The People Priority

Several years ago, the Special Olympics were held in the city of Seattle. During that competition, nine contestants—all of them physically or mentally disabled in some way—lined up at the starting line for the 100-yard dash. As the gun sounded, they all burst from the blocks, not exactly like Donovan Bailey would maybe, but with the determination to run the race to the finish and win.

All, that is, except for one boy. When the starter’s gun went off, he stumbled out of the starting blocks, tripped over his feet, tumbled to the ground, and began to cry. The other eight runners heard the boy cry. They slowed down and came to a halt in their race to the finish line. A hush fell over the stadium. Then the eight runners all turned around and walked back to where the boy was sitting. Every one of them.

One girl who had Down’s Syndrome bent over and kissed him on the cheek and said “This will make it better.” Then they pulled the boy to his feet and all nine of the contestants linked arms and walked together to the finish line.

Everyone in the stadium stood. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. And the cheering went on for 10 minutes.

Those Special Olympics athletes painted a picture of what the church is supposed to look like.

In our hectic, competitive, performance-oriented world, with its projects and deadlines and bottom-line mentality, we sometimes forget the people priority. In our frantic race for that elusive finish line, we can often lose sight of the fact that people matter most to God.

Having just come back from Ecuador, this fact has really struck home to me. While in Ecuador, we had a chance to really bond together as a team. It was a great experience to be able to work together shoulder to shoulder, to share with each other, to enjoy one another’s company, and to really get to know each other.

And it strikes me, as I return to North America, that this is an element that is sometimes missing in our busy lifestyles.

When Jesus came to earth… his passion was for people. He wasn’t here to build an empire, to put together a political program, or to amass a personal fortune. He was here to build relationships with people and help them to connect with God.

Turn to John 1:35-45

Imagine that you are Jesus, living in heaven. One day God comes to you and tells you that He wants you to go to planet Earth on a special mission. Your mission is to communicate the truth about God, and how to have a relationship with God, to the whole human race.

Now that’s a pretty tough assignment because there are currently about 6 billion people living on planet earth. And hardly any of them know anything about God, let alone know that they can have a relationship with him.

But as an obedient servant, you accept the mission. Now you’ve got to figure out your method. What are you going to do to get the job done?

Maybe technology has the answer. Perhaps you could set up a system of satellites that would blanket the earth 24 hours a day with TV and radio broadcasts proclaiming the truth about God. But then you’d have to make sure that all 6 billion people on earth had access to either a TV or a radio and would listen to it.

Maybe you could set up a Web site on the Internet. But there are about 5 billion people who don’t have a personal computer, or any access to one.

Or maybe you could use mass marketing techniques. You could hire a Madison Ave. advertising agency to create a worldwide, multi-billion dollar ad campaign to promote God. You could design an attractive logo and come up with a catchy slogan and saturate the media with it. You could have t-shirts and jackets and other licensed merchandise that would tie into the campaign. Companies like Coca-Cola and Nike have already tried this and had a certain amount of success with it.

But if commercial marketing didn’t work, perhaps you could try politics. Maybe you could arrange to take over the government of a major country. Then you could build up their armed forces and secret police to the point where you could simply impose your message on the people of your country and the other countries around it. This might not make you very popular, but the Communists tried it and it seemed to work for awhile.

Perhaps it would be better to take an educational approach. If you could just get all the universities and colleges in the world to teach a course called God 101 to their students, then maybe that would do the trick. But then again, how many of those 5 billion people on earth are ever going to have a shot at a university education?

So you see, it’s a pretty daunting assignment.

I’ll tell you one method that you would probably never think of. That would be to come to earth and spend three years with 12 average blue-collar working class guys, and then let them be responsible for spreading the news. I mean that would never work. Or would it?

That’s exactly the method Jesus Christ chose to get the job done. In order to change the world, he chose to make disciples—to pour his life and his teaching into a small group of men, so that they could go and do the same thing with others.

The first step in Jesus’ approach to disciple making was simply to get to know these guys. Did you realize that Jesus spent approximately the first half of his public ministry just getting to know the men who would eventually become his disciples?

He just hung out with those guys. He built a friendship with them. He got to know them and he let them get to know him.

Read John 1:35-45

These men started out as his acquaintances. There is some biblical evidence that two of them, James and John, might even have been distantly related to him. They were certainly curious about who he was and what he was up to. But there was no full-fledged commitment on their part to following him yet. They just needed to get to know him better. And he needed to get to know them.

As Christians, it’s easy for us NOT to build relationships with people outside the church. Studies have shown that when a person becomes a Christian, he or she tends to lose most of his or her non-Christian friends within the first 18 months. Those relationships tend to melt away as the new Christian begins to form new friendships with Christians. And a new Christian can become so wrapped up in church activities, and in doing things with Christian friends, that he or she just doesn’t have the time or the inclination to stay connected with unbelievers.

But at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus intentionally got involved with lost people. First, he hooked up with Andrew and John. They were followers of John the Baptist, which means that they must have been somewhat spiritually minded. (You’ll find lots of people out there whom God has already been working on.)

They asked Jesus where he was staying. Instead of simply answering them, Jesus invited involvement, “Come on along with me and you’ll see.” In other words, he invited them to spend time with him. And in v. 39, it says that they spent the entire day with him.

Later on, he strikes up a friendship with Peter, that big rugged fisherman, by giving him a nickname—Rocky. Then he found Philip and he said, “Follow me.” How did he find him? I don’t know, but he must have been out there where the people were. Philip went and got his buddy Nathaniel and introduced him to Jesus.

So in two days, Jesus makes friends with five people. He’s intentionally building relationship. And all five of these men ended up becoming his disciples.

We need to start looking for ways that we can strike up friendships with people for Jesus’ sake, because we’ll never win people to Christ if we hold them out there at arm’s length. Howard Hendricks said “You can impress people at a distance, but you can only impact them up close. The closer the personal relationship—the greater the potential for impact.”

Once he had built a relationship with these guys—and this took up about the first year of his ministry—he then invited them to a deeper level of commitment. He invited them to be with him full time.

We find this in…

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.

If you were only reading the Gospel of Mark, you would think that this was the first time that Jesus had ever met these men. But that is not so. Remember, in John 1, he had already met Andrew and John, and Andrew had introduced Jesus to his brother Peter. This was not the first time these guys had ever laid eyes on Jesus.

As you piece together the chronology of Jesus’ ministry, you find that this episode in Mark 1 happened well into the first year of Jesus’ ministry. In fact, the events described in the first four chapters of the Gospel of John happened before you get to Mark 1:16.

(A helpful tool in studying the ministry of Jesus is a Harmony of the Gospels.)

So Jesus spent almost a full year getting to know these men before he called them to be his disciples. You can’t lead people to a deeper level of commitment unless they know you and trust you. Jesus understood this.

Now the next thing he does with these men is to invite them into a more intense relationship. He already had a casual relationship with them. They had already spent some time with him, in social settings such as the wedding feast at Cana.

But now, after a year, he says to them: “Come with me on a full-time basis. I’ve got things I want to teach you.” And so they leave their nets, they leave their jobs and follow him. And this is how Jesus begins to build a small group.

When you look at the methodology of Jesus’ ministry, it is tremendously significant to realize that the most important thing he did was to form that small group with those 12 guys. It wasn’t the preaching that he did with the huge crowds that formed around him. It wasn’t even the miracles, the healings and the exorcisms. It was the small group ministry.

Many times, Jesus actually avoided the crowds who were following him so that he could spend more time with this little group of guys.

And it was there in that small group setting that those men really began to come to terms with who Jesus was and what he had come to do. It was there in that small group that they could really get to know him, and get to know one another. It was there in that small group that he could teach them what he wanted them to know.

Well what about today? What about ourselves as followers of Jesus Christ? What about the way we “do church”?

I’m convinced that – just like these original 12 guys – our most significant growth as followers of Jesus is going to happen in the context of a small group. Unless we are somehow relating to Jesus Christ, and grappling with the questions of our faith in the context of a small group, our growth as Christians will be stunted.

That’s why we are doing the seminar this Saturday. It’s to encourage you to become involved in a small group. It’s to make small groups a vital part of our church.

Peter was a member of Jesus’ small group. Over in 1 Peter 2:5, he writes…

you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house

We are the living stones that Christ is using to build His church.

Think about bricks for a moment. A lot of buildings are built with bricks. But what can you do with one brick? I know some people who put a single brick in their toilet tank to reduce the amount of water they use when they flush. A lady once gave me a single brick with an embroidered cover to be used as a doorstop, or an extra-heavy-duty paperweight.

But when you get right down to it, one brick is pretty much useless. Bricks, to be useful, need other bricks. They are not much good by themselves. The same thing is true of Christians. We’re not much good alone. We need each other. We need to be together in order to become the building God wants us to be.

And that infers something else. It infers that we need to be ready to give up our a certain amount of our independence in order to commit ourselves to an even greater goal. You see, when you build a building out of bricks, you take one brick and you slap some mortar on it, and you place it next to another brick. And then you place another one and another one and so on.

Those bricks lose their individual independence and freedom in order to be a part of something far more significant than they could ever be on their own. And as Christians, we need to be ready to make the same kind of sacrifice in order for God to be able to build us into a spiritual house.

We need to be willing to make a long-term commitment to get side by side with other Christians and be, in a sense, mortared to them—attached to them. But how many of us are willing to do that?

Nowadays, many Christians are floating around unattached, looking to plug into a ministry or a church only so long as their needs are being met. It’s an age of uncommitment. Personal freedom and autonomy is the altar we worship at. Some Christians would rather be rolling stones than living stones.

But in order to really grow and flourish, we need to link arms with other believers – to become significantly involved with them, in the context of a small group.

So we’ve seen two principles on which Jesus based his ministry.

1. He took the time to build relationships with lost people.

2. He concentrated on investing his life in a small group.

This week, we’ll have opportunities to do both.