Truth: Follow Jesus.

Key Verse: Matt. 4:19

Reading Assignment: Matthew 4:12-25

1. Jesus fulfills the location prophecy of His ministry.

2. Then Matthew shows us Jesus’ ministry activities:

a. Jesus preached: He preached a message of repentance much like John’s. But like John said, Jesus also sent the Holy Spirit, which John could not do.

b. Jesus discipled: Jesus taught and trained men to be like Him. He called everyone to follow Him, even the crowds. At the end of the book of Matthew, Jesus called for all the nations to become His disciples. This is why we seek Jesus today. Jesus continues to make disciples through His Holy Spirit and through His people today.

c. Jesus healed: Jesus gave to people a foretaste of the future kingdom of heaven in order that they might repent and be ready for that coming kingdom.

Prayer Suggestions:

1. Tell Jesus of your commitment and desire to follow Him.

2. Tell Jesus that there is no one else we would rather follow than Him. He alone is worthy of our devotion.

3. Ask Jesus to teach you to follow Him, and ask for His help and His Spirit’s help.

Transcript

All right, let's pray and we'll begin our time together.

God, as some of us were talking together moments earlier, we are so thankful for Your grace. We could have all so easily drifted away from You farther and farther to the point of no return. But You in Your generosity and the depth of Your kindness, You drew us away from ourselves and our sin and all of our troubles. And You led our footsteps back to You. And for this, we are so grateful. Because for every person who goes through hard times who is drawn to You, there is a horde of others who never come back to You. We know we are gathered this morning because of Your grace, not because of anything good in us, but because You're the God who has set His eyes on those whom He will love and save forever. And that's why we're here. We're so grateful. Help us every day to think upon the riches of Your grace, so that we will live every day with gratitude overflowing from our hearts. Thank You also for Your word that informs our minds and stirs our hearts toward the right things. And we pray that You would bless this time this morning. May You strengthen everyone here and bless each one as they daily seek You, read Your word, call out to Jesus in prayer. May You bless them with Your holy presence through Your Holy Spirit. Grant to them a greater understanding, a greater faith, and a greater yieldedness to You, and that You will do Your wonderful works in their lives. Thank You for each person here. Bless them, Lord. In Jesus name we pray.

The next passage to be read is Matthew 4:12-25. That's the remainder of Matthew Chapter 4. The truth I want to highlight out of this section is “follow Jesus.” It’s really just simple as that: Follow Jesus. The key verse is found in 4:19, where Jesus says these familiar words, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Now Jesus made that statement in a larger context where Matthew introduces to us Jesus' ministry, and this call to follow Him was one of the main aspects of Jesus's ministry. Were I to point out the main idea of this section, it would be this: Jesus’ ministry activities. Matthew shows us Jesus' ministry activities. Have you ever wondered what Jesus did after He got baptized? Matthew gives us the answer. He gives us in a nutshell what Jesus did in this section. But before getting into Jesus’ activities, Matthew first points out the location of His ministry. He does this to highlight another Old Testament prophecy fulfilled by Jesus. Even the location of His ministry confirmed that He is truly the Messiah, the Savior, whom God promised to send. And so Jesus, after being baptized in the Jordan River and after His wilderness temptations, He returns to Galilee. But when He does, He doesn't settle in His hometown of Nazareth, but in a different city by the northern shores of the Sea of Galilee, in a city called Capernaum. With this, Matthew shows us that Jesus fulfilled another prophecy of Scripture, namely, that when the Messiah comes, He will do His ministry in the region of Galilee. And so this is what Jesus did: He began His ministry in that area called Galilee. By the way, if you're not familiar with the geography of Israel, Galilee is sort of on the northern part of the land of Israel. It's the one lake that you can see from a satellite map in that northern part of Israel. On the southern part, you'll find another body of water. It's called the Dead Sea, the location made famous by the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered around that lake. What connects these two bodies of water together is the Jordan river, which runs as a straight line between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. I suppose, one more landmark that's important to point out is Jerusalem. Jerusalem is by the northern tip of the Dead Sea. And so you've got Jesus doing His ministry far away from the capital city of Jerusalem, in Galilee where there was a lot of different groups of people that traveled through that area. Matthew points this out that this was called Galilee of the Gentiles. This is where many different people groups converged because it was an important trade route. In any case, Jesus fulfilled this prophecy, which is now the 6th prophecy Matthew presents to us. And so Matthew again and again confirms for us that Jesus is truly the Savior, the Messiah.

Now, in terms of His ministry activities. Matthew points out three things.

Number one, He preached. Jesus preached. That was a main part of His ministry and His message is summed up for us in verse 17. This is where Jesus says the famous words, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Jesus's message was just like John the Baptist's message, and I pointed this out in our prior meeting that the summary of the two messages is actually verbatim. They're exactly the same. They called to men, “Turn away from your sins and turn to God to worship him, serve him, and obey Him.” That's in a nutshell what repentance is. And Jesus was teaching them just as John had taught his people, that this is the way to get ready for the Kingdom of heaven; that was repentance. Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand. As I mentioned previously, what distinguishes Jesus's message from John's message is that Jesus's message is accompanied by His promise of the Holy Spirit, whereas John could not send the Holy Spirit being just a mere mortal. But here's Jesus, the Son of God from heaven, and He promises to send the Holy Spirit. And so that was the preaching of Jesus. He preached a message of repentance. And I would quickly also add, the promise of the Holy Spirit. Even though that part doesn't come up in this section, it does come up in other parts of the Gospels. And we've already seen a reference to this in chapter 3 where John talks about Jesus's ministry.

The second activity of Jesus is that He discipled people. He trained people to become like Him. And so first you have the preaching, now you have the discipleship. Jesus taught people to follow Him, to become like Him. In particular, in that verse I quoted earlier, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Jesus was describing His training activity as making people into something they were not already. The men that He had called by the shores of Galilee were fishermen. They were not fishers of men, but fishers of fish. But Jesus told them I will make you to be something you are not. And that's the wonders of the works of Jesus. With those who would follow Him He teaches them to become like Him. And indeed, Jesus Himself was a Fisher of men. In a sense, this is exactly what He was doing in this scene in Matthew 4, where He was calling people to follow Him. This was Jesus’ disciple-making ministry. He was teaching the disciples to be like Him, to also help others to repent and to follow Jesus. And believe it or not, that work of Jesus’s continues today, because His Holy Spirit is with us today and His word is with us, and also because Jesus's disciples are today on earth, those who help others to become disciples of Jesus also. In this sense, Jesus's work of making disciples continues on through His people today. And in really, we're all a part of that, because we're here to learn from Jesus.

The third activity of Jesus's ministry is healing. Jesus demonstrated His power over the problems of the world by healing diseases. But He did more. He also healed birth defects, deformities. This is really just ridiculous to think about, that someone who was born lame with no muscles in their legs, with no ability to use their legs, such people were instantly fixed by Jesus and they were made to walk. Same thing with blindness. Those who were born blind, Jesus healed them of their birth defect. Of course, Jesus also did something else that is extraordinary. He casted out demons. People who were possessed by demons, Jesus commanded the demons out of them and delivered them from their power. So, Jesus has this great power to undo every physical and even spiritual problem. He has that power, and Jesus does not keep that power for Himself. He used that power to give everyone a foretaste of the future Kingdom of heaven. His message was always about the future Kingdom of heaven. He wasn't telling people that your life on Earth from here on out will be problem free. Instead, He was leading people to true repentance, to be ready for the future Kingdom of heaven. And with His healing powers, He gave everyone a foretaste of that future Kingdom of heaven. But His objective was to lead them to repentance.

Now, of those three activities, I want to highlight the second activity, which is making of disciples. Jesus made disciples and the call of Jesus that people would follow Him wasn't only to the men that He spoke to in this passage. As we go on in the Gospel of Matthew, we will hear Jesus calling others to do the same. In fact, even in a very general sense, Jesus called the crowds to follow Him. What this shows us is that the message to become Jesus' disciples is not just a message for someone else. It's for us. In fact, when we get to the very end of the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells the twelve apostles to go and make disciples of all the nations. That means Jesus's will is that even people today among all the nations, that we too would become His disciples. And this gives us something to pray about because if your heart is set on following Jesus, this is the time to tell Him that. And so what can we say to the Lord with regard to this? We can pray by telling Jesus of our commitment and desire to follow Him. I think furthermore, we can also express to Jesus that we really would rather follow Him than anybody else, that there is no one else on earth that is worth all of our trust, all of our efforts, all of our energy, than Jesus. Then we should ask Jesus to teach us to follow Him. And so a prayer like this would be appropriate.

Jesus, You are everything that I have read about in the Bible. You’re the Messiah. You're the Savior. You're God. You're the King. And You are the righteous One. And it's amazing to me that You came to save me, and I just want to give my life to You. I want to become Your disciple. I want to walk in Your footsteps. Thank You that Your call to follow is for people today. You called me to follow You and my answer to You is “Yes.” I want to follow You. I am committed in my heart to follow You. I don't want to follow anyone else. No one else is worthy of that kind of commitment. You are the Lord. You are my Savior. You deserve my wholehearted devotion, and so I confess that to You, that I am Your disciple and You are my teacher. And so I pray that You would teach me and that You would train me up, that You would give to me a new pattern for life, a new pattern of thinking and a new pattern of living. I ask You for this because I can't follow You on my own. I have weaknesses; I have distractions; I have many things can that draw me away from faithfully following You. I'm asking for Your help, that You would give me all the encouragement. all the truth, everything I need to be a faithful disciple. And so I ask You for this, because You are God with us, because You promised the Holy Spirit. Amen.

You know, when we call out to Jesus, we can be absolutely assured that He hears us, because He loves us, He laid down His life for us and so with confidence go to Him and pray to Him. And with that, we'll wrap it up for today and I look forward to seeing you on Friday. Lord bless you and we are done for today. Goodbye.