If you put me on a desert island and told me I could only have one gospel to read the rest of my days, I’d choose John.  It’s my favorite.  It’s not as newsy at Mark’s gospel and Matthew and Luke each have their own beautiful way of telling the Story.  But, I like the way John’s gospel reads, especially the way it starts.  “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us (John 1:1, 14, NIV).”  And, it’s virtually impossible not to identify with the way the gospel ends with Peter, having made it all the way to the cross and beyond with Jesus, still struggling through his own insecurities, especially his jealousy of John, to work out his own unique response to Jesus’ call.  John doesn’t end his gospel with a Lord of the Rings grandeur with good triumphing over evil.  He leaves things very human, kind of leaves things hanging, leaves room for each of us to struggle with our own insecurities and our consciences, too, in discovering how we’ll responded to the call of Jesus to follow him. 

Isn’t that what this is all about, this thing we call church?  Isn’t that why we’re here?  I work out of this simple, perhaps naïve assumption that people don’t come to church because they need another organization to join or because they want to learn how to more efficiently run a not-for-profit 501C3.  Maybe I’m working out of what I’m looking for, what I need.  But, I work out the simple assumption that people come to church specifically because they are looking for, hungry for, what Jesus’ call offers them, an opportunity for a personal encounter with the living God of all creation.  Maybe that’s why the first disciples answered Jesus’ call so readily, just dropped everything and took off, because they believed Jesus could lead them to that encounter with the living God. 

Picking up the story in John’s gospel, just before the beginning of our text for the day, Andrew heard John the Baptist describe Jesus as “the Lamb of God (John 1:36).”  He knew what John meant.  Jesus was the one the Old Testament prophets had described as the Messiah, the savior, the one who would take away the sins of the world.  That’s all it took and Andrew was off to follow Jesus wherever he led and so excited that he found his brother, Simon, and invited him to meet Jesus, too.  Then, it just sort of snowballs from there.  Jesus found Philip and invited him along.  Philip found Nathanael and one domino after another fell, through the centuries, until someone found you and me and invited us along, too.  As helpful as mass media has been in communicating the gospel, nothing has or ever will be more effective than one person answering Jesus’ call and then inviting the people they know and love to join them in the journey. 

All of which leads to two questions I’d like to spend the next few weeks trying to answer with you.  Will we follow Jesus?  Will we invite others to join us in the journey?  This next six weeks I will preach a sermon series using our church’s mission statement, Sharing Christ Through Caring Relationships, as the theme.  The series will be built around our Core Values which we derived this past year from a study of the first church in the book of Acts.  Again, two questions.  Will we follow Jesus?  Will we invite others to join us in the journey?  My prayer is that this series will stretch our faith as never before as we grapple with those two issues.

There is very little about Jesus’ call to Philip that sounds anything like the typical invitation at the end of a Baptist worship service.  He just says, “Follow me.”  That’s all.  There’s no threat of hell if Philip chooses not to, no promise of fame, riches or permanently perfect health if he does.  There’s no choir singing soulful hymns in the background.  No preacher saying, “We’ll wait for you as we sing just one more verse.”  It’s simple, straightforward, “Follow me.”  What was it about Jesus’ invitation that made Philip drop everything and do just that.  Wouldn’t you like to know?  I would.

That’s what keeps me coming back.  And struggling to better understand the Bible.  And slogging through ditches knee-deep in my own human laziness and self-centeredness to discover what it really means to pray.  And listening to music that touches my soul, and wrestling with challenging books and working hard at sometimes very difficult relationships because those are the relationships through which God has made himself most known to me.  And, I might add, working overtime at not letting myself get torpedoed by my need for approval so that I end up molded by everyone’s expectations or outdated denominational models of what it means to be “the preacher” because thirty-one years ago I “surrendered” to the ministry.  As a matter of fact, I wasn’t “surrendering” to the ministry.  As best I understood, I was following Jesus’ call.

Whatever else, I’m still on that journey with Jesus that started years before I can remember.  Somewhere back there, when I was very young, I heard a voice in my soul as clear as my own mother’s call to supper, calling me to let go of my sin and just trust him for everything that would ever matter.  I’m trying my best to follow his call still.  I feel something very powerful well up inside of me every single time I read Paul’s words, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead (Philippians 3:10-11).”

I want to follow Jesus so radically that it will influence those who know me best to think about what faith in God could mean to them.  I want to follow Jesus so radically that my sons will remember me as a man of faith and even choose my faith as a model for their own.  I want to follow Jesus so radically that even my worst critics couldn’t question my sincerity.  I want to follow Jesus until I am genuinely, sincerely more concerned about how I use what I have to help others who are hurting instead of just investing it to make myself feel safer or more comfortable.  I want to follow the Jesus who didn’t have a place to lay his head so radically that even if tomorrow I awakened to find that, Job-like, I’d gone broke, lost my health and my family to indescribable tragedy, I’d bend my knee in obedience and start over even if it meant crawling because I believed that, despite the evidence of my immediate circumstances, God was still in control.  I’m searching for an obedience than transcends my feelings, my middle-class upbringing, and my narrow, predominately white, southwestern United States worldview, an obedience that leads to a transformation of everything in me that still rebels against the God who loved me enough to let his son die for me. 

I want to follow the Jesus who walked out of his own tomb until I’m so full of peace that the day will come when I can park behind a hearse on the way to Laureland without having to struggle with anticipatory grief about my own death.  A peace of knowing that if I died tomorrow I’d not miss out on one blessed thing God intended me to have or that would alter my eternal joy one iota. 

I want to follow Jesus so radically that I could do what Steve and Kay Armstrong, parents of our own Stephanie Cheshier, have done.  Missionaries to Africa with the IMB of the Southern Baptist Convention at home on furlough, they received a call from their supervisor this very week telling them that if they did not sign the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message, they would not be allowed to return to the field.  In refusing his orders Steve and Kay said that signing “would be a betrayal of our Baptist heritage and of our Anabaptist forefathers who gave their lives for (the) cause (of establishing) freedom from religious authorities over their personal faith and obedience to God's Word (and) signing would mean we would agree to give up our individual priesthood as believers to hear directly from God and His Word.”  By the way, I wouldn’t want to be the one who ever told someone like Steve and Kay that knowing church history and knowing what it means to be Baptist and caring where churches invest their mission dollars all don’t matter.  They just bet their missionary careers they do.  Will we stand with them?

I’m not here, as your pastor, because, first and foremost, I want to become the leading expert on church growth.  I’m here because I’m following Jesus.  And, I’m following Jesus because I operate out of this simple assumption that he, and he alone, is the answer to every question and every fear, he and he alone is the center of all hope and peace and joy.  He’s the “‘Lamb of God,’” gentle and pure, Lord of life and death, the dawn at the end of the darkest night, peace at the end of our tears and the only one who ever stooped low enough to know intimately and personally what makes us laugh and cry in the first place.  I want to follow Jesus and I want to be in the company of others every day who do, too.  That’s why I’m here.  I’ve gone as far in following Jesus as my comfort will take me.  After all these years, I can honestly say that I’ve never been more ready for God to do something new in my life, to show me new frontiers of faith that are just over the horizon of following Jesus farther than my comfort will take me and where only more sincere faith can. 

Perhaps you heard about the West Virginia man who won some $103 million playing Powerball.  Turns out he’s a tither!  Every preacher’s dream, right?  What would happen if someone dropped $10 million on us one day?  Truthfully, beyond the fantasy, it might well destroy us.  There’d be arguments over how the money should be spent, how big a raise to give the preacher and such.  We’d probably have to appoint a special task force to script a decent way of explaining it all to Weston Ware.  Worse, those whose giving is based solely on the perceived needs of the church rather than the faithfulness of God to bless them would stop giving altogether.  Simply put, I’d rather pastor a church any day where people gave over $1.2 million to the Lord’s work, as you did last year, because it stretched their faith than to have someone bless-curse us rich over night so that we never again had to ask what it meant to follow Jesus’ call even in the way we spend our money. 

A good friend once wrote, “Jesus . . . wants us to follow him . . . but he let’s us know that the life he wants to give us is more about joy than happiness, more about significance than success, more about adventure than achievement, more about pursuit than possession, more about passion than predictability, more about serendipity than security.  And (we’ve) got to decide whether that’s what (we’d) rather have (“What Would You Rather Have,” George Mason, The Wilshire Pulpit, Wilshire Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas, January 17, 1999).”  Will we follow Jesus?  Will we invite others to join us in the journey?

From its inception, the church has always grown along lines of relationship.  Jesus invited Andrew, Andrew invited Simon.  Philip invited Nathanael.  Someone invited us.  Will we invite others?  A few Sundays ago, a woman came into our church just before Sunday School.  She’d come in off the street, said she’d traveled to Dallas from some distance and hadn’t had any food in quite a while.  Kenny Cheshier, our young, ambitious and compassionate Associate Pastor helped her and, in the process, also gave her his business card.  Three or four days later the office phone rang and Jerry Spivey, our Administrator, happened to answer.  A woman who lives near our church told Jerry that there was a woman standing at her door, holding Kenny’s business card and claiming that she was helping Cliff Temple collect donations for Meals-On-Wheels.  Jerry assured her that we don’t collect door to door for anything and that he’d be right over.  In the meantime, this neighbor of ours called the police and Jerry met them at her house and got everything straightened out.  He also had greater things in mind.

Before leaving their home he asked the family, “Do you have a church home?”  They said, “No.  But, we’ve been looking for one.”  They live so close they can see our church from their front porch.  This past Sunday, these new friends and their four children worshipped with us.  This past Wednesday evening, Kenny and I had a delightful visit with them in their home.  In the course of the conversation they said something that struck deep.  They said, “We’ve never had anyone from a church come into our home before.”  We’ve changed that for them.  Will we change that for others?

One might ask, can anything good come a homeless person misusing Kenny’s business card?  Any chance what one person meant to misuse God will now use to bring about even greater things for them and us?   There’s no better way to answer that question than the way Philip answered Nathanael’s question about Jesus, “‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’” “‘Come and see,’” Philip said.  No better answer our question than Jesus’ promise to Nathanael’s astonishment at what Jesus had already done, “You will see greater things than these.”  I wonder what he meant.

What were those greater things?  Let’s follow Jesus and go find out!