Passage: Mark 1:14-20
Preacher: Rev. Joel Beyer
Series: Jesus Loves Me
Category: Love
Detail:
Jesus Loves Me: And He Chases Me Down With It!
Mark 1:14-20
This week we’re talking about about how we come to know and experience Jesus love for us for ourselves. How did you first experience the love of God? Was it through a church? In school? At home? Through a friend? Did you feel as though knowing God’s love brought you out of a hard situation in your life? There are all sorts of ways that God first reveals His love to people in this world, but the most important thing to realize is that it is indeed God who brings His love to us. It is God who seeks us out and by His Holy Spirit working in our lives through the words and actions of other believers, that He brings His Gospel, His Good News of love and forgiveness and captures our hearts and gives us the ability to trust in Him alone, for everything!
A story that illustrates this “God coming to us” awesome reality is the Bible passage that was read earlier this morning from Mark 1:14-20 in which Jesus is walking along the sea of Galilee and He reaches out to a few simple fishermen and calls them to follow Him and become fishers of men. Now, for those of you who have been fishing before, you know that fishing is not the easiest thing in the world. When I was a kid my dad sometimes would take me fishing with him, promising me that we would have a great time and catch lots of fish. You know it always had to be either super early in the morning and you would get dragged out of bed, or it was close to dusk and the mosquitos started coming out to feast on your blood, those mean little vampires. And you would sit there or stand there for hours, just waiting for that little bite. And when you feel it you reel it in as hard and fast as you can...and then spend five minutes taking the weeds off of the line, untangling it, putting new bait on the end, and repeating over and over until you’re sore, messy, and sunburnt.
Well Simon Peter and Andrew were fishermen in career. We read that Simon Peter and his brother Andrew are going about their daily jobs as fishermen along of the shore of the sea of Galilee, tossing their circular nets into the sea, hoping that they return with a good catch of fish. It must have been a slow day because Jesus comes along, and He says “follow me and I will make you fishers of men” and they drop everything and follow Him. I mean Wow! You think fishing is hard, how much more challenging is it to fish for people. But put yourselves in their shoes Would you drop everything and follow Jesus if you were them? If someone you had never met before came up to you and told you stop living your life the way you are now and follow Him, woudld you do it? Does the prospect of becoming a missionary and “fishing for men” make you just jump for joy? This is seemingly their first interaction with this Jesus and they are already being put to work. Would you leave your home, leave your job, leave your dreams and your desires and get in line behind this man, Jesus? Would you give up everything to follow him? I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty intense to me. This doesn’t sound reassuring, joyful, or at all enticing. But this is what a lot of churches and every other religion in the world preaches today. They teach that God demands that you forget about your own life and devote it to following Him and He in return will love you and bless you. But this is not what is going on when Jesus calls Simon and Andrew, or you and me, and to speak of it so simply misses the very point of why Simon and Andrew so immediately followed Jesus.
The disciples had in fact heard about Jesus through a man named John the Baptist. John the Baptist, just a few years before Jesus began His teaching on earth, had an interesting message. He went around proclaiming that the kingdom or the reign of God was close. You see, the Jews had been waiting eagerly for God to send someone to rescue them. They were sick of bowing down to the pagan, unbelieving, money grabbing Romans who controlled the land that God had given to them. While it was a time of peace and prosperity for Rome, anyone who was not a Roman citizen was not treated with such equality. The Jews wanted God’s peace and God’s law to rule their land as it had in the time of their forefathers. Johns message was that this man, this Messiah, this rescuer was coming soon! And so when Jesus approached Andrew and Simon at the sea of Galilee, they recognized the power and authority with which He spoke and they recognized Him as the one whom John had spoken about. Jesus went around speaking that the Kingdom of God is here. It is as though when Jesus arrives on the scene, the climax of God’s plan for humanity from all eternity is beginning to spill over.
From Jesus words in the Bible, we know the Kingdom of God is special. The Kingdom of God is important. The Kingdom of God is so earth-shattering that it makes you drop everything and follow it. But the Kingdom of God is not what the disciples expected, and it sure is not what the world expects today. You see, the Kingdom of God is not about us at all. It’s not about our pursuit to please God by being good people. It’s not about finding the right formula of good deeds and gratitude in order to find true happiness. It’s not even about living right so that God will bless you. Its all about Jesus. Its about Jesus being God Himself, sent not to establish an earthly kingdom with power and laws for us to be obedient to, but sent to be obedient to God’s perfect law for us and thus He was able to conquer sin, death, and the devil and bring complete forgiveness, mercy and love straight to you and me forever and ever. Jesus didn’t come to show us a bunch of new rules to follow. He came to follow the rules of religion for us. When He says follow me, the word he used literally means for us to stand behind Him, to put our trust in Him as He leads us. If I could put an image in your head: As our King, bringing His kingdom to power in our lives, we follow Him into battle, but before death and the devil can get to us, He takes the brunt of the attack for us on the cross. Our fearless leader gave himself up, died the death that we deserved, and then conquered death and rose from the grave. And now He continues to call us simply to trust in Him, to follow Him into eternity, knowing that His mercy and love is enough for us.
But the problem that we run into as fallen human beings is that it’s all too easy for us to resist His love, to think that we know better than God, to fight against trusting Him, when we’re knee deep in our own problems in life, when we don’t have everything that we desire, when there are so many distractions in this life. I don’t think its a coincidence that Jesus told Simon and Andrew to “drop their nets” because what to nets do? They tangle you up. Metaphorically, the nets in our lives ensnare us from truly trusting that God loves us and is with us. What are the nets in your life that cause you to resist trusting in God? Is it a relationship you’re struggling with? A guilty conscience? A difficult situation at work? The inability to stay on top of your bills and provide for your family the way that you really want to? The reality is that we will always have nets that seek to tangle us up, and often, we give into them, but the Good News is that Jesus doesn’t stop coming to us with His love and mercy and forgiveness.
When God comes for us with His love, He doesn’t stop. The Psalm that we all know so well, Psalm 23 says that goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. The word that is used there literally means that God’s mercy and His love will chase me down, will pursue me heavily all the days of my life. When Jesus calls us to follow Him, He changes our hearts and gives us everything we need to follow Him. The apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:3 that no one can say that Jesus is Lord unless the Holy Spirit gives Him the ability to do so. The very fact that we can say Jesus is our Savior, that we want to follow Him means that the Holy Spirit has indeed come to us and given us that faith. Even when we resist God’s love, even when we sometimes in our circumstances in life, we don’t place our trust in Christ alone, we have the assurance that He comes to us. He’s promised to be Here today, as we gather together around His Word. That’s why we exist as the church, because Christ has called us together, to be in unity with one another, to work together to bring others to know His love too. When He calls us to follow Him and become fishers of men is solely because He wants everyone to know Him and have confidence in who He is and what He has done for us. Martin Luther once said that we as believers are “Little Christs” because it is through us that Christ seeks and saves those who are lost. He also said it simply that the Christian life is faith and trust towards God and fervent love, even prayerful service towards neighbor! When we realize that our lives are secure in Christ, the purpose that God has called us to in our lives becomes crystal clear. Love for the people in our lives flows freely, not from guilt or trying to be a “good person” to earn God’s love. It’s already been given. It chases us down! God’s love is not something we have to go searching for. He brings it to us.
God’s love is pretty incredible. He gives it to us even when we resist it. Its there for us, even when we don’t think we need it. And when we think that nothing in this world and in our lives seems to be going right, He’s right there in His Word, through the people in His Church offering just what we need. Hope, life, a new start, each and every day. Following Jesus doesn’t mean we have to forget everything in our lives and become missionaries in a far away land. It simply means taking Him at His word. Trusting in our heart that He loves us, that He cares about us, even though we will never deserve it. That he has a purpose for our lives to use personalities and gifts that He’s given to us to be fishers of people and to share His love the people He’s placed in our lives. God bless you. Amen.
Vicar Joel Beyer
January 22, 2012
