The Starting Place of Learning

When Jesus chose his first four disciples, he immediately took them on a tour. You'll see in a moment of Galilee and the things that he taught them, he taught them without saying a word. Oswald chambers in a piece entitled working among six souls writes this, my brother or sister, if you are a worker for Jesus Christ, he will open your eyes. Why? To the fact that sin and misery and anguish are not imaginary. They are real anguish is as real as joy fired.

Jangled and tortured nerves are as real as nerves that are in order. Luther of which we sang that incredible him this morning, wrote this toward the end of his life. I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forth with and carry me home. Let him come from above. With all of his last judgment.

I will stretch out my neck and the thunder will burst forth and I shall finally be at rest and having the necklace of the white, a gates around his neck, which was that which was a pastor or priest. He added this. Oh God, grant that it may come without delay. I would read or write or I would sooner eat up this necklace today for the judgment to come. Tomorrow. A lady was sitting with him at lunch and Luther was dining with her and she said to him, Dr, I wish you may live 40 more years, madam.

He replied. Rather than live 40 years more, I would give up my chance for Paradise Golf. In his writings in 18, 24 wrote this, I will say nothing against the course of my existence, but at the bottom of which has been nothing but pain and burden and I can afford that. During the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine wellbeing. It has been the perpetual rolling of Iraq that must rise up again and again.

Robert Louis Stevenson said that three hours out of every five, he was insane with misery. John Stuart Mill said that life was not worth living after you were a boy. This is the misery and pain that the Christian life does not look away from. It looks straight on and it has an answer. Chambers goes on and tells the Christian worker, the first thing you must understand is you do not understand people. You don't even understand yourself. He encourages the worker to rely deeply on the Holy Spirit.

We come, we come to life with a text and with averse and with a plan and with a strategy, and we run into people of all sorts and all that flies out the window. Rely completely on the Holy Spirit when dealing with others and then give them, give them Jesus Christ. He is the only one that can solve it. He's the only one that can save us from sin. He's the only one that can redeem and straighten out the twisted life. Look with me, if you will, to Matthew Chapter Four, verse 23.

He calls his disciples and immediately leave for Galilee. Now I'm going to give you a couple of shots of Galilee so you can kind of see what it looks like. The pasture lands and the hillsides, and they went. There's the Sea of Galilee and the distance there, there's some more countryside. As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, there were 204 villages throughout.

Gallery galleys, about 50 miles long, 20 miles wide, 200, four villages, nine flourishing villages on the Sea of Galilee, which you see there in the background. None of these villages had less than 15,000 people, so don't think he walked into these villages and they were 150 people. No less than 50,000 people in every village that he went into. This was a densely populated Galilee and it was this for that reason because it was flourished with vegetation.

Man. You could grow anything in the soil, in Galilee, fish abundant in the sea. People flocked. But I need to let you know that the kind of people that live there, we're not strictly a Jewish territory. This was Galilee of the gentiles. They were flooding in from everywhere with a a diverse population. Let me just read to you what Barclay writes about. Galileo. It's people were of a certain kind of all parts of Palestine. Gala. Galilee was most open to new ideas.

Joe Josephus says, of the Galileans, they are every ever fond of innovations and by nature disposed to changes and they delight in sedition's. Interesting. They were ever ready to follow a leader and to begin the an insurrection. They were notoriously quick in temper and given to correlate. Yet with all, they were a very chivalrous people. The galileans wrote, Josephus have never been destitute of curry. Cowardice, was never a characteristic of a Galilean.

The inborn characteristics of the Galileans were such as to make them the most fertile ground for a new gospel to be preached to them. And Jesus takes us four men out of strictly Jewish territory into this densely cross population of all sorts of people groups. That's important to mark because you have Jews following Jesus, Peter, James, John, Andrew, who have strictly gentile mentality. Well, look at verse 23. Notice he says, and he went throughout all Galilee.

Notice it does not say, and they went, his disciples are with him at least the four, and yet it does not say that they went. It says that he went, I take that to me and they followed him, but grudgingly. I also take that to mean that he is. His stance toward taking them was be quiet and watch because if you're chosen by a rabbi, that's a great honor and these men had probably thoughts and ideas of what they wanted to contribute to the ministry of Jesus. That's all of our way.

Isn't it so valuable that God has saved me because he can do so much through me. He's got a win. He's got a knock. The wind out of us to use us at all. He's got a gut us of all self importance in order to begin to use us, and so it says that he went up into Galilee, notice what he was doing. He was teaching in their synagogues. Now what's a synagogue? It's a small building. It's not very big. You could probably fit two or three synagogues in this building.

Every Jewish town had them and they were more than just church. They were the religious center and Social Center. The town itself, the center guys came to be as a result of the captivity up in that up in Babylon, years before what happened was nebuchadnezzar came down and destroy the temple before the temple was destroyed. Synagogues weren't even thought of or known of, but with the temple, the one word, watch this with a one worship place destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar.

The Jews up in Babylon have to think of something to keep their religious teachings alive, and so they began the practice of these synagogues and when the Jews came back to the land, the temple was not rebuilt again, and so they continue the process of synagogues. Now, why is that important? Synagogues came to be because they have no temple to go to, to meet with God.

It had been destroyed by men, but what got men could not destroy was the temple of God himself and the person of Jesus Christ who now came to the synagogue. Okay, you see what God did and coming to the synagogue, he brought the temple with them. Jesus said, destroy this temple, and in three days I will rise it up. No longer is there a place to meet to meet with God if the person of Jesus Christ, wherever he shows up, that's the temple and the temple now comes to the synagogue.

The very thing that was built because the temple was not there, so he was teaching. Notice what else he was doing. He was proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom. The King James has it. He was preaching. He was proclaiming. Now, what's the difference between teaching and preaching? Preaching. Explo teaching explains, preacher you proclaims preaching is a Declaration of unalterable truth that is not up for a vote or a debate.

It is a declaration declaration of this which is rock solid that you don't choose. Well. You can choose to avoid it, but you will hit it later on. It is a proclamation that is that is information outside of our brains given to us. There are things that are true from God. I'll give you a couple things. We preach dogmatically from the scripture. There is a heaven and there is a hell. There is a place that Christians, believers in Christ go to when they die. It's called heaven.

There is a place that lost people go to and it's called hell. The Gospel is that Christ died for our sin. I can't explain that. How can a man, 2000 years ago, bleeding on the cross, make any difference in my life? That is my redemption and my life. Now I preached that to you, that he rose from the dead. How many of you were there when it happened? Rick, you're older than I think. How many you know what happened? Because this is truth, that is not up for discussion and debate.

It is truth that we declare to be true. It was like the two night that it's like the two lights in the night on the rough ocean. They were heading toward one another and the one light signaled we're moving toward each other, move away, and the other lights said, signaled back. No, you move away. The first signal said, at the first light said, signal backs that I am a huge ocean freighter. You'll move to the left. The other light signal back, I am a lighthouse. You move. That is true.

You're either going to embrace it or fight it out later in the judgement, when you have rejected it, Jesus preached in the synagogues and he preached with authority. These things are true whether we believe them or not. They are what we proclaim. Notice he did not proclaim himself as the king I thought he might have. Isn't that interesting? He doesn't preach and try to convince them through a well seasoned address that he is now king and I want you to bow down to me. He doesn't do that.

He preaches the good news, that there is an authority from heaven and there is a whole new order of things coming because it's not about promoting himself as king. It's about presenting the opportunity to join the kingdom where he is king. Let's read on because talking's not all he did notice and healing every disease.

Notice there's words that are repeated when you see those scriptures, take notice of them healing every disease and every affliction among the people, so he flame facing his fame spread throughout all Syria and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains and they came out of the woodwork like Turkey vultures to a dead carcass. They just showed up.

They see no way out and Jesus is there in the mix of them and they're overrunning him and he's turning no one away. Can you imagine standing in that line for two hours? You finally get there and closer shop. I'll see you tomorrow. No way man. He reaches out and touches and I'm telling you when he kills the leprosy, it's like baby skin again. What'd he heals? Those who are lame. They dance and run like Olympic champion. You talk about excitement. You talk about the masses coming.

Uh, I shot my first Armadillo last Sunday night. Got them in a cage, drug him out, popped him with a gun. So excited. I came in the house. I came in the house. I said, care chest. I said, Karen, I killed. She looked at me. She says, you know, I think there's probably millions of mouth there in the woods. It's like a Debbie Downer moment. He's like, Oh God, you don't want your shoot one. And they just, they just keep coming and they just keep coming. And Jesus never turned them away.

He never got tired of these moments and just brushed them off. These men are watching them heal gentiles series. In fact, take a look at the list, take a look at them. They brought him all the sick and those afflicted with various diseases, pains those oppressed by demons, epileptics, paraplegics, and he healed them. Not Beautiful. So what's your issue? What's your sickness? What's mine? Religion can help you. Only Jesus Christ can. And he won't set you free tomorrow. He'll set you free today.

The power of his life is here today because we're preaching out of the scripture and this is what he did then. And do you think he doesn't do it today? He does it. What's your know? We want to be respectable. We want to have some dignity. We just don't want to spill it all out there. And I got to problems, you know, because we wouldn't because we care what people think about us. These people didn't care. They'd been sick so long they didn't care anymore.

They just brought this dragging her leg up. You know, just dragging the. I ain't got no good leg here and laid it at his feet. Notice the crowd around and notice verse 25 in great crowds. Probably 50 100,000. We don't know the way. We don't know. Do we? We don't know. Do worry, there's no numbers given to us. Very few times in scripture are numbers ever given. We liked the number. Don't way we want to know how many you're running down there at whatever. We want to chart the growth.

We want to chart the progress. We don't like little stuff. We like big stuff because we're. Americans aren't way big. We won the big. We want to see results. We want to run them down the altar. We want to send our reports into some newspaper to get published. That doesn't. That's old school. I know Christ is concerned about these little towns. He's concerned about the countryside. He concerned about the sick folk. He's not worried about the number.

He's worried about people and if it's little, who cares? I asked Lorelei, she got talking about how short she is and she is short for her age. If you put her on a stage with 100 kids, her own grade level, she is the shortest kid. I'm there. So I said, Laura, like tell me, tell me about being short. Are there any advantages of being small?

She said, well, you know, I got the, a tinkerbell part in, in, uh, in Peter Pan, and she said, the other day we got locked out of the house, a family that I was visiting and I crawled in through the doggy door and unlocked it for the family. Don't worry about big, don't worry about explosive stuff because the gold, silver, and precious metal is what Jesus is doing individually in our lives. No matter if it's two or 2000. Who Cares?

These were great crowds, but we don't know the number because the number's not important. It's important of who's doing the work. This crowd was from Galilee deck a policy which was an area with 10 cities and from Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan. This was all around the area. They were flooding in, flooding in. Let me share three things and I'll be finished today about this text.

Number one, Jesus looks at his for men during this time and he says this, I am the only one who understands the needs of the human heart. You guys don't. I can touch people because I understand what's going on and by the way, the fame that spread and these thousands probably of the came to him. He was under no deception. They were following him in order to be healed. He was trying to gain their attention in order to proclaim that he was the king.

He knew that in a few short years, many that attended these rallies would cry out for his death and yet he's still loved them. You imagine being omnipresent, to know all things and to know that that that fellow who had leprosy, who you just healed will cry out for your death in two, three years, two years, India, he loved them. How patient he is with us, how gentle he is with us, how slow he is with us to bring us along, how dense we are, how loving he is.

I got saved when I was 19 and I didn't set things up to that age, blasphemous stuff rolled out of my mouth as a teenager, and yet Christ still saved me, still saved me. Turn to acts chapter 10. I want to show you something. Acts Chapter 10, this is several years after the fact, I would say four or five years after this experience acts chapter 10. This is where Peter, this is a chapter where Peter's eyes are open, that the gospel is more than just for the Jews. It's for the gentiles.

Now I find that incredibly amazing that he would need that vision right out of the gate. Peter's taken on this tour where Jesus ministers to gentiles and yet prejudice runs deep and these old trains of thought run deep within us, and so he gets this vision about, well, I won't go into the vision, but he finally shows up at Cornelius's house and look what he says, way down in verse 37 verse 37, he's talking to a group of gentiles and God has opened his heart to them.

In verse 37, he says, you yourselves, know what happened throughout Judea and beginning notice beginning from Galilee. He's addressing this very trip right here and beginning from Galilee after the baptism that John proclaimed how God anointed. Notice how he refers to him, Jesus of Nazareth. Whenever the Gospel writers use the word term Jesus and then they say of Nazareth, they have a very specific purpose and goal in mind because Nazareth was despised. He was the term, he was the a Nazareen.

It's not a compliment in the first century. It was a slander to his messiahship and Peter Right back in your face says how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and he went about doing good notice, healing all gun. Five years before I saw it, I didn't get it five years ago. I'm getting it now.

It took me that long, Peter says, but I finally got it through my thick head that God loves the non Jew healing all who were oppressed to the devil, for God was with him and says, we were witnesses to all this stuff. None of us understand people. Number two, let me give you the next thing. Jesus says to them, I am the only one who truly loves. We do not have in our capacity to love our fellow man and love other people. Human love is always going to fall

One word that describes your father, and this is what she said, indestructable, which I thought was a pretty well. She's watched him try to hack his finger off and tried to cut his leg off. You know he's, he's, he's, he's taking off pretty good word for a nine year old.

I heard them scurrying around the corner. I met him by the air conditioner and unloaded for slugs into it. You say, well, why? If you've ever shot an Armadillo, you just want to make sure they're dead because I'm telling you that armor, they just get it run off again. I came out in the morning and there he was, plopped up, had some kind of gut material next to him and some it didn't look like a red heart on the other side of that, what it was, it just looked like some bread thing. I got to roll.

I'm doing it. If you ever loaded up on a shovel, man, it feels a shovel and you are huffing and puffing back to the woods. I have an important reason for sharing this. You cannot alter an arm that Karen started to call me, Armadillo, Dundee,

All human beings that will not yield to anything other than Jesus Christ. You cannot change yourself. You cannot change others. Only Christ can come in and make a difference in your life.