’ll look at the skills of that other person. So incredibly skilled. They’ll say something like, Well, imagine what God could do with that person if they became a Christian. Right. They’re looking at all the skills, all the abilities, all the success. Imagine what God could do if God could just get Ahold of this person’s heart. Now I get the logic of that. I understand from our perspective that makes a lot of sense to say, look at the skills, look at the abilities, look at the character, look at the charisma of this person. And if God could just change him, that would be an incredible person to be in God’s kingdom. I make that makes sense to me. But listen, listen to Paul describe how God puts his church together.

This is from First Corinthians chapter one. For consider Your calling Brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world, to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world. Even things that are not to bring to nothing. Things that are so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. That’s how God’s calling his team together. Friends, Jesus qualifies you to have a relationship with God. He’s the one that does it. He does it by his work on the cross applied to you. Grace qualifies you to be in the position of a disciple. When God brings you into His kingdom by grace, through faith in Jesus. It’s at that point that He gives you the spiritual gifts that you’ll use for the work of the church. Everything that you need to be a disciple is on the job training. It’s all it. All comes afterward, after he places you. God doesn’t call those with skills. He gives skills to those that he calls. And the third thing, and perhaps the most exciting thing that we learn from this list of apostles is that this calling from Jesus is a call to spiritual growth. It’s a call to be on a journey.

You will not always succeed when you follow Jesus, but you will grow. You will learn good theology and you’ll learn good theology sometimes by saying or doing something that’s wrong. And then you’ll have to have God’s Word change your mind, and that’s when you’ll grow. You’ll fall asleep when you should have been awake. You’ll speak when you should have been quiet. You will call down fire when you should have been gracious. These guys did. We certainly will. And some of you, in the darkest moments of your life, may find yourself wondering if you should even stick with Jesus. What the 11 disciples show us is this journey is not designed to determine whether we will stick with Jesus. It is designed to show us that he will always stick with us. Jesus is is not looking for what you can bring to the team. He’s not looking for qualified people that he can bring into his kingdom. He is working his discipleship in us. He is at work in his disciples to make us more like Him. And so the question, the only question that needs to be asked is, is he calling you? Is he calling you? Don’t worry about what you can bring. You have nothing. Don’t worry about whether you’re qualified. You’re not actually recognizing that as one of the first steps to understanding the gospel. You’re not qualified on your own. Come and receive His grace and begin this journey with Christ. Would you pray with me?