Immanuel Sermon Audio
Luke 6:12-16
If you have your Bible, there we go, if you have your Bible, take it out to Luke 6. Will you turn that down a little bit while you're standing there? Thank you. Verse 6, "Our theme verse, as we are studying the Gospel of Luke, is Luke 19-10, the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. I just sort of throw that out there every week for you to think about and to remember. But even as I throw it out, I want to remind you this morning that there are some great and some weighty doctrines in that little bitty verse that's so easy to memorize. The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost. Preschool child could memorize it in five minutes easy. But there are some tremendous truths in that statement. One truth in that statement is the incarnation, the fact that God took on human flesh. The Son of Man came, God Himself, humbled Himself, became a servant and dwelt among us." So you've got the incarnation in there. You've got the idea of grace, that God, the Son of Man, came looking for us. It wasn't us that went looking for Him, but it was He that came looking for us. And you've got the idea of the atonement, that He came to save us. He gave His life for hours on the cross. And so some tremendous and some weighty doctrines wrapped up in that theme verse. And all of those big doctrines are part of the big idea of our passage this morning. And our passage is a small one, but here's the big idea that you need to take away. God uses ordinary people to spread the gospel message. God uses ordinary people to spread the gospel message. That's the big idea of this passage. We're going to talk about the twelve apostles. Ordinary guys, regular guys, nothing spectacular about them in any way, shape, or form. None of them were rich, none of them were powerful, none of them were influential, none of them were religious leaders in their own right before Jesus got a hold of them. Just ordinary regular guys. In fact, you get a glimpse of what the world thought of these guys and Acts 4 where they're brought before the religious leaders and the religious leaders sort of talk to them, listen to them and step back and say, "These are just common, uneducated men. They're just regular old guys and we have absolutely no idea what to do with them." So they're regular guys. It is worth noting that they are an eclectic group. They are ordinary and average and regular, but they're not a homogenous group. You've got some really interesting personalities in this group. You've got four self-employed fishermen, four blue collar guys who work with their hands for a living. You've got a guy Matthew or Levi who was a former tax collector, a collaborator with the Romans, and then also in the same group, you've got Simon the zealot or Simon the Canaanian who was part of a political movement that wanted to assassinate people like Matthew. So in the same group, you've got the political left and you've got the political right and you've got a couple of blue collar Joe's right in the middle and then you've got six other guys thrown in. So they're an eclectic group, but on the whole, they're just an ordinary group that Jesus trained up and that Jesus used to spread the gospel message. What is the gospel message? Luke 19, 10, the word that the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. So if you have your Bible, you've got it in Luke 6. We're going to read verse 12 to 16, a very, very short passage. We will almost never focus in on a short of a passage is this one, but we're going to do it this morning. Luke chapter 6, beginning in verse 12, it says, "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 he chose from them twelve 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 was called the zealot, and Judas, the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor." This is the word of God. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful for your breath in our lungs today, for the ability to respond to you in worship, for the opportunity to celebrate baptism and new life with Kobe and with his family. Father, we're grateful for your word. And as we look at these verses in the Gospel of Luke, a short passage, we pray that your spirit would speak to us, that you would convict us, that you would build us up in our faith and strengthen us in our relationship with you and our love for Christ. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. I told you before, but I will remind you again that one of my favorite movies is the movie Tombstone. Movie came out on VHS, not DVD, but VHS when I was in middle school, and so my dad and I got a copy of this, and we watched it over and over and over and over, and watched it hundreds of times. And I think the thing that appealed to me most about this movie is that it is pretty much the perfect movie for a middle school boy. It's a perfect movie. Lots of guns, good one liners that you can say with your friends over and over and over again, more guns, great action scenes, and more guns. So for a middle school boy, this is perfect. It's got everything you could ask for, and so we watched this movie over and over and over again. But behind all that stuff, I think one of the things I really did like about it is knowing that it was a true story, knowing that these were real people. This just isn't a fantasy, a fiction, this isn't just made up out of somebody's imagination but these are real people in real places in real events. Now what I did not realize as a sixth, seventh, eighth grade middle school student is that usually, in fact it would probably be safer to say always, Hollywood is selective in the story that they tell you. They don't ever tell you the whole story. And so somewhere along the way in high school and college, I got curious, I said, "You don't know, I've seen this movie thousands of times, I've just always assumed that everything in it is true and historical and accurate, but I wonder if it is." And so somewhere along the way I said, "I want to learn about the real Wyatt Earp and I want to learn about the real Doc Holiday." And so there they are and I grabbed a book about Wyatt Earp and read about him, grabbed a book about Doc Holiday and read about him, and you get a different perspective on the story. And you realize, well, maybe Hollywood didn't tell me the whole story. Maybe Hollywood added a few details in there, or maybe they got it exactly right. Maybe they nailed it on the head and this is exactly how it went down. But when you get a different perspective on something historical like that, you begin to see a fuller picture of what really happened. Now very carefully, let me apply this to the Gospels in a similar way. Not in an exact way, but a similar way you have that when you read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The difference is, obviously, that Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, none of them exaggerated, stretched the truth, added things that weren't true, or withheld things that they really, really should have put in. They all wrote exactly what God wanted them to write. It's all true. However, they wrote from different perspectives. Matthew writes from a completely different perspective than Luke does. And Mark's purpose in writing is completely different than John's. And they include a lot of the same stuff, but some things that Matthew includes, no one else includes. And some of the things that John tells you, no one else mentions in their Gospel account. And when you read all four of them together, you get a fuller picture of what was really going on. Now in our study of Luke, we're not doing that every week. We're not taking every story in Luke and comparing it to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. But this morning, we're going to do that, a very short passage, and when you read it and you compare it to the other passages that list the apostles, the other passages that describe their call, you get a fuller picture and a more complete picture of what's really going on here. So let's start with the list. I'm going to put the list up on the screen, and we've got these new nice screens. They're clear. I can put little letters up there, and you can still make sense of them for the most part. This is also in your outline. One of the interesting things is that John, in his Gospel, does not ever list the twelve. He doesn't include one. Luke lists them twice, once in the Gospel of Luke, and then again in the book of Acts. And you see by the time we get to Acts, Judas Iscariot has removed himself from the situation and so he's no longer listed. But when you look at these lists, it's fascinating that none of them are the same. They all have the same names, the same people, but none of the lists are identical, including the two that Luke wrote, which is fascinating to me. Luke is a historian, carefully writing these things down. His two lists are not exactly the same, and so you have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and then Luke again in the book of Acts. One of the constants is that Peter is at the head of every list. We recognize when you read through the Gospels that Peter seems to be the leader of the twelve. He seems to be at times the spokesperson for the twelve, and that bears out. Not only is Jesus says, "You are the rock upon which I will build this church," but you get into the book of Acts, and Peter takes a leading role. Interesting though, that the names in red, and I didn't put them in red on your outline, but you can see them here, the names in red are the same, in the same position all the way across. There seems to be three groups of four, and it seems like each group of four had a leader, and so Peter is always at the top of that group, Philip is always at the top of the second group, and James, the son of Alpheus, sometimes called James the less, is always at the head of this third group, just a word or two about these three groups of men. Look at that first group, Peter, Andrew, James, John, that's a lot of testosterone. Four guys who were self-employed fishermen, two sets of brothers, Peter and Andrew, James and John, two sets of brothers put together in one group, a lot of independent thinkers, a lot of headstrong guys and personalities, men who were used to just rolling their sleeves up and getting the job done, these were tough guys, and there's plenty of alpha dogs in that first group, Peter, Andrew, James and John. Look at the second group, second group is a special group of guys. The second group, when you go from group one to two, it's like you turn off Monday night football, and you turn on the Big Bang Theory. You go from big, burly tough to just, not really squirrely, but just different. You go to just a special group of guys. You got two guys in that middle group who are type A bean counter accountants by the book kind of guys, and so some of you say that's the group I belong in. These are my kind of people. You got Matthew in there, and you can see he's listed in different spots, but Matthew, the former tax collector, somebody who worked with a ledger for his livelihood, somebody who did numbers all day long every day, always making the book's balance, of course, in his favor so that he could come out ahead. You got Matthew in there, and then you've also got Philip. Philip was a bean counter. Remember the time that Jesus was about to feed the multitude, and they didn't know where they were going to get the food from, and Jesus said, "You guys feed him." And they said, "Are you kidding me?" And Jesus, the gospels tell us, looked specifically at Philip and said, "Philip, what are you going to do?" What's the plan? And immediately he popped off with exactly how much money it would cost to feed everybody. He'd been counting heads, he'd been doing the math, and he immediately says, "Jesus, this is how much it's going to cost, and we don't have near that much." So you've got the two number guys, Philip and Matthew, and then you've got Bartholomew and Thomas. You've got two Eor's. You remember Eor? Winnie the Pooh? Oh, poor me. I think I lost my tail again. You've got two Eor's. Thomas, we remember Thomas is doubting Thomas, the guy who, after all the amazing things Jesus didn't said, shows up, and the gang says, "Hey, he's alive!" And Thomas says, "Please, come on. I am not going to believe that unless I see him with my own eyes and touch him with my own hands." So we've got doubting Thomas up there. We've also got Bartholomew. Most scholars say that Bartholomew is the same person John in his gospel called Nathaniel. He had two names. And Bartholomew, Nathaniel was the guy that when Philip came and said, "Hey, we found the Messiah. Guess where he's from? He's from Nazareth." Bartholomew, Nathaniel said, "Are you kidding me?" If he's from Nazareth, I ain't buying it. I don't want anything to do with it. He was skeptical. He was doubting. He was slow to believe. And so you've got this middle group of guys. And then you've got the last group of guys. These are the guys who needed to hire a PR firm to help them with nickname and name recognition issues. And it begins with James, the, "Suppose the leader of this last group in his nickname because there's already another James up at the top and you can't have two James. His nickname is James the Less." That's a tough break. It would be one thing just to call him James and to call the other James James the greater. That would be bad enough. But they say, "You are James and we're going to call you James the Small." James the insignificant. And that's the leader of their group, James the Less. Then you have Thaddeus, who was also known as Judas. Judas was a very, very popular name in Jewish culture around Jesus' time and between the Old Testament and the New Testament's lots and lots of people named Judas, famous people named Judas, very important historical figures named Judas. For some reason, about 30 A.D., the name kind of declined in popularity. And so this guy says, you know, Judas is not working for me. I'm going to go by Thaddeus. Other Gospels, other places, some manuscripts say his name was La Bayes. So you pick Judas, Thaddeus, La Bayes, the guy needed to help with his name. And then you got Simon the Zealot or Simon the Canaanian. It's the same word and transliterated from two different languages. He was part of a political party. And when I think about Simon the Zealot, I think about an old hillbilly. I love this guy, but he's an old hillbilly in Kentucky. And when he used to say Simon the Zealot, he would say, "Simon the Zealot." And so there you go, name problems, once again, Simon the Zealot. And then of course last and least among the twelve, Judas Iscariot, who shows up in the first three lists, but obviously not in Acts chapter one. That's the breakdown of the lists in the different Gospels. And there's some other things that could be said, but you get a general idea. The same twelve guys listed. The order varies each time, but there's some discernible patterns in all of the Gospels. Let's talk about the call of these men, because there's some important things you learn as Jesus called these men to follow him. The first thing you learn is from Matthew, we'll start with the first Gospel. Matthew tells us specifically that Jesus gave these men authority over demons and sickness. That's a point Matthew brings out that nobody else emphasizes. Marker Luke, don't make a point to say this, but Matthew says Jesus called these men and he gave them his power over demons and over sickness. Now in your outline, I gave you some verses. We're not going to look those verses up this morning, you can look them up later. Here's why I put them on your outline. I think what Matthew is trying to say, and I think what those verses on your outline support is that this gift of authority over the demons and illness was a gift that Jesus gave specifically and uniquely to the 12. That they were a unique office for a unique time in Jesus, uniquely gave them these gifts and these abilities. You say, so we can't cast out demons today or people can't be healed today, not at all what I'm saying. I have enough missionary friends who have told me multiple stories to the contrary to say that these miraculous things no longer happen, but what I am saying is that these men uniquely had this gift that they could use more or less at their own disposal. I don't believe that's a gift that people have today and so we can argue about that after church and I'll prove you wrong. Matthew tells us Jesus gave them authority over demons and sickness. Number two, Mark says, and this is important, Mark says the 12 were called to be with Jesus before going out to preach. No one else mentions this, Luke doesn't mention it, John doesn't mention this, Matthew doesn't mention it, but Mark says, look, when Jesus called these guys to be apostles, the first thing he wanted them to do is to be with him, to listen to him, to learn from him, to be trained by him, to be taught by him, to pray with him, to watch him, Jesus wanted these men to be with him and then he sent them out to preach and the order is important and Mark makes that point for a reason. Number three, Luke. Luke tells us that Jesus prayed all night before selecting the twelve disciples to then become apostles. He prayed all night. It's the only time in the entire New Testament that you read about an all night prayer vigil. Lots of times that people prayed about important decisions, in fact in the gospel of Luke alone, just in Luke there are eleven instances where Luke says somebody had a big thing coming up and so they made a point to pray about it. They set aside time to pray, to ask for wisdom for direction. Eleven times Luke mentions that. This is the only one in Luke or the rest of the New Testament where they say they prayed all night long. He persisted in prayer all night. I don't know about you, but that's a fascinating detail to me. I tend to think about Jesus as some sort of all-knowing superhero mutant superman walking around. As if he just knows everything and can do everything and everything's easy for him and he's just sort of going through these silly motions because he has to, but Luke says before he made this monumental decision he stopped and he prayed about it, asking God, asking the spirit to give him wisdom, the spirit to guide his thoughts, the spirit to guide his heart. There's an entire sermon you could preach on the fact that Jesus felt the need to pray before making this decision how much more do you and I need to pray before big events in our life, before big decisions in our life. Just note that Luke says specifically and uniquely Jesus prayed all night before he got all these disciples, all these learners, and picked twelve of them to be apostles. The word apostle means ones who are sent out. So he's got all of these learners, disciples, and he's going to pick twelve after praying all night that he is going to send out to preach the truth of his gospel. Lastly there's John. John doesn't list them so he doesn't describe Jesus calling them, but there's a fascinating detail in John chapter 15 and this is in italics because it's a little bit different than the other verses that focus on the call of these men. John 15, Jesus speaking with his friends the last night he was alive on earth and he looks them in the eye, John 15 and he says, "I'm divine, you're the branches, abide in me and you bear much fruit apart from me, you can do nothing." And then he says to them twice specifically, "Don't forget, you didn't choose me, but I chose you." He makes a point to say it twice. When his time is short and he doesn't have a lot of opportunity to just ramble on about non-important things, he looks at them and he says, "Don't forget, you didn't pick me, but I picked you." That's a good reminder for you and for me as you think about how you became a follower of Jesus Christ. You may look back on that time in your life and you may say, "You know, well I made a decision or I came to a conviction or I fell under this sort of repentance just sort of overcame me and I decided to do this." That's great in your testimony but understand that behind all of it is God's grace. And Jesus is reminding his disciples, "You didn't pick me, I picked you." And this goes back to Luke 19-10, "The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. He did not come to help out people who were trying to find their way back to him. We were lost and we didn't even know it and the Son of Man came to seek us and to save us." And John reminds us of that. So look, the story is really, really simple. Jesus comes to the point in his life and his ministry where he knows and we're going to talk more about this in a minute, he knows the end is in sight and he says, "I'm going to be gone. I'm going to accomplish what I came here to accomplish to seek and to save the lost." That's going to happen at the cross. But when I'm gone, somebody needs to carry on this message in this movement. And so he stops and he prays all night long about who to pick, about which twelve men he should choose for this task. And out of this larger group of disciples, after an all night prayer vigil, he selects twelve and he selects them first and foremost that they would be with him, that they would be his friends, that they would listen to him, that they would learn from him, that they would watch him and they would interact with him, they would get to ask him questions that no one else would hear the answers to. They got to be with Jesus. And then he gave them his authority, authority to preach the truth, authority over sickness and disease to heal, and authority over the demons to cast them out in the power of his name. And he sends them out as apostles, and we'll talk more about that as we move through the Gospel of Luke. So that's the list of the names, that's how they were called. Let's think about application, a couple of simple truths of application. Number one, the role of apostle was unique in temporary in church history and there are no apostles today. Unique and temporary, there are no apostles today. I gave you some verses, you can look at Ephesians 4, talks about God using the apostles among other roles and offices, but using the apostles to build his church. Ephesians 3, 5 talks about God giving special revelation to these men. Obviously that happened first and foremost through Jesus and their conversations as they interacted, but he gave them this special revelation, this unique truth. You can look at Ephesians 2 that says the apostles are part with the prophets of the foundation of the church. And that foundation has been laid, it does not need to be laid again. There are no vacancies, there are no job openings, there will be no voting. You can hang on to your resume, we're not looking for any new apostles. These guys were unique and their role was temporary and they did exactly what Jesus wanted them to do in the history of his church. Secondly, and there is a second and a third and a fourth. Even though we're not looking for more apostles, there's some important truths you need to take away. Second, Jesus is not looking for superstars, celebrities or larger than life personalities, Jesus is looking for people who will be devoted to him. Now fill that blank in and then look me in the eyeballs and tell me the truth. When you read that first sentence, hold your hand up and block out the bottom lines there. When you read the sentence that said Jesus is not looking for superstars, celebrities or larger than life personalities, your immediate thought was he's looking for ordinary people. That was the first thing that came into your mind, if you're trying to read ahead and think ahead. If he's not looking for those people, that must mean he's looking for ordinary people. That's not the point. We're not trying to puff up or to pull down celebrities, superstars, big names and we're not trying to puff up or pull down ordinary Joes. That is completely beside the point. What Jesus is looking for is people who will be devoted to him. Now I'm going to say something that some of you may agree with and some of you may disagree with and again we can argue about this after church if you really want to lose an argument. We don't believe that. We do not believe that and by we I don't mean me individually or you individually. I just mean Christians. We don't believe that. We really don't believe that Jesus isn't desperate for superstars, celebrities or larger than life personalities. We really think in the back of our minds, man Jesus could really use that person. Let me give you a couple of examples of how this plays out, proof that we really don't believe this. Number one, we and I mean just a big collective we, we totally spaz out anytime a famous person says God on TV. We just think that's the greatest thing ever. They gave all the credit to God. That means they're with us and if they even go so far as to mention the name Jesus we just totally blow our minds. This is the greatest thing ever. Did you hear what that person said? They talked about Jesus. That is amazing. That is so awesome. Yes. There's an actor who's in a recent war movie and I have no idea how you say the guy's name. It looks like Shia LaBouf to me but I think it's Shia LaBouf. He's a character. He's an interesting fellow and lives an interesting life and he's all over the news for all sorts of things. As he made this most recent movie, he said I became a Christian man while I was making that movie. I am a Christian man now. You know many times I've seen that on Facebook over the last couple of weeks. He's a believer. He's a super. Yes. Do you know how God could use him if he would just get on board with us? Do you know what could be done with a person like that if they were on our side? Why do we get more excited about that than a third grade boy giving his life to Christ? We get more excited about it because we don't really believe what's up on the screen. Whether we want to admit it or not, whether we give the right answer or not, we think somebody with a big name, a big personality, somebody with lots of money, somebody with lots of influence, man, if they could only get saved, what could God do with them? Those weren't the guys Jesus weren't looking for. That's not to say that he just told those people to go take a flying leap into hell. But when he called twelve to be with him, he didn't go looking for those people. Let me give you another example of proof that we don't believe that. We and again this is my big collective. We love preachers on TV. Love them. Maybe it's better in this technological age to say we love preachers on a screen. It doesn't matter what kind of screen, TV screen, computer screen, iPad screen, cell phone screen. But we just love preachers on a screen collectively. We just think some reason if your face is on a screen, that means you really know what you're talking about. If your face is on a screen somewhere, that means you're a really great communicator. That means God is really going to use you in amazing ways. And you see this as churches move away from a church planting model of missions into a church campus model of missions, you see this. Most churches that have campuses don't send people to those campuses to preach. They just say just put a screen up. We got the guy and he's a superstar. So just put the screen up and we throw it in there. It'll be the best thing could ever happen. Just put the screen up. We love preachers on a screen. Now you may think, man, he's griping about all kinds of, he hates celebrities. He hates preachers on a screen. Listen, I want celebrities to know Jesus, absolutely. There is nothing inherently wrong about preaching on a screen, television, computer, iPad, campus. Nothing inherently wrong with that. But if behind those things, we're making the mistake of thinking Jesus is desperate for celebrities, enriched people, and famous people, and larger-than-life personalities, we missed it. He's not desperate for those people. He looked around in all the important folks he could have chose. He said, let's see. I'll take the political nut, Simon, and I'll take Matthew, the guy everybody hates, and I'll take some of these guys who know how to fish, and I'll take a bunch of guys that quite frankly we know nothing about. We know nothing about them. It's because it's not about them. Jesus is not desperate to use these people. He is desperate for people who will be devoted to him. Rich, poor, famous, not famous, he's looking for people who will be devoted to him. Number three, serving Jesus is not going to result in your best life now, not. And I don't care what Pastor Osteen says, or how many times I have to look at the commercial on Fox News for his new SiriusXM satellite radio station where you can listen to him 24 hours a day. I don't care. Following Jesus is not going to result in your best life now. You can read about James, who was up at the top of that list. Not James the less, but James the big dog James. Acts 12 gets his head locked off following Jesus. You can read about Paul, who could be brought into this discussion of the apostles. You can read about the sufferings that he experienced in 2 Corinthians 11. You can read about a multitude of people, Hebrews 11, who were harassed, imprisoned, beaten, sawed in two, persecuted because they were faithful to Jesus. None of those people found their best life now. They did find their best life, but it wasn't now, and it wasn't as the world defines it. It's especially true for the apostles. Above anyone else, it's true for the apostles. James, we know, was beheaded for his faith. The only one whose martyrdom is recorded in Scripture. His brother John, we know, was the only one not killed for his faith, not martyred for his faith, but he experienced some horrendous things that we know, scripturally, exile in a prison colony, and history tells us some other incredible torture. Here's what tradition. Not the Bible, but tradition tells us about the rest of the apostles. Peter, crucified upside down in Rome with his wife, who was also being crucified. Andrew, tied to an ex-shaped cross in Greece, not nailed to it, just tied to it, and left to die. Philip, stoned to death in Asia, Bartholomew, Nathaniel, tied into a sack and tossed into the ocean. Matthew, burned at the stake. Thomas, run through with the spear, James, the less beaten to death in Persia, Simon, the Zilat, martyred in Britain, Judas Iscariot, club to death, excuse me, Judas, not Iscariot, Thaddeus Labaeus, club to death for his faith. That's not your best life now. It's not what these men were signing up for. Understand that following Jesus will not result in your best life now. Now, let me counterbalance it with this last idea. Jesus will not overlook the faithfulness of his followers. He will not, just as certain as it will not result in your best life now, he will not overlook the faithfulness of his followers. Luke's point in all of this, all of it, is to remind us that the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. Ultimately, that happened at the cross. That happened when Jesus died your death and took the penalty for your sins and for my sins. And already in Luke 6, already in Luke 6, Luke is pointing us towards that to the cross. He told us last week in this confrontation with the Pharisees that the Pharisees went out and they decided, what are we going to do to deal with Jesus? Ultimately, that ends up where, right at the cross. In listing the 12, he mentions, just like Matthew and Mark, Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor, the one who betrayed Jesus into the hands of the Pharisees in the Romans and allowed him to be crucified. Listen, this is not just Luke's literary device to introduce conflict into the story. This is Luke saying everything in this book points to Luke 19-10. The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. That was not frustrated by the wickedness of the Pharisees. It was not frustrated by the fact that one of his closest friends became a traitor. This was the reason and the purpose and the mission that he came here for. He came to seek and to save the lost. And he did it. And he is not asking you to be rich, famous, or super powerful. He's asking you to repent of your sins, confess them, acknowledge them as sin, and turn away from them. He's asking you to believe that he came to seek you and save you and that that happened at the cross where he took your death and he took your punishment. And he's asking you to be devoted. You don't have to be the sharpest, the smartest, the best educated, the best dressed, the most influential. He is calling you, however, to be devoted. And he promises to the people who are devoted to him, "I will not overlook the faithfulness of my people." It may look like from an earthly perspective that I'm paying no attention. I'm paying attention. So the Bible tells us that these men, these apostles who died simply telling people about Jesus that in the New Heavens and the New Earth their names will be written and engraved on the foundation of the city that we will live in. They will not be forgotten. And Jesus says later in the Gospel of Luke, we'll get to it. He says look, I'm not going to overlook anyone who makes a sacrifice for me in my kingdom. Maybe you sacrifice family, maybe you sacrifice friends, fortune, time, money, I don't know. But I will not overlook any of it. In fact, in the age to come, in the life to come, it will be reckoned and all the debts will be settled. I will not overlook the faithfulness of my people. But it won't result in your best life now as the world defines it. But it will most certainly result in your best life forever. Let's pray. Father, you're a great God and it is a holy privilege to hear from you. Your Word is truth and we are grateful that even in a simple story like this one, in a list of names, that we are driven to the cross and that we are reminded that the Son of Man came to seek us and to save us. Father, we don't have anything good to offer you. Father, we find ourselves in the same boat as the Corinthians. We are the weakness and the folly of the world. Father, we rejoice that you are shown to be great through our weakness and our foolishness. Father, in our prayer is that you would use us for your glory and the spread of your kingdom just as you used these men. Father, help us to think true thoughts about what it means to follow Jesus and what Jesus is looking for in followers. We want to sing and we want to worship as a church family and we pray that as we do that, your spirit would work in our hearts. We pray that you would receive all of the honoring glory that you deserve and we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.