The 12 Apostles The People God Uses People Jesus Met, Part 10 Lon Solomon McLean Bible Church April 19, 2009 Years ago, when I first became a follower of the Lord Jesus, I heard a Christian song on the radio that radically changed my life. It s called Ordinary People by Danny Hall, and here s how the chorus goes. The chorus says, What you have may not seem much, but when you yield it to the touch of the Master s loving hand, then you ll fully understand how little becomes much when we place it in the Master s hand. At 22 years old, I was a brand-new follower of Christ. Listening to that song, I decided that even though my all was very small, I was going to do what the song said. I was going to place it completely in the Master s hand and trust Him to turn it into much for the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, 38 years later, at least looking at my own life, I can say that this song certainly has come true in my life beyond anything that I ever dreamed possible. Folks, this is what we want to talk about today. We want to talk about how little meaning us can become much in the service of the Lord Jesus Christ by simply placing ourselves completely in the Master s hand. Remember that we re in a series entitled People Jesus Met, and today we re going to watch as Jesus meets His twelve apostles. We re going to watch as Jesus chooses them. We re going to talk about what kind of men they were, and then we re going to bring all of that forward and talk about what difference that makes for you and for me. That s the plan. Here we go in Luke chapter 6. Then Jesus went out to a mountain to pray, and He spent the whole night in prayer to God. Remember that Jesus was about to make one of the most strategic decisions of His entire earthly ministry; He was about to choose His twelve apostles. These men would form His inner circle. These would be the men that He would disclose Himself to most intimately, and then once He had gone back to heaven, these men would be His ambassadors here on earth. That s what apostle means; it means to be an ambassador.
More than just that, these twelve men would write much of the New Testament. These twelve men would establish the Christian church and give it its structure and its form, and these twelve men would form the first team of missionaries ever to exist. These men would fan out over the entire Roman world and would affect the entire Roman world with the gospel of Christ. As a matter of fact, apart from the apostle John who was exiled he wasn t actually martyred but apart from him, every one of these other twelve men ended up giving their lives in the service of the Lord Jesus Christ. So the point is that being an apostle was an enormous task, for which the Lord Jesus had to choose the right men. So before making His choice, the Bible says He spent the entire night in prayer, seeking wisdom from God, seeking direction from God, seeking guidance from God. Let me stop and say that this was a common habit of the Lord Jesus, to pray before He made decisions. Mark 1:35 says, In the early morning while it was still dark, Jesus got up and went off to a solitary place, where He was praying. Mark 6:45 says, And immediately after this that is, after the feeding of the 5000 Jesus made His disciples get into the boat and go ahead of Him to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. After He dismissed the crowd, He went up on a mountainside to pray. Luke 5:16 says, Jesus would often slip away to lonely places and pray. Early in my Christian life, when I noticed this in my devotions one day, how often the Lord Jesus slipped away and prayed about things, I remember that the Holy Spirit and I had a wonderful conversation, because the Holy Spirit said to me, Hey, Lon, do you know why you make so many bad decisions in life? I said, Well, no, not exactly. He said, Well, I ll tell you why. It s because you do things exactly backwards from the way the Lord Jesus did things. That is, you tend to make decisions quickly. You tend to make decisions impulsively, and then you bathe in prayer the disasters that result. (laughter) That s not how the Lord Jesus did it, Lon. The Lord Jesus bathed in prayers the decisions before He made them, not the disasters afterward. I ll tell you, that conversation was a life-changing conversation between me and the Lord that day many years ago, where I decided I was going to try to be more like the Lord Jesus in making decisions than more like me.
As followers of Christ, may I suggest to all of us that there s a great lesson here for us? May I suggest and isn t it so true that we would all make better decisions in life if we would follow the pattern the Lord Jesus followed here in Luke chapter 6, if we would seek God before we make the decision instead of after we ve made the decision. Well, by morning, the Lord Jesus had decided who He was going to choose, so verse 13 says, When morning came, Jesus called His disciples to Him and chose twelve of them, whom He designated as apostles. Then the Bible names them. Let s see who they were. It was Simon, whom He also named Peter, his brother Andrew, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor. I want us to take a quick look at these twelve men and see what the Bible tells us about them. First of course, we have Simon Peter. The Bible tells us that he was a fisherman who lived around the Sea of Galilee. We also know from the Bible that Peter was uneducated, unpolished, impulsive, passionate, and outspoken. Peter was one of those people who always entered the room mouth first. You know the kind of person I m talking about. (laughter) Then we have Peter s brother Andrew, who the Bible tells us actually was one of the very first people to ever follow Jesus (John 1). He was actually the one who went and got his brother Peter, brought him and introduced him to the Lord Jesus. Andrew was a fisherman too. The Bible seems to indicate that, very different from Peter, he was a calm man, a quiet man, a restrained man. Then there are James and John, the next two apostles. They were brothers, sons of Zebedee. They were also fishermen. In Mark 3:17, it says that to them, Jesus gave the nickname Boanerges, which means sons of thunder. To give some people that nickname, you ve got to figure these guys must have been real fireballs for the Lord to nickname them that. Then the Bible tells us very little about Philip, Bartholomew, James the son of Alphaeus or Judas the son of James, but the Bible does tell us a little bit about the next apostle, a fellow named Thomas. We tend to know him as doubting Thomas. John chapter 11 tells us that his nickname was Didymus, which means the twin, so he
obviously had a twin brother or a twin sister. He was the one who doubted the Lord s resurrection (John 20) and said, Unless I see the nail prints in His hand and stick my hand in the hole the spear made in His side, I will not believe. That was Thomas. Then there was Judas Iscariot, whom the Bible says became a traitor. You say, Yeah, Lon, praying all night did a wonderful job in choosing this guy. I mean, Jesus prayed all night and chose a traitor! Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. In preaching to the Jewish people in Acts chapter 2, here s what Peter said. He said, This man Jesus was handed over to you by whom? by Judas, by God s set purpose and foreknowledge. Listen, the choice of Judas was no mistake. The choice of Judas was 100% part of God s plan for the Lord Jesus Christ. He did not make a mistake by choosing Judas. Finally, we come to the last two apostles. With these last two guys, we could not pick two people who were more different, two people for whom their lives were more of a striking contrast than these two guys. First we have Matthew. The Bible tells us Matthew was a tax collector. We have talked about Matthew before, but just let me remind you that, as a tax collector, Matthew was a Jewish person who actually worked for the Roman occupation government. He collected taxes. After he paid the amount that the Roman government required him to pay, he was allowed to keep whatever else he collected for himself. He was backed up by the Roman army, so no Jewish person could resist him or stop him. Basically, all these tax collectors were allowed to engage in legalized extortion. The Jewish people hated these guys with a passion. They considered them traitors against their own people, and they considered them to be collaborators with the occupation forces of Rome. Then on the other hand, we have another apostle named Simon the zealot. Now zealots were an underground political movement in Israel at the time of Jesus. They were a resistance army, if you will, whose goal was to drive the Roman occupiers out of the land of Israel once and for all by any means they could. In the middle of the street, they routinely would stab and kill any Roman soldier they could find by himself. They lynched Jewish people, without a trial, whom they believed were collaborating with the Romans. They were the people who started the revolt against Rome by the Jews in 66
A.D. that eventually led to the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. and the obliteration of Jerusalem. So my point is that it doesn t take a rocket scientist to figure out how Simon the zealot felt about Matthew the tax collector, does it? It doesn t take a rocket scientist to figure out how Matthew felt about Simon. Yet the Lord Jesus Christ picked these two men and put them together along with ten other guys who were as different as could possibly be, and He made a team out of them all. Now you say, Well, Lon, how do you explain this? How do you explain twelve men with such diverse backgrounds, such diverse personalities, and such diverse political outlooks being able to work together, bond together, and get along like this? I can t even get my relatives to get along at Thanksgiving? How in the world did Jesus do this? Well, it s very simple, folks. The explanation is that there was a unifying force in these twelve men s lives that was mightier than all the forces that divided them. That unifying force was their love for Jesus Christ. And you know what? I heard one time that twelve pianos, all tuned to the same tuning fork, are automatically tuned with one another. Do you understand? You say, I don t get it. All right, twelve people in tune with the Lord Jesus Christ are automatically in tune with one another. He is the great unifying force in the universe that supersedes our sinful differences, our sinful prejudices, and our sinful hatreds and can bind people together above all of that. Because when we re tuned to Christ, we are automatically tuned to people who are also tuned to Him. He proved it with the twelve apostles. Well, that s as far as we want to go in our passage, because now we want to ask our most important question, so are you ready? Okay, big 9 a.m., here we go. One, two, three so what? Mmm, that was okay. (laughter) Now all you people at Loudoun, I m going to give you another chance and all you people on the Internet too, because I m going to give our friends here another chance. Let s do it again and really make this worth it. Come on now! Ready? One, two, three SO WHAT? Now wasn t that better? (laughter) Don t you feel better now? Yeah, I do!
Okay, so you say, All right, Lon. So what? This is interesting, but what difference does this make to me when I walk out of my house tomorrow morning to go to work, to go to the office, to go to school, huh? Well, let s talk about that, shall we? We ve already agreed that these twelve men that Jesus chose were as diverse as any group of people imaginable, except for their love for Jesus Christ. But you know, there was one other thing that they all had in common other than their love for Jesus Christ, which is that all these men were just ordinary people. None of these guys were Ph.D. s. None of these guys were movie stars. None of these guys were famous athletes. None of these guys were Bible scholars. They were just everyday, normal people. The Bible makes it clear, my friends, that when it comes to impacting our world for Jesus Christ, God loves to use ordinary people. I ll go farther than that and say the Bible makes it clear that God prefers to use just ordinary people. Look at what the Bible says in I Corinthians 1:26. Paul wrote and said to the believers in Corinth, Think of what you were when God called you. Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many were influential. Not many were of noble birth. There s a wonderful true story told about Queen Victoria of England, who happened to be a wonderful follower of Christ. One day she was asked what were some of the things in the world that she was most thankful for. Here s what she said. She said, I am very thankful for the letter M. I am thankful that the verse says Not many noble instead of not any noble. (laughter) Well you know, in spite of Queen Victoria s wonderful faith, look down through history, folks, and you will find that seldom, if ever, has God used people who were revered in the world s eyes or people who were renowned in the world s eyes as His greatest servants. Seldom, if ever, has He done that. He goes on to say this right in I Corinthians chapter 1. Watch. But God chose the things that are foolish in the world s eyes to shame the wise. God chose the things that are weak in the world s eyes to shame the strong, and He chose things that are lowly in the world s eyes and despised things.
You say, Lon, who exactly is the Bible talking about here? He s talking about us, the people God uses to advance His kingdom. I think The Message translation captures it well. The Message translates this verse by saying, God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks, the nobodies of the world, to drive His work forward and impact the world for Jesus Christ. So often we say, Oooh, if Brad Pitt would only come to Christ! If Cuba Gooding, Jr. would only come to Christ! If Madonna would only come to Christ! Just think of the impact that they could make on the world if they came to Christ and became outspoken witnesses for Jesus! Not so, not so. Actually it s not big shots like this whom God likes to choose and to use to shake the world for Christ. Let me tell you why. I Corinthians chapter 1 finishes and tells us why He chose the nobodies of the world to make an impact for Christ. Watch. It s so that no one may boast before God. You see, when big shots like Brad Pitt or Madonna use their money, their fame, their power, their influence, and their charisma to accomplish big things for God, we would all tend to look at them and give at least some of the credit to them. But you see, when God chooses ordinary people, when God chooses everyday people, when God chooses unspectacular people, people from whom we would never expect anything to come out of them, and God uses them to accomplish great things for God, then all the credit and all the glory goes to God, because people look at us and go, Well, it certainly can t be you, so it s got to be God! (laughs, laughter) This is precisely the way that God wants it, my friends. Do you remember the story of Gideon in the Old Testament? If you don t, let me remind you. Gideon, in Judges chapter 7, shows up to fight the Midianites--who were raiding Israel, killing people and stealing things with 32,000 soldiers. God says, Nope, nope, you ve got too many men here. He told Gideon to go down to this little running brook, this little spring of water and tell every one of his soldiers to take a drink. The Bible says that 300 of his soldiers got down on their knees, and in a very refined way, in a very cultured way, in a very well-mannered way, they drank the water with their hands. All the rest of the soldiers got down on their hands and knees and
lapped it up like a bunch of dogs. Do you know what this tells me? This tells me that 300 of Gideon s men were married. (laughter) That s what it tells me. Yeah! Who do you think taught them to drink with their hands like that? (laughter) Yeah, that s funny. All right, so God said, You tell everybody to go home but those 300 men. What was the issue here? Listen to what God says in Judges 7:2. He says, You have too many men, Gideon, for Me to deliver Midian into their hands, lest they become boastful and say, Our own power has delivered us. See, if Gideon had won with all 30-some thousand soldiers, the soldiers would have taken the glory for themselves. God says, You know what? In the work of God, we will have none of that. Isaiah 42:8 says, I am the Lord. That is My name, and My glory I will not give, I will not share with another. God is obsessed, as He should be, my friends, with getting all the glory, all the credit, all the spotlight for what He does here on earth. This is why He loves to use ordinary people, people like Peter, Andrew, James, John, Matthew, and Simon the zealot, because when He does great things through them, anybody with any brain knows better than to give the credit to them, which means that God gets the credit that He deserves and that He wants. It reminds me of the true story of Dwight L. Moody. When he was in Scotland from 1873 to 1875, for two years he preached not only in Scotland but also all over the UK and shook the entire UK for Jesus Christ. It was an amazing two years of ministry. Now remember, Mr. Moody had a third-grade education. When he wrote letters, he didn t capitalize and didn t punctuate, because he didn t know how. He was a very uneducated man. His diction was horrible, and his grammar was atrocious. Here s what one London paper said about him. It said, Mr. Moody is the only man alive who can pronounce the word Jerusalem in two syllables. Now I tried this all week. (laughter) You can t do it! Go home and try to pronounce Jerusalem in two syllables. It can t be done, but Moody could do it. This same London paper wrote about him, Mr. Moody is so uncouth, so uneducated, so brutish and uncultured that his success can only be attributed to God alone. (laughter)
And you know what Moody said when they read him the paper? Moody said, Amen! That s exactly how it should be! Amen? Exactly how it should be! Here s the point, friends. If you want to make a difference for Jesus Christ with your life, look here. You don t need to be rich. You don t need to be talented. You don t need to be handsome. I proved that! (laughs, laughter) You don t need to be powerful, and you don t need to be brilliant. You don t need to be a jock, and you don t need to be a cheerleader, friends. If you re just an ordinary person with ordinary skills and ordinary capacities, then you are a perfect candidate for the Lord to use to make a huge, extraordinary impact for the Lord Jesus Christ. You re the person He s looking for, if you re just an ordinary person. Now by way of biblical balance, let me say that as followers of Christ, if we do want our lives to count for Him, there is one area of life, however, where we do need to be extraordinary. That is in our personal dedication, in our personal surrender, in our personal consecration to the Lord Jesus Christ. Back to Moody, we ve already agreed that he was a less-than-ordinary man really in so many ways, but you know, we need to understand that God used him in a mighty way. We need to understand what it was that positioned Moody so that God could use him like this. Let me tell you what it was. In 1872, the year before he went to Scotland, Moody was up all night in a prayer meeting with some friends. The next morning he was sitting on a park bench with one of those friends, a fellow named Henry Varley, a fellow evangelist. Varley almost offhandedly made this comment to Moody. He said, Moody, the world has yet to see what God will do with a man who is fully consecrated to Him. Now you know, up to this point, Moody had felt painfully inadequate for preaching the gospel. His own home church wouldn t even let him speak in public. They wouldn t even let him talk to adults; they confined him to children s work only. The children would make fun of him and laugh at him. According to his biographer, Moody would often end up in tears after teaching his Sunday School class because of the ridicule that he endured.
And yet Varley s words changed Moody s life. A week later, Moody said, Varley said, any man. Varley didn t say that man had to be educated or brilliant or anything else, just a man. Well, by the Holy Spirit in me, I aim to be that man. Moody went on to become the greatest evangelist since the apostle Paul, my friends. In fact, his biographer said, D. L. Moody was personally responsible for reducing the population of hell by a million souls in his campaigns. The point I don t want us to miss here is what it was that positioned Moody to be used in a mighty way by God. Yes, he was ordinary in his speech and ordinary in his diction and ordinary in his education, but he was not ordinary when it came to his surrender, to his consecration and to his full-out dedication to the Lord Jesus Christ in every area of his life. That s what positioned him so God could use him the way He did. Listen, friends. You and I may be ordinary in every way, but if we will give God the same kind of 100% surrender of our lives that Moody gave God, then God will take us and stagger us He will with what He will do through our lives, because little becomes much when you place it in the Master s hand. Let me conclude by saying that Satan loves to convince us He does as followers of Christ that God is looking for people with more talent than we have, that God is looking for people with more ability than we have, that God is looking for people with more education than we have, that God is looking for people with more training and more polish than we have. Don t you believe that for a second, my Christian friend! If God could shape the ancient world with twelve ragtag guys like the apostles, if God could reduce the population of hell by a million souls through the life of a very ordinary man named Dwight L. Moody, then look here. Don t you dare minimize what God can do through you! Don t you do that! If you re a follower of Christ here today, my challenge to you is to do what I did 38 years ago. I looked at myself, and my evaluation of myself is that I was a dopesmoking, hard-drinking, hard-partying, profane, potty-mouth, narcissistic sociopath. And that s being kind to myself! I was worse than that. When I say that I took little and put it in the Lord s hands, I m not telling you a lie. It was a real little, and yet to
see what God did with my life is staggering to me. Still to this day, it s staggering to me. Friends, listen. You re just an ordinary person too, like I am, but you take your life and put it into the hands of the Lord Jesus a hundred percent as best you can, and I m telling you, the Lord Jesus will shock you with what He will do with your life. That s my challenge to you. You do what I did 38 years ago. You say, Lord Jesus, You ve got it all. It ain t much, but You ve got what it is, Lord. The one thing that I will give you to the best of my ability that s not ordinary is a commitment, a dedication, a surrender of my life that s not ordinary, but the rest of me is less than ordinary. Here I am, Lord. What are You going to do? You watch what God does, my friends. Moody s son, Paul Moody, said, To the day of his death, my father never ceased to wonder at the use God had made of him, despite his handicaps. Folks, if you ll give your life to the Lord Jesus the way Moody did, He will do the same with you. You say, So Lon, what do you want me to do? I want you to serve Christ. That s what I want you to do! I want you to surrender your life to the Lord and find an area where you can throw yourself into the service of the Lord Jesus Christ. That s what I want you to do. I want you to teach Sunday School here at Kids Quest. I want you to become a small group leader here at McLean Bible Church. I want you to volunteer in ACCESS Ministry. I want you to go down to The House in Anacostia or to DayBreak in Lincoln Heights and work with those people we minister to there. I want you to work in the clothing ministry or in the food pantry and serve people. I want you to become a high school youth coach or a junior high youth coach or teach Bible studies here at McLean Bible Church or work in adult Bible ministries here. I want you to work in the Creative Arts Ministry and use the talent God gave you to serve Christ. I want you to be an usher or to be a greeter. I don t really care what you do, but I want you to throw yourself into serving Christ somewhere. You say, Well, what if it s the wrong area? What if that s not really what I m really good at? Listen, God steers a moving ship, folks. If you throw yourself into serving Christ somewhere, even if that s not the ultimate area where God wants you, I promise you that God will get you where He wants you. You just start serving Christ.
Don t you dare say to yourself, Well, I don t really know how much I can do. What did we just say? Just show up for duty, and say, Lord, here I am. My all is small, but I m confident that when I give You my all, when I put it in the Master s hand, little will become much when I place it there. If you need help with that, go down to our Connect Room and talk to the folks there. They would be happy to help you find an area of serving here. Let the Lord use you, folks. Don t minimize what God can do through you. Let s pray together. Lord Jesus, thanks for challenging us today with the wonderful truth that little becomes much when we place it in the Master s hand. Father, as we reflect on the great men and women of God down through the centuries and how ordinary they were, may that be a great encouragement to us who feel ordinary, that the Lord Jesus can take us and use us in a mighty way if we will just give Him an extraordinary level of surrender and dedication with our lives. So Lord, use us, we pray. Use us in a mighty way to advance the work of God and exalt Jesus Christ here in Washington, D.C. Lord, help us not listen to Satan whispering in our ear, saying, God can t use you. God needs more than you. Help us say, Be gone, Satan. Help us listen to the Lord Jesus who said, I love to take the nobodies of the world and use them in extraordinary ways, so that I get the glory. May You get the glory from our lives, Lord. May You get the glory from this church family, Lord, and may we serve You with all of our heart for the glory of Christ, and we pray these things in Jesus name, and what did God s people say? Amen.