Building for Eternity

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I spent quite a bit of time yesterday thinking about the pyramids, which sounds like a really weird way to spend a Saturday, but it makes sense if you understand that it’s because I was out building myself and thinking about the difference between the skill level of the people that built those pyramids versus what I was trying to do. About a year ago, I had built an extension onto our chicken run so they’d have more room to run around. Really, it’s more room to put more chickens.

But I had built a canopy over this extension so they’d have some protection from the sun and the rain and those things. And I am not a construction expert and did not put a steep enough pitch in the canopy. And so a week or two after I put that up, we got our spring rains when we get it all at once.

And that thing collapsed, just absolutely scared the chickens to death. I had to go out there and stab holes in this tarp so the water could drain. It was a mess.

And ever since then, that structure has kind of been held together with prayer and chewing gum until I had time to get back out there and work on it some more. So yesterday I was out repairing it and putting something more like a roof over it. But even that I built out of scrap lumber that I scavenged from around my workshop and such.

and I was looking at what I was building and thinking, you know, the first version of it lasted a week or two. I’ll be happy if this version lasts 10 years. And I’m in awe of things that will last for thousands of years like the pyramids.

Because even our homes that are built and, you know, in some cases cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know, in a hundred years or 200 years, they’re going to need some serious work or they’re just going to collapse in on The pyramids, I think we have trouble understanding just how old they are. One historian said, if you think back to how long ago Cleopatra was, by their estimation of time, she was closer to the moon landing than to the building of those pyramids. If that gives you some idea of how old the pyramids are.

And a few years ago, the History Channel put out a series of programs back when they actually talked about history life after people and went through some historical artifacts and what it would look like if all humans on earth just vanished. Now we know that that’s not how things are going to play out, that the whole human species just dies out at once. But if that happened, they said the pyramids would very likely be one of the last traces of human civilization that would survive on earth.

Those things were built to last. We look at what the builders of the pyramids did versus anything we do today. And we realize that there’s a way to build and build quickly, but if you want something to last a long time, you have to do something that’s different from the norm. That’s what the builders of the pyramids did.

That’s what Jesus did in his ministry. A lot of people arose in Jesus’s time, rabbis, teachers that developed followings, and most of those people we don’t know anything about anymore. A few of them are recorded in history, little footnotes here and there, but most of them we don’t know anything about.

Of all the teachers, of all the rabbis, of all the people who were leading others and developing a following and teaching during the time of Jesus, he is far and away the one who has had the most impact. Now, part of that is a big part of that. I don’t mean to minimize this.

A big part of that is the fact that he’s God in human flesh. He is the incarnation of God. But Jesus also did things during His ministry that were not like what the others did.

And as we continue our series of studies in the book of Luke this morning, we come to a place where Jesus did one of those things that was a little different from some of the other rabbis. And as much as this is a historical account of what Jesus did, I think it’s also an example for us where we can learn some things from how He did ministry to apply to how we do ministry if we want to do things that are going to last. And when I say last, I don’t mean that all of us are going to go out and build a huge movement or a church or whatever that lasts for hundreds of years. I’m talking about doing things that matter in eternity, things that have an impact beyond what we’re capable of because we followed the example that Jesus said.

And so we’re going to be Luke chapter 6 this morning, where we left off last week. We left off at verse 11. We’re going to pick up at Luke 6, 12 this morning.

And once you’ve turned there, once you’ve found it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. If you can’t find Luke chapter 6 or don’t have your Bible this morning, it will be on the screen for you. But please follow along as we read together.

Here’s what Luke records of what Jesus did. He says, it was at this time that he went off to the mountain to pray, and he spent the whole night in prayer to God, meaning the Father. And when the day came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also named as apostles.

Simon, whom he also named Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James and John, and Philip and Bartholomew, and Matthew and Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon, who was called the zealot, Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor. Jesus came down with them and stood on a level place, and there was a large crowd of His disciples, and a great throng of people from all Judea and Jerusalem, and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon, who had come to hear Him, and to be healed of their diseases. And those who were troubled with unclean spirits were being cured, and all the people were trying to touch Him, for the power was coming from Him and healing them all.

And you may be seated. Now, this is just a short section of text in which we really see three separate pieces that show us three short things that Jesus does one after another. But I think we can learn from each of them.

The first is he goes up to the mountain to pray, then he comes and calls his disciples, and then he goes back to where the crowds are to do ministry. And each of these, though, teaches us something about the way Jesus did ministry and why it had such an enormous impact on the people around Him. And again, although we’re not Jesus, we don’t have the power that Jesus had, none of us are the incarnation of God in human flesh, we can still learn from His example and follow these things as we serve, as we do ministry, as we live out the calling that He’s placed on each of our lives.

And each of these things go a little bit against the grain of what was normal for somebody at that time to do. The first thing that we can learn from Jesus here is that we prepare ourselves with prayer. If we want to do anything for the kingdom that’s worthwhile, if we want to do anything that has any lasting value to it, we have got to prepare ourselves with prayer.

I like the way Bill Osborne always says when he’s about to lead us in prayer, let’s get the Holy Spirit involved in this. We know the Holy Spirit is here. He’s with us.

If you belong to Jesus Christ, you’re indwelled by the Holy Spirit. He’s always there. But there’s something about acknowledging that and acknowledging your dependence on the Holy Spirit.

We want to acknowledge our dependence on God. Anytime we come to try to do ministry, we’ve got to keep in mind that we are empowered by God to do that ministry that it’s not us on our own. There may be some things that we can do on our own, but we can’t do on our own what God can do.

Now, Jesus, in verse 12, went up to the mountain to pray. It says it was at this time He went off to the mountain to pray and spent the whole night in prayer to God. And as I mentioned a minute ago, that was to His Father.

This is just after He’s had a series of confrontations with the Pharisees over the Sabbath. Things were going pretty well for Jesus at this moment. At this moment, things were going pretty well for Jesus.

He had shamed and silenced his opponents. We might think, oh, they weren’t going well because he’s building opposition. If you’re doing anything for the Lord, you’re going to run into opposition.

But it was how he handled that opposition. He handled that opposition in such a way that he took them back to the Scriptures, he spoke with his own authority, and he shut them down. They had no answer that they could give.

As my son would say, he roasted them. He put them to shame. They didn’t have an answer they could give.

They were embarrassed. I mean, that’s a pretty good place to be. You know, you’ve taken the critics and you’ve got them where they don’t even know how to respond.

He had demonstrated his wisdom and his power in the way that he had answered their questions about the Sabbath, in the way that he had healed people on the Sabbath, in the way that he had taught, he had just demonstrated what he needed to demonstrate about who he was, and he was drawing enormous crowds, as we see from verse 11, and as we see at the end of the passage we just read. The crowds were following Jesus from anybody’s standard of ministry. He’s done a fantastic job.

They would look at this and say, this is a high point in his ministry. On paper, On paper, the worst thing you could do when you’re in a position like that is just to walk away. You’ve got momentum.

You keep going. You keep pressing forward. You keep building that movement.

That’s not what Jesus did. Jesus walked away. Not that he abandoned the people, but he walked away from all that momentum when, from a human perspective, he should have stayed busy.

We put enormous pressure on ourselves and on each other just to stay busy for the sake of being busy. And I’m not arguing that we should be lazy either, but sometimes we’re so focused on being busy about our business that we forget to check in with the Lord and see what business He wants us to be about. From a human perspective, He should have been busy, but instead He left the crowd and He went up to the mountain and He spent the entire night communicating with the Father.

Now, His need to communicate with the Father is different from ours. You and I don’t have the wisdom Jesus had. We can’t lose sight of the fact that He is the second person of the Trinity.

So Him checking in is not that He lacked wisdom, that He lacked strength, but it prepared Him in ways that I can’t fully grasp why God needs to spend time in prayer with God. There are things about the nature of Jesus that we will never understand on this side of eternity, but there was something in Jesus that drew the strength to move forward from that time that he spent with the Father. And he always comes out of these times of prayer with a renewed vigor, with a renewed sense of mission.

Not that he had lost it, but that time with the Father was so important to him. And if in his humanity, Jesus needed to take times away to pray, what in the world makes me think that I don’t need it. That, oh, I’ll just stay busy.

Keep pushing on. Keep finding more things to do. That’s how you’re effective in ministry.

Find more stuff to do, more hats to wear, more busyness to engage in. Jesus, from time to time, stepped away from those things and spent that time, that extended time with the Father. Why would we think we need that time any less?

And when it comes to serving the Lord, when it comes to doing ministry, and by ministry, I don’t just mean things like what I’m doing. I mean, each believer has been called to do ministry. We think the key to effectiveness in ministry is just do more things.

Sometimes we need to stop and put the things on the back burner and check in with the Father. And Jesus’ example here reminds us that if we want to have a greater impact for the kingdom, if we want to not just do things, but do things that are going to matter in eternity. We need those times of prayer.

Prayer is more effective than busyness. We also, we have to take note of something here, that Jesus had a habit of having these extended times of prayer right before something big was about to happen. And just examples from Luke alone, we see back in Luke chapter 3, he went and prayed before his baptism.

In Luke chapter 9, before the big conversation where Peter confesses Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God. Before he confesses all of that, Jesus went and prayed before he asked them, who do you say that I am? Which was a turning point for the apostles themselves.

He prayed in Luke chapter 9 before he went up to the mountain of transfiguration where Peter and those who were with him got to see Jesus encounter Moses and Elijah and got to see this incredible sign of the continuity between the law and the prophets and Jesus. They got to see Jesus in all of His glory. Before Jesus went up to that Mount of Transfiguration, He had one of these moments of prayer.

And the most famous is in Luke 22, where He prays in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before His crucifixion. Knowing what He was about to go through, He prepared with prayer. And again, I come back to the question, what makes me think, what makes us think that we can be more effective without more time in prayer?

If that’s what Jesus modeled, that’s what we ought to follow. But the fact that he went up to a mountain to pray before calling the twelve also shows us what an important thing this was. When we see this is what he did right before something big was about to happen, he went out and prayed before he called these twelve.

That tells us that he was doing something that was crucial to his ministry, something that mattered immensely to his ministry. And what he did there, starting in verse 13, he shows us we invest in others as God leads. When we think about the ministry of Jesus, we think about a lot of the public teaching, we think about a lot of the miracles, we think about a lot of the stuff He did as far as drawing the crowds in.

Proportionally, a very small number of people from those crowds actually stuck with Jesus. Short of going to the cross, His ultimate goal in coming to earth was to fulfill all the prophecies related to the Messiah and then go to the cross and rise again. That was His ultimate goal. As far as what he did during his ministry in the meantime, though, the most important thing he did was to prepare those 12 men so that when he did fulfill all of those prophecies and when he did die on the cross as our one and only salvation, when he did rise again three days later to prove it, there would be somebody there to carry on that message so that it would go out from Jerusalem into Judea and Samaria into the uttermost parts of the world and it would be carried down to you and me today.

The most important thing He did outside of fulfilling those prophecies and going to the cross was to prepare these 12. He invested in these men. When Jesus, He ministered to the crowds, but drawing a crowd was never His emphasis.

Even as He’s working with the crowds, you can see, especially later on in His ministry, as He’s working with the crowds, He’s using those interactions with the crowds to teach His apostles, to train His apostles for what they were going to be called to do. And we also see that we use these terms interchangeably, disciples and apostles, but he had a lot of disciples, as we see in this passage. Disciple means follower.

He had a lot of people who followed him. Now, the crowd was even bigger, but within this crowd, there are actual disciples, people who followed him. But he had 12 apostles, and he focused on training them.

We see this from verse 13, where it says, he called his disciples to him and chose 12 of them. It doesn’t say he chose the 12 disciples because there were more than that. But out of the dozens of disciples, and we know at one point he sends 70 out to do mission work.

We know at the time of his resurrection, the church numbered about 120. We know that as he began to appear to people, about 500 saw him at one time. There were many disciples, but there were these 12 apostles.

And the crazy thing about this, and I say crazy not in the sense that Jesus did things that were insane, but crazy in the sense that nobody did things this way. Jesus brought in a seemingly random assortment of ordinary people. If we’re trying to find the people who are going to have the biggest impact, we’re going to be looking for people with certain characteristics, people that have a lot of influence, people that have a lot of money, people that have a lot of following themselves.

That’s not what Jesus did. He picked at least four men who were fishermen, two sets of brothers. He basically took the entire staff from Zebedee’s fishing operation.

These two sets of brothers, he took them. He took a tax collector and a zealot, which I’ve always thought had to be an explosive situation. Like you’ve got to, you got to be careful getting those two in the room because you’ve got a guy that has been a traitor to the Jewish people by collaborating with Rome and is possibly involved in crooked dealings on top of that, the person of Matthew.

And then you put him in a room with Simon, whose job is to try to overthrow Rome on behalf of the Jewish people. I would imagine there’s some fireworks there that those guys wouldn’t automatically be the best of friends. He picked Judas, who he knew was going to betray him, knew that was going to be a mess.

That brings us to seven. He picked five others that we, they were so ordinary that we know almost nothing about them. These were not the people that most rabbis were going to pick, but Jesus called ordinary people, and then He set them apart.

It says He chose those 12 out of the disciples, and He called them apostles. Apostle means somebody that you send out. It’s an ambassador.

They were not just followers. They were then given the task and trained up for the purpose of representing Him, to carry His message beyond His time on earth. And He set them apart for that purpose.

An apostle is somebody who’s trained up and sent out with this authority to represent Him. And so they went from being students to being ambassadors in training. This is a big deal, that he would choose these 12 and give them the authority to speak for him.

Most of us would not want to pick 12 people off the street at random and give them authority to speak for us. If that thought of authority to speak for you doesn’t mean a whole lot, imagine giving them power of attorney. Go down to Walmart, pick 12 people at random, say they’re going to have power of attorney to take care of your affairs in your absence.

Anybody going to take that deal? I have joked that we could pick 538 people at random at Walmart and send them to Congress and do at least as good a job, but I still don’t know that I want them to have power of attorney over my personal life. Okay, Jesus is sending them out with full authority to represent him, and he’s training them for that purpose.

What this required was a day in, day out time with them, teaching them, Training them, investing in them, spending life together. This is what discipleship is. Unfortunately, I think a lot of times in our minds, discipleship, and I realize there’s a difference between disciple and apostle, but they’re being discipled into apostleship, if that makes sense.

They’re being trained. That’s what this is. We think that discipleship, training as a believer, is something that takes place in a class.

And a class can help, don’t get me wrong. But the most effective training you will ever do with somebody, the most effective you will ever be at helping somebody follow Jesus more faithfully, comes from those personal times that you spend with them. Over the years, I have preached in front of and taught hundreds of people.

Now, not at one time, okay? But just over the course of ministry, I’ve taught hundreds of people. I don’t think I have been as effective at teaching or training anybody as I have with my children.

As a matter of fact, I was talking to one of their teachers the other day, and I said, I don’t even use the term discipling anymore. I call it radicalizing. Radicalizing my children.

But I’ve been more effective at discipling them than probably anybody else. And do you know why that is? Because we live life together every day.

The random conversations that come up in the truck. The life questions that we talk about at the dinner table. The example, the teachable moments as we’re working together.

Even as we’re working on repairs to the chicken coop, discussing life things, or inviting them to come with me as I do ministry things. One of the best things I’ve ever done is to try to bring my kids on hospital visits when I have the opportunity. Because it’s good for me to invest in somebody intentionally.

It’s good for the people that I come to see because they’d rather see my kids than me anyway. My kids are more fun. And it’s good for the kids to learn how to do ministry.

This is what God has called us to do as we minister to other people. It’s about investing in other people, one-on-one. We’re in small groups.

That’s how we learn. That’s how we grow. That’s how these 12 men grew.

It was not just by sitting with the crowd and hearing the lessons that were taught. It was by spending three years with Jesus day in and day out. When he said, come follow me, they left everything behind and walked with Jesus.

That’s where we’re supposed to be putting our effort, our energy in ministry is in discipling people. And the more I recognize that, the less I want to put any energy in. I know there’s some things we have to do, administrative things, but the less energy I want to spend in anything that’s not making disciples.

Because we could easily spend a lot of energy, a lot of focus on a lot of things that aren’t going to matter beyond next week, let alone our lifetime. Jesus gave us the example that he had three years of ministry here on earth and he spent it investing in people and it was the people God led him the father led him to because he spent those hours in prayer and after that came down from the mountain and called out those 12. The most valuable effort we can make in ministry is investing our time in helping others to know and follow and serve Jesus.

We can start discipling people before they’re even disciples yet as we share the gospel with them. If discipleship is just helping somebody become a more faithful follower of Jesus Christ. If they’re not following Him at all, discipleship starts with knowing Him as their Savior. So as we tell people the story that sin has separated us from a holy God, and that there’s no way that you and I can be reconciled to Him because of our sin, because our sin is offensive to a holy God, and that the only way we can be right with Him is that Jesus Christ came to earth, and He took responsibility for our sins, and He was nailed to that cross and shed His blood and died in our place so that our sins could be paid for in full.

The slate could be wiped clean. And then He rose again from the dead three days later to prove it. And now all that’s left for us to do is believe and ask for that forgiveness.

When we tell that story, we’re helping to take somebody from where they are to where they need to be. And then once somebody knows Jesus Christ as their Savior, our task becomes helping them follow Him more faithfully. And you may say, well, I’m not an expert.

I don’t know, as well as Jesus does, what it means to follow him. You just have to be one step ahead of somebody. Ten years ago, I was not what I am now.

I’m not what I’ll be in ten years, but I’m far enough ahead of my kids that I can show them what I know at the time. And you can do that with anybody that God has put in your life, to help them know and follow and serve Jesus. And then he did one more thing that was uncharacteristic of people, of leaders at that time, and probably leaders today, but that helped him build something that lasted beyond his three years of ministry.

If we look at verses 17 through 19, he invited others to join him in the ministry, and we invite others to join us in our ministry as well. Jesus came down from the mountain, and he brought those 12 with him. And we see this process unfold over the following years, where he comes down and he works in the ministry, he brings them with him, and goes back to the crowd, and he teaches and he heals.

And this is the beginning of their training. And you begin to see as He, over time, lets them take a more hands-on role. Until that time, 40 days after the resurrection, when He’s ready to turn it over to them, because they’re now ready.

They’re prepared because He invited them to join Him in ministry. Our human mindset says, no, I’m the leader. I’m supposed to be the one building.

I’m supposed to be the one. It’s all supposed to be built around me. Our human mindset is, I don’t want to bring somebody else in to do this.

I’ve got to control this. That’s a real danger in ministry. Those things don’t last very long past that leader’s tenure.

If you’re in ministry, bring somebody along with you. Invest in them as you teach them to do the ministry that you’re doing. And then when God calls you on to the next thing or calls you home, there’s somebody there to carry it on.

Now, I always say I’m very careful about calling Jesus an example, because there are churches that will teach you that Jesus is just an example, and that’s certainly not the case. Jesus is not just an example. He’s God the Son who came to earth in human flesh to be our one and only Savior.

But within that, He did do things that are an example to us today. I can’t think of a better example to follow. And if you want to have an impact for the kingdom that lasts beyond your time on earth, I can think of a lot worse ways to do that than to follow His example here.

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