The Master and His Men

A few years ago, the United States Marines had a very effective recruiting campaign. Everywhere you looked you would see billboards and magazine ads stating “The Marines are looking for a few good men.”

The reason you don’t see those ads anymore is that under the infinite wisdom of our present Administration, women are now eligible for combat. To run such ads nowadays would not be politically correct.

However, when the Marines were running those ads, their underlying assumption was that a small, highly trained, elite fighting force could determine the outcome of battle. And they had the record to prove it.

History has always been shaped by the lives of relatively few people. Dedicated individuals whose vision, whose courage, whose sheer will-power have shaped events and swayed the masses, either for good or for evil.

Nowhere is this more true than in the spiritual realm. The Bible is full of stories of men and women who stood in the gap — whose lives made a tremendous impact. They were God’s key people for their day.

I would like you to consider 12 of these people: the 12 disciples of Jesus. Today, we think of them as giants of the faith. But they would be the first to disclaim anything special about themselves. By their own account, they were merely ordinary men whose lives were transformed by an encounter with the most extraordinary person in history—Jesus Christ.

Over the next few weeks of the summer, I’d like us to look at several of these men and try to get to know them. Why did Jesus choose them? What were they like? How were they similar to us? Can we see ourselves reflected in them?

But today, by way of introduction, I’d like us to consider them as a group. We’ll ask three questions: when, who, and why. When did Jesus meet them? At what point in his ministry did they become his followers?

Who were they? (I’m sure that there are very few Christians who can actually give you a complete list of all twelve disciples.) And finally, why did Jesus call them? What did he have in mind when he called them into this special relationship with himself?

1. When.

As best we can ascertain from the Gospel records of his life, Jesus’ public ministry lasted about three and a half years. Most people think that Jesus enlisted his 12 disciples at the very beginning of that ministry and that they spent the entire three and a half years with him.

That is not the case. Jesus recruited his disciples gradually, over a period of time. He met some of them right at the beginning of his public ministry, shortly after he was baptized in the Jordan River. We read about an encounter with the first five disciples in John 1.

John 1:35-39 The next day John was there again with two of his disciples. When he saw Jesus passing by, he said, “Look, the Lamb of God!” When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?” They said, “Rabbi” (which means Teacher), “where are you staying?” “Come,” he replied, “and you will see.” So they went and saw where he was staying, and spent that day with him.

One of those disciples was Andrew, the other was John. Andrew immediately went and found his brother Peter and introduced him to Jesus.

John 1:43 The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip, he said to him, “Follow me.” Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethsaida.

Then Philip went and found Nathanael and introduced him to Jesus.

Now although Jesus had said “Follow me” to these first disciples, it seems that it was an off–and–on relationship at first. Sometimes they were together, and sometimes they weren’t. Jesus often appears alone in the early days of his ministry. The disciples were still working at their day jobs. They hadn’t left everything to follow him.

A little while later, we read of another encounter he had with them.

Mark 1:16-20 As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” At once they left their nets and followed him. When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.

Later, in Mark 2, he met Levi the tax collector, whose other name is Matthew. He invited Matthew to follow him and Matthew did. But the disciples were still not with him on a day to day basis yet. That didn’t happen until…

Luke 5:1 One day as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret, with the people crowding around him and listening to the word of God, he saw at the water’s edge two boats, left there by the fishermen, who were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat.

When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink.

When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken, and so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, Simon’s partners. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will catch men.” So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything and followed him.

That’s the point at which the disciples became full-time followers of Jesus. And that didn’t happen until approximately a year had passed. A year in which Jesus was building relationships with them, getting to know them, and letting them get to know him.

Now if I had been in Jesus’ sandals, I wouldn’t have done it that way. If I had known that I only had three and a half years to change the world, I don’t think I would have spent the first 30 percent of that time trying to get to know a bunch of rowdy, uneducated fishermen and their friends.

I would have gone straight to Jerusalem, or even better, straight to Rome, the capital of the Empire, and started a big publicity campaign. I would have rented the Coliseum and held a week of evangelistic meetings. I would have handed out free “I Found It” bumper stickers for people to put on their chariots. I would have tried to make the biggest possible splash. Get attention, capture the headlines. Use technology to get out the message.

But Jesus did exactly the opposite. Before Jesus ever preached a sermon, before he ever performed a miracle, he began quietly building relationships with a handful of ordinary men.

If you had observed the religious landscape of Judea during that first year of Jesus’ public ministry, you would have barely detected his presence. Jesus was hardly even a blip on the radar screen. He was the stealth candidate for Messiah.

There were no great crowds in that first year. There were only two recorded miracles. Yet the work that Jesus was doing as he built those relationships was going to have an impact that would change history.

There are two lessons for us:

1. Never minimize the importance of building relationships. It’s people that matter to God, not programs, and not publicity.

A few months ago, a man in our church apologized to me for not being at Prayer Meeting. Apparently a friend of his had dropped by on a Wednesday evening around suppertime. The visit went a little longer than expected, and they ended up having supper together. That visitor was someone that the man had been praying for, and trying to witness to.

I said “Please don’t ever feel that you have to apologize to me for missing one of our church programs because you are trying to build a relationship with a non-Christian.

And that goes for all of you. Please don’t ever feel that I’m going to get on your case for missing church because you need to be at a family function, or you have the opportunity to be with people who need to know Jesus Christ. I’m not here to promote church programs. And I’m sure not here to be an attendance monitor.

I’m here to help you reach people for Christ. And the best way to reach people for Christ is to become friends with them. And you can’t do that if you’re always running off to some church function. Never minimize the importance of building relationships.

2. Building relationships takes time. It took Jesus a year of being with the disciples, of hanging around with them, of letting them see what he was all about, before they were willing to trust him enough to want to follow him full-time. Before they were willing to make any change in their lifestyle. Before they were willing to make a commitment.

The trouble with most of us is that we are too impatient. We expect people to make a life-changing commitment for Christ just because we handed them a 10¢ tract. Or we took 5 minutes to explain the Gospel to them. Or we brought them to one church service.

And if nothing seems to happen, we have a tendency to write that person off. When what they really need is more time. More time to get to know Jesus. More time to get to know you. More time to see if Jesus is really making a difference in your life.

Jesus respected his disciples enough to give them time to get to know him. We should too.

2. Who:

Who did Jesus choose to be his closest followers? He chose 12 men. Interesting that he didn’t choose any women. He could have. After all, there were many women in his band of followers. But he chose 12 men. There’s a reason for that, but we’ll save that for another sermon, or maybe “Axe the Pastor”.

He chose Simon Peter and Andrew, who were brothers. They were professional fishermen, and Peter was a professional big-mouth. He’s always listed first among the apostles, probably because he made the most noise.

Then there was James and John, the sons of Zebedee. They were nicknamed the sons of thunder, because they both had short fuses on their tempers. Their mother’s name was Salome, and it’s quite possible that she was a sister of Mary, in which case, they would have been Jesus’ cousins.

There was Philip from Bethsaida. Don’t confuse him with Philip the Evangelist in the book of Acts. Same name: different people. Philip’s friend was Nathanael, whose surname was Bartholomew.

Then there was Mathew, whose Hebrew name was Levi. He was a tax collector, which made him about as popular as a ham sandwich at a Bar Mitzvah. Especially since he was working for the Romans.

There was Thomas, whom the disciples also called “Didymus” which means twin. There was another James, whom they called James the Less either because he was shorter or younger than James the son of Zebedee. And there was another Simon, who was called Simon the Zealot, because he was a member of a radical political organization by that name.

Finally, there were two disciples named Judas. One of them also went by the names Thaddeus, or Lebbaeus. (Have you noticed that these guys were great for having a lot of names?)

Last, and unfortunately least, there was Judas Iscariot, whose surname means “from Kerioth”, a town in Judea. He was a tragic failure.

Twelve men. None of them had impressive résumés. In fact, some of them had shady backgrounds. None of them were leaders in the synagogue. None of them were members of the Levitical priesthood. None of them were from the big city; they were all small-town guys. In your high school yearbook, you would have voted none of these characters “Most Likely to Succeed”.

They were impulsive, tempermental, easily-offended, and racially-prejudiced. They were slow learners. And yet Jesus chose them to carry out the most important mission in human history. What was he thinking about?

Never underestimate what can happen to a person when Jesus gets hold of his life.

3. Why did he recruit these guys to be his followers? The answer is in Mark 3:14:

Mark 3:14-15 He appointed twelve—designating them apostles—that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach and to have authority to drive out demons.

Jesus had a two-part mission for these men:

1. to be with him.

2. to go out and proclaim the message about him

What was the most important part? The first part. To be with him. Because you cannot minister effectively for Jesus unless you have first been with Jesus.

Look at how Jesus spent the remaining two and a half years of his ministry. He spent less and less time ministering to the masses and more and more time ministering to these men. He poured his life into them.

And it wasn’t so much the principles he taught them that made an impact — indeed, most of the time they had trouble figuring out what he was even talking about. It was his personality, his character, that made an impact on them. That’s what made the difference in these men: they had been with Jesus.

If you want to make an impact for Jesus, you’ve got to be willing to spend time with Jesus.

And likewise, if you want to make an impact on the unbelievers around you — in your family, in your neighborhood, in your workplace — you’ve got to be willing to spend time with them. Because those people matter to God.

Someone has said that if Jesus were to appear on earth today as he did 2,000 years ago, many churches would not even elect him to their official board. He would have disqualified himself because he ran with the wrong crowd. He spent time with sinners.

The Pharisees and the teachers of the Law wrote Jesus off because they thought that his friendship with sinners meant that he approved of their sin. Yet Jesus went out of his way to build relationships with those kind of people.

Making a place in your life for non-Christians demands effort, thought, and risk. Bridges are harder to build than walls. But if you spend time with Jesus, like those first disciples did, then you’re going to find that Jesus will give you a burden for those people who don’t know him.

There’s an old legend about the time when Jesus returned to heaven after his earthly ministry. He was given a royal welcome by the angels. The angel Gabriel, as a spokesman for all the angels, approached him and said “Master, you must have suffered terribly for those people down there.” And Jesus said “I did.”

Gabriel continued, “Do they know all about how much you love them and what you did for them?”

Jesus replied “Oh no. Right now, only a handful of people in Palestine know anything about that.”

Gabriel was perplexed. “Then what have you done to let everyone know about your love for them?”

Jesus answered “Well, I’ve asked Peter, James and John, and a few others to tell everyone about me. Those who are told will tell others, and they in turn will tell others, and eventually, my story will spread to the farthest corners of the earth. Ultimately, everyone on earth will hear about my life and what I have done.”

Gabriel frowned and was silent for a long time. He knew how unreliable human beings could be. Finally, he spoke up. “Master” he said “What if Peter and James and John and the others fail? What if they get tired? What if they forget? And what if the people they tell don’t tell others? What happens then? Don’t you have another plan?”

And Jesus said, “No, Gabriel. There is no other plan. I’m counting on them.”