The Healing Word

Pastor Jack Morris: When you have Jesus, you have the power to do it. And it just happens. You followed him. The truth has come in. The transformation is taking place.

Guest (Male): What was it about Jesus that caused people from every walk of life to follow him? Today on The Healing Word, Pastor Morris reveals the compelling love and power that drew men, women, and even children to Christ.

Pastor Jack Morris: At Matthew chapter 4, verse 13, leaving Nazareth where he had grown up as a little boy and worked in the carpenter shop for 18 years, he went and lived in Capernaum. He changed his residence and he goes to Capernaum so that he can meet more people. Capernaum was only a few miles from the city of Nazareth, but it was more of a metropolitan area. It was right off the east-west highway trade route where there were many people. Jesus wanted to move in where the masses are and call them out to follow him and to be his disciples that he might answer their prayers and bring blessing and healing to them.

He started calling people. He called women, he called men, he called children, and they started following him. Women followed Jesus. They knew the word of God as he brought it to them. They loved God and they followed Jesus. I think of Mary Magdalene. What a condition that woman was in, the life that she had lived, and the demons that inhabited her. I've heard people come up and say, "Pastor, if you knew my situation, you wouldn't even try." Here was a woman possessed with all of these demons controlling her, and yet Jesus brought healing and she followed Jesus.

Then there was the woman at the well. What a woman she was. She really lived a bad life. We would call her maybe a prostitute. But when she got saved, she went back into town to all those fellows and she said, "I want you to come see a man which told me all things that ever I did." She became a woman evangelist and she won men. She brought the whole city of men to Jesus. Someone said, "Well, women can't testify to men." Look at the scripture and see what happened to this woman.

Women followed Jesus. Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus, followed Jesus. At the cross—and here's something that I'm always a little embarrassed and a little bit chagrined over because I'm a male—every time I read it, and it's there forever in the Bible, it says the women were the last at the cross and first at the tomb. I wonder what happened to the guys?

Women followed Jesus. Children followed Jesus. They loved him. Parents loved Jesus. They brought their babies, their little children, gave their children to Jesus. Someone says, "I don't think Jesus ever smiled. Many saw him cry but no one ever saw him smile." I don't know where that story ever started because that is not true. Jesus wouldn't talk about us having joy and happiness and redemption and the joy of the Lord being our strength and him not possessing it. You can't have joy without a smile.

I'll tell you something else. You can never attract a child with a frown. He had to have smiled. Parents wouldn't have given their children to a grumpy-faced man. The children would have looked up at his scowl, his deep theological expression, and said, "No, I don't want that man to bless me. I might end up like him." He had to smile, and he took them, and he smiled, and he hugged them, and he blessed them.

The scripture tells us that men followed Jesus. Men always have followed Jesus, all types of personalities. I read in the scripture where that big, two-fisted, cursing like a sailor Apostle Peter, what he was before Jesus changed him around from a man of the world, a man of the flesh, to a man of God, a rock. He built his church on this man's experience and testimony.

There was Matthew. Matthew was a tax collector. People hated tax collectors because tax collectors were people who had betrayed their own people, the Jews, and sold their soul, so to speak, to the Roman government. They were extortioners and they would make their living by taxing the people. The Roman government said, "If you want to get more money personally in your salary, then you go out there and you raise their taxes." That's the kind of man Matthew was, but he found in Jesus the man that he had always looked for and wanted.

There were government workers there, religious people, men, and men of medicine, and men of the military, writers and authors. Jesus was a man's man. All you have to do is turn on your television and see the hundreds of thousands of men down there on the Mall. You know why they were there? Because Jesus was there. They met Jesus there, they sang about Jesus, they prayed to Jesus, they testified about Jesus. Men have always followed Jesus, and men continue to follow Jesus. People are attracted to him. He really knew how to win friends and influence people, and he never had a Dale Carnegie course.

Matthew 4:18 says, "As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew, and they were 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." Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and his brother John, and they were in the boat with their father Zebedee preparing their nets. Jesus called them and immediately they left the boat and their father and they followed him.

Calling disciples was the very first thing. There was baptism, there was the temptation, there was the move to Capernaum, and then before he preached a sermon, he called men, he called these disciples. Some of these men had a previous encounter with Jesus, particularly the two brothers, Peter and Andrew, and then there were two other brothers, John and James. These four brothers had a previous encounter with Jesus. Jesus didn't just walk by that day and, like a bolt out of the blue, say "Follow me" and they left their business and walked off.

Jesus wants you to count the cost. There is a cost to following him, and he no doubt talked to them many times, well-acquainted with him. But the time came, he says, "Now it's time to make a commitment," and they left all—father, business, everything—and began to follow Jesus. There are three reasons that Jesus called men and women to follow him, and particularly today we're looking at these original disciples, the twelve.

Number one, he called them to proclaim God was restoring Israel. This was something Jesus did. Jesus called them, but Jesus was doing the proclaiming. How many disciples were there? The original number was twelve. Twelve original disciples. He also made them apostles. There were twelve. There is something extremely significant in the number twelve in scripture. How many tribes of Israel were there? Twelve tribes of Israel. The prophecy was when the Messiah comes, he will restore the twelve tribes of Israel.

So, he calls twelve disciples. He's proclaiming to the people in his local environment that he is the Messiah, the restorer of Israel. He has come to restore Israel. The confusion came in when they thought he was going to be a political Messiah, that he was going to be a king on a throne, that this was going to be an ostentatious kingdom. The people of that day thought that. That's where the confusion came in. Jesus said no, just as Jesus said no to Satan in the wilderness, he again says no. This is not going to be a political kingdom yet.

Someday it will come with ostentation, but right now it's a spiritual kingdom. It's invisible in the heart. It's a kingdom that starts within because of a blood sacrifice. He is the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. Later on—and you and I are looking for that day—he will sit upon the throne of David in Jerusalem and he will be that political king. But right now, before he ever becomes your political king, he must first become your spiritual king. You must bow before him, submit to him, accept him as your Lord and Savior, allow his blood to cleanse away your sin, and then he sits upon the throne of your heart. He's king of your heart.

This is what confused the people of his day, but he was proclaiming to all Judaism: "The king has come, the Messiah has come, the restorer has come." At that time, there were only two tribes of Israel still intact. The other ten tribes had been scattered abroad. At least nine and a half of the ten scribed tribes had been scattered abroad and assimilated into other cultures. The scripture says when Messiah comes, he will bring them together, put them all intact again. They were waiting for him to do it. He didn't do it. They crucified him. They thought he was an impostor. They didn't realize that he came to be a blood sacrifice and to be a king by the washing of blood.

That was the first reason he called twelve and the number twelve. He didn't call 13, didn't call nine or 10. He called twelve to let the world know that the Messiah, the restorer, has come. But again, before he can restore society, he has to restore the people, the individuals in that society. Number two, to be with him. Mark chapter 3, verse 14, Jesus appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach. To be with him. That's how discipleship begins.

This is where I want you to begin to think of yourself and your own personal relationship to Jesus. He has called you that you might be with him, be close to his heart, be in his heart even as he is in your heart. These first disciples were to accompany him, to hear him teach, hear him preach, witness him heal and perform miracles. They were to be with him, an intimate fellowship. They ate together, they worked together, they slept together. A bond of friendship formed.

Aristotle says that friendship is the producing of another self. When I become a friend with somebody, I become like that person and then that person becomes like me. We begin to interact and share until a new self is born. The rabbis had students or disciples. These disciples would sit at the feet of the rabbi and learn. They'd be taught the tradition. They would learn the law. The rabbis would work on their academic, mental capacities, and they became students to that degree. Jesus had disciples not only to teach them—yes, to teach them—but that they might be with him.

"I don't want you to just pick up and learn what I've learned and become as smart as I am," Jesus says, "I want you to become like me." Not just what I know to impart into you that you now also will know. I want to impart more than that which is cerebral. I want to impart a heartbeat, a life, a personality, a nature. To be with him. Jesus said, "I no longer call you servants, but I call you friends." What's he talking about? "I'm making you into another self, myself. I'm making you into me. I'm making you a reincarnation of me."

That's why we not only need to study the word of God, we need to be with God in prayer, in fellowship, that he might move upon us and act upon us until we begin to take on his very nature, the very nature of Jesus. Number three, to send them out. Mark 3:14 says that they might be with him and that he might send them out. He's never going to send you out to do something for him until you have been with him first. He's never going to send you out to represent him until you are him, until you are a reincarnation of Jesus.

He sent these disciples out to preach and to teach and to do his actions, another self—loving, serving, teaching, healing. He said to the disciples at the very end of his ministry—notice he began his ministry by calling disciples—at the end of his ministry, in Matthew chapter 28, he says, "Go make disciples just as I made you." There's a difference between a creation and a making. You make something, you create it, but it speaks of a more protracted time. He says, "You go out there and make disciples, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have taught you. And lo, I am with you always." Again, Jesus wants us to be taught, but "lo, I am with you, I am with you, I am with you."

The church needs to understand and to know that we have a God, a Savior, who is with us, and that is discipleship. When you understand that God is with me in every situation, in every hurt, in every joy, that God is with me, then you have entered into a discipleship walk with the Lord Jesus Christ. Point B in your outline: the meaning of discipleship. Discipleship is the cure for superficial Christianity. It is the cure for superficial Christianity because discipleship calls for a radical, life-enhancing change.

A disciple is a learner. A disciple is a student, a scholar who sits at the feet of the master teacher and learns. We as Christians, we learn these infallible truths. I want to hear it, I want to learn it. You're hearing it and learning it today from this pulpit and in the classes that you go to and in the Bible that you read in your devotions. We are learning it for a reason. It goes beyond storing it up in my brain. I'm learning it so that first, these wonderful, infallible truths that I'm learning will work in me like yeast in bread and bring about a transformation that will cause me to again become more and more like Jesus.

I'll talk like Jesus, love like Jesus, serve like Jesus, behave like Jesus. Did anybody ever walk up to you and mistake you for Jesus? We are to be a reincarnation of Jesus. That's why the truths come in to cause us to be more like him and to grow in his grace, to be transformed into his very image. Number two, a mimicker of Jesus, becoming one like the teacher. Again, Jesus reproducing himself so that we will begin to love and preach and teach, a reincarnation.

The Apostle Paul said, "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." I no longer live. I'm a new person. You now begin to act like Jesus. Now, by mimicking Jesus, that is not really a good word because it's not monkey see, monkey do. "He did it, I'm going to do it." It's the very nature of Jesus coming in you. I've seen these young people with these bands, "What would Jesus do?" and I think that's good, that's nice. But it goes beyond that. It's not "What would Jesus do?" You don't have to stop and think, "What would Jesus do?" You just do it because that's your nature. You have Jesus living in you.

You see a particular situation, something comes along in your life, and you just automatically react to it. You think, "Whoa, I would have never acted that way before. I would have never said that before or I'd have never been silent before." You even surprise yourself at how nice you are. You have the nature of him. You have the power of him within you. Someone says, "Oh, I'm trying so hard to be a Christian. I'm just trying so hard to go to church and I'm trying so hard to love the unlovable." That's you. But when you have Jesus, you have the power to do it, and it just happens. You followed him, the truth has come in, the transformation is taking place.

And then number three, a commitment or a committer. There are people who are curious about Jesus and this Christian way of life. There are people who are inquiring about it. They're curious. "Why do you get up and go to church on Sunday morning? Why do you read the Bible? Why have you stopped cursing and drinking and carousing?" They're curious about you, they're curious about the change. They have seen the change and they're curious, and they begin to inquire.

"Hey, what's going on? What's happened to you? Man, you've changed." Hallelujah. Yes, he changed me. So the curiosity, then the inquiry came, and then finally the person becomes convinced. But then there comes that person, that time in a person's life, when they become committed. That's what discipleship is. You're not only convinced, you are committed. You have lost your identity to Jesus. You're not that same former person, lady, that same former man. You've lost your identity. You have his identity. You're beginning to look like him, act like him, talk like him, have victory like him.

You've become like Jesus. You've become the salt of the earth. You've become like a city on a hill, even in your own life, even in your own family, even where you work. You've become like Jesus. The imprint is there so deep in your heart. One time they brought a coin to Jesus and they said, "Should we give to anything to Caesar?" He said, "Show me the coin. Whose image?" "Well, that's the image of Caesar." Well, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, give to God the things that are God's. Do you have the image of Jesus stamped on you? Someone says, "Well, I have a birth certificate, I have a baptismal certificate, I have a membership certificate." That's not it. Do you have the image of Jesus in your heart? Have you lost your identity to him? That's discipleship.

Guest (Male): Jesus still draws people today, not by force, but by love, truth, and a promise of a changed life. At thehealingword.com, you can explore more messages about following Christ and growing in your faith. If you believe in this message, we invite you to support this ministry so others can hear it too. Next time, we'll hear the message Jesus came to proclaim: the Kingdom of God.