FOLLOW | Apprentice

If you would please remain standing for the reading of God's Word. This is a reading from Matthew chapter 4 verse 18. As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee he saw two brothers Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake for they were fishermen. Come follow me Jesus said and I will send you out to fish for people. At once they left their nets and followed him. Going on from there he saw two other brothers James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee preparing their nets. Jesus called them and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him. This is the Word of the Lord. You may be seated. How's it going Church of the City? Good to see you guys tonight. My name is Keithen. If we haven't had a chance to meet I'm the pastor that oversees all things Next Generation so Youth of the City and College NYC. There's this crew over here. And tonight we are starting a new series in the Gospel of Matthew and this is an opportunity I would say for our church to get behind the same vision over the summer. Some people hit the summer and they're ready to just phone it in to just kind of go on autopilot because of how intense the normal rhythms of life are but I believe that God has something unique for us this summer if we're gonna lean in and hear all that he has for us. To set up this series we wanted to put this question it kind of sits at the core of what we're trying to address with this series in front of you tonight and it's this. Is it possible for someone to be a Christian and yet not be a disciple of Jesus? Dallas Willard in his book The Great Omission wrote this, the greatest issue facing the world today with all its heartbreaking needs is whether those who are identified as Christians will become disciples of Jesus. And this is a this is a bold claim. Is that fair to say? Like the most pressing thing for the world is that those who would affiliate with Christianity would actually become disciples of Jesus. And it really presses on the definitions that we use when we talk about Christianity and we talk about discipleship. You may be in the room and those are kind of newer concepts to you or you've been in rooms like this for your whole life and you feel like you know what a Christian is.

You feel like you've already made up your mind about what a disciple is and what discipleship looks like. One of the most legendary football coaches of all time is named Vince Lombardi and he's actually a grad from Fordham here in the city. Do we have any grads from Fordham University? No? Sick. He went to Fordham. Oh we have one? This is for you. This is for you. Amazing. Okay, Vince Lombardi went to Fordham for you and he he was one of the most legendary football coaches of all time. He's coached the Green Bay Packers in the 60s and the Packers won the first two Super Bowls ever. He was so successful that they named the Super Bowl trophy after him, the Lombardi trophy. But he would start every single season of coaching the best football team in the world at the time by taking a football, bringing it into the room of the world's best football players, and he would slam it down on the table and look these men in the eyes and say, gentlemen this is a football. Which sounds kind of patronizing to like the best football players in the world, but he was getting at something here. That if everyone on the team just brought their own assumptions of the fundamentals of the game, of how to do everything that they think that they know better than the very basic things, that the team will not achieve its potential. The energy will be too fragmented. You need to get down and drill into what's at the core of the game. And that's similar, that's what we want to do for you this summer. Now how many of you have been following the World Cup recently? Anybody? About half the room. Okay I'm going to alienate about half the room with another sports reference. But how many of you have seen the Norwegian fans going crazy at the World Cup? Anybody? I have a video for you. There was a group of Norwegians on a subway rooting for their World Cup team. Can you show that video? It's, God, it's, people from Norway have no idea how disgusting the subway is. Like, what are they sitting in?

Lord only knows. But what they're doing is they're mimicking their ancestors that the Norwegian ancestors, they're Vikings. So they're like rowing a Viking ship in the middle of the subway in New York. And this is like, this became kind of viral. It became, it took over really the fan base. And they thought if the players on the field could see us all moving in unison together, rowing our ancient Viking boats, then maybe we can get a win at the World Cup. And so you multiply that one subway car across thousands of Norwegians. Check this out, just moving all at once, all in unison. It's powerful, right? Like that's, but Norway's doing really well. So maybe there's something to it. But really, I mean, that idea of like, okay, of all of the different things that we could go after, of all of the different definitions that we could have of Christian or disciple, if we all take this summer and we just start rowing in the same direction, we just have our mind fixed on one objective, and that's to follow Jesus, to give him everything that we've got, we are going to hit the fall in strength. So that is the invitation for us that we're gonna get into tonight. What do we mean when we say the word disciple? The word that we translate as disciple in English

is the Greek word mathetes, or in Hebrew, it's the word talmid. And the most literal translation of this word would be something like student or learner, a pupil of a professor, something like that. But we actually can miss the fullness of what this term is meant to be because of our education system. We live in a world today where education is so much about retaining information that is given you from some authority figure. If they say it, you retain it, and then you regurgitate it on a test and hopefully you had it memorized enough to pass. And if we think that's what disciple means, we'll actually miss the full picture of what was happening in Jesus' world. The best definition, John Mark Comer, as well as Dallas Willard, a lot of spiritual formation writers say that the best translation of the word mathetes, or talmid, is apprentice, which is somebody who follows the lifestyle of someone in order to learn deeply from them. Willard wrote in Divine Conspiracy this, the definition of a disciple. He says, a disciple or apprentice is simply someone who has decided to be with another person in order to become capable of doing what that person does or to become what that person is.

A really literal example from my life, my grandfather was an electrician and he wired in homes in rural South Dakota. And my father in the summers would be his apprentice, would be his right hand and would learn the trade from him. So it began, like my dad having no idea how to wire in a home, how to work with electrical grids and how to wire circuit boards and all this stuff. But over the course of time, my dad got to the point where he could wire almost an entire house by himself and then just have his dad check on, is this good or is this not good? And he picked up a very practical, tangible skill that he could use for the rest of his life. And that's what we need to be thinking when we hear the word disciple. Now what you'll notice if you read through the Bible, the word Christian doesn't really show up that often. Have you guys noticed that? The word Christian is only used three times in the entire Bible. Which is kind of shocking, only three such a prominent word in our world in following Jesus. But the word disciple is used over 300 times in the Bible. 300 disciples, three mentions of the term Christian. Now if you were to dive into those 300 uses of the word disciple,

296 of those uses, so all but four, disciple is used as a noun. It's to describe the identity of a person where only four times is disciple ever used as a verb. Now if I was to think about the modern. evangelical church. I think that what we've done is actually flip that percentage on its head. Would you agree? That we talk about discipleship far more as a verb than a noun. Discipling is like, oh, who are you discipling? Do you have time for discipleship? I had time last semester for discipleship, but I don't really know if I can be, if I could show up for discipleship again. It's verb language. And what we're in danger of if we just only use disciple as a verb is that we can think that discipleship is this optional add-on to a life of being a Christian. It's like, I believe that Jesus is Lord and like maybe I'll get around to discipleship if I can squeeze it in somewhere. It would be, it would be like this. An identity statement of me is that I am a husband. I'm married to an incredible woman named Celeste, mother to our two boys, just an absolute legend. ICU nurse at Sloan Kettering. I could go on for days. She's amazing and I'm married to her. My identity is husband. Now it would sound a little bit weird to you if I came and I was like, hey, you know, I know that I'm married to Celeste, but like I don't really have like time to be a husband. Like I don't, I can't really, I can't really fit it in. You wouldn't understand like I'm going through a lot right now. There's so much pressure on me through working. And I have all these interests and things that I really, I really want to spend time doing. All these hobbies and things I really want to get into. I really want to play pickleball a lot this summer. And so sorry, I just don't really have time to be a husband. That's not good. That's, that's not the way that you would say that that word works. And I think that often we do the same thing with discipleship. That, oh, I'd see if I could fit this into my summer rather than, you are a disciple, okay? The minute that you say that, Jesus, you are the Lord of my

life, you're a disciple. So then you move forward with the mindset of an apprentice. So you either are or you're not a disciple, okay? So if you are a disciple, then what is the primary objective of a disciple? And you can drill it down. We've titled the series with this one word. You could drill it down to this. The primary objective of a disciple is to follow after a rabbi. To follow, to apprentice under a rabbi. Now this word follow is just warped and distorted almost beyond its original understanding to Jesus and the authors of the New Testament in our world today. Up until 2006, social media platforms had been relational in nature and reciprocal. Meaning that, how many of you had MySpace in the room? This is like outing the Millennials in the room. Okay, I see you. How about Facebook? You got a Facebook in the name? Do you still have one to keep up with your grandma or something? Yeah, a few people. So the way that these platforms worked is they were reciprocal. So I, if, say for example, when I wanted to send a friend request to this cute girl that I met at Bible camp, who became my wife later, I had to muster up the courage to send a Celeste a friend request. And you kind of put something on the line, right? It's like I really want to have a relationship with you, but it's kind of all in your hands. And so I sent my little friend request into the internet and prayed a lot about that moment. Because here's the thing, if she accepts that friend request, I then have access to send her a message. I could post on her wall. I could comment on her photos. It opens up a world of possibilities for me. But if she doesn't accept that friend request, then I stay in friend request purgatory, and that's not a good place to be in relationship. This was how social networking platforms worked until all of that changed in 2006 when Twitter introduced the follow button. And I would, I would argue this is the primary understanding that has formed our culture in understanding the word follow. Follow me. Follow this thing. Click, subscribe, follow along. And we use this so much that it actually loses its meaning. You now for the first time were able to curate your feed that was in front of you by media outlets that you wanted to receive news from. You could hear from celebrities that you like. You could hear from influential voices. And

you, the people didn't have to follow you back. So there was no reciprocity in it at all. Following at that moment then became asymmetrical, relatively anonymous, and an extremely cheap access point to influential people. All you have to do is click a button and now you follow them. Which is so funny, follow is a very physical word. It's like walk behind a person, do what that person does. That's what the word follow actually means. But if you were to ask me like, hey, are you following Tyler Jenkins on Instagram? I would say, yeah, I follow him, but I'm not like stalking Tyler, okay? I follow him and he shows up on my feed every now and then when him and Sapphire do something really fun. It's very, very different. So when Jesus goes to the boats on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and he looks these young guys in the eye and he says, follow me. They weren't hearing smash that like button and subscribe. Jesus has a new YouTube channel or they weren't hearing like, oh Jesus, I'm so glad that you have a sub stack. It's like a part-time job for me to keep up with the sub stacks of my friends and I don't have time for your sub stack. I'm so sorry. They weren't hearing this cheap transactional language when it came to this. Follow me would have changed the trajectory of everything in their lives. So here's what's at stake. I think that our church is at a unique moment in its history. That you, right now, are in a church that God is doing a lot of beautiful things in. We're seeing lost people come to faith like never before. We're watching a move of God just start to build and we're a part of it. It's incredible. But here's the danger in a church like ours and at the dynamic that we are right now. The danger is that we could become a church that simply admires Jesus,

like clicking a follow button, rather than actually embodying the way of Jesus in our city. And if we don't get discipleship right, then we could become a church that looks very different than what Jesus had in mind for us. And so if we were to talk about admiring Jesus Christianity, what would that look like? I think it would look like these three things that we have a temptation to fall into. The first is that we revere Jesus. We have all of the right theology that Jesus is God, that Jesus died for our sins, that he is the Savior of the world. We could have all the right things. We could think and revere him as God, but it would just stay there. Next, we would affiliate with Jesus. So say that you're filling out a census form or a form at the DNV or something for your student visa or whatever, and there's a little box that you are meant to check your religious affiliation. And hopefully, you would check the box that says Christian. I affiliate with being a Christian. But then the next is that we applaud. You come into an environment like this, maybe once a week, twice a week if you go to the prayer room, and you're in an environment that applauds the way of Jesus, that we celebrate him. We sing, we lift his name high. Now, discipleship is not less than these things. It includes these things. This is not a bad—these are not bad things. But our faith in Jesus cannot stop at just admiring Jesus. We can't stop here. And I think that what will happen if we stop here is that the faith of our church will be dismissible. Let me tell you why. If we only revere Jesus, we'll be put in the camp of just another religion. Everybody has a belief about God or the gods or what's ultimate in life, so there's nothing really special about you just choosing to follow Jesus or choosing to revere him.

Next, if we only affiliate with Jesus, people can dismiss us as just tribal, just going along with the flow, just, oh, well, this is just the thing that you were raised in, or man, I was really lonely, so I just wanted to be a part of something, so I came to a gathering, or I'm very single and I really want to meet somebody who's halfway decent, so I go to this thing at 6 p.m. at Fort Rutherford Place. It's like, that realm is easily dismissed, tribalism, just going with the flow. The next thing is applause of Jesus. There's a heavy critique on the church right now around emotionalism, that if the lights are just right and there's like a fog machine and the worship music isn't bad and the person says the right thing, then we can experience this emotional encounter with God. But that's really easy to dismiss as well, thinking that, oh, if you just had an emotional experience, it doesn't mean that there's anything objectively true about what you say. Okay, so admiring Jesus cannot be our end game. This is not what Jesus had in mind. So if we get back to the text, what did Jesus have in mind? When he looked those disciples in the face on that shore in Galilee, what was he thinking? And if we can recover what Jesus thinks about discipleship, that actually unlocks how we can live that accurately here in our moment. Though Jesus did not invent discipleship, but rather he steps into the Jewish educational system of his time. Rabbis were like the most honored and revered people in that culture. They represented like the height of scholarship in the Torah and the pinnacle of the Jewish education system. So you started in education in like elementary school age in a school that was called Beit Sefer,

which means house of the book. And in Beit Sefer, from the time you were about six until 12, this entire group of people would memorize the entire Torah. So could you imagine by 12 years old, having Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy completely memorized? That was the education system in that oral culture. They were soaked in the word of God knowing the teachings of their people. But at that point, about 12 years old or so, most young people would go into their family trades. If your father was a fisherman, you were a fisherman. If your father was a blacksmith, you were a blacksmith. All of these things, you would just go into the trade that was given you by your lot in life. But if you were like the best of Beit Sefer, like one of the top scholars of your little elementary school class, you had the Torah just dialed and memorized, you could move on to what was called Beit Midrash. And Beit Midrash is the next step of the education system where students would put the rest of the Hebrew Bible or the Hebrew scriptures to memory. Could you imagine that? Putting from Genesis to Malachi to memory in your heart. That's how highly this culture valued God's word. But then from that point, it was an honor to be invited into the next level. But then most of the time, people were moving on,

going into the family trades and entering society. But if you were like the top 1%, if you were the valedictorian, if you were the top of your class, if you were the best of the best of the best, then you could move on to the next level of education, which was called the Talmidim, or becoming a Talmid, a disciple of a rabbi. And what this would look like is you would gather up all of the knowledge, all of the resume, all of the courage that you have, and you would approach a rabbi. You would find a rabbi that you wanted to follow. And when you come to this, you gotta come prepared, because this rabbi is gonna grill you. They're gonna interrogate you, they're gonna interview you, and see if you have what it takes to become a rabbi. And so many of these students would come before a rabbi, and they'd be begging to be involved. They'd be begging, here's what I can do, here's how much scripture I have memorized, here's how good that I am, and I want to be your disciple. And the vast, vast, vast majority of people that applied to be disciples were dismissed, were told go home, go enter your family trade. But a few rabbis, when they see in the eyes of these students potential, they believe, they start in this interview process, they start to see, I think that this person, this kid could do what I do.

They could actually be like me. The disciple, or the rabbi would say to this young disciple these simple words, come follow me, come and follow me. And the disciple at that moment enters a whole new realm of existence. They become an apprentice of that rabbi. They have to leave their entire home, they have to leave everyone that they've known, everything that they felt secure in, and follow this rabbi around everywhere that they went. The goal of a disciple was threefold in this culture. The first was that you were to be in the presence of your rabbi. You were to walk in physical proximity as close to him as you could to help with whatever you needed. If that's where the rabbi slept, you were sleeping in the same place. If that's what the rabbi ate, that's what you're eating. If this is where the rabbi walked, that's where you were walking. This was physical proximity and leaving everything that you knew before. The second aim was to become like your rabbi. to take on his lifestyle, his mannerisms, to become like him in the most intimate ways of his person. And then last, the third aim is to embody the mission of the rabbi in the world. So a rabbi would have a set of interpretations of the Bible, and it was called his yoke,

the yoke of the Torah that a certain rabbi would carry. And so the aim at the end of the discipleship process is that the yoke of the rabbi would be given to the disciple and that they could be an extension of that rabbi into the future, extending his mission. So what you guys will notice here is that our church is built on these three anchors as well, presence, formation, and mission. And we draw these because we think that this is actually how you become a holistic disciple. If all of this seems like a lot of Jewish history, we in the modern church, we use the language of Lord and Savior a lot. Has anybody heard, have you ever made Jesus your Lord and Savior? Like by that moniker, yeah. That way of speaking about Jesus also kind of contains this idea that Jesus is our Savior, that we are forgiven from our sins, from the work that Jesus did on the cross, that we are completely made right and reconciled in relationship to God. That's the Savior part. And most of church today focuses on that piece of it and less on the Lord aspect of it, Jesus becoming the ultimate authority for your life, that you would submit everything that you are under his authority. And if we miss Jesus as Lord, we're kind of missing out

on the whole world of discipleship. Jesus in Luke chapter six, verse 46, was frustrated with people that just affiliated with him. It just said, Lord, Lord, we'll call Jesus Lord all over the place. But he says this, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I say? There is a deeper invitation than to just call Jesus Lord. The Hebrew scripture, the prophets would talk about people that honor God with their lips, but their hearts are far from God. And this is something that discipleship is meant to correct, all of life integration under him. So if we were to put up a chart here of the difference between admire Christianity and apprenticing under Jesus, something is gonna come into focus for us. I think that instead of just revering God and leaving it there, there is a passion within the heart of a disciple that wants to be with their rabbi. Like every part of our lives being fused with him because we love his presence, we're passionate about him. Instead of just affiliating ourself with him, we will choose to form the very patterns, rhythms, and habits of our life to look more like Jesus than to look like the world around us. And then when it comes to applauding him, just coming into worship gatherings

that have great worship and having Jesus on your T-shirt and all of these things, moving from just that to all of life costing you something to give your everything to him. Not just once a week in a rally, but every single day in the ordinary rhythms of your life. So let's go back to the boats again. So Jesus comes to these fishermen on the Sea of Galilee, and he kind of starts to mess with this formula that was given him about how to be a rabbi and what disciples are supposed to do. Jesus subverts this in really interesting ways. What you'll notice here if you look at the text in verse 18, that he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew, and they were casting a net into the lake for they were fishermen. "'Come, follow me,' Jesus said." Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. The disciple is meant to beg and plead on his knees to become a disciple of a rabbi. Jesus is going to these people. He's seeking them out. They're not coming with a stacked resume. They're not coming impressive. Jesus finds people, and he invites them in. This wasn't a typical rabbi at all. And on top of that, notice if you look down at verse 21, he went on from there, and he saw two brothers, James and James.

John, the sons of Zebedee. And so they were fishing with their father, which in the education system, what did that say about their intellect? What did that say about their spirituality? What did this say about their knowledge of the Torah? They didn't make the cut. They weren't the ones that should have been pursued for apprenticeship at all. And then Jesus calls out their identity. He says, if you come and follow me, I will make you fishers of men, meaning you can do the thing that I am doing. In the rabbinical culture, it's, hey, prove that you're good enough. Prove, come and be with me, but we'll see if you make the cut in the end. And Jesus looks these young guys in the face and says, if you follow me, I will make you a fisher of men. This is a very different kind of rabbi. The disciples follow Jesus. They drop their nets because they're probably shocked that they were chosen. Like, could you imagine going up to somebody who's working a really hard manual labor job in the city and saying, you have a full ride to study anything that you want at Harvard right now. All you have to do is come with me. You'd probably see that person, like, leave whatever they were doing and go.

And it makes so much sense. Jesus is giving these people an opportunity to do something that they never thought was possible for their lives. And as they follow him, they're kind of expecting the normal rabbi stuff. Hey, are we gonna become teachers? Are we gonna become preachers? Are we gonna understand the Torah? Are we gonna do all this stuff? But they just see that Jesus starts to break down the boxes of what a traditional rabbi was. A rabbi at the time would often quote other scholars in order to kind of piece together a teaching. So their teachings would sound like this. Well, rabbi so-and-so said this, rabbi so-and-so said that, rabbi so-and-so said this. And I think that my perspective is some kind of blend of these opinions of these people. That's how rabbis would often teach. But what Jesus did, if you get a little bit further in the Gospel of Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, he speaks on his own authority. He says, you've heard it said this, but I say to you this. And he's speaking not from borrowed authority, but with his own authority. You know, at the time, people even had different boxes for like what a prophet would be, what a priest would be, what a king would be.

And Jesus just blows these out of the water too. The priesthood, priests were those that would facilitate the sacrifices for the forgiveness of sins. But Jesus started to speak of himself as the sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. Instead of being like another prophet that the word of the Lord would come to Isaiah, the word of the Lord would come to Jeremiah, what we see in Jesus is that he starts to speak on behalf of God himself. It's not the word of the Lord came to Jesus, it's I and the Father are one. If you've heard me and seen me, you have heard and seen the Father. Nobody had a category for this. Nobody had a category for Jesus as the kind of king that he was. Not coming in to overthrow and to dominate with military power, but to introduce the kingdom of God, to die for his enemies, to introduce a whole new way that the world is supposed to function. And this is the rabbi that we follow. Jesus, yes, is a rabbi. Yes, we're meant to relate to him like disciples. That's the way that he wants this relationship to be set up. But he is not just a rabbi. He is so much more than that.

He is the promised Messiah of Israel. He is the son of God. He is the king of the universe. So not only does Jesus up the ante, he says, I am the king of the universe, I am God. But then he looks normal people like you and me in the eyes, and he says wild things about what is possible for the life of a disciple. Jesus believes more is possible for your life than you believe for your life, by a wild margin. Jesus says in Luke chapter six that a student that is fully trained can be like their master. Jesus believes that you can be like him. John 14, Jesus says that those of you that follow me, who believe in me, will do the same. do the things that I have been doing, and even greater things. You're like, Jesus, did I hear you right there? Greater things? In John chapter 20, Jesus says, as the Father has sent me, so I am sending you. Let that sit in for a moment. As God the Father sent Jesus, think about intimacy and authority, he says, I am sending you to do the same things that I have done. This is wild. See, I think many of us are comfortable with a version of Christianity that has us in the stands.

I brought a photo of Madison Square Garden, and from the nosebleeds, this is kind of what the arena looks like. And I did a little bit of research. In games three and four of the NBA Finals, these nosebleed seats up at the very top were going for up to $14,000, which was insane. People were taking out second mortgages and going into debt just to be in the room. But I think many of us can see our life in God like this, meaning that if we're in the nosebleeds, we're chilling, we may be the furthest away, and we're like, man, just happy to be here, just happy to see what's going on. I got my jersey on, it says Brunson on the back, like I'm in the room. And we get so comfortable that that's enough. And maybe if we were like hyper-spiritual, maybe we'd be like Timothee Chalamet or Spike Lee or Ben Stiller or Taylor Swift, and we'd be courtside. Like, oh man, if I'm really in it, if I really am at this, I'm gonna be courtside. You can see that is the height of your spiritual inheritance. And I just wanna say, Jesus sees you not back here, but he sees you right here. Can you go to this next picture? What a moment. He actually entrusts you to be on the court.

He wants you to get in the game. You're not in the nosebleeds, you are a participant. Jesus, it's more important than this, if you can fathom that. It's more important than this. Jesus said, I will establish the kingdom of heaven on the earth through the church by giving authority to women and men like you filled with the Holy Spirit. And so I don't know what image you have in your mind when you think about your potential as a disciple, but I want you to get this seared in your mind. This is the moment of history that God has called you to New York City. This is the moment that God has brought you here for a reason, you are not in the nosebleeds. God has divinely brought you here to live on a mission for him and to become the kind of person that does what he does. Just to wrap up here, every single week through this series, what we'll do is we'll give some concrete practices to flesh out the way of Jesus in our city this summer. And it's very practical. I think that if anything, that the church has erred on being too theoretical when it comes to following Jesus. So we're gonna spend the whole summer getting very, very practical. But for this first teaching, we just wanted to kind of get it 30,000 feet and get us all on the same page of,

Jesus has wild things for you as you step into the assignment of being a disciple this summer. What we wanna do is just give you a bit of an audit of your own heart and life when it comes to your apprenticeship to Jesus. Dallas Willard in his book, The Divine Conspiracy created this chart that I find so helpful. It's called The Golden Triangle of Spiritual Growth. It's like, what a title, right? The Golden Triangle of Spiritual Growth. What this does is it puts into one chart the ways that these aspects of our life in God are meant to work together, that all of them fuse together. We then can share in what the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 3 called the mind of Christ. And it's the presence, being in the presence of our rabbi, following him and living on his mission with a little bit different language. The first thing is the action of the Holy Spirit, opening yourself up to more intimacy and relationship with God through the Holy Spirit than you ever have in your life before. The next is by taking on a set of disciplines or rhythms from the life of Jesus that would actually transform the way that you live. And then embodying the mission,

this has to happen in your ordinary, normal life here in the city, not just spiritual highs or moments of connection at church, but in the actual context that you live. So I just wanna give a quick thought on each here, presence, formation, and mission. Samuel Whitefield wrote a book called Discipleship Begins With Beholding. And he has this really helpful framework that Jesus doesn't want people to follow him just because they have to, but because they long to in the depths of their being. This is from that book. Jesus never expected everyone to follow him. He looks for those who find joy in him. He is very patient with us in our shortcomings and failures, but he does not want people to follow him out of duty. He wants to be an object of delight to his bride, like any other groom preparing for a wedding. If people do not see Jesus as a beautiful treasure, far more desirable than anything else, they will not endure the process of discipleship, and they will certainly not sell everything to obtain him and become like him. We cannot call people to deep discipleship when they do not see Jesus as the superior treasure to every other treasure. We can't properly disciple people based on guilt and compulsion. Did you guys know that God doesn't want

a relationship with you based on guilt or compulsion? What a word. He wants a people that follow his son more deeply and consider him the greatest treasure than any other treasure. So the question to ask yourself tonight is do you want to be with your rabbi? Do you want to be with him? Do you want to devote yourself to him? And if you're here tonight, and the answer to that may be no, or man, I in the past have had a deep relationship with Jesus, but I just feel like I've lost that desire, I've lost that love for him. Tonight can be a night that you come to this altar, and your prayer could be this simple. God, I want to want you. Jesus, I want to want you. And you know the beautiful thing, the work of the Holy Spirit is to pour the love of God into your hearts. This is Romans chapter five. It says the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. So you might be coming here like me often into this room, feeling like my heart is cold and dead in relationship to God, and I need it set ablaze with love for him again, and receiving prayer, asking for a filling of the Holy Spirit

is possible for you tonight. Don't just read Matthew over the summer. Get to know who Jesus is. Find a desire for him in that. Next, we want to talk about formation. This is renouncing all rival gods, all rival habits and practices that would form you out of the image of Jesus. James K.A. Smith wrote a book called You Are What You Love, and he wrote this. Spiritual formation in Christ requires a lot of rehabituation, precisely because we build up so many disordered habits over a lifetime. If you think of all of the love-shaping practices, anything that you do in your life that stokes love or devotion for someone or something, if you think about all of those things as liturgies, then this means that you could be worshiping other gods without even knowing it. The question to ask yourself with formation is, who are you allowing to define the good life for you? Who are you comparing? Who shows up in your algorithm that makes you feel worse about yourself and more inspired to be like them? That's something to pay attention to, because what we want to do is take the definition of success, happiness,

and how we are to live our lives in the city and then give Jesus permission to shape those things deeply, and then last, this question of mission. Does my everyday life embody the way of Jesus in the city? Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, one more time. He says, I'm learning from Jesus to live my life as he would live my life if he were I. I'm not necessarily learning to do everything he did, like every small, little, tiny detail of his life, but I am learning how to do everything I do in the manner that he did everything that he did, and you may be hearing this teaching tonight, and this is overwhelming and difficult, and you feel like, I just don't know if I have the capacity to actually become a disciple of Jesus. One, I'll say you have more capacity than you think. It's just changing what your inputs are, but the second thing is that Jesus wants to meet you in your actual life. Many of us think that we need to be someone else in another life stage, in another city, with another context, then we could actually be disciples of Jesus, and that's not true. Jesus, at where. Wherever you are in the world, in your career, in your life stage, you can be his disciple. And we're gonna take some really practical steps in what that would look like,

but just take heart that you can become like him. You know, if people were to follow me around on a normal day in the city, if they were to follow me on my commute on the train, if they were to watch me walk Sonny and Powell, my boys, if they were to watch me walk them to the park, if they were to see how I interact with people in line at a bodega, if they were to see the things that I search for, my search history on my browser, or the people that I follow on Instagram or online, if someone was to take my bank statements and go line by line through how I spent my money that month, would people be able to know that I'm an apprentice of Jesus or not? This is the call for us, and this is like a gut check. This teaching was so hard to write because there's so much of my life that I feel like I am on the journey of apprenticeship. I don't feel like I've fully arrived. But the beauty is that wherever you are, Jesus' invitation to you is the same, come and follow me. See, admiration Christianity can be explained and dismissed as hype, sociology, classic religion. But apprenticeship to Jesus can overthrow empires with sacrificial love. It can form you to be a person you wouldn't hardly recognize yourself a year from now if you take this invitation seriously. Just to close as we go into a moment of prayer,

could I have everyone stand up in the room? And then if you're on the prayer team, if you could come forward, just have an invitation for us to step in here. There was this blessing that began to circulate in the rabbi's teaching around the time that Jesus was on earth. And this blessing would be spoken when a brand new disciple would sit before a rabbi. This blessing would be spoken over them. And I feel like for some of us in the room tonight, this is a profound night of decision, that you go from somebody who's just curious about Christianity or maybe loosely affiliated with Christianity or you've had hard things with your past, you're kind of at an arm's distance with Jesus, that you actually go from that to being a disciple of Jesus, saying I will follow you with everything that I've got. And when a new disciple was made, this blessing would get spoken over them. May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi. May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi. This following Jesus, following your rabbi is physical proximity. Think about the ancient world, walking along dusty, disgusting roads as the rabbis would walk, they would kick up dust behind them. And the word picture here

is that you would be so close to Jesus. You would draw so near to him that you would be covered in the dust that he kicked up behind him. This is the image of discipleship that we want to offer as accurate to the New Testament and absolutely available for your life tonight if you wanna say yes to it. So if you would bow your heads, we're just gonna pray and we're gonna go into a moment of response. Jesus, our rabbi, Jesus, our Lord, Jesus, our King, tonight we pray that you would deliver us, deliver us from thinking small things of you, deliver us from calculating our devotion to you, deliver us from lives of compromise and complacency. Jesus, we wanna step into all that you said that is available for us. We pray that tonight there would be just light that just shines into darkness all across this room that you would draw people to yourself, pull people into a relationship with you that's more powerful than they ever thought possible. Would you do that tonight in Jesus' name? Amen. Amen. So a few calls for prayer. If you're here in the room and that prayer resonates with you, I feel like my heart is cold and distant from Jesus.

I want the love of God to be restored to my heart. Come and receive prayer. No shame there. Just come and receive the filling of the Holy Spirit. Maybe for you, it's like I have disqualified myself. I've been in the nosebleeds and I feel like God's calling me to get on the court. This is a moment for you to say, I'm in. Maybe for you, you've disqualified. You've said, I'm not a person that has space or time for this. Jesus is saying, come, follow me. He's saying that to you tonight. So wherever you are across the room right now, if any of those things resonated with you, come and receive prayer. We're gonna go into an extended window of worshiping and seeking God. So let's go into this together.