Draw Near
Luke 6:12-19 ·April 16, 2023· Joel Passmore
Part of: Luke
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A few years ago, a survey was done among Gen Z tweens. And the question that was asked to them was, what do you want to be when you grow up? The number one answer in this country was an influencer, a sure sign of the apocalypse.
This term, an influencer, has been around for about 15 years or so. Somebody who has a large social media following, on any of the channels that are available now, there's more and more. And their presence, their audience, they use it to promote products and services and make money. Now, the fact that this is a thing, an influencer, it begs the question, who has influence in your life? There's people out there, they're so clear about it, they call themselves influencers.
They want to have influence over you. Who has influence in your life? Those that are near to you surely are going to have some influence on you. Today's passage, we see that people are close to Jesus, they're influenced by him. Other people are trying to get closer to Jesus because they want what he has to offer, and they're changed by him. And this passage should cause us to consider how much influence is he really having on us? How much is he influencing us?
Is he our primary influencer? Or is it something else, someone else? So let's turn there, turn with me to Luke chapter 6, verses 12 through 19. This is the word of the Lord for us. It's reliable, it's trustworthy, because it comes from a reliable and trustworthy God.
In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them 12, whom he named Apostles. Simon, whom he named Peter, and Andrew, his brother, and James and John, and Philip and Bartholomew, and Matthew and Thomas, and James, the son of Alphaeus, and Simon, who is called the Zealot, and Judas, the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.
And he came down with them and stood on a level place with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases. Those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all the crowd sought to touch him, for power came out from him and healed them all. Pray with me.
Lord Jesus, we need your word today. We need you to have influence on our lives. Would you please work by the power of your spirit to plant the word down deep in us so that we would hear it but also respond to it. We would center our lives on you. Show us more of who you are. Change us, Lord. Give us life. Jesus, we pray this in your name.
So the title of my sermon today is Draw Near. Amazing things happen to ordinary people who get close to Jesus. Amazing things happen to ordinary people who get close to Jesus. When we draw near to him in faith, Jesus changes us. It's as simple as that.
There's two sections to this passage. You probably noticed them here. The first section is this, the unremarkable apostles, starting in verse 12. Now so far Luke's told us about the beginning of Jesus' ministry. He's been in Galilee. You may remember this. He's been teaching. He's been healing, casting out demons, performing miracles, talking about who he is, what he's come to do. This has already brought him in conflict with the religious leaders several times.
There have been major conflicts already. Jesus now takes some time to retreat. He's like, you know what? I need to take a minute. He goes off by himself. He wants to spend time alone with his father. He goes to a mountain to pray. All night, he continued in prayer to God. You would think if anyone could go without doing this kind of thing, it would be Jesus, right? Doesn't he just have this constant lifeline with the father? He's just nourished and strengthened all the time, and he just never needs to take a break.
Well, evidently not. He takes some time to go off by himself, just him and his father, to pray. Even Jesus needed times of prayer. Even Jesus needed time that it was just him and God. I think that can be instructive just in and of itself, the pattern of Jesus here. If he needed it, surely we do as well. When he finishes, he's got a lot of clarity about what he's supposed to do next. He gets together, his disciples, everyone that's been following him, and he chooses from among them, from among the people who have left everything to follow him, he chooses 12.
12 men. He chose from them 12 whom he named apostles. The word apostle, it means sent one. Someone who's been sent. Now, based on how it's used in the New Testament, an apostle is someone who is sent by Jesus with his authority. It's a simple definition. These are commissioned messengers, representatives, chosen by Jesus himself to proclaim the gospel, to give their eyewitness testimony about him, to teach the things that he taught, and to call people into the kingdom.
This was an important role and it was a temporary role. We talk about the apostolic age. That's the age in which these apostles, these initial eyewitnesses were around teaching. Ephesians 2 says the church was built on the foundation of the prophets. You only lay a foundation once. And everything after that is just stones. If anyone comes along telling you that they're an apostle, that's a red flag. Walk the other direction. There's no office that's known as apostle anymore.
That's finished. These people were speaking from God himself. They were commissioned by Jesus. And these apostles, they were supposed to be a critical means of building the church after Jesus ascended and returned to the Father. These men would still be around. Jesus had spent all night praying with his father about this decision. And then he chooses these 12. Now what do we know about these guys? First of all, in all likelihood, they were very young.
They were probably all between their late teens and early 20s. That's pretty young. But also, they were ordinary. They were very ordinary men. These were not the elite of Jewish society. They didn't come from people with great family names. They were common folk. In this society, if you didn't come from a rich family, then the way that you would get a quote-unquote higher education was that you would be picked by a rabbi to follow them around and learn from the scriptures and be taught there.
That would be basically your higher education. If you got to the age that these guys were at and you picked up a trade, which they had, you know that you hadn't been selected. So that's just, that's what happened. You didn't get picked, so you learn a trade. There's no more education at that point. You learn a trade. They hadn't shown promise as theology students, in other words. It's fine. My point is, is that they didn't have much education. Their formal education stopped at a pretty early point.
Simon and Andrew and James and John were all fishermen. These were working class guys. Jesus picked them. Another thing about them is they did not naturally fit together. A lot of these guys were not people that would be hanging out together. Simon and Andrew and James and John were hanging out together. They were all in a fishing business together. They probably were friends. Matthew, that's another name for Levi. We met him earlier. He's a tax collector, or at least he used to be.
He had made his money extorting people, his own people, on behalf of the Roman government. He was considered a turncoat. Nobody in this group would have wanted him around. They would have been like, man, Jesus, you picked him? Especially this guy Simon who was known as a zealot. The zealots were a group of political firebrands. These were revolutionaries. They wanted to overturn the Roman government. They were hot on this. This was like a little mini political movement.
He was a nationalist. He was an Israel nationalist. A guy with his ideology would absolutely hate anyone who was a tax collector, especially someone who was a Jew and who had become a tax collector. Matthew and Simon the zealot didn't want to be in the same room with each other, much less on the same team. Who in the world picks these two to be on the same group of apostles together? Jesus, it just doesn't make much sense. What are you doing?
The most important thing, I think, is to look at these men and understand that they were flawed. They were very flawed. I mean, we're all flawed, but as you turn the pages of the scriptures, you see over and over just how these guys were just stumbling and bumbling all over the place.
By the way, young people, if you never thought about this, if the Bible was a falsification, then why are there all these stories about how much of idiots these disciples were? Doesn't that kind of pull down the credibility of the whole thing? Wouldn't you leave those parts out if you were falsifying it? Let's look at this. They made, they were immature, they were rough around the edges, they made all kinds of mistakes. Some of these mistakes that you read about, they make you slap your forehead.
And other mistakes they make, they make your jaw drop. Let's talk about Peter. Peter was a natural leader. Immediately, a leader among the disciples, but he was fearful. He struggled with fear. He sank into the ocean, well not the ocean, but the sea. When he started to doubt Jesus, he started sinking. And of course, that fear, that same fear led him to deny that he even knew Jesus when the chips were down, when Jesus needed him most. He was a denier.
He caved into fear. He was brash, but he didn't, oftentimes, he didn't back up his own speech. He was the kind of guy who would often put his foot in his mouth. He was a shoot first, ask questions later kind of guy.
He was impulsive. One time, he rebuked Jesus because Jesus was talking a little too much about going to die. You know, the thing that he was sent by the Father to do? Jesus takes him aside and says, Jesus, stop talking this way. This is never going to happen to you. Stop it. This is what Jesus said to him. Get behind me, Satan.
You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. Let's talk about James and John. They were brothers. They were actually Jesus' cousins. Their mother is Mary's sister. They come off as pretty smug, pretty self-righteous, pretty arrogant. They got their mom, Jesus' aunt, to go to Jesus and ask Jesus. They weren't confident enough to do it on their own, so they were kind of cowardly. They got their mom to go to Jesus and ask that Jesus would make them the second and third most important people ever, on their right and their left.
I know it's ridiculous, right? One time, if you think that's something, one time, when a Samaritan village rejected Jesus and his disciples from coming to stay, James and John turn to Jesus and say, Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them? Yikes.
Jesus chose these guys after an all-night prayer session. I mean, really, think about that. Do you want us to call down fire? I mean, it's something that they thought that they could do that, right?
They were ready to just rain down judgment right then. That's how far apart they were from the mission that Jesus was on. Jesus is like, guys, I'm here to make a way for people to be reconciled to God. People like those Samaritans rain fire down? Have you not been listening?
And then there's Thomas. You probably know the story that he didn't believe the others when they said all of the others, the other ten at that point, apostles, because Judas Iscariot wasn't there anymore, and then all of the other disciples, the women that had been to the tomb, he didn't believe any of them. I think you're all lying about seeing the resurrected Jesus. I've got to see him myself. I've actually got to touch him in order for me to believe.
But here's the thing. He was pessimistic and skeptical even before then. When Lazarus dies, Jesus says that they're going to go so that he could bring Lazarus back to life so that they could believe. And what does Thomas say? Thomas says, let us also go that we may die with him.
You know, we laugh, but haven't there been times when we've all been just like so clouded with pain and disappointment and hurt that we're just like ready to just give it all up and we're just despondent, right? Our hope is gone.
That's Thomas. we've probably been self-righteous and angry like James and John, right? A critical spirit, feeling like we're better than other people, that we deserve more.
We've probably been like Peter, opening up our big mouth, telling Jesus that we know better than him about his own plans. and all of the disciples struggled with Jesus' teaching, tried to keep children from seeing Jesus, argued over who was more important, kept their distance during the trial and the crucifixion, and then hid in fear after it had all gone down.
And yet these young men, ordinary, problematic, conflicting, they were chosen deliberately after an intense overnight prayer session. Remember, church, it was not an impulsive decision. It was not an impulsive decision by Jesus. It was part of a divine plan. Isn't it good to know that these are the kinds of people that Jesus moves near, extends grace to, calls into his kingdom? That's you and that's me. On our worst days, maybe even on our best days, we look like some of these guys.
Messy people, ordinary people, people with a rough past, people that the world writes off. These are exactly who he calls for great purposes in his kingdom to reveal to them who he is. These men heard Jesus calling and they answered. They followed him. And all of them except Judas followed with faith, persevered in faith. In just a few short years, they're testifying about the risen Lord Jesus before a group of angry and powerful religious leaders.
We read about this earlier. We heard it in the scripture reading. These religious leaders, when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, they perceived that they were uneducated, common men, and they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus.
That's all. Drawing near to Jesus with a faithful heart, that's what matters. Not your family name, not your pedigree, your background, not your abilities, not what other people think of you, not your track record. Remember, many of the things that I just named that the disciples did, these apostles did, they did that after Jesus called them. It wasn't like their past and then Jesus called them and then they were on the right track. They made those boneheaded things, those boneheaded mistakes, after they had been called.
But drawing near to Jesus in faith, that's what matters. Let's talk about the crowd. The second part of this passage, starting in verse 17. Jesus comes down to a plateau with his newly chosen knuckleheads.
Gathered around them are his disciples, but also a great multitude of people. It's probably his largest crowd yet, and they've come from all over. Interest in him is spread beyond Galilee. People from Judea and Jerusalem, those represent the more traditional areas, the religious establishment, you might think. And on the opposite end, you have people from Tyre and Sidon. These are places that have large Gentile populations and these are places that historically have been very oppressive to God's people.
Even they are coming to seek Jesus. All these different people are coming and why? They came to hear him. They wanted answers. They wanted wisdom. They came for his teaching to hear him because his teaching had authority and impact. They came to be healed of their diseases. They had things wrong with them. They needed healing. They were wounded. Jesus could restore them in ways that no one else could. They came to be cured of unclean spirits. They were beset by evil.
They were afflicted by evil and they needed release from that. They came to touch him for power came out from him. Now just think about the context. These people came long distances, some of them very long distances on foot. They had left behind everything. They put their whole lives on hold just to go hear Jesus and be near to him. For most of them it had taken days. Their houses were empty, their fields were untended to, their livestock, whatever animals they had were untended to.
They put their whole lives on hold because they knew they had to get to Jesus. They were compelled to come. They were in need. They wanted a word from God. They wanted a touch of his healing and his power. Now I'm sure that there were mixed motives among that crowd, just like there's mixed motives among us. But I do know that they came to the right person. Now listen, see yourself in this crowd.
I know, and I put myself in this boat two, we're looking for answers. We're looking for wisdom. We need healing. We need restoration. We struggle with sin and with evil and its grip on us and its impact in the world.
Who do you come to with those problems? With the questions that you have, with the need that you have for healing, with the release that you're looking for from sin? Who do you go to? Do you want change in your life? In the Gospels, lots of people sought Jesus. Over and over, people are coming to him. During his whole life, one thing he never, ever said was, you know, it's great that you came, but you didn't have to come to me.
You can help yourself. Just seek your own path of healing, find your own path, and you're going to be fine. He never, ever, ever said that. Jesus was exclusive about who he was, about him being the only source of healing and life and restoration. He said, come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Come to me. Not come to me, or you know what, you can also try this or this. If it's kind of inconvenient for you to come to me, you can also try this.
Come to me. He also said, if anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Deep change, real healing, and abundant life come only, only by drawing near to Jesus. Nowhere else. The Christian life begins by drawing near to Jesus in repentance and faith, and it continues in that same way. The Lord's will for you. If you're a Christian today, there's not many times that I can say to you what the Lord's will is. But Scripture says this, so I can say it to you.
The Lord's will is your sanctification. Paul says that in 1 Thessalonians. God's will for you is your sanctification. Being made new in his image. Paul talks about, he says that there is an old version of ourselves that needs to be taken off like we would take off clothing and set aside. Actually, he says that that old self needs to die. Meanwhile, there's a new self that we need to put on that needs to come to life more and more. That's sanctification.
But here's the thing. This isn't something that you can make happen. You can't make yourself bear the fruit of the spirit. That's the problem. You can't just try really hard and then all of a sudden love, joy, peace, patience starts coming forth from you. It's not an act of the will. It's an act of God's will. It's God's work. But there's something you can do. You can draw near to the one who does that work in you. That's what you can do. Just like these people came to Jesus because of the power that came out your eyes blink whenever you want to but you can't just say I will fall asleep now and then just you're asleep.
It'd be great, right? It's not an act of the will. You can't just will yourself to do it but you can do things that make it likely for you to fall asleep. Right? You can turn off the lights. You can put on comfortable pajamas. You can put if you like white noise you can turn on a white noise machine. You can lay down in bed. All of those things make sleep likely to happen. You can't make yourself sleep but you can do all those things that make it likely for you to sleep.
And till the sun came up and I said boy I just couldn't get to sleep last night. You be like well duh look at all those things you were doing. No wonder you couldn't get to sleep last night.
Do you see the point I'm making? You can't make yourself more Christ like. You can't just will yourself to bear fruit of the spirit. You can't heal yourself. You all those things. And that's what you're called to do. That's what all of us are called to do. You can read your Bible. You can pray. You can join a church and participate in the fellowship and the worship with your church family. Doing those things they don't sanctify you. But turning off the lights doesn't make you fall asleep either.
Doing those things don't sanctify you but they bring you near to the one who does sanctify you. If you're going on and on in your life and you're just thinking I'm not sure how much I'm growing in Christ are you like the person I said earlier who is like I couldn't get to sleep last night but you were doing this on your phone all night if a person said that you'd be like well he's promised you that he will meet you there he will change you he will make you more like him he will help you take off the old self die to it and put on the new self are you going other places with your questions other than Jesus are you going other places for the healing that you need other than Jesus are you going other places with the problems that you have with sin in your life other than Jesus forsake those other things come to him just like these crowds did they came to the one the only one who could help them in those ways when we do those things in faith those simple things opening up the Bible praying even if you feel dumb doing it you don't feel eloquent coming to church even when you don't feel like it when we do those things in faith he will meet us he will change us he will heal us and he will give us life Hebrews 4 says this let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need church amazing things happen to ordinary people who come to Jesus the apostles found that out because they were like what you want us to do that
you know we don't have it all together Jesus right and these crowds found that out too they left so many things behind because they wanted to be with the only one that could help them unremarkable people are put to use in his kingdom and hurting people receive healing and life he is powerful and loving church let's draw near to him and he will draw near to us he will meet us he will change us and he will give us life let's pray Lord thank you for your constant ministry in our hearts by the spirit Lord we are just like these apostles making all kinds of mistakes some things that make us slap our forehead some things that we just can't believe we did that and yet grace is ever greater your grace is greater than our sin you called us into your kingdom and you have a role for us Jesus help us to be like these crowds that came from far away because they knew that only you could help them only you were the person that had the answers to their questions only you had the healing that they needed for their diseases and their hurt their wounds us to be more diligent to attend to the means of grace that you've given us and when we're not Lord help us to receive your grace thank you Lord that it's not about how well we do