Book: Matthew 4:12-23

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany                                       January 26, 2020
Text: Matthew 4:12-23                          3 Year Series A              20:2171
Theme: Jesus Finds Disciples, and Then…

Every year one day belongs especially to you. On this day you get presents; there are special things to eat; maybe there is a party. Your family and friends celebrate with you because it’s your birthday!
But there is another day which is even more important to you. This is the day Jesus comes to you, finds you and makes you His disciple. It’s the day He gives you new life with Him, the day the Holy Spirit enables you to begin putting your trust in Him as the Savior, the day He puts His hand into yours, and then you begin to walk with Him in life.
Perhaps you can hardly remember when that happened. For many it was when you were baptized as an infant. For others it may have been when Mom or Dad taught you stories about Jesus and how to talk with Him in prayer when you were very small. As you grew in faith you learned to trust Him for everything, to turn to Him for forgiveness, to ask Him for His help when you were in trouble. Whether you recognized it or not, you were walking in the light of salvation, no longer floundering in the darkness of sin and unbelief.
But imagine what it is like to need Jesus but to know nothing about Him, not even understanding that you need Him? To live in the darkness of sin and unbelief? To walk in the shadow of death with no hope for eternity? That’s the way it is for many today. It was the same in Jesus’ day. People lived in darkness, especially in the lands of Zebulun and Naphtali.

I. He shines upon them.
In the O.T. times these were two of the 12 tribes of Israel that were the most northern tribes. They occupied the area that later was called Galilee. The tribes, like most of the 12, had years before passed away. But the territory that they once occupied was the place where Jesus came to start His ministry.
Galilee was truly a place of darkness. This area was always the first that was hit by Israel’s enemies who came to destroy them. Many of the Jews who once lived there were taken away into captivity in distant lands. They were replaced by people from other nations who didn’t know God. It was a mixed race of people living there, and their spiritual condition was a hodge-podge. Many did not know the truth of God, and many others worshipped false gods. That’s the reason “darkness” prevailed. It was the darkness of unbelief and sin. It was that way for centuries.
Now, the truly astonishing part was that the most benighted place in Israel was the place that God chose to receive the light of the Savior’s presence. How about that! Don’t ever presume that a people or nation is beyond the efforts made to proclaim the gospel to them. Galilee wasn’t; and it was in a state of spiritual darkness. Many years before Jesus came, God, through His prophet Isaiah, foretold the effects that the gospel would have there when he said, “The people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light; on those dwelling in the region and the shadow of death a light has dawned.”
The picture is that of a glorious sunrise breaking through the darkness of an especially black and deadly night. Without God in their lives, eternal death cast its shadow over the land. Into this gloom and doom situation light breaks forth through the dark sky. That light was the Lord Jesus. The Savior had come to shine upon them. God let the great good news of the salvation from sin that He would bring to all people begin there where it was least expected. Maybe it was even the place where it was needed the most.
Ah, the wondrous ways in which God works in His grace, quite often apart from our way of thinking. When people are at their lowest ebb and all spiritual light seems gone….when there appears to be absolutely no hope or help to remedy things, then God steps in and with heavenly grace sends His eternal gifts.
That’s the way it worked for us, too, for we were all once living in darkness, dead in sin. Then God graciously stepped into our lives. Maybe it was at your baptism, maybe it was when someone first taught you God’s Word, maybe it was through a friend or relative who told you about Jesus. In each case Jesus finds us and makes us disciples. He shines upon people with His saving grace. But after doing that, He is not done yet. What happens then?

II. He calls them to follow Him.
Our text continues: “From that time, Jesus began to preach: ‘Repent because the kingdom of heaven is near.’ As He was walking by the sea of Galilee, He saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew…He said to them, ‘Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’ They immediately left their nets and followed Him…He saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and his brother John….Jesus called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed Him.”
This was not the first time that these men met Jesus. They had already learned of Him and from Him. Before he was thrown into prison, John the Baptist had been the one to school them about Jesus. Months before this he pointed to Jesus and said, “Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn.1:29).
To Jews the word “Lamb” meant something huge. Everything in their worship life revolved around lambs and sacrifices. It was a lamb with its blood painted on the doorposts of their ancestors’ homes in Egypt that saved them from the Angel of Death. It was a lamb dying on the altar in the temple which assured them that God would send someone to atone for their sin. It was a lamb on whose head the priest laid his hands, symbolically passing sins to it, that was sent out into the desert to perish in their place. It was a lamb that the prophet said would be led to the slaughter to redeem to God. To Jews “lamb” meant sacrifice for sin, deliverance from death, and a joyous return to the light of salvation through the Messiah to come. John made it clear to these four men that person was Jesus. “Look!” John said. “There He is! God’s Lamb!”
Thus, they spent some time with Jesus. Then they returned to their jobs, fishing on the Sea of Galilee. They already knew Him. But then the day came when He said, “Follow Me.”
What would you do if one day the Lord Jesus passed by and as He did He said to you, “Come, follow Me.” Would you promptly go with Him? And what would you understand by those words? Would they mean, “Walk behind Me and go with Me on a trip”? “Come, follow Me.” Would they mean, “Imitate Me; be like Me and do the very things I am doing”? Would they mean, “Take up where I leave off because I will be going away and you need to carry on with My work”? “Come, follow Me.” What would you understand with those words if Jesus said them to you?
These 4 men understood the full extent to which Jesus spoke these words. Jesus was a Rabbi. They had even addressed Him earlier with that title. Rabbi is a word that means “great one,” “master.” Rabbis were men who studied the Bible thoroughly. They gathered a circle of disciples around them in which the younger ones were trained by the rabbi. Their education could last as long as 20 years. During that time the rabbi lectured and examined them every day, all day until they learned everything that the rabbi taught. They were able to recite much of the Bible by heart and to explain to people what it meant. Rabbis were like seminary professors, highly, highly respected by people.
Becoming a student of a rabbi was a very difficult decision to make because one gave up everything else in his life to do so. There was so much to learn, the student stayed with the rabbi 24 hours a day, day-in, day-out. Wherever the rabbi went, the student went. A student never left a rabbi’s side (Julian Anderson). When Jesus told these men, “Come, Follow Me,” the fullness of what He was saying did not get by these men. Jesus was calling them to make dramatic changes in their lives. It means the same today.
When He finds you and shines upon you with the blessings of salvation, He also calls, “Follow me.” It means making dramatic changes in your life. It means walking behind Him, letting Him lead you. It means going with Him wherever He takes you in life. It means imitating Him in what He does and says. It means taking up where He left off and carrying His ministry forward. It means a lifelong commitment that breaks all other ties in a binding fellowship of life and death with Him. It is as He later said, “If anyone would follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for My sake and for the sake of the Gospel, will save it” (Mk.8:34-35). Neither Andrew nor Peter, James nor John misunderstood what Jesus meant when He said, “Follow Me and with the net of the Gospel, you will catch people for Me.”
To that end He calls us too. Maybe not as apostles but as witnesses to help those who are still living in darkness see the light of salvation in Christ. God grant it to us for Jesus’ sake. Amen

C a l e n d a r & A n n o u n c e m e n t s f o r Z i o n L u t h e r a n C h u r c h

Today  Jan.26  Epiphany 3

9:00 am  Divine Worship Service

10:15 am  Bible study for all age

Mon  Jan.27

Tues  Jan.28

10 am  The Gardens  Bible Study

11 am   Midweek Bible Class
(Just this week on Tuesday)

Wed.  Jan.29

Thurs.  Jan.30

Fri.  Jan.31

Sat.  Feb.1

Next Sun.  Feb.2  Epiphany 4

9:00 am  Divine Worship Service with Holy Communion

10:15 am  Bible study for all ages

A Brief Bible Study on God’s Word for Today
How do unbelievers come to find out about Jesus? Does the Holy Spirit just strike them with lightning one day and bring them to faith? No. Paul tells us that “faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ” (Ro 10:17). We can’t expect others to come to faith in Jesus if we remain silent. We’re reminded that Jesus is revealed through preaching.

The Gospel Lesson (Matthew 4:12-23)
1. What did Jesus do when He heard that the Baptizer had been arrested?
2. What did Jesus do to help Him in His job of preaching the good news of the kingdom?

Prayer/Sick List Those We Remember In Our Prayers Gail Stuesser; Dea Windsor, Alyssa Cook’s mother; Barbara Long; Clyde and Sharon Johnson; Dave Ballou; Angela Meek; Roger & Liz Lisenby’s brother and sister-in-law and granddaughter Jackie; Liz Lisenby, at home with a severe virus.

The Week in Review:

Last Sunday’s Worship Attendance: 34; Annual Meeting: 21; Sunday School: -; The Gardens Bible Class: 9; Midweek Bible Class: 4; Sunday Offering: General Fund $1928; Sign Fund: $300.

Upcoming Dates

Mon.-Tues., February 3-4 – MN District’s Southern Conference (IA & MO) Winter Pastors’ Institute, at Cedar Rapids, IA
Saturday, February 8 – Quarterly Women’s Breakfast & Bible Study at Zion, 9-11 am
February 26/27 – Midweek Lenten Suppers/Services begin; at Peace on Wednesday evenings, at Zion on Thursdays

Next Sunday’s Lessons:
Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany: The Presentation of Jesus: 1 Samuel 1:21-28; Hebrews 2:14-18; Luke 2:22-40

Answers to Today’s Gospel Lesson Brief Study:
3. He returned to Galilee to preach the gospel, fulfilling the words of Isaiah in the first lesson.
4. He began to call His disciples. What faith they showed by dropping everything and following Jesus!

This week I am praying for……

The Third Sunday after Epiphany                                                   January 21, 2018
Text: Matthew 4:12-23                 3 Year Series A                          18:2046
Theme: Come, Follow Me.

What would you do if one day the Lord Jesus passed by and as He did He said, “Come, follow Me.” Would you promptly go with Him? And what would you understand with those words? Would they mean, “Walk behind Me and accompany Me on a trip”?
“Come, follow Me.” Would it mean, “Imitate Me; be like Me and do the very things I am doing”?
“Come, follow Me.” Would it mean, “Take up where I left off because I am leaving, and you need to carry on with My work”?
“Come, follow Me.” What would you understand with those words if Jesus said them one day while He was passing you by?
It’s not such a far-fetched thought. It happened to me and my brother Andrew, as well as to James and his brother John. By the way, my name is Simon. You perhaps know me better as Peter. What is a person to think when Jesus directs, “Come, follow Me”?

I. In one respect it made me feel uneasy.
You see, we Jews understood to a fuller extent what Jesus meant with those words. Jesus was a teacher. Indeed, people addressed Him with the high title of rabbi. Rabbi is a Hebrew word. It means “great one,” “master.” Rabbis were men who studied the Bible very thoroughly. They gathered a circle of disciples around them in which the younger ones were trained by the older rabbi. Their education could last as long as 20 years. During that time the rabbi lectured and examined them every day, all day until they learned everything that the older rabbi taught. Thus, they were able to recite much of the Old Testament by heart and to explain to the people what the Bible meant. Rabbis were like seminary professors with doctorates in your day, highly, highly respected by our people.
We understood that becoming a student of a rabbi was a very difficult decision to make because one gave up everything else in his life to do so. Since there was so much to learn, the student stayed with the rabbi 24 hours a day, day-in, day-out. Wherever the rabbi went, the student went. A student never left a rabbi’s side, except for an occasional errand, because there was so much to learn (Julian Anderson). All Israel was beginning to treat Jesus as a rabbi, but a special one, a rabbi like they had never heard before.
Perhaps you are beginning to see the reason that in one sense it made me feel a little uneasy when Jesus said, “Come, Follow Me.” I did not misunderstand the fullness of what those words meant.
They meant walking behind Jesus to accompany Him wherever He went. They meant imitating Him in what He was doing and saying. They meant taking up wherever He left off and carrying His teaching forward. They meant a lifelong, self-commitment that breaks all other ties in a binding fellowship of life and death with Him. And they mean much the same for you as you call yourself Christian. Jesus said, “If anyone would follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for My sake and for the sake of the Gospel, will save it” (Mk.8:34-35). None of us, neither Andrew nor James nor John nor I misunderstood what Jesus meant when He said, “Come, Follow Me!”
We had already learned of Him and from Him. Before he was thrown into prison, John the Baptist had been the first to school us about Jesus. He told us months before this, “Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn.1:29).
To Jews like us the word “Lamb” meant something huge. Everything in the worship life of Old Testament times revolved around lambs and sacrifices. It was a lamb with its blood painted on the doorposts of our ancestors’ homes in Egypt that saved them from the Angel of Death. It was a lamb dying on the altar in the temple which assured us that God would send someone to atone for our sins. It was a lamb on whose head our priest laid his hands, symbolically passing our sins to it, that was sent out into the desert to perish in our place. It was a lamb that the prophet said would be led to the slaughter to redeem us to God. To Jews like us, “lamb” meant sacrifice for sin, deliverance from death, and a joyous return to God through a more powerful One who was yet to come. John made it clear that person had arrived in Jesus. “Look!” John said. “There He is!” So, months before this we spent time with Jesus. And what a rabbi He proved to be! Our hearts were lifted while we were with Him. Then we returned to our jobs, fishing on the Sea of Galilee. But He had given us lots of exciting things to ponder, knowing our Savior, the Messiah, had finally arrived.
We went about our fishing with renewed spirits. Jesus does that to you when He enters your life and you understand what He means to you eternally. We heard that He had returned to Galilee, but we went on fishing until this day when He came to us and said, “Come, follow Me.” I knew everything those words meant. It could not have been addressed to us if we had not already been with Him. It was a call to learn, to do, and to enter daily into fulltime fellowship with the work of this heavenly rabbi. I was just a simple fisherman, with a humble education. The more I considered it, the more I perceived the magnitude of the call and everything it implied. Can you see in one respect how it made me feel uneasy? Who was I, so lowly a person, to enter this relationship and fulfill such a task?

II. But in another respect it spurred me on.
Perhaps you know from our friend Luke’s account of that day what transpired next (Lk.5). Before anything else happened, a crowd that was eager to hear and touch Jesus gathered so closely around us that Jesus got into my boat. From the back of my boat (that resembles a pulpit), He taught such wonderful things. It is truly a joy to hear the Gospel as it finds it’s fulfillment in Jesus.
Afterwards He told us to row into the lake for a big catch of fish. But we had fished all night and had not caught a thing. And we were tired. Nevertheless, at His words we did what He said. When we did, we caught so many fish that our nets broke and our boat began to sink. Again, I felt uneasy. Who was I in the presence of this Holy One? I even spoke words that later I regretted. I told Jesus, “Lord, you should go away from me, for I am a sinful man.” How could I ever match up as one of His followers?
But Jesus put aside my uneasiness by letting me know He wanted me, He had forgiven me, and He would be with me. He said, “Have no fear. From now on you will be fishers of men, catching people (for eternity).” That assurance, with His call to follow, spurred me on for I realized that if Christ calls me to Himself, if Christ is in my boat, if Christ bids me go to people, there must be a great multitude to catch and He is the One who enables it. I am to learn, to do, to be His witness, and He with His Spirit will do the miraculous rest through the Gospel we speak.
Right after that I, along with my brother Andrew, James, and John said goodbye to all and left to follow Jesus so that we might learn to share the joy we had in a Savior by revealing Him to others.
You, dear friend, are not called to be an apostle like we were. Yet, you are called to the joy of discipleship in a Savior and, to be witnesses with us of the salvation that only He brings. Without Him people will die eternally, but with Him they find forgiveness and life forever. You are blessed to believe it like we did. So, learn the lesson of your calling, receive comfort and joy in it, and let it spur you on to become a true fisher of men for Christ.
And to help you picture the vital nature of it all, allow me, if you will, to tell you a fish story. After all, I am a fisherman and we fishermen tell fish stories. But this one is true.
Several years ago on the Fox River, 2 young men were fishing. In order to obtain a better casting angle, one of them waded further into the water. The river was swollen with snow melt, making the current flow rapidly. As the young man waded into the swiftly flowing stream, he slipped on a rock and hit his head as he went down. Knocked unconscious by the blow, he began to helplessly float towards the dam. His friend saw him floating towards disaster and did the only thing that he could do. From some 30 yards away, he cast his lure towards the unconscious friend. Miraculously, on that first cast, he somehow managed to snag his friend’s sock and slowly reeled him out of the turbulent current into the shallow water where another friend grabbed him and pulled him to safety.
Sometime later the one who snagged his friend’s clothing was asked about his thoughts. “All I could think about was my friend and how to help him. We just couldn’t let him drown out there!”
Things like that happen daily – on a spiritual level. Millions are drowning in the dark waters of sin and unbelief. Looking for a better cast in life, they wander from God. The promise of worldly wealth, power, pleasure, drugs, false religions, and other enticements beckon. But in the end, all such allurements trip them. They fall spiritually unconscious into the clutches of Satan who will drown them eternally in sin. The question for each of us is what can we do about it? What can we do about the family member, the friend, the fellow employee, the foreigner whom we suspect is being swept away by the current of unbelief to eternal damnation that lies ahead. The young fisherman said of his companion, “We just couldn’t let him drown out there!” What can we do?
Jesus responds, “Come, Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” It is His work, His training, His ability that enables you as you find your life in Him. God grant it to us in faith for Jesus’ sake.