Jesus Calls His First Disciples

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here today. We start a new series today, A Journey with the Disciples in the Gospel of Matthew. We're going to be going through for six weeks this gospel on Sunday mornings as we approach Holy Week, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter. It starts in Matthew chapter 4 today, where the first disciples are called. They're called at the Sea of Galilee, and they are called without ... It's just an amazing text because I'd love to know the back story. I'd love to know what happened before this. I'd love to understand why, but maybe the whole point of the text is there is no back story at all. It's just Jesus called them, and they immediately follow. It's an amazing story. The magnetism of his message and his person, that's all it took. That's all it took. It's so simple, it's profound. Would that I would immediately follow, right? Because I tend to have to figure things out. I tend to be a slow adopter to a number of things. It's like, yeah, let me check it out first. Let me see. You got to show it to me. I'm not from Missouri, but I'm into the show me first. Do you understand? These disciples just drop their nets, drop their living, leave their family, and follow. That's what we're going to be exploring in this series. What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? Not simply to ascertain and go, yeah, I think he's a good guy. I think he's got some good things to say. But to actually follow, to trust him enough to follow in his ways. While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men immediately. They left their nets and followed him. And going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother, in the boat with Zebedee, their father, mending their nets. And he called them. Immediately, they left the boat and their father and followed him. And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, those having seizures and paralytics, and he healed them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee and from the Decapolis and from Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan. So just this week, I think it was this week, maybe it was last, the Pew Research Center put out the results of a survey of, I believe, 36,000 Americans across in every state and every basic faith background. They do a thorough job of any of their research. And this was in connection to faith and spirituality. And what they found is that most Americans now are spiritual, but not religious. Now, you've heard that before, but now we're seeing the results of it in a lot of ways. They are still spiritual. They want a connection with the divine, but they want to define it in whatever way they want. They want to set it up in the way they want. They have made their connections. They're doing it individually. There are like 17 million people who call themselves evangelical Christians who are not connected to any church or any organization. Do you understand that? Individually, they're just doing their thing. They believe in Jesus. They do all this stuff. The question is, can you do it on your own, do it your way, and still claim to be following Jesus? Even the first disciples are called two by two, and there's already four of them at this point in time in the text. Fascinating, right? Yeah, a lot of people want to be spiritual, and we in America think the best way to do it is to do it in our own way, on our own terms, kind of a concierge-style Christianity. You know, this is what I'd like from it, this and this and this, and to gain it, and that's the way to do it. But here's the question. What we discover in this text, already at the beginning, is you don't get to pick and choose. No disciple picked and chose Jesus. He'll say later on in the Gospel of John, you did not choose me, I chose you. And we see that directly in this text. We discover we're not the ones who are free to make the choice. Peter, James, John, Andrew didn't make the choice. Jesus did. He was the one that was free to do it. And he made the choice, he made the decision to call them on his terms, in his own way. All four Gospels show that's the only way you can encounter the real Jesus. Because if you try to do it on your own terms, it's not going to work. If you try to do it on your own terms, then aren't you just projecting whatever you want Jesus to be? Like I said, he's your concierge, not your savior then. He's your servant i...