We
are at day 28 in the “50 days to Pentecost” theme. This is
not an arbitrary date. We started counting the day after
Easter and exactly on the 30th
of May we will hit Pentecost Sunday. If you have a
calendar with any kind of religious focus it will probably
call May 30th , Pentecost Sunday….Why?
Because in Biblical times
the calendar was set by God himself and was very specific.
The first feast of the year was
1) Passover followed
by…
2) Unleavened Bread
one day later…
3) Feast of First-fruits
the Sunday following Unleavened Bread
4) Feast of
Weeks/Pentecost exactly 50 days later
Why does any of this matter
to us today?…
Because, in God’s great
plan of the ages, in about 4 BC Jesus Christ, the Messiah,
God’s Son come to this earth to take away the sin of the
world.
1) Dies on the afternoon
of Passover
2) Was buried on the
evening of Unleavened Bread
3) Rose
victorious over sin, and satan, death, and hell on the
morning of the Feast of First-fruits.
4) Ascended back to heaven
40 days into the Feast of Weeks telling the disciples to
wait until his Spirit came to infill them.
5) They waited exactly 10
days until the Feast of Pentecost when the Spirit of God
came and filled them with spiritual power.
I explained to you, at
least in part, how God had set up all these feasts in the
Old Testament so that 1500 years later they could be
fulfilled by Jesus and each fullfillment has
tremendous significance. (
You can get a C/D of
sermon one in the series from the men in the back) ( We
will come back to this topic in great detail as we
approach May 30th.)
I. A Pattern to Follow
And…..The Jewish people
came to understand the whole mental mindset that was
supposed to accompany the feast times….the introspection
up until Unleavened Bread (sadness and sorrow), followed
by an attitude of thanksgiving and joy that was supposed
to grow during the 50 days leading up to Pentecost. God
had literally commanded what their attitude was supposed
to be:
(Deuteronomy 16:9-12) Count
off seven weeks from the time you begin to put the sickle
to the standing grain. Then celebrate the Feast of Weeks
to the LORD your God by giving a freewill offering in
proportion to the blessings the LORD your God has given
you. And rejoice before the LORD your God at the place he
will choose as a dwelling for his Name-- you, your sons
and daughters, your menservants and maidservants, the
Levites in your towns, and the aliens, the fatherless and
the widows living among you. Remember that you were slaves
in Egypt, and follow carefully these decrees. (NIV)
1500 years of action
suddenly made sense the day Jesus rose from the dead
exactly on the day God had prescribed their change of
attitude. They began to understand giving him first fruits
when he gave himself to them as the first fruits who would
die and rise eternally,
II. A Principle to Explore
(With all that as
background)…
So I’m looking in the Bible
to figure out how Jesus was spending his “50 days to
Pentecost” during his ministry years. That what the rest
of today’s sermon is about.
John 2 records Jesus first
Passover in Jerusalem during his public ministry. John
three gives the story of Nicodemus then says Jesus began
to preach further out in Judea, John the Baptist is
murdered, Jesus then leaves for Galilee, stopping in
Samaria for the “woman at the well”. He goes to Nazareth,
is rejected, moves on to Cesarea and starts ministering. I
don’t know this for sure but it is possible that these
events happen within 28 days….that would put Jesus and all
other Jews at the same place in the Feast of Weeks that we
are this morning.
So with everybody’s
attitude being one of
1) Thankfulness for
freedom from bondage
2) A Spirit of inner
joyfulness
3) A spirit of generosity,
the giving of their first fruit to God….
What does Jesus do
next?______________________________
(Mark 1:16-20) As Jesus
walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his
brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were
fishermen. "Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make
you fishers of men." At once they left their nets and
followed him. When he had gone a little farther, he saw
James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat,
preparing their nets. Without delay he called them, and
they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired
men and followed him. (NIV)
Oh…it’s Jesus calling the
first four disciples…that’s a nice story…..
Nice story!!! Do we
realize the significance of what was going on here? These
boys aren’t loitering down at the unemployment office…
they are career fishermen! They have lives, and own boats,
and support families, and have influence in their
community. Somebody they have never met comes up to them
and asks them to drop their entire life and follow him….The
amazing thing is that they do it.
I imagine they had just
gotten back from Jerusalem as well. Every Jewish male was
required to attend Passover and Unleavened Bread. They
might have actually seen Jesus and heard him preaching
while they were in Jerusalem… They probably had just
gotten home after a two or three week trip, had probably
spent far more than they could afford, desperately needing
to replenish their income and here comes the teacher
asking them to leave their livelihood, give up, not just
their first fruits…but their “everything”. And the text in
both Matthew and Mark is very strong:
…..At once they left
their nets and followed him. (Pete and Andy)
(Jimmy and Johnny)
… and immediately they left
the boat and their father and followed him.
So Jesus disrupts their
careers, ask not for a little bit of them but for their
whole lives, and as far as they knew His request wasn’t
going to be for three years, but for the rest of their
lifetime. (And so it turned out to be)
The phrase used in
Scripture to signify their level of commitment was:
They left their nets!
Their nets signified
security, income, familiar commodities. The normal
response to a call to radical commitment is to cling to
one’s nets.
In order to follow Christ
each of these four men had to drop their nets! The nets
were the symbol of what stood between them and giving
themselves to God’s service.
We all have nets…for the
sake of the rest of this sermon I want to give you a
definition of what a net would be in your life and mine:
A net is anything that
inhibits or prohibits our non-negotiated commitment to
follow Christ!
We desperately need to
understand something….Following Christ is not something
you step up and volunteer to do. Following Christ is
something you were formed to do…you were created for and
redeemed to follow Christ, you were built.. you were
fashioned with everything in place to become a Jesus
follower. When you do anything else with your life you are
literally out of sync with the very purpose for which you
were put on this earth.
So when we balk at
following Jesus with our lives… he doesn’t just blink and
look the other way. He relentlessly pursues us until we
drop our nets and become totally committed to our
relationship with Him.
That’s where the
difficulties in life come in…. Our natural sinful tendency
is to hang onto out nets with everything in us. They are
our security blankets… they are what is familiar, they are
what is comfortable. Without them around us we would have
to live lives of
….FAITH!….
….TRUST!….
…..TOTAL DEPENDENCE!
Look at your hands… see
those lines? Those are net burns!!! You notice they tend
to become more pronounced with age. That’s because of the
constant burning of the nets God is graciously trying to
remove from our grasp and the fervor with which we try to
hold onto them!
What do our nets look like:
A) The Net of Other
People
It would be possible for us
to hold onto a net that is another person in our lives, a
good person, but who, for whatever reason, draws our
attention away from Jesus. Life can be such a balancing
act because there are so many people who demand so much of
us. If we are not careful the priority can become, not
others because of
Jesus but others instead of Jesus.
Even more likely to become
a net is our focus on somebody who we have no right to be
focusing or not focusing on. A net could be a person with
whom you are having an affair…either outward or just
inwardly. A net could be somebody that you are supposed to
be loving that you refuse to. A net could be a person you
have shut out of your life who by God’s standard should be
a vital part of your life.
Look at the net burns in
your hands, what put them there?
B) The Net of “Things”
This is a huge net in
America and not much of a net at all in Fumbisi where
Pastor Joseph comes from. Many of you have never been out
of the material atmosphere that we are daily surrounded
with and simply do not have a frame of reference that
alerts you to how much we, literally, give ourselves to
the material things of this world. I think particularly
about you young people who, since the day you were born,
have been bombarded with the fake reality that the
accumulation of “things” is the main reason for life and
the person who manages to accumulate the most is the
winner.
It is so hard for many
in our society to grasp that, that is the exact opposite
of what Jesus said to be the truth. That is one of the
biggest nets that he is trying to get out of our hands,
and at the same time he is trying to get that great
eternal truth into our minds, everything else in our
society is working overtime to assure us that collecting
possessions and happiness are one and the same!
Last night Pastor Oscar and
I were driving through Ft. Pierce. We had discussed the
fact that neither he nor Pastor Joseph have a car…the
distance between their churches is 18 miles and to it is
common for them to walk that far or ride a bicycle over
rough dirt roads. We looked at the rows and rows of new
vehicles and I pointed out many that cost $ 30,000- 45,000
US… for that amount of money both he and Joseph could have
a good rugged used vehicle…. with enough money left over
to build three new church buildings that would seat 3000
spiritually hungry people.
(Matthew 6:31-33) So do
not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we
drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the pagans run after
all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you
need them. But seek first his kingdom and his
righteousness, and all these things will be given to you
as well. - Jesus (NIV)
C) The Net of Money
The truth is….most of us in
this country do not truthfully ask ourselves the question:
Do I have enough?
…but rather…
Do I have enough to do
all I want to do?
Buried deep inside of us is
often the fear that if we totally commit ourselves to God
he may threaten the treasury. He may ask us to give some
of what he has blessed us with back to him thus hindering
us from accumulating some of what we plan to do.
Let me relieve your mind on
that question:
Will God ask you to take
some of what he has blessed you with and give away what
you have worked so hard to accumulate?
Yes! Yes He will!
Our attitude toward money
is one of the most strategic nets of all that might be a
net in our life. If we learn to let go of this net, most
other nets become easier to release. That’s probably why
Jesus spent more times talking about our relationship to
our money than he did any other single subject. He even
threw in the admonition that you cannot serve both God and
money.
Either we let God master
our money or our money will master us!
This period of 50 days
after Passover and before Pentecost became to the first
century Jewish people a time for generosity and
benevolence. The brought the first fruits of their barley
at First-fruits and the first fruits of their wheat 50
days later at Pentecost but after the resurrection of
Christ that 50 day period became a time when they focused
on giving away what God had blessed them with.
They gave up several weeks
of work at that time every year to attend four different
feasts but in addition to that they brought generous gift
to give to God, to the temple, to the poor.
I would like each of us to
focus our attention on what God would like to do through
us during the days of May as we approach Pentecost Sunday,
May 30.
What do you say we enter
into the Feast of Weeks mindset and ask God to show us
what he would like to do through our finances.
During the next few weeks
GRACE lake will be dug, the dirt will be compacted on the
slab, and we will begin to set foundation forms and the
plumbers and electricians will begin to rough in their
trades.
This would be a perfect
time to allow God to let the net of money slip through
your grip and let the generosity of First-fruits and
Pentecost come to the surface.
Conclusion:
I’m going to be returning to this subject next week…there
are other nets we need to discuss.
The Net of Plans and Dreams
The Net of Secret Sins
I don’t want to leave you
with the wrong impression…..
The disciples did not drop
their nets to take on another project…they dropped their
nets to embrace a Person.
When I let go of the nets
in my life, I am doing so to embrace the God of the
universe, It is to this Person that I am surrendering all
that I presently am, all that I will become, all that I
now and ever will possess.
When I refuse to “leave my
nets”
If I have the Net of Secret
Sins, for instance and I chose not to drop them and follow
Christ but to grip them tightly, to hang on for all I’m
worth…
I’m not rejecting the call
to a new project in my life…..I’m rejecting a Person and
His call for my to abandon all and follow him.
When I resist the call
to drop the nets in my life an follow Jesus I become the
big- time loser. Think what might have been had the
disciple not left all to follow Jesus.
Peter, Andrew, James, John,
would have had piles of smelly fish to show for their
efforts and little else.
Matthew might have had
piles of cash buried in his backyard and no one at his
funeral.
Simon the Zealot probably
would have given his life in some hopeless clash to
overthrow the Roman government.
Instead all of these men
are immortalized in the minds of millions of believers.
Why?
They made the decision
to drop their nets and follow Jesus!
What nets do you need to
drop today?
