Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Luke 6:12-19, NASB
- Series: Luke (2025-2027), no. 11
- Date: Sunday, March 23, 2025 (Morning)
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Building What Lasts
I spent quite a bit of time yesterday thinking about the pyramids, which may sound like a strange way to spend a Saturday. But it makes sense when you understand that I was building something myself and comparing my work with the skill of those who built the pyramids.
About a year ago, I built an extension onto our chicken run so they would have more room to run around. Really, it gave us more room for more chickens. I had also built a canopy over the extension to protect them from the sun and rain.
I am not a construction expert and did not put a steep enough pitch in the canopy. A week or two after I put it up, the heavy spring rains arrived all at once. The canopy collapsed and terrified the chickens. I had to go out there and stab holes in this tarp so the water could drain. It was a mess.
Since then, that structure had been held together with prayer and chewing gum until I had time to repair it properly. Yesterday, I was repairing it and building something more like a proper roof. Even that was built from scrap lumber I scavenged from around my workshop.
As I looked at what I was building, I thought, “The first version lasted only a week or two.” I will be happy if this version lasts ten years. And I am in awe of things that will last for thousands of years, like the pyramids.
Even homes that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars will need major repairs within one or two centuries, or they will eventually collapse. The pyramids are so ancient that we struggle to comprehend their age. One historian observed that Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landing than to the construction of the pyramids. That gives you some idea of how old the pyramids are.
A few years ago, the History Channel produced a series—back when it still talked about history—called _Life After People_. It examined what would happen to historical structures if all human beings suddenly vanished. We know that is not how human history will end, with the entire species disappearing 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. When we compare the pyramids with much of what we build today, we realize there is a difference between building quickly and building to last. But if you want something to last a long time, you have to do something that is different from the norm.
Jesus Built Differently
That is what the builders of the pyramids did. That is what Jesus did in His ministry. Many rabbis and teachers arose during Jesus’ time and developed followings, but most of them are now forgotten. A few survive as minor historical footnotes, but little is known about most of them.
Of all the teachers and rabbis who gathered followers during that period, Jesus has had by far the greatest impact. A big part of that is the fact that He is God in human flesh. He is the incarnation of God. I do not mean to minimize that.
Jesus also conducted His ministry differently from the others. 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. This is a historical account of what Jesus did, but it also gives us an example. We can learn from how He ministered and apply those lessons if we want our work to have lasting value.
By lasting, I do not mean that each of us will build a movement or institution that endures for centuries. I mean doing things that matter in eternity—things whose impact exceeds our own ability because we followed Jesus’ example. So we are going to be in Luke chapter 6 this morning, where we left off last week. We left off at verse 11, and we are going to pick up at Luke 6:12 this morning.
Here is 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 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 power was coming from Him and healing them all.”
This short passage presents three actions Jesus takes in sequence. But I think we can learn from each of them. First, He goes up the mountain to pray. Then He calls His disciples. Finally, He returns to the crowds to minister.
Each of these teaches us something about the way Jesus did ministry and why it had such an enormous impact on the people around Him. Although we are not Jesus, do not possess His power, and are not God incarnate, we can still learn from His example. We can follow these things as we serve, as we do ministry, and as we live out the calling He has placed on each of our lives.
Prepare with Prayer
Each of these actions went against what people might normally have expected. The first thing that we can learn from Jesus here is that we prepare ourselves with prayer. If we want to do anything worthwhile for the kingdom—anything with lasting value—we must prepare ourselves with prayer.
I like the way Bill Osborn says before leading us in prayer, “Let’s get the Holy Spirit involved in this.” We know the Holy Spirit is here. He is with us. If you belong to Jesus Christ, you are indwelled by the Holy Spirit. He is always there.
But there is something about acknowledging that and acknowledging your dependence on the Holy Spirit. We want to acknowledge our dependence on God. Whenever we undertake ministry, we must remember that God empowers the work. We are not doing it on our own. There may be things we can accomplish in our own strength, but we cannot accomplish what only 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. As I mentioned a minute ago, that was to His Father.
This is just after He has had a series of confrontations with the Pharisees over the Sabbath. Things were going pretty well for Jesus at this moment. He had silenced and put His opponents to shame. We might think, “Things were not going well because opposition was growing.” If you are doing anything for the Lord, you will encounter 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 did not have an answer they could give.
They were embarrassed. From a human perspective, that seemed like a strong position. He had left His critics without an answer. 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, and 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. By ordinary standards of ministry success, He had done exceptionally well.
They would look at this and say, “This is a high point in His ministry.” On paper, the worst thing He could do in that moment was walk away. He had momentum. Human wisdom would say, “Keep going. Keep pressing forward. Keep building the movement.”
That is 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.
Prayer Over Busyness
We place enormous pressure on ourselves and one another to remain busy simply for the sake of busyness. I am not arguing for laziness, but we can become so focused on our own activity that we neglect to seek the Lord about what He wants us to do. From a human perspective, Jesus should have been busy, but instead He left the crowd, went up to the mountain, and spent the entire night communicating with the Father.
Jesus’ communion with the Father was different from ours. You and I do not have the wisdom Jesus had. We cannot lose sight of the fact that He is the second person of the Trinity. He did not pray because He lacked wisdom or strength, but His prayer prepared Him in ways I cannot fully understand. How God the Son prayed to God the Father is one of the mysteries of Christ’s person that we will not fully comprehend on this side of eternity.
Yet that time with the Father clearly strengthened Him for what lay ahead in His human experience. He always comes out of these times of prayer with a renewed vigor, with a renewed sense of mission. It was not that He had lost His mission, but communion with the Father was essential to Him.
If in His humanity, Jesus needed to take times away to pray, what in the world makes me think that I do not need it? What makes me think, “I will stay busy, keep pushing, and keep finding more to do. That is how ministry becomes effective”? 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? When I speak of serving the Lord and doing ministry, I do not mean only vocational ministry. Each believer has been called to do ministry. We think the key to effectiveness in ministry is just to do more things. Sometimes we need to stop, set our work aside, and seek the Father.
Jesus’ example reminds us that if we want a greater kingdom impact—if we want to do things that matter in eternity—we need sustained times of prayer. Prayer is more effective than busyness.
We should also notice something else. Jesus regularly spent extended time in prayer before major moments. In Luke 3, He prayed before His baptism.
In Luke chapter 9, before the big conversation where Peter confesses Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God, Jesus went and prayed before He asked them, “Who do you say that I am?” That conversation became a turning point for the apostles. He prayed in Luke 9 before the transfiguration, where Peter and the others saw Jesus with Moses and Elijah and witnessed the continuity between the Law, the Prophets, and Christ.
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. 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.
Again, what makes us think we can become more effective while neglecting prayer? If that is what Jesus modeled, that is what we ought to follow.
Invest as God Leads
The fact that He went up to a mountain to pray before calling the twelve also shows us what an important thing this was. Because Jesus prayed before calling the twelve, we can see how crucial this decision was to His ministry.
What He did there, starting in verse 13, shows us that we invest in others as God leads. When we think of Jesus’ ministry, we often think of His public teaching, miracles, and the crowds He drew. Yet only a small proportion of those crowds remained with Him.
His ultimate purpose in coming was to fulfill the messianic prophecies, go to the cross, and rise again. That was His ultimate goal. During His earthly ministry, one of His most important tasks was preparing those twelve men so that, after He fulfilled the prophecies, died as our one and only Savior, and rose again, someone would carry His message forward.
Through them, the message would go from Jerusalem to Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth, eventually reaching people like you and me. Outside of accomplishing redemption, preparing the twelve was central to His ministry. He invested in these men.
Jesus ministered to the crowds, but drawing a crowd was never His emphasis. Even while ministering to the crowds, especially later in His ministry, He used those interactions to teach and train the apostles for their future work.
We often use the terms disciples and apostles interchangeably, but Jesus had many disciples. A disciple is a follower or learner. He had a lot of people who followed Him. The crowds were larger still, but among them were genuine disciples 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 does not say He chose the twelve disciples, because there were many more disciples than twelve.
From among many disciples—Luke later records Him sending seventy on mission—He selected twelve apostles. 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.
Ordinary People, Eternal Work
What is remarkable is that Jesus gathered a seemingly unlikely assortment of ordinary people. No one else would have chosen a group this way. If we were choosing people to make the greatest impact, we might look for influence, wealth, credentials, or an established following.
That is not what Jesus did. He picked at least four men who were fishermen, two sets of brothers. He essentially took the core staff of Zebedee’s fishing operation. He took these two sets of brothers. He took a tax collector and a zealot, which I have always thought had to be an explosive situation.
Matthew had been viewed as a traitor for collaborating with Rome and may also have been involved in dishonest tax collection. Then Jesus placed him alongside Simon the Zealot, who had been committed to resisting Roman rule. I imagine there was tension between them and that they did not become close friends automatically.
He chose Judas, knowing that Judas would betray Him. The remaining five were so ordinary that Scripture tells us very little 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. An apostle is someone sent out as an authorized representative or ambassador.
They were not just followers. They were trained and commissioned to represent Him and carry His message beyond His earthly ministry. He set them apart for that purpose. An apostle is somebody who is trained up and sent out with this authority to represent Him. 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 choose twelve strangers and give them authority to speak in our name. To understand the weight of that authority, imagine giving twelve strangers power of attorney. Imagine choosing twelve people at random from Walmart and authorizing them to manage your affairs in your absence.
Is anybody going to take that deal? I have joked that we could select 538 people at random from Walmart and send them to Congress with comparable results, but I still would not give them authority over my personal affairs. Jesus is sending them out with full authority to represent Him, and He is training them for that purpose.
Discipleship Through Life Together
This required daily life together—teaching them, training them, and investing in them. This is what discipleship is. Unfortunately, we often reduce discipleship to something that happens in a classroom. These men were disciples being prepared for apostleship, but their training involved far more than formal lessons.
A class can help, do not get me wrong. The most effective training often comes through personal time spent helping someone follow Jesus more faithfully.
Over the years, I have preached in front of and taught hundreds of people. Not all at once, but over the course of ministry, I have taught hundreds of people. I do not think I have been as effective at teaching or training anybody as I have with my children.
I was talking with one of their teachers recently and said that I hardly use the term discipling anymore. I jokingly call it radicalizing. Radicalizing my children.
But I have been more effective at discipling them than probably anybody else. Do you know why that is? Because we live life together every day.
It happens through spontaneous conversations in the truck, life questions around the dinner table, personal example, and teachable moments while working together. It happens while repairing the chicken coop, discussing life, or inviting them to accompany me in ministry.
One of the best things I have done is bring my children on hospital visits when the opportunity arises. It is good for me to invest in somebody intentionally. It is good for the people I visit because they would often rather see my children than me anyway. My kids are more fun. And it is good for the kids to learn how to do ministry.
This is part of what God has called us to do as we minister to others. It is about investing in other people, one-on-one or in small groups. That is how we learn. That is how we grow.
That is how these 12 men grew. Their growth did not come merely from sitting in the crowd and hearing public lessons. 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 is where we are supposed to be putting our effort and our energy in ministry, in discipling people. The more clearly I recognize this, the less energy I want to invest in anything that does not contribute to making disciples. Some administrative tasks are necessary, but they should not consume the energy that belongs to disciple-making.
We can easily expend enormous energy on things that will not matter beyond next week, much less beyond our lifetime. Jesus gave us the example that He had three years of ministry here on earth, and He spent it investing in people. It was the people God 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.
Helping Others Follow Jesus
The most valuable effort we can make in ministry is investing time in helping others know, follow, and serve Jesus. We can start discipling people before they are even disciples yet as we share the gospel with them. If discipleship means helping someone become a more faithful follower of Jesus Christ, then it begins by helping those who do not yet follow Him come to know Him as Savior.
We tell people that sin has separated us from a holy God and that we cannot reconcile ourselves to Him. Jesus Christ came to earth, took responsibility for our sins, was nailed to the cross, shed His blood, and died in our place so that our sins could be paid in full. In sharing that message, we help people move from where they are toward where they need to be.
Through Him, the slate can be wiped clean. Then He rose again from the dead three days later to prove it. What remains is for us to believe and ask Him for forgiveness. When we tell that story, we are helping to take somebody from where they are to where they need to be.
Once somebody knows Jesus Christ as their Savior, our task becomes helping them follow Him more faithfully. You may say, “I am not an expert. I do not understand as much as I should about following Jesus.” You only need to be far enough ahead to help someone take the next step.
Ten years ago, I was not where I am now. I am not what I will be in ten years, but I am far enough ahead of my kids that I can show them what I know at the time. You can do that with anyone God has placed in your life, helping that person know, follow, and serve Jesus.
Invite Others into the Work
Jesus did one more thing that was unusual among leaders then and remains unusual among leaders today. It helped Him build something that endured beyond His three years of public 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. Over the following years, this pattern continued: Jesus ministered, brought the apostles with Him, and returned with them to the crowds. He teaches and He heals.
This is the beginning of their training. Over time, He gave them increasingly active roles until, forty days after the resurrection, He entrusted the mission to them. They are prepared because He invited them to join Him in ministry.
Our human mindset says, “I am the leader. I am supposed to build this, and everything should revolve around me.” We may also think, “I do not want to bring anyone else into this. I need to control it.” That is a real danger in ministry.
Ministries built that way rarely outlast the leader’s tenure. If you are in ministry, bring somebody along with you. Invest in them as you teach them to do the ministry that you are doing. Then, when God calls you to another assignment or calls you home, someone is prepared to continue the work.
I am careful about calling Jesus an example because some churches teach that He is merely an example, which is certainly not the case. Jesus is not just an example. He is God the Son who came to earth in human flesh to be our one and only Savior.
Yet within His unique identity and saving work, He also gave us an example to follow. I cannot think of a better example to follow. If you want your kingdom impact to last beyond your time on earth, there is no better pattern than the one Jesus gives us here.
