section of the gospel of John at the end of the first chapter and we eaves drop in on this initial phase of Jesus attracting or drawing followers gathering disciples and that term disciple we don’t want to over complicate that because uh church jargon disciplehip programs can confuse the matter. It’s a deceptively simple term in the in scripture refers to someone who is simply a learner just someone who comes to learn. It can even encompass people who show only a very passing initial interest in Jesus, but they don’t really follow through with any commitment. At the end of John chapter 6, when we get there, we’ll read about many of Jesus’ disciples who turned back and no longer followed him because Jesus was referring him to himself as the as the bread of life and they found that teaching too hard to swallow and they said, “We don’t want any more to do with this guy.” But whenever Jesus talks about disciplehip and following him, it’s never that passing phase of casual interest. He always calls people to radical permanent commitment. He says, “If you want to follow me, you must deny yourself and take up your cross. Those who want to save their life will lose it. Those who who will lose their lives for my sake will find it.” He never ever made it easy to be one of his disciples. Matthew 8, a Jewish scribe came up to Jesus and said,”Teacher, I’ll follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus warned him in advance that he might not realize what he was in for. Jesus said, “Foxes have holes. Birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” Another man referred to as a disciple of Jesus came to him and said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” In other words, I need to fulfill some family obligations before I can just shut down my life. and uh and go to be with you. And Jesus gave him this uncompromising non-negotiable word. He said, “Follow me. Let the dead bury their bury their own dead.” Luke 14, Jesus speaking to a crowd of followers about counting the cost and giving things up to follow him. And he says, “Any of you who doesn’t give up everything he has can’t be my disciple.” So this morning, we don’t want to take those words of Jesus and soften them and dilute them so uh so that we’re comfortable to what we’re already doing and following Jesus. This passage comes to us as a bit of a challenge and changes might be called for in our lives as we go through this and see what it means, what Jesus meant in terms of following him. So our passage shows five men. The first two are called disciples of John the Baptist. They came to learn and to follow John the Baptist. One is Andrew and the other one he’s not named, but it’s very likely the gospel writer John himself. Next along comes up Peter and Philip. And finally, we’ll get to Nathaniel. And all of these five men are just processing their attraction uh to Jesus and what it’s going to mean for their lives moving forward. Bottom line of this passage, the bottom line question for you and me this morning is, can we risk spending our lives for a cause that’s greater than ourselves? Is it in us to uh to risk our lives to give our lives for this cause that is greater than we are? Douglas Hyde was a man from England. He joined the British Communist Party when he was 17 years old. His career led him to become the news editor of the major communication arm of the British Communist Party, the daily worker magazine or newspaper. He poured himself into that cause for 20 years from ages 17 to 37 before abruptly resigning in March of 1948. He had become deeply disillusioned with the postworld war II Soviet expression of communism. One week later, he committed the ultimate act of betrayal to the communist cause. He and his wife and his children joined the Catholic Church. Now 18 years later after processing all of that in 1966 he wrote a little book entitled dedication and leadership and in one passage he refers to the distinctions between communism and Christianity. He makes the observation that the new Marxist man is cast in the opposite mold to the new man in Christ. Their creed is evil. Their life tends to become evil too. The mold into which a communist man is squeezed ultimately de debases him as a man. And this is particularly true where communism has already come to power. He says part of the tragedy of communism is it takes good men with good intentions and uses them for a bad cause. Because its approaches to God, to the nature of man, to the world are false. It starts off on the wrong foot. The consequence is that the idealists and natural rebels who join the communist party set out to be the saviors of mankind but instead become men’s jailers. Now his book is was not written as a critique of communism. It came about because he observed uh the low level of dedication and commitment in the church that he was involved with. He was convinced that the church had a lot to learn from the methods and the examples of the communists. So he’d sometimes meet with people like himself, ex-communists. They’d nostalgically reflect on what life was like in the party. One of his friends said to him wistfully, “Do you remember what life was really like in the party? You got up in the morning as as you shaved, you were thinking of the jobs you would do for communism that day. You went down to breakfast and you read the Daily Worker newspaper to get the party line to get the shot and shell for a fight in which you were involved. You read every item in the paper wondering how you might be able to use it for the cause. I’d never been interested in sports, but I read the sports pages in order to be able to discuss sports with others and be able to say to them, “Oh, have you read this in the Daily Worker?” And I’d follow this through by giving them the paper in the hope that they might turn from the sports pages to read the political ones, too. And on the bus or the train on my way to work, I read The Daily Worker as ostentatiously as I could, holding it up so others might read the headlines and perhaps be influenced by them. I took two copies of the paper with me. The second one I left in the seat in the hope that someone would pick it up and read it. When I got to work, I kept the daily worker circulating. One worker after another would take it outside, read it for a few minutes, and bring it back in again. At lunchtime in the canteen or the restaurant, I’d try to start conversations with those whom I was eating. I made a practice of sitting with different groups in order to spread my influence as widely as I could. I didn’t thrust communism down their throats, but I steered our conversations in such a way that they could be brought round to politics or if possible the campaigns that the party was conducting at the time. Before I left my place of work at night, there was a quick meeting of the factory group or the cell. There we discussed in a few minutes the successes and failures of the day and we discussed too what we hoped to be able to do the following day. I dashed home and I had a quick meal and then went out maybe to attend classes, maybe to be a tutor, maybe to join some communist campaign, going from door to door canvasing, standing at the side of the road selling communist papers, doing something for communism. And I went home at night and I dreamed of the jobs I was going to do for communism the next day. You know, he says life had some meaning and some purpose in those days. Life was good in the Communist Party. Hyde writes how he and the other newspaper workers would receive their little pay packets and immediately give back 814s of their contents to the party and to the paper before that money even had a chance to burn their fingers. He had friends say to him, “Even though I now see the evil in communism, I still believe that when I joined the Communist Party, it was the biggest and best decision I made in my life. It was the most unselfish thing I ever did.” Well, it’s intimidating for us to think of that level of daily commitment to a cause, isn’t it? One writer comments how many years ago in our western world, people regularly made large commitments to causes beyond themselves. They fought in wars. They risked and lose their lives and behalf of others. They lined up in order to sign up for the cause. And people regularly subject subjected their own desires and plans uh to a community cause or a church cause, maybe a justice cause worth suffering for, worth dying for. Even even raising a family well demands a large commitment to a cause beyond ourselves. And the question people asked wasn’t should I commit to this cause this cause beyond myself, but do I have what it takes to do this? Will I take my safety and my happiness and submit that to something higher? Am I really willing to die for this? Much less of that happening today. More often, rather than commit wholeheartedly and sacrificially to a cause beyond ourselves, our cause becomes our self. This this may be utterly unique to our age. I don’t know if there’s any previous time in history where this has been so dramatically the case. Discovering our identity and our authentic self and finding out who we are has taken on a priority that previous generations would have misunderstood or or never considered. service to a cause greater than ourselves. It’s given way to that journey of inner discovery. And so the modern notion of courage, it’s all been reframed to mean knowing yourself and living out your truth. And we’ve collapsed in on ourselves. In light of that, it’s a legitimate question to ask. Is it even possible to be a disciple anymore? Is it even possible to follow someone to that extent? Is that even a thing? to be willing to give up so much to follow someone pursue a cause much bigger than oursel. Is it possible to be the kind of disciple of Jesus that we read about in the Bible? To that question, I think Jesus would look at all of us and he would say, “If your cause is to find out who you are, you’ll never find out who you are.” Jesus says, “If you want to find yourself, you have to first lose yourself and be swallowed up by this cause that’s much bigger than you are. If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it. Whoever loses his life for me will find it. So let’s look at a passage and trace Jesus’ brief interactions with these five guys who are being challenged to commit to a cause bigger than themselves. The first two, Andrew and an unnamed disciple, again very likely the the the gospel writer John himself. that connected at some level to the ministry of John the Baptist. They were both from up north, from up in the region of Galilee, that traveled south to learn something from this odd character who preached repentance and baptized people in the wilderness of the Jordan River. But they saw their spiritual mentor, John the Baptist, point selfdeprecatingly to Jesus and say, “Look, the lamb of God.” And so they began to tentatively follow Jesus. They followed from a distance. And Jesus turned and he looked around to them and he said, and I don’t know how he said that, how how he said this, but it almost sounds a little bit off-putting. He says, “What do you want? What do you want?” And throughout the gospels, Jesus never comes across as any kind of an eager recruitment officer. He’s not a corporate head hunter. He always makes it easy for people to say no. He never tried to pump up crowds. He he discouraged hangers on. He’d call people out who were with him just to see miracles uh or were with him because they ate the bread that they ate when he provided it when he fed the 5000. He was never looking for casual followers for those who just hung around for the show. His challenge was always to call people to be his true disciples. So in a church like ours, we all come in here for various reasons. It’s always possible to hang around the Christ atmosphere of a church and be an interested observer and learn things but never hear that call to be Christ’s disciple. Jesus wasn’t looking for curiosity seekers. He didn’t need fans. He wanted disciples and that’s what he consistently called people to be. He called people to have a new center of gravity for their lives. So when those two disciples of of John the Baptist began following Jesus and he asked them, ‘What do you want? They they actually they didn’t know what to say. They didn’t have it figured out. The best they could manage was rabbi, which means teacher, where are you staying? And Jesus said, “Come and you’ll see. You can check me out if if you like. You’re free not to if you choose. Come and see.” And commentator Gary Bergie notes that throughout the Gospel of John, many people are going to be challenged to come and see conversion. It’s not about knowledge alone. It’s not just a head thing. It’s about coming and appropriating a relationship with Jesus personally. In other words, for these guys to follow Jesus, they were going to have to depart from where they were and head in a new direction. Disciplehip means we have to be prepared to leave, to move on. Following someone means we can’t just stay where we are. Not that we all have to change houses or cities or jobs. It’s possible God might call us to something very different than our lives right now. But following Jesus simply means that we can’t just sit in one place be the same people tomorrow that we are today. So it says from 4 in the afternoon that day those two men left where they were. They went to be with Jesus. Something about that time proved utterly amazing for them. life-changing because afterwards, one of those followers, Andrew, ran off to chase down his brother Simon with the goal of bringing him to see Jesus. Andrew blurted out to his brother, “We found the Messiah, that is the Christ.” And he brought his brother to Jesus. And then we have one of the most endearing exchanges in the whole gospel accounts as Jesus looked at Simon and he saw this potential in Simon. This northern hick fisherman that uh he’d never have seen in himself this potential. But Jesus gives him an enduring nickname, a nickname that’s going to stick. He says, “I’m going to call you Peter.” And that was not a proper name. No one would name their child Peter. Cphus or in Greek Peter means rock. So Jesus was essentially saying, “I’m no no longer going to call you Simon, your given name. From now on, we’re all going to call you Rocky and that’s how that’s how you’re going to be known.” It’s a name that it speaks to Peter’s destiny. And only someone with great authority has the power to rename us, to give us a new name. Peter was a very unlikely candidate for greatness. But you know, one day only about three years later, Peter would stand up and he would preach the first Christian sermon in Jerusalem. 3,000 people would become Christians that day. So Peter, this fisherman hick from the north would alter history. Because with Jesus, it really doesn’t matter where our starting point is. He can do something with us if we’re willingly willing to lose our life in order to find it again in him. You know during his uh years as a communist Douglas Hyde he was once conducting a leadership training course in London uh group uh he finished his lecture by saying that the communist party could take anyone who was willing to be trained in leadership and turn him into a leader. Says when he stepped down from the platform man named Jim was waiting to see him. He said Jim was a relatively new member to the communist party but he was almost pathetically anxious to be turned into a leader. Douglas Hyde said that when he looked at Jim, he thought he’d never seen anyone who looked less like a leader in his life. He describes Jim as very short, grotesqually fat, with a flabby white face, and to make matters worse, a distressing stutter. And Hyde says, “I’m not making fun of him when I write this, but he came up to me and he said, “Comrade, I will want you to take me and turn me into the leader of men.” And Hyde looked at Jim and he wondered, “How could I possibly do that?” But he had just spoken about how he could take anyone who wanted to be trained in leadership and turn them into a leader. So he set about the job. He saw nothing in Jim to be confident about, began building confidence in him. He told Jim how important the training classes were and how one day the great class war was going to erupt and Jim would be one of the small minority of people who would understand properly and would know what to do. At that time, Jim would be one of the guides that people would look to when the revolution came about. And Hyde said it wasn’t long before he was able to turn Jim’s natural inferiority complex into something of a messianic complex instead. After months of instruction, Hyde gave this nervous Jim an opportunity to tutor others in the truths of communism. He sent Jim, who was an electrician by trade, to lead a communist beginner’s course among the construction and workers at the building site where he worked. Jim was terrified, but he tried to explain the ideas that had been crammed into his own head. And Hyde writes, “In pushing him into this tutorial work, we were sim simultaneously training this Jim to be a tutor, we were teaching these communist beginners, and we were developing a leader.” Next step of Jim’s training, Hyde exhorted a terrified Jim to take a public speaking course. And although he never became a great orator, never lost his stutter, he became increasingly confident. He’d stand on the street corners. He’d spout communist doctrine, and his stutter actually helped him gain sympathy from a fair-minded British crowd. After having him work as a tutor and a street corner speaker, Douglas Hyde helped Jim become involved in his trade union as an electrician, studying trade union history and vocabulary. Wasn’t long before Jim had one of the top positions in his local branch. Then he was elected to the area committee. He was made a federation shop steward on the building site. In time, he became a national leader in his own industry. And Hyde writes, “When Jim died, his death was of sufficient importance to warrant a front page report in the communist newspaper. Many of his fellow workers and trade unionists followed his body to the crematorium.” Hyde’s conclusion is this. People who have been seen as failures by other organizations are frequently turned by the communists into successes. The communists show confidence in the gyms of this world where others ignore them. They demonstrate and practice all too frequently a greater faith than we Christians have in the human material that God puts into our hands. So when Jesus saw Peter, he saw through Peter to what he could become if Peter dedicated himself as a follower of Christ. And Jesus knows that all of us are pretty unpromising looking sinners with little natural potential to ever operate in or become leaders in the kingdom of God. But Jesus will take anyone who’s willing to lose their life for his sake and give them a new and much bigger life in him. Next man up in our passage is Philip. We only have a very briefly recorded exchange where Jesus says to Philillip, “Follow me.” And and Philip was willing. He’s willing not only to follow Jesus, but also tell other people about him. Just as Andrew had persuaded his brother Simon to come to Jesus, Philip finds Nathaniel. Our passage makes the note that Philillip and Andrew and Peter, Nathaniel, they were all originally from the same hometown, the northern community of Bedada. And Philip says to Nathaniel, “We found the one Moses wrote about in the law and about whom the prophets also wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” And Nathaniel’s rural prejudices came to the four because every community, no matter how small or insignificant, always needs some other community to look down on. Nazareth. Can anything good come from Nazareth? People in Turwilliger say, “Can anything good come from Milwoods?” Nothing come from Milwoods. And Millwoods, they say, “Can anything good come from the north side?” And uh and people like me on the north side, we say, “Well, can anything good come from Morrenville?” And uh Morrenville looks down on Bon Accord. And we always need some community to look down on. Of course, everyone in Toronto just smirkingly looks down on everyone. But Nathaniel, he wasn’t impressed with Jesus’ hometown. Quickly impressed with Jesus himself. Jesus sees Nathaniel coming to him and exclaimed, “Here is a true Israelite in whom there’s nothing false.” He has some supernatural insight in Nathaniel’s character. Jesus saw that with Nathaniel, what you see is what you get. He’s not deceitful. He’s not transparent. He’ll let you know exactly what he thinks of your hometown. His motives are not duplicitous. In our passage, Nathaniel may start off as a skeptic, but at least he’s an honest skeptic. Jesus, he has this familiarity with Nathaniel, startles Nathaniel, and Nathaniel says to Jesus, “Well, how do you know me like that? How could you say those things about me?” And Jesus prophetically makes reference to something that only Nathaniel would know about. He says, “I saw you while you were under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Now, something happened under that fig tree that causes Nathaniel to immediately recognize that he’s in the presence uh not of some lowly Nazarene, but someone of utter greatness. No one else could know about that fig tree thing. That was private. And Nathaniel, his unpretentious eyes must have grown as big as saucers. And immediately he offers to Jesus a litany of titles that extend beyond anything else that the others have said about Jesus. They had referred to Jesus as the Messiah and the one Moses and the prophets wrote about. Nathaniel’s impressed to take things even further. Rabbi, you’re the son of God. You’re the king of Israel. Nathaniel immediately assumes this position of complete deference to Jesus. Jesus is not, again, he’s attracting disciples, but he’s not begging anyone to join him or follow him. He’s not offering any incentives or signing bonuses. But something was being activated in the hearts of these five men as Jesus interacted with them that drew them in, radically reoriented their lives. They’d follow Jesus no matter what it cost them. Nathaniel grants Jesus the term rabbi. And uh in a rabbi student relationship, the rabbi really regulated and restructured the entire life of the student. If we don’t understand our relationship with Jesus like that, then we just really haven’t learned to be his disciple yet. Probably the only kind of relationship like that of a rabbi student in our modern world is that of a coach with an athlete. When my uh son-in-law was rec recruited to play college basketball in Virginia, the coach, who’s pretty well known in American basketball coaching circles, paid a visit to Edmonton and he sat with the family and he told my son-in-law that there was an opportunity for him to play on the coach’s team. And so my son-in-law arrived in Richmond as a 17-year-old kid, and the coach’s demands were always completely non-negotiable. The team’s first practice of the day would be at 6:00 a.m., and you’d better not miss it, and you’d better not be late for it. And the coach even regulated the players daytime hours. He told the players, “None of you are ever allowed to sleep during the day, nights for sleeping.” And each player was also required to be in the library for 3 hours every night of study hall. If you wanted to play for that coach’s team and experience some success as a student athlete, that’s what you had to do. Coach had every right to make you do all the things you didn’t want to do. He could train you until you’re ready to drop. He could run you into the ground when you had nothing left to give. He could tell you do another lap and that’s exactly what you do. The payoff in your life though for following that coach could be really astounding. Late Tom Landry, he was the uh the coach of the Dallas Cowboys. He was a he was a fine Christian man. He served on the board of the seminary I went to and he summarized his job as a football coach saying, “I make men do what they don’t want to do so they can become all they’ve ever wanted to be.” Being one of Jesus’ disciples, it’s like it’s like that for us. We sure we don’t have it all together when we come to him. He knows how frail we are. He knows we’re just dust. He knows that unless he holds on tightly to us, every one of us will fall away from him. None of us really have what it takes to be his disciple. But Jesus also knows that if we put ourselves into his hands and we commit to following him and all of our tentative weakness, if we’re willing to lose our life in order to find it, he’ll make sure that he gets more out of us, more comes to the four in our lives than we’d ever imagined. And being Jesus disciple, it’s not going to kill us. It won’t destroy us. It’s not designed to burn us out. So that in a few years of really giving ourselves to Christ that we’re exhausted and we’re cynical and we want nothing more and we just want to settle into a safe and maybe a selfish life. Jesus says that disciplehip it’s it’s a renewing resource in our lives. He says come to me my yoke’s easy, my burden’s light. I’ll give you rest. Isaiah 40 says those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength. They’ll mount up on wings like eagles. They’ll run and not be weary. They’ll walk and not faint. Disciplehip, it’s not meant to burn us out. It’s meant to be a renewable resource. In fact, Jesus told Nathaniel that following him was going to be the greatest adventure in his life. When Nathaniel was so impressed by whatever Jesus told him about uh seeing him under the fig tree, Jesus said to him, “Oh, I’m going to go back. You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You shall see greater things than that. I tell you the truth, you’ll see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. Jesus told Nathaniel that following him, Jesus was going to be the link between heaven and earth for Nathaniel. Nathaniel was going to experience what life was like under an open heaven. He’d see how permeable the cosmic membrane is and angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. as Jesus is the link between our tiny little lives and the God of the universe. And Jesus would one day he would hang on the cross for Nathaniel and for Peter and for Philillip and for Andrew and for all of us. And he’d allow himself to be suspended between heaven and earth. And he was able, if he wanted, to call on legions of angels to come and deliver him and smite his executioners. But instead, he chose to remain on the cross unto death so that you and I could be lifted up to heaven on the basis of Jesus’ sinless qualifications. On our own credentials, hell was all we deserved. But because Jesus took the penalty on himself, when we put our faith and trust in him alone for salvation, he’s the link between heaven and earth. He’s the intermediary that brings heaven to earth and takes earthly dirt bags like us up to heaven. That’s the one who calls us to follow him and be his disciple. He doesn’t say that if we follow him, we’ll never get tired. We’ll never get frustrated. We’ll never have our moments. But he does say that his presence is renewable in our lives and we don’t have to face eventual burnout. Life with him is meant to be and will be a great adventure. Douglas Hyde says that people like himself who left the Communist Party, they’d struggle if they didn’t find a cause, a worthy cause that they could continue pouring themselves into. Douglas Hyde found that in the church. He found it in Christ. His ministry involved a years of service, particularly to those suffering from injustice. Of others who lost their communism, but found nothing to replace it. He says, “They’re frequently rather pathetic figures. They remind me of a squeezed out lemon. Everything has gone except the traces of the old acid. They’re left with nothing but disillusionment which may easily turn to cynicism or even as they get on with living life as many others live it without any deeply held beliefs of any sort. They look back wistfully from time to time to the days when they had something to live by and live for. See, the adventure of disciplehip with Jesus is not meant to turn us into squeezed out lemons. Not if we follow him, not if we’re being renewed by him day after day. And those five guys who were attracted to Jesus began following him. They had no idea what they were in for. But they joined the adventure. They signed up for the adventure. They didn’t know what new behaviors or habits they’d adopt, what changes would come over their lives, uh how they might be viewed by other people. Neither do any of us when we begin to follow Jesus. What we do know is Jesus already knows us. He’s seen all of us under our fig trees and he still calls us, each one of us, come and see. Come and follow me. So, some things that we can pray for, I think, as we reflect on our own disciplehip, our own following of Jesus. We’re just going to take a few moments of private prayer, your private time with God. You might want to thank God that he’s given you ears to hear his call to come and be with you. Might ask Jesus to deepen your understanding of what it means to take up your cross and to follow him. And you might thank God that being his disciple, sure, it’s a demanding, but it’s a renewing adventure. And thank him for the open heaven that we all live under. So, just take a few moments. This is just your personal time with God. And I’ll close us off in a moment or two. Jesus, we recognize this morning that uh you see in us a potential that um we don’t see in ourselves. Thank you that you call us to uh to come and see and you call us to live under an open heaven where angels are ascending and descending on the Son of Man. Jesus, I pray you’d open our eyes and and and reattract us to be your followers, to be your disciples, and whatever it means for all of us to to lose our lives in you in order to find our lives. Pray we’d be willing to do it. Father, speak to us about changes that need to come over our lives and ways we need to apply ourselves in seeking your kingdom. And we thank you that it’s not your intention to burn us out and just to leave us on the side of the road, but to renew us and uh that your your burden is light and your yoke is easy. And I pray we’d come with joy and anticipation and we’d sign on for the adventure and uh we’d pursue you this year with even more than we’ve pursued you with in the past. And we thank you that that at the end there’s uh the promise of being in your presence forever. We thank you for these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.